An appeal for unremarkable women
jgc.org
jgc.org
At least we're consistent.
I have very little patience for people who are tired of the conversation that we never seem to have. There are no women in this industry. It's unnatural, it's stifling, and it's a problem. And I think it's a situation where the wolf is guarding the hen-house -- the chickens keep disappearing, but nobody knows why! Whatever could it be?
One thing I've noticed amongst my female friends is that while they might get interviews, they tend to be rejected at a much higher rate than equally qualified male applicants. Given how completely idiotic and machismo-driven the interview process is at most tech companies, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that this is an industry-wide phenomenon.
Do I know this is a problem? No. But like most other latent sources of bias, we'll never know if we stick our heads in the sand every time the subject is raised.
(Disclaimer: I'm a man, but I know a lot of female engineers. I obviously can't speak for all of them, but I've noticed some trends.)
Many women in engineering are wary of situations in which they won't be taken seriously.
For example: say there's one guy on your team who tends to patronize women, especially ones he finds attractive. He might not realize he does this. You have a female engineer who's getting fed up with this behavior, and tries to gently (because she's experienced this before) point this out. He gets defensive -- maybe he says she IS different than the other engineers, so it's only natural, maybe he just gets angry, whatever -- but, whatever he does, it's not an honest effort to improve. Later, she tries to bring this up with someone else on the team, look for help, but to everyone else he's always been a nice guy, so why is she making trouble?
Or let's say someone illustrates a presentation with some unfortunate images or metaphors. (Where have we seen this before?) Nothing flagrantly unconscionable, but, you know, kind of skirting the edge of acceptability. This makes a female engineer uncomfortable -- the presentation marginalizes her, makes her wonder if the team sees her as a colleague or an object of desire. Now, she knows it's going to end badly, but she mentions that it made her uncomfortable, and asks that everyone please try to avoid that mode of presentation in the future. And suddenly everyone on the team is explaining, no, he didn't mean in THAT way, the presentation wasn't REALLY about her -- well, if you hadn't marginalized her before, now you definitely have.
It doesn't have to be that way. But in some places, it is. I've talked to women looking for software engineering jobs, and this is definitely something that gets considered. Are other women willing to work there? Willing to stay? Will they have anyone to back them up when shit happens? Because when the answer is "no", life sucks.
That said, I don't know how you hire the first one. But you've got to be aware of these things. You've got to make completely sure that you look like someplace where women will be respected and taken seriously, not marginalized and undermined. Because, if a good female candidate gets a whiff of that, she's probably gone.
But you're right, I should have a better answer to this question. I should discuss it with my friends sometime and try to get a handle on it.
Get to know some female engineers, if you don't already. Not necessarily as potential hires, but as professional contacts. At that point, they may decide they're interested in the jobs you have, or they may know women who are. If they refer female candidates to you, their implicit endorsement will help your credibility. It will be very hard to hire female engineers if you don't know any.
Oddly enough, most men applying for the job want to have some assurance that they're going to be respected and their concerns taken seriously. Having someone of the same sex as you on a team or at the workplace is no assurance of anything.
Also, lots of men get put off by immature attributes about sex, and a company the fosters a culture similar to a high school boys locker room is going to loose both men and women who don't care for that.
I mean, you hardly need a locker room atmosphere to turn women away. Plenty of little things can contribute. Maybe you have a guy who constantly fawns over one particular coworker. Maybe the team has grown to expect that the women will bring the bagels on Friday mornings. Maybe the labels "emotional" or "too sensitive" stick a little too easily. Maybe t-shirts at work events only tend to show up in men's M-XL. Maybe another group tends to explain things to the new female engineer in very small words, implicitly not acknowledging her as a peer. Whatever.
Here's the thing: you need to be sure that the women in your workplace are comfortable telling you these things. As a man, it can be hard to realize that there are problems when the work environment is 90% men. Why? Because you're not on the receiving end of all the bullshit, most of the stereotypes and cultural norms work in your favor, and most of the people you know are the same way. Very few men are thinking, "man, I wish I could make women feel unvalued." Most of the toxic behavior happens out of apathy or ignorance.
But, even then, most little problems, in isolation, are just that: little problems in search of solutions. Unfortunately, when women do speak up, what they often hear is, "I don't see the problem. That's never happened to me. I think you're overreacting." That response is, I would venture, why having another woman on the team is reassuring: because she probably would see the problem, it probably has happened to her. That response is why women in engineering want to know they'll have someone (male or female) willing to back them up, or at least to listen: because they're used to having to go it alone.
How do they all know that it was specifically because they are women?
In other words: because most of these things don't apply to men. And because, when women try to explain what's happening, one of the most frequent reactions they get from men is, "what are you talking about?" (Or the related, "oh, but that happens to me too," followed by a spurious equivalence.)
So, look, if you really want to get into the details, there's a limit to what I can tell you. I'm male, so I'm not speaking from my own experience. If you're genuinely curious, ask some female engineers. Not all of them will feel the way I've described, but I've talked to enough to know that I'm not totally off-base. The main thing is, if you want to know, you have to be willing to actually listen and accept that they have had experiences different from yours. Even if you disagree with them, try to hold off on going into debate mode; they've probably done that too many times before and are tired of it.
I'm assuming what you're saying is if you instead say 'ok, we won't do that' she won't assume (based on the lack of protest) that it was in fact objectifying her?
And how is it saying the presentation wasn't objectifying you marginalizing? 'You aren't important enough to objectify'? Psychology... it confuses me. I never understand how people don't want to be objectified yet seem to be offended if you don't want to objectify them. It's like, 'I want you to want to, but I don't want you to actually do it'...
And for your second paragraph: saying "no, it's not like that" is marginalizing because it demonstrates an unwillingness to take the woman seriously. If she says, "I didn't like that, it made me feel excluded from the group", and you say, "well, we didn't mean it that way": you are continuing to exclude her. The message communicated is, "your opinions aren't important". If the presentation went so far as to be objectifying, you're saying "well, I didn't mean for it to make you feel objectified, so you shouldn't feel that way" -- which indicates a flagrant lack of respect.
For emphasis: I do not know a single female engineer (not a single engineer, actually) who wants to be sexually objectified by his or her peers. Not one. They want to be respected as competent engineers, as colleagues, as friends.
"Sexual objectification refers to the practice of regarding or treating another person merely as an instrument (object) towards the person's sexual pleasure."
I don't know of anyone who wants this in the context of work. Even if they're, say, attracted to someone else on the team: they're still not interested in being reduced to only the sexual aspect of their being.
As for the last bit, sorry if I wasn't clear, I'm fully aware of that. I was just confused as logic seemed to imply you were in fact stating that the woman would want to be wanted, and I didn't believe it.
I am also generally a little confused because my reaction would be "I'm sorry! We didn't mean it that way. It won't happen again." Is that also wrong?
In any case, at least you're trying to hire more women. That's more than can be said for the guys who respond to every thread with the comment equivalent of a shrug. The voting trends here are also indicative: nearly any comment that dismisses or diminishes the solvability of the problem is voted up; all others are ignored or voted down.
Besides, it just makes me feel guilty for being one of the awkward teenagers who reinforced the stereotype that math and science are for unattractive, unpopular, socially retarded people. Who knows, I may have personally turned a few women away from technical fields by being the shining, shambling, pimply, slack-jawed, poorly-dressed, sex-obsessed, socially blunderous face of math and science at my school. Damage done. WTF can I do about it now? Treat female candidates who have already entered the profession fairly? That's easy (if you have a consistent and systematic interview process) and also not particularly useful for improving the demographics of the profession.
Why does women's intolerance of people like you make you feel guilty?
What next, should Indians/Asians feel guilty for driving racists out of computing? Making computing unattractive to intolerant people is a good thing.
"I may have personally turned a few women away from technical fields by being the shining, shambling, pimply...face of math and science at my school."
Similarly, I don't blame all whites if a few of them avoid computing in a effort not to talk to minorities, just the intolerant ones. And in my opinion, we are better off without them.
In any case, I believe dkarl was trying to be funny, and you've twisted that into something fairly ugly.
Similarly, a woman is free to be intolerant of geeks, but no geek should feel guilty for driving her out of computing. Her avoidance of computing is caused by her own intolerance, nothing more.
My theory is that regular computer science and programming education for all students starting in the 5th or 6th grade would balance it out a bit.
In my experience, which spans 2 companies having what I judge to be remarkable software engineering talent, several women at each place feature prominently on the "lifeboat list". At each of those places, the stars had a much higher percentage of women than the general population at those places (though still short of 50/50). Said slightly differently, given you were a woman at one of those places, you were disproportionately likely to be a star.
If far fewer women than men enter computer science (at the university level), I don't think that it's likely that workplace discrimination effects are the dominant effects in the final population biases we all see. It's also no surprise to see that those who do enter are disproportionately good, because they are disproportionately likely to be intrisincally more motivated and interested in the work than the large set of "unwashed masses [of males]" who enter comp-sci because it's a relatively easy way to make a comfortable and secure living, even if they don't really "care" about it.
I know for my own account, I'll hire every qualified candidate I can find, without regard to gender or anything else unrelated to their prospective job performance. As I think back to the college recruiting I've done for my current firm, I can think of 2 men whose candidacy I championed significantly and 3 women in that same boat. That's against a candidate pool that is probably >5:1::male:female ratio.
I think the real reason the women aren't infiltrating the male dominated industry is because they are letting themselves be to dependent on the status quo.
I'm saying that as someone who works as a programmer, what can I really do, other than be cognizant of the problem and, when the opportunity presents itself, first do no harm, and hopefully do a bit of good?
She was hired in the 70s (and continued doing consulting through the 90s) by a designer of nuclear reactors doing programming, since she could understand both the engineering side (steam valves etc) and the programming side - she helped program the nuclear reactor control room simulator using Fortran.
Yet now she is a professor at a well-known university. The hours are easier, pay is as good or better, excellent benefits.
Given that, why beg women to join in something that doesn't pay as well and expects you to slave away during weekends and holidays when there is a crunch?
(edited to add: I think part of it may be that men (speaking generally) are more in love with the works of their hands, even if it doesn't benefit them directly; they can have pride in it years later. I am not sure that women necessarily have the same attitude towards material objects.)
"I am not sure that women necessarily have the same attitude towards material objects"
I suspect 90% of offerings on Etsy.com are from women? Haven't looked it up, but I am pretty sure it is a large fraction.
This is one of those self-perpetuating falsehoods that people only say because they heard it somewhere else (which I guess I am now complicit in).
Why rule out half the population?
Then clearly you haven't talked to enough women.
Also, if you believe the only allure of programming is a poorly-paying job and terrible hours, then there are larger problems afoot.
The team I manage has 9 people, 5 of whom are female. This was purely chance, I'd swear that no preference was given based on any particular demographics.
One thing that makes this difficult is that this year and each of the previous two, I've been one developer short for a significant period due to maternity leave.
Add to this the extended vacations (2-3 weeks) that developers who immigrated (from China and India) take to visit family, and it becomes clear that having a diverse team makes scheduling our work quite a challenge.
A conversation that I've wanted to have a few times with my boss: Boss, I understand that you think me taking two weeks off at Christmas is difficult to schedule. If I can direct you to the calendar, boss, you will see that Christmas is clearly marked on it in red ink. You see, it happens at the same time of year... every year. Sort of like, I don't know, Chinese New Year, Divali, etc etc. As you might recall, I was gone last year, and the year before, too, always at roughly the same time. You might remember that in those years, too, I sent you emails six months and six weeks in advance. You might also recall that, when you asked me if there was anything I wanted added to my employment contract at our first meeting two and a half years ago, I said "Yes, I want it explicitly understood that I return home for two weeks every year at Christmas."
So now it is three days before my annual vacation, the one time per year that I see my family, and you believe you have discovered an urgent problem in the schedule... to whit, that you have scheduled a project such that it cannot possibly be completed without my presence these next two weeks. Ah hah. Well, best of luck with that. I'll see you in the New Year.
I like to think that my staff thinks that this is a good place to work, and that I'm somebody good to work for. I've never asked somebody to cancel a vacation; the farthest I go is to make sure everyone is aware of when deadline pressure is going to occur, and let them make their own decisions about their own priorities. I fully subscribe to the idea "work to live, not live to work".
And darn it, that's hard for me to do. The real world doesn't observe someone's wedding on the other side of the planet, so our customers still have needs, as does the rest of our company.
I make sure my people get their lives, but it costs me headaches and I get flack when I have to tell others in the company that something will take more time than they think is reasonable.
Please continue talking about how the real world is giving you flack for the grave sacrifices you are making here. I'll be sympathetic.
On the one hand, an employee asks if it's OK to take 2 weeks to go to her brother's wedding in India. I say "sure, no problem".
And on the other hand, I'm getting pressure from the CEO for some new features, and obviously losing one of 9 developers for 2 weeks impacts that, so I have to tell the CEO that's she's got to wait a little longer.
Where am I getting things wrong, or being self-righteous or something?
Humans have needs, so you have to take them into account. So "it makes it hard" sounds weird - it just is what it is, it is not being made hard. You are not losing a developer for 2 weeks, you never had that developer for those two weeks to begin with. Just as you don't have a developer who can work on two projects at the same time.
Perhaps employing more people might be an option?
Your job is to get the best performance from your reports, and to shelter them from the often unrealistic demands of upper management while they get on with their work unhindered.
One such unrealistic demand is that people only take vacations when it's convenient.
I think your definition of "real world" is not entirely correct.
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my
personal explanation for men going into science is the
following:
- young men strive to achieve high status among their
peer group
- men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step
back and ask the question "is this peer group worth
impressing?"
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/01/how-i-got-50000-page-views-b...
Greenspun's claim is that you probably overvalue this popularity, whereas women disproportionately would not.
I think everyone strives for status, and don't see any evidence that women are better than men at deciding who to impress. What may be different is WHAT is considered impressive.
That's not just a male problem, it's just a different set of peer groups.