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Comment by nrjdhsbsid | Hacker News Reader

Any other perspectives on this? Racial and gender diversity is clearly lacking in tech and I have a feeling that's even more concentrated at the "top" employers.

Not sure if we can do much about it though. Anyone that's been to school can see it's clearly something happening before college level. Seems like 5% or less of CS program students are women or minorities besides Asians, that doesn't give tech companies much to choose from.

The lack of diversity is being driven by something at highschool level or below, it's stupid to blame tech companies for something so obvious.

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"lack of diversity"

If two groups are different enough that, when you put them together, you call it "diversity"; then why would you expect them to be statistically identical when you pull the groups apart again?

In other words, if the concept of diversity exists at all, you would expect some groups to be overrepresented in one area and underrepresented in others. Why is any of this a surprise?

Note that I am not saying there are any kinds of inherent limitations on what people can accomplish. It could be any number of factors that cause two groups to diverge: culture, life experience, preferences, etc.

But it's pure madness to celebrate diversity and the attack any differences in outcomes.

It's actually more like 20% women in CS programs now, and it was 30% a decade ago. It would be stupid to attribute that 50% decline to changes at high school or below though, wouldn't it?

And what does any of this have to do with equal compensation? If 0.01% of CS graduates were women they should still receive the same pay as men do.

> It would be stupid to attribute that 50% decline to changes at high school or below though, wouldn't it?

Why?

Because there have not been changes at high school. Meanwhile there have been huge and obvious changes in tech itself (mobile) and the way the tech industry is viewed in the media, which would be the obvious place to start looking for answers.

I agree that the institution that is high school has not significantly changed wrt this in the last decade, however there is plenty of room for the experience of being a high school to have changed in the last decade.

It's not anything near 20% from what I've seen. I've worked at fairly random companies and went to a pretty large school and women are consistently outnumbered at least 10-1 everywhere.

Even at Google and Facebook a lot of their female employees are just tangentially related to development. The core dev teams are probably 95% male just like everywhere else.

How about someone do a name-gender scan on GitHub to check???

What you are seeing is inter-profession gender segregation. When a minority enters a profession, they tend to go into sub groups where they can be majority in a local context.

Its similar to male teachers. Teaching has similar to tech a about 80-20 gender split, but you don't find 20% of say English teachers to be male if you did a random poll. Instead men go into typical male teacher roles such as physical activity (sport), after school activity (sport again), and math. They still went to teaching school, have a title thats recognized as teacher, so statistics will still give a 20-80 ratio.

So the 20% women in CS is there, you just have to figure out what sub-group in CS which is designed as typical female CS.

I always use plumbing as an example. You never hear about that being not diverse enough. Look, I'm all for equal pay, but I didn't see those ladies in my classroom 10-15 years ago. Only after it became "cool" to be a nerd, seeing that there is money to be made being a nerd, and realizing that living in a major city can't be subsidized by whatever they chose to study, did they start hammering on about this.

Equal pay will be very difficult to enforce unless you make salaries public. I can assure you that among your peers there are plenty of differences in compensation.

It's not fair to compare them, plumbing requires physical strength, whereas tech jobs don't. Women have anywhere from 40-60% of the strength men do, and men have especially greater hand strength than women https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physi... Given that you need really good hand strength to do plumbing, it's never something that will see sex diversity.

I worked in remodeling before and during college, including plumbing. It requires less physical strength than what you are implying.

The parent comment makes a good point. There are few (if any) calls for diversity in regards to "dirty" jobs.

Are you a male? You think it takes less physical strength because what's physically easy for a male would be harder for a female. Ever been asked to open a jar for your wife?

Yes, I'm male. No, I've never opened a jar for my wife. My wife actually has as much physical strength as I, perhaps more.

For what it's worth, there were 3 female crew members with which I worked at the remodeling company. None of them had issues turning a pipe wrench. It's seriously not as strenuous as you seem to think. Have you tried it?

Edit: I also feel like you are missing the point, which is that there is relatively little call for diversity outside of "more women in STEM".

> I always use plumbing as an example. You never hear about that being not diverse enough.

I suspect that people who work in tech, closely follow tech news, and spend their free time posting in tech-industey-centered forums often miss things like campaigns for diversity in skilled manual labor not because such campaigns don't exist, but because of where their attention is focussed.

http://news.sky.com/story/white-van-woman-held-back-by-sexis...

> The lack of diversity is being driven by something at highschool level or below, it's stupid to blame tech companies for something so obvious.

What basis is this statement founded on? It is also stupid to make unfounded claims without any indication that you have substantiated them. I am genuinely curious what the cause is and if grade school so be it but let's not point fingers at something just cause.

>What basis is this statement founded on?

The graduation statistics from schools. You can't expect to have 50% men and 50% women of the same quality in an company without unfair hiring practices if the ratio from schools is 80/20.

No, the enrolment statistics for schools tell us nothing about why the trend is occurring. It could just as easily be due to the industry being perceived as being distinctively male and that puts off young women from enrolling in CS.

And anyway, the article is not about unfair hiring, it's about unfair pay.

We need to trace when the issue is happening. College enrollment teaches us a lot more than job statistics where most people have made up their minds 10+ years ago.

The enrollment statistics represent people making up their minds right after highschool, so logically something before college is skewing the statistics.

Some exposure to young people is causing the demographic rift and these statistics can tell us that which is more than nothing

>It could just as easily be due to the industry being perceived as being distinctively male and that puts off young women from enrolling in CS.

Quite possibly. That perception lies 100% on the idiots that write articles/comments/facebook posts/tweets parroting the idea that the industry is sexist because of the ratio though. Every time there is an article questioning what the industry can do about "it's sexism problem", it just makes things worse.

Large companies actually do better in terms of diversity.

As far as doing things, there is definitely many things to be done! You are right that the problem starts well before college. In America there is a culture that being CS is nerdy, and not girly. This is largely in part due to Hollywood's attempts, but this can be combated at a more local level.

That's not exactly what the research shows. The great book "Unlocking the Clubhouse" shows off some research to suggest that culture within CS departments and software development companies are largely, but not entirely, to blame.

I can't see any way that could be proven with any rigor.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Gender warfare? Go back to the 60's. Women outnumber men in college significantly and are graduating with much better grades. The biggest difference is college major which has a huge influence on lifetime earnings.

It's not like you get accepted to a school and forced to study philosophy. These student have a choice and for some reason they're not picking the ones that make good money

Philosophy students tend to make good money.

I agree. That's why it's going to be difficult to get rid of these diversity bureaucracies.

I guess if you can't imagine it then it's impossible.

Note the other discrimination category Google is currently under fire for: age. There's currently a class action being assembled for people over the age of 40 who interviewed at Google: https://secure.dahladmin.com/HEATH/Index

My guess is that this is the reason Google is fighting it, not sex or racial discrimination. Google's lawyers took one look at the age distribution of the company (or of new hires) and said "oh dear."

> Not sure if we can do much about it though.

I just saw this in my Facebook feed today, which seems like a positive step!

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tech...

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