On Ada Lovelace Day, how diverse are tech companies?

But they can still point to other companies and call the names. :)

That assumes a perfect 1:1 mapping of grads to employees, and careers are lifetime. It would be pretty easy to downsize every white man at 30 for ageism reasons yet keep women and minorities around until retirement as diversity hires thus "fixing" the problem.

Also assumes the purpose of the original story was as stated on the surface, not just to enforce prevailing politics in a preaching to the choir sense (we should all feel and share the white mans burden, etc).

We don't hire (mostly white male) mechanical engineers to work on assembly lines although I'm sure corporations would enjoy that caliber of employee if they could get it, which they can't, so their assembly lines demographically look a lot more like the local neighborhood and relatively few bolt tighteners are good at differential equations or finite element analysis, although that doesn't affect productivity at all so its OK. Likewise to write boilerplate CRUD apps we traditionally hire grads with extreme levels of higher math and exotic upper level CS education because we have a huge surplus of those sort of people (who are mostly white men), although in practice there is no need and random laborer off the street is both semi-realistic and demographically more like the rest of society.

Not all tech workers are programmers, not all programmers have CS degrees. This problem cannot be boiled down to such a simple metric.

I've talked to a number of women in my office, almost all of whom have expressed that they felt like they had to overcome obstacles while growing up as a woman who was interested in technology. That when they made mistakes, they were told "maybe you should do something else" while their male counterparts were told "just try again, I'm sure you'll get it!" This may not be something Google, Facebook or Apple can unilaterally fix. We need to fix society, and that starts with privileged people simply accepting that this is a problem, even if it doesn't have a simple solution (although donating to organizations like BlackGirlsCode and GirlDevelopIt can certainly help).

With that out of the way, there are real problems that women and minorities face in the workplace when diversity is ignored: abuse, harassment, being passed over for promotion in favor of less qualified white men. When the workplace is composed of 90% white men, they get to set the norms of behavior and culture. If they do so without thinking about the other 10%, they will hurt and eventually lose most of those people. When they get to the point where their workplace is 99% white and male, they may muse "hmm, I guess women and minorities just aren't that interested in tech."

Someone may inevitably ask me: "alright smartypants, what are these 'white male behaviors' we're so guilty of?" To be honest, I'm not the one you need to hear it from. You need to talk to women and underrepresented minorities in your life about their experiences in the workplace (in tech or in other fields). If you don't know many women or minorities in white collar fields, and (this is very important) you're willing to patiently listen without butting in, I recommend following ericajoy and jennschiffer on twitter.

> People should do what they feel passionate about regardless of their gender (or skin color or other nonsense there is possible to come up with). Everything else is a moot point.

Yes. This is why I believe children should be raised in a gender-neutral way. It helps in steering clear of premature expectations.

People will tell you that believing that it's possible that interest in tech is correlated with gender. However I would point out "Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers"[0] which gives evidence that a different field (law) is a meritocracy and women's relatively poor outcomes in terms of promotion, are caused by their relatively lower focus on their careers.

[0] www.econ.upf.edu/~rferrer/files/PAPER.pdf

What are you referring to when you say "double for cycle?"

> It still does not follow that we should not make something more accessible for anyone, or that we should tolerate a discrimination.

To me, not making the effort to make this industry more accessible for those who are underrepresented is itself discrimination, even if a mild, unconscious form. Your story of passion naturally leading to a fulfilling career is wonderful, and I want that for anyone. I don't think the onus of fostering passion is only on the family, but it comes in large part from societies expectations of gender roles. That is why I believe we can't have enough efforts to make tech more accessible, even if those efforts seem contrived.

I'm confused... do you think that people of different genders and skin colors are less likely to share your passion? If not, then what's the point of this post?

A good point you bring up. Similar to Ada's mother, a lot of Asian parents are very involved with their child's academics and often push their kids towards studying STEM. Yet, even as a minority in America, Asians are never included in discussions related to diversity and inclusion within tech - and it isn't because this point is addressed. If we're going to attempt to find the root cause of why there may be a disparity in tech, race or gender, what good does it do to ignore the differences in upbringing?

Ahh they don't care about the dirty jobs. It's OK for men to dominate those fields.

A better example would be teachers. Female dominated, and there's some half-hearted "concern" about the gender imbalance, but get back to me when the media and the president are harping on the issue constantly.

I'm confused as to why you think Hacker News would have a front page article on garbage workers. There are large gender gaps in waste management, as there are in programming, and there are initiatives to reduce those gaps, including action by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding illegal discrimination against women in the field.