Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

> The study of more than 4,000 UK IT professionals, published to mark International Women’s Day, reveals women typically reach management level three years faster than men (in nine rather than 12 years) and they are appointed CTO/CIO two and a half years faster (in 13 versus 15.5 years for men).

> However, the survey also reveals a colossal gap between the numbers of men and women working in top IT roles. Of the senior developers who responded to the survey, only 6% were women; with IT managers the figure was 8%, and of those heading up IT only 7% were female.

These statistics are weird together. How can this be?

Speculation: There is a bias against average/underperforming women relative to men entering and staying in tech. This means that the women who do stay in are from the upper end of the distribution. It's as if you took a normal distribution (as skill often is distributed) and truncated some segment of the lower half. This would explain why there are much fewer women reaching managerial positions but why the ones that do reach it do so very quickly.

Is there any data on how qualified and performant female engineers are relative to male engineers who occupy the same position? A result that would support this hypothesis would be something like women in the same position as men in tech have beefier academic credentials or more awards.

That's one explanation that fits a narrative. (and ignores the fact there are far fewer women who even attempt to enter the tech industry).

The gender gap in tech starts with children, is seen in STEM enrollment rates and continues in the job market where a multitude of diversity initiatives exist to promote underrepresented groups in tech.

So, an alternative speculation for the abnormally high promotion rate for women is there are fewer women interested in IT in the first place and companies are scrambling to compete for women because it makes them look better (via diversity initiatives).

There is a great documentary examining actual science on the subject and interviewing both scientific researchers and social scientists on opposite sides of the issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

Should we attempt to combat the gender gap in the nursing industry with the same vigor that we are focused on tech? How about the gender gap we see with garbage workers or psychology?

edit: clarity.

Every explanation """fits a narrative""", including your alternative.

Your explanation requires significant mental gymnastics to make your claim fit the data. If anything the data implies the opposite conclusion. If women were discriminated against in tech they would not be promoted at twice the rate.

Wouldn't you also blame discrimination had this study revealed women were promoted at half the rate of men?

>> This means that the women who do stay in are from the upper end of the distribution.

> Another explanation is there are fewer women interested in IT in the first place and companies are scrambling to compete for women because it makes them look better.

Those aren't even mutually exclusive explanations. It seems likely that both are true as the people that go into it despite the lack of interest from the rest of their cadre will be better candidates vs. borderline candidates.

I am mostly playing the devil's advocate. Both explanations may be true to a degree.

I believe it is misguided to shoehorn discrimination as the goto explanation for every statistical difference between groups of people. In this scenario the data literally implies the opposite conclusion yet danharaj was able to contrive an explanation that leaves women as the victim despite lliterally being promoted twice as fast. You can bet danharaj would still be arguing the same conclusion if the data had born out the opposite results.

To be fair there it's likely that there's a bit of victimization there as well if it's harder to go into one field vs. another due to social norms. You get it from both sides, too! "You're a man, why do you want to be a nurse??". Going back to tech, if you were a borderline woman candidate that wanted to get in it seems that you would statistically be less likely to follow that dream.

I like to step back and just say that it's not something that has to be fixed if a cadre of people appear to "collectively decide" based on individual decisions. It sucks that if you are in the cadre and have to fight the perception that you should(n't) be doing something. But I think (as I suspect you do as well) that saying that your individual decision should be different simply because you share an identifying trait with others is broken.

Ideas that men or women are some collective that needs to be pushed one way or another are difficult. You can generalize based on the apparent preferences of the group, but then judging an individual based on those preferences is where it starts to get troublesome.

Try being a male who wants to go into education for young children. I have a friend who went through the process as the only male member of his entire graduating class, and he says the level of suspicion he had to face from his professors and fellow students was overwhelming at times.

It was consistently implied that a young male would only want to teach young children for puerile reasons.

Even when he was given the benefit of the doubt, it'd only be to say "oh, so you'll take your education degree and enter administration?"

Totally agree with you and I implore you to watch the video I linked above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

There is growing scientific evidence (discussed in the video) that men and women have preferential differences that are exhibited as early as we are capable of measuring them. (Toys chosen days after birth)

The differences in choice of profession are seen globally across all cultures and are in fact stronger in places like Scandinavia which are arguably world leaders in gender equality and provide women with the most choice.

When you see something that all cultures have in common it hints that it is not a cultural phenomena and that there is something biological going on.

I am speaking by and large here and paraphrasing the evidence laid out by researchers in the video. There are plenty of exceptional outliers which buck the trend and any individual's choice in profession doesn't imply that the group as a whole has a poor aptitude or are incapable of it. It simply states that they prefer to do something else.

Maybe women are, on average, treated worse at university and entry-level, so the majority that continue aren't a random distribution but predominately represent those more determined and aggressive.

Well yes, there could be such a bias at every stage in the development of an IT career and this would skew the skill/ambition distribution of female engineers towards the high end.

I know plenty of male engineers who, to put it nicely, are underperformers. All of the female engineers I know, and there are much fewer of them, are what I would call exceptional engineers. Because I know so many more male software engineers, I still know more exceptional male engineers than female. However anecdotes don't matter for scientific inference which is why I asked if anyone had such data.

I've had 2 examples around me where the woman was incompetent in programming and she was promoted because she was better with Excel spreadsheets. Plus the prejudice that men are supposed to be worse at communication than women, so managers promote women.

It's sad because it reinforces the mistake where women are allowed to be incompetent, whereas we should keep them in a programmer job until they gain skills, like young men do, instead of promoting them too quickly. As opposed to the article, I witnessed a mean-time-to-promotion to the job of Team Lead of 3 years for women instead of 7 years for males – but that could be because the article considers "management" as a higher job than Team Lead.

Easy to explain.

Field is male dominated.

Women enter and the ones that enter raise faster than men. One can speculate whether there is a promotion bias or the ones that enter have an above average pioneering spirit but...

...it takes time and experience to raise to the top. And not that many women have 15+ years relevant tech experience.

The only mystery is why journalist not see that. In any case it is good to see some hard data at least on the engineering and first management level dispelling the myth that women are discriminated against.

I'd suspect both.

Women in tech are more closely scrutinized out of the sheer virtual of being a novel demographic within a company.

Upon close scrutiny it is discovered that these women are actually amazing practitioners, because all the women who were on the wrong side of the bell curve dropped out under their close scrutiny experienced in high school or university.

Thus women are promoted faster.

It's survivor bias.

Most people have a 'spotlight effect' in that they believe they are noticed more than they really are, but for a woman in tech it might actually be true.

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