Hacker News Reader

Comment by fjjrxcbdhx | Hacker News Reader

Why not more female sanitation workers or more male elementary school teachers? What makes the gender demographics of building websites so much more important than all these other imbalanced fields?

View on HN

She seems pretty clear about it

"I care about computer science. When I was in school in the 1980s, women got about 37 percent of computer science degrees and law degrees then. Law went up to 47 percent now. In medicine, we were at 28 percent in 1984. That’s gone up to 48 percent. Computer science went from 37 percent to 18 percent. I started to learn about it and say, my gosh. To me, the tech industry is one of the best places to work right now."

Some tech jobs are very flexible, but many of them are completely toxic and expect crazy hours. If anything I find women tend to make more rational career choices, which makes programming far less appealing than you might think.

PS: I have also been outnumbered by female developers on a team before. But, never at 'toxic' work environments.

Or commercial fisherman, mining machine operator, etc.

The money is in tech at this moment. And women want it.

There has been movements for more female sanitation workers, as for male elementary school teachers and nurses, haven't heard of that. The gender demographics of tech is important due to the perceived wealth and power of Silicon Valley. I personally say perceived because I thinks its the VC's who have the real wealth and power.

A mix of articles about men in nursing and men in teaching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7088418

Thanks.

Half of those aren't about pushing men into nursing or teaching, not many are in valued news oulets( abc go). Its mostly blog posts, others are about the difficulties being a male nurse or teacher.

I also just googled "men in nursing" and "men in teaching" as quick sanity check.

Its pretty clear there is nowhere the same level of push we have going for women in tech and nowhere near the same social validation for pushing men into those fields.

While I kind of agree with the thrust of your comment overall, I think it makes sense in the case of Melinda Gates. Look how fabulously wealthy her family has become as a result of tech. You can see why, if she thinks women are at an unjust disadvantage, she would want to try and fix that through getting women into tech.

Or coal miners! /s

Seriously, the answer is the same as why half of the planet wants to be in tech, money, success, and influence. The general thinking is and has been that you try to fairly populate the mid-top range of jobs, and that's more effective than trying to shoehorn in more women driving dumpsters.

> Or coal miners

This is said every single time this comes up. People need to learn how to use a fucking search engine.

http://www.womeninmining.org/

http://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/135815/API_Study_Getti...

the answer is the same as why half of the planet wants to be in tech

Because they're nerds?

[...]money, success, and influence.

Oh. Well, I'm sure they'll stay in the field when the find themselves crammed into an open office, working on yet another webapp, with little to no control over product direction. And a wage trajectory of a field that is leveraging it's current cultural cachet to drive a huge recruitment effort.

Once the jig is up, and exposed as just a way to drive down wages, we'll be back to being seen as the hate-worthy nerdy fuckers in the basement. And society will go back to encouraging girls away from the field.

I think you're overestimating the relative glamour of waste disposal.

>the answer is the same as why half of the planet wants to be in tech, money, success, and influence.

If those are your primary concerns, odds are you'd be more interested in finance or politics.

This may come as a shock, but plenty of people don't have what it takes to make it big in finance or politics, or don't want to make money, have success, and gain influence by being a monster.

Engineers are respected for their ingenuity, intelligence, real-world problem-solving, studious determination, maybe even grit. These skills are on the opposite spectrum from vanity skills(presentation, socializing, marketing), which unfortunately are at the core of gendered expectations for girls. Since engineering skills actually reflect a depth of the holder(especially in our vanity driven world), they implicitly demand more respect. Really, more professional females in engineering is the only way forward for current gender issues. I would argue it's the same battle that must be fought to combat racism as well.

> What makes the gender demographics of building websites so much more important than all these other imbalanced fields?

I don't see anything in the article about building websites. There is a lot more to Computer Science than building websites even if websites and mobile app are the chosen UI for a great many enterprise and B2C projects now.

Edit: What about women data scientists? Women firmware engineers? Women AI developers? Women database administrators? It's interesting that the mind would immediately associate woman with the more creative CS subsets vs one of the more math heavy ones.

Probably because Melinda herself worked in tech (how do you think she met Bill?) and therefore has more of a connection to this industry then to sanitation workers.

I totally agree with you. No one really seems to be able to explain this.

There are many programme to try to increase male elementary school teachers, you just don't hang around on elementary school related forums.

Okay, that's actually great to know, but I am yet to see feminists fighting to get more females into other male-dominated jobs that are not as well-paid as software engineering.

Have you tried looking? There are plenty of programs encouraging women to go into non-traditional jobs.

Such as? What are these programs encouraging women to become garbage collectors or construction workers or miners, and on the same scale as the endlessly hyped women-in-tech initiatives?

http://www.womenintoconstruction.org/whoweare

http://www.hays.co.uk/job/construction-property-jobs/insight...

https://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/nontra2008.htm

http://www.new-nyc.org/

http://www.learnhowtobecome.org/underrepresented-careers-for...

The Swedish institute for higher education made a study that looked at the teaching profession, and their conclusion was perfectly clear on this. There are barely any programme to increase the number of male teachers, and this was in stark contrast to the long history of programs to get more women into tech and engineering. They suggested that teaching universities, who just now are beginning to address the lack male students should look at the programs for women for inspiration and ideas in how to build similar program towards men.

But surely you have references that show those "many programme" and that the number of initatives to get men interested (and to remain once enrolled) is identical to the number of similar programs to get women into STEM. Or maybe it just Sweden with its self defined feminist government thats are backwards on this.

This is moving the goalposts from the post I originally replied to. I have no idea of the relative number of initiatives in different areas. The idea that men need pushing more into some industries is a newer idea, and it wouldn't suprise me if it is further behind. However, that wouldn't be a reason to have less "women in tech" movements, just more "men in X" movements too -- it's not like the same people would be doing both anyway I imagine.

I think a lot of people do care deeply about getting more men into elementary school teaching.

But as for why tech: technology is increasingly a sector where people earn high wages: people care about some getting some share of that. More importantly, tech companies are becoming the center of our lives: they produce the products we spend our time with. Moreover, tech companies today are increasingly oriented around and dominated by technical employees, rather than "business" or marketing staff. If women aren't represented amongst these technical employees and founders, that will have a detrimental effect on society, because these products will be less likely to reflect the needs of women. Case in point: the ongoing failure of Twitter to properly ha for abusive behaviour and harassment, which overwhelmingly affects women.

Technology is ones of the places where money, status, power, and influence is (like finance, etc.) Diversification of the elite requires elite professions; sanitation worker, school teacher, and coal miner are not elite professions.

It's true that this doesn't always get stated, but it is the most likely reason.

Programmes to get more women into sanitation work, or men into teaching, already exist and have already been posted to HN.

Learn to search.

And do they get even one one-hundredth of the publicity that the tech programs do? And is anyone who even dares to quibble with their methodology or approach subjected to media hate campaigns, as with the tech programs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com