I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.
And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE.
When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks.
Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a Norwegian documentary on this, in 8 parts, and it is well worth a watch.
Oh? Which ones are those? There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men, for example. The shift happened because computer programming turned a corner and became prestigious, at which point it became "stereotypically male", and the pattern of "stereotypically male" = prestigious holds through a number of professions. Men are doctors while women are nurses. Men are professors while women are primary school teachers.
You can't just look at the present, you have to look at past shifts in employment demographics and "prestige" explains a lot more than "some genders just intrinsically desire certain kinds of work" (which, just to ensure my point is clear, is bullshit).
Can you cite a good source for this.
I'm concerned it might be confusing the job called "programmer" with the role we now call programmer. AIUI in the early days of computers a "programmer" was a sort of typist that took a written program and punched the cards that allowed the program to be entered in to a computer, the technical tasks of algorithm design, program construction and such were generally not done by these same people.
That aside, I'm not sure it matters: why aren't there more female top chefs? It's certainly not because women don't like to cook. I posit that it's because in general they care less about being competitive and prefer to avoid high-stress situations.
Do you consider that testosterone is inert? It's mood and mind altering and men have lots of it. Denying the basic biological differences between the sexes is a dangerous axiom on which to attempt to create a stable and fair society.
Men, as an example, undergo hormonal changes when they become parents. These changes lead to greater tendencies towards nurturing behaviours, tendencies that female ordinarily possess by default and which make men and women naturally suitable for different societal and occupational roles. It makes a lot of sense for humans to be hormonally perturbed towards preference and ability at different roles -- why we are fighting against that rather than embracing it is well beyond my ken.
I think you meant 'computer'.
My grandmother was a computer. That is what they used to call the women who performed calculations in the old days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
It's interesting history but this could not honestly be described as computer programming. Looking around online it appears there are a lot of articles that have conflated the jobs. There certainly were women in computer science back in the early days, Lovelace, Hopper come to mind.
I am no expert, maybe it has something to do with maternity leave regimes or the interviews (like OP mentions)?
Then, your wife must have worked with dynamic web pages (a.k.a. web applications), probably frontend, to have that tool churn. Other areas don't change that quickly and even then new tool allows to use most of the past experience.
Situation with lack of female developers is not US-specific. I went to college in Ukraine, of ~100 sudents on computer science faculty, less than 10 were woman.
Perhaps instead, it's because schools (government?) in Russia, India, and China have emphasized Computer Science, and produce higher number of female grads.
Anecdotally, I attended a tiny engineering school in the midwest, and pretty much all the grad students were international students--women from India and China.
Also, we take it to mean that he's talking about traditionally western culture, Russia doesn't have a western culture.
Well, from what GP said, it may be attributable to the culture itself:
"a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not."
Which is to equate (or conflate) systemic bias and cultural difference. In other words, it sounds to me like, "it's not systemic bias, prejudice just comes from people doing the things." It's just a simple substitution, because "systemic" refers to a system, not an overarching one, so while we may not be able to ascribe these tendencies in The Technology Sector (or similar large group), systems have subsystems (a la culture vs. subculture), and it may be that those are where bias becomes encoded.
This in particular is the concept of a "model minority".
Culture difference cannot explain why women are not well represented in tech.
Culture difference can be a part of systemic bias, anyway. Let's say you have some programming job. The interviews focus on questions about frobbing linked lists (which is often the case). Now, it turns out that people from demographic A are more likely to focus on these questions when practicing for interviews, whereas demographic B focuses on honing the skill set they need for the actual job (algorithmy linked list stuff may not be necessary at all!).
You'd say that it's not possible for /culture/ to change how you study. There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills. This stems from the general culture of finding and using a formulaic method of succeeding at academics. I don't like this culture (it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic), and always have spoken out against it, but it's there.
But, you say, that's a different country, what about a minority demographic within the same country? Firstly, minorities more often than not are segregated into their own communities (socially, if not physically) due to various voluntary and involuntary reasons, and the effect can be the same as being in a different country (albeit milder).
Now realize that an interviewer will probably design questions around the kind that they are used to and that they (and their peers) would do well with. This is an unconscious bias -- interview questions are more often than not tests of how similar you are to the (often non-diverse) peer group of the interviewer, and not actually a test of how good you are as a candidate. This is an association fallacy, "all people like my peer group are good programmers, hence all good programmers are like my peer group". Of course, interviewing is often about avoiding bad programmers much more than it is about hiring good ones -- generally folks are okay with accidentally not hiring a good programmer, but want to avoid hiring a bad one at all costs. Thus tweaking your interview process to target a subset of the set of all good programmers isn't that bad, is it? Except that this targeting carries an unconscious bias inside it, and unfairly ends up disproportionately excluding minorities. If you're going to use a process prone to false negatives on purpose, be damn sure that the likelihood of someone being a false negative is in no way correlated with the demographic they are from. You may not have designed the process with this correlation in mind (hence, "unconscious bias"), but this bias is still there.
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And it doesn't have to be culture differences. You have a lot of other behavioral differences due to economic status or demographic which are unconsciously excluded in interviews. E.g. women are less likely to apply for jobs where they do not have all the listed qualifications, but men are very likely to apply, and get hired, because not all the qualifications were necessary anyway. The fix here is to be clear on what you absolutely need in a candidate, and what would be "nice to have".
And it doesn't have to be behavioral differences either. Sometimes it has to do with defining your inputs. Many companies focus on hiring from a set of people which itself is biased. It can be by hiring only from certain colleges (and then inexplicably whining about the "pipeline" -- you chose the pipeline!). It can be from having unconscious or conscious discrimination against autodidacts. Or code bootcamp folks. If you restrict your inputs to an already biased source, you will get biased results.
There are tons and tons of articles and papers out there about this. These aren't unknown effects. They're well established.
None of this is on purpose, of course (at least, I hope it isn't!). But it's still a bias, even if it's unconscious. And the onus is on the creators of the bias to fix it.
There are a million reasons out there why various demographics aren't well-represented in tech. It's just lazy to blame it on the demographics and say "it's cultural differences" without realizing the mistakes made by tech cos in making culture a factor in the first place.
What bias occurs against my [Filipino,Vietnamese,Thai,Malaysian,Pakistani...] brothers, that doesn't also apply towards me, an Indian?
> There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills...it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic.
What about American CS Students, who presumably don't have a "teach to the test" based education system? They are well represented in tech.
I'm going with Google here. It's a pipeline issue. Fewer folks that pursue degrees in tech, fewer applicants in the pool.
> What about American CS Students, who presumably don't have a "teach to the test" based education system? They are well represented in tech.
I gave the "teach to the test" example as an example of how culture affects tech interviews and why that's a problem on the interviewer's side, not as a specific example of why Indians do well in the U.S.. Nor was it a litmus test for "people who will do well in interviews", because many other factors contribute.
Though "teach to the test" is probably a part of why Indians do well. In my comment above I explained the mechanism by which the majority white-male-american tech industry unconsciously ends up crafting interviews where white-male-americans will do better. It wasn't about giving an exhaustive set of reasons as to why each demographic does the way it does. But if you want examples, just google "pipeline problem tech" and you'll get more than enough examples in the hundreds of articles out there about why the "pipeline" is a red herring, often with examples as to why various interview practices (or other practices) end up excluding demographics. I gave one example about women, and below I talk a bit more about "choosing the pipeline", but I'm not going to start a discussion where I give an example of systemic bias for/against one group and you ask why it doesn't apply to another group ad infinitum. These biases are complex, intertwined, and not always tangible. There is a simple mechanism as to how they appear, and lots of evidence that they exist (interviewing.io itself has done some of research on this by running voice modulation etc on their platform, but there's plenty more research otherwise too), independently of the pipeline.
Edit: I guess an example that folks might find easier to understand is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12860397 , it's an unconscious bias against self taught people. Most self taught people are pretty picky in what they actually do, because they're often doing it for fun. On the other hand, if you are a CS student, you will learn whatever is taught in colleges, and follow what your peers do (e.g. practice coding puzzles for interviews). So a self taught person may not be great at coding puzzles because that's not an actual skill that they've ever needed when coding for fun, whereas CS students tend to be competent with these. I know many autodidacts who have had issues with this but are otherwise great programmers. I myself am self taught, and while I did practice coding puzzles, I have felt such biases too.
> Fewer folks that pursue degrees in tech, fewer applicants in the pool.
...
> degrees in tech
and here it is again, you're choosing your pipeline. I just talked about that. There are plenty of autodidacts out there. Plenty of folks (often from a lower income background who cannot afford college, or be able to juggle college and work) who go to coding bootcamps. Plenty of folks who do go to college, but go to less prestigious ones because they can't afford it or they have to go to college near their holes (and they have less mobility because of job/family to support/whatever).
Again, there are articles all over the internet about this. I recall reading about companies which target historically black colleges in their interview process. They don't quota it or otherwise disallow people from interviewing with them; they just go to the colleges for campus interviews. No different from other companies who go to Stanford for campus interviews.
As long as opportunity is sufficiently available for everyone (which it is, one can learn to program, get input on their code and collaborate with other people on the internet without disclosing their gender/age/race), that's good enough.
Have you ever used software or website that was written entirely by an offshore team and felt that it was a bit "off"? The translations were a bit wonky and the interactions felt somewhat unintuitive?
Most people have and we're more than willing to attribute it to a lower skill level, but it's also the case that clear and intuitive aren't universal concepts. White men make software that's intuitive for white men and less so for other groups. The more than you can blend different perspectives into the product development process, the more the finished product will appeal to those represented perspectives.
There's a reason all the big tech companies are trying to address their lack of minority representation, and it's only partly PR. It's also the case that these companies have largely saturated the tech-savvy market where the demographics look similar to the demographics of their employees. And in a world where high valuations require growth, reaching those under-represented groups of consumers is critical to achieving that growth.
Translations off? Sure. Unintuitive? I don't know, but let's say I'll give you that. The offshore team lives in their own cultural bubble, where English is used in a particular way(incongruent with what I/you are used to), and maybe they like to place their menu on the left instead of on the right. I can see, intuitively, the link between "local differences" like language proficiency and cultural preference, and producing a different product.
You then cite "white men" making software that's intuitive for "themselves". I don't see any intuitive characteristics that would encompass "white men" in any meaningful way. There's white men in the US, there's white men in Russia. The white men in Russia don't build applications the same way the white men in the US do.
I can instinctively tell the difference between a german developer and a US developer(visible language differences). What are the common factors attributable to "white males" that lead them to create software that is intuitive for them?
This reveals a complete misunderstanding of how "systemic bias" occurs and persists.
[Edited with further thoughts]
"Cultural differences" don't just appear out of nowhere. Culture itself is an amalgamation of different human experiences that have combined and recombined over tens of thousands of years. It's not static. The things you deem "cultural differences" have many causes, and "differences" can and do change all the time.
When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation.
"Systemic bias" may or may not exist in this case, but if you think cultural differences themselves can't lead to systemic bias then you are mistaken.
> When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation.
Except the article (and conversation) isn't about cultural differences, but instead about "diversity problem[s in tech]" and in this case, how the technical interview unfairly penalizes underrepresented groups.
1: I believe that in general, Caucasian Russian males can be safely lumped into the "white male" category that dominates the tech industry.
If this was your big takeaway I think you should read the article again. It's not about unfair penalization.
People fail at technical interviews all the time, men and women alike. The article doesn't assert that there's the kind of simple bias that would cause women to unfairly receive lower marks in an interview compared to an equally-qualified man.
The article reveals that women react differently to negative signals from the technical puzzle-based interview process.
You've tried to assert that this is due to "cultural differences" (your words, not mine or the article's). And I'm saying that's too naive an explanation, and we should look further.