Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women? | Hacker News Reader

Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

blog.ycombinator.com

273 pointscbcowans478 comments

It is a continual frustration to me that the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues. Predictably, the top comment on this post that tries to move forward on a very real problem that has been empirically established is an appeal to stick with the status quo.

I'm sorry, but companies have always focused on making money. Saying that the way to handle this very specific problem is to focus on making money is an appeal to brush the problem aside completely.

The top comment, for good measure, even obliquely swipes at active events taken by small local groups to tackle the issue, such as Girls Who Code, because men might be silently stewing over their existence...[1]

I am opting for a top level comment here because my frustration is less with the comment itself than that the community as a whole has voted this comment to the top.

[1] Before I get kneejerk responses that the comment didn't specify the group, let me belabor the point that the context of this discussion is SPECIFICALLY women's difficulties working within the masculine tech culture, so MinorityCodingClub trivially translates to WomenCodingClub, which sounds an awful lot like Girls Who Code, which has been gaining prominence of late. It is a cowardly oblique swipe at these sort of organizations. It's a cop out not to name the organization that you have a problem with explicitly, an attempt to lash out at such organizations while maintaining the comfortable position of plausible deniability. Everyone gets it though. So I won't countenance "shocked and appalled" denials that organizations like Girls Who Code were the target of the swipe.

Yeah. These issues get talked about so much in our industry, but I don't understand how they're supposed to change if the way we're expecting to fix it is just "business as usual, but uh, don't do discrimination". Obviously there is something wrong with how we got here.

There is not "obviously" something wrong.

Would you say there is obviously something wrong with the plumbing industry that keeps women away? Or is it just that the smell of shit is too unpleasant? Likewise, some aspects of tech could simply be unpleasant to women, and there are reasons why men are more likely to put up with unpleasant work (like the need to feed a family). I have personally experienced a lot of unpleasant aspects of the tech industry (let's just say the movie "Office Space" is not far off the mark), unrelated to gender.

Mind you, I am not claiming nothing is wrong (although personally I consider it unlikely), just that it is not obvious, because there are other explanations for the gender ratio that don't involve "wrongness".

Oh, OK.

For any given job where biology is not a factor (which is all of them except weight lifting and highly athletic sports), cultural norms are.

Women take care of children, typically, and their shit does not smell like roses. So you need a new hypothesis.

So you think women don't go into plumbing because of cultural norms? Really?

Ok, I wish somebody would study that and find the reasons. The baby argument doesn't hold, though, because it makes a huge difference if it is your own baby.

Better comparison would perhaps be care of the elderly, which involves cleaning up shit but also has a social component.

If the argument there is so few women coders why isn't it also why are there so many male garbage collectors (I could list a great many undesirable jobs here), prisoners, homeless and combat fatalities? Is the goal to balance those out as well?

Yes.

I would say weight lifting is not an exception at all. The cultural norm is that women should not be too muscular.

It is not just cultural norms, the strongest female athletes are about as strong as average men: http://media.townhall.com/_townhall/uploads/2015/11/13/8.jpg (linking to this chart without context because I don't have a lot of time to Google - but if you google, you will find lots of information on the differences in strength).

Or specifically for weight lifting, consider this recent case of a transgender woman winning an international weight lifting title by a significant margin: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/03/22...

I doubt that the women/girls who choose to compete in weight lifting hold back because of cultural norms. That would be a silly sport - basically it would be a competition about who cares the least about cultural norms. In any case, there should be several women who don't care about cultural norms (what about the raging feminists who reject the norms, for example).

"women/girls who choose to compete in weight lifting"

That is where the problem lies. When a 6 year old girl tells her parents she wants to become a weight lifter, her parents will say "how about ballet instead?". When a 12 year old girl tells her class mates she is a weight lifter all her friends will laugh at her.

The cultural norms prevent girls to participate. If they are strong-willed and decide to pursue weight lifting despite all of this, they would have a good chance to become very good because of their determination.

But there are female weight lifters. You mean they probably only started later in life, and they would be as strong as men if they started at 6? Not sure if weight lifting is even recommended for kids, what is the average starting age?

Also, I googled and a lot of the best female weight lifters look Chinese. I have a suspicion that they might be recruited by the Chinese system at early age and pushed for the glory of China, at the expense of their health. So cultural norms wouldn't be the issue here.

Here's an article exploring body image opinions of female tennis players:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/sports/tennis/tenniss-top...

I would say that there is something obvious wrong that is causing society to have 87.5% (Swedish statistics) of citizens, equal amount women and men, working in professions that has serious gender segregation in favor of their own gender. The trend is that the remaining 12.5% men and women that actually work in a gender equal environment (minimum 40% of each gender) is continuing shrinking and we have yet to see how far gender segregation will go until it start to reverse.

I sincerely doubt that the 43.75% of professions that is male dominated is purely caused by genetic aspect, nor the other 43.75% of profession that is female dominated. What I have heard it seems more like it is a combination of the flip of a coin and culture, through the question is then if culture simply adapted to segregation or if it caused it.

There are some jobs that require physical strength, and I think it is undisputed that men are stronger than women on average. Garbage men are an example for that (I think it is very strenuous work). I've read that while the military in many countries strives to allow more women, this has resulted in many injuries to women because they are more prone to injuries under physical strain.

There are some jobs that can not easily be done part time or don't allow for flexible schedules. For example, as a truck driver driving to Turkey for three days to pick up tomatoes, you can not simply go home after 8 hours to put your children to sleep. Surgeons have a similar issue: you can not leave and go home in the middle of a brain surgery, and you can not predict how long a surgery will take.

Also, women can often simply opt out of unpleasant jobs, by not returning after the baby break. Men have no such option. Women often don't need to earn s much money, either, as they can expect their husband to be the main breadwinner of the family. So they can opt for jobs with lower pay, but higher life satisfaction.

Most of it boils down to children and family. Feminists of course think that it is just a cultural norm that makes mothers take over most of the responsibility for the kids. In my opinion, it is completely different: women get the first pick because they invest more into bringing children into the world - so they get to decide if they want to stay home with the kids or go to work, and most simply prefer to stay home with their kids. Because, surprising perhaps to feminists, spending time with one's own children is not all that horrible after all. Basically, the womb is a really good bargaining chip.

It is also a pretty modern discussion, with all the office jobs that seem equally suited for men and women because they require no physical effort. In former times, the bulk of the work was impossible to do for pregnant women (who should avoid heavy lifting), so the question didn't even arise.

Here is a list that is google translated (https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...).

I can't say I see a clear pattern where physical strength is directly correlated to extreme gender segregation. The extremest male dominated profession is tile floor constructor (ie primarily bathrooms). Second was mechanic and third is tinsmith. The extremest female profession is indeed midwife, but it is then followed by dentist nurse, followed by pediatric nurse, followed by secretary in hospitals, followed by district nurse, followed by therapists, followed surgeon nurse, and we are still at 90%+ professions. After this comes a bunch of specific education and social security professions.

The common theme I would say is that female dominated professions are focused on social environments where a person can feel that they have a real impact on others in their local area, while male dominated professions is focused on profession where a person work mostly separated and alone, and where the work don't general cause a major impact in someones life. In return for not having those social benefit and status, they generally also have higher pay.

Tile floor constructor and dentist nurse, with both way over 99% gender segregation, are quite strong data point. You don't need massive strength to lay down tiles in a bathroom, nor is dentist nurse a very "children" focused profession. Why do those two profession so extremely repel each opposite gender?

Don't underestimate the tiling - iirc it is the job with the highest risk of becoming physically unable to continue working. (edit: "tiler" seems to be the job of tiling roofs. I found a list in German that puts it at 2nd highest risk, after scaffolder. Tiling (presumably) bathroom floors is at position 7 on that list of jobs most risky for becoming physically unable to continue working).

Looking at the male jobs in your list (the bottom of the list?), it seems to me there are a lot of them with high physical risk. For example fire fighter, or wood worker (? "forest face mask" - not sure what that is supposed to be, but if it is woodworker, that is the job with the highest lethality). Concrete worker sounds quite physical. There was an article about grip strength on HN which mentioned mechanics might have become weaker because of automated tools, so that seems to have involved some physical strain at least historically. Plumbing might actually be rather strenuous, too?

Anyway, I don't claim to have all the answers, just theories. Physical strength would of course not apply to all job segregation, I mentioned other factors in my previous post.

I spent several months at home with my <1 yr old son. I found it very hard indeed; much harder than either coding or academic research. His needs were difficult to predict, 'success' was undefined, constant watchfulness was hugely draining, and there was no chance of taking a break to get coffee (or go to the toilet, or to change out of a vomit-covered jumper). And I didn't know what I was doing.

People's mileage may vary, but I would be very reluctant to paint "spending time with one's children" as some kind of easy option. I returned to full-time work at the earliest opportunity and with a sigh of relief. Many other child carers (of both genders) would love to do the same.

Not quite sure why the difficulty of scheduling brain surgery or truck driving around children is apposite either. No particular reason (beyond ingrained expectations) why a woman can't do the surgery and her partner keep predictable hours and handle the children.

I had the opposite experience, I find coding much harder than spending time with kids (I also took off a lot of time for the kids). Also consider that as a stay at home parent, you don't really have a boss, and we have just learned from the interviews that bad bosses are a major reason for quitting jobs. I guess technically your spouse is kind of your boss, but if they fire you the state will still make them pay you, so you can't really lose.

Taking care of kids is strenuous, of course - the constant attention you mentioned, and also the sleep deprivation. But you can still watch a kid while sleep deprived, but you can not code sleep deprived (at least I can't - YMMV).

As I said, (imo) women get to choose who takes care of the kids and who does the job with unpredictable hours to feed the family. Or ultimately in a way both parents get to choose, because they choose who they marry. But many women choose already when they decide on their profession. As a man, you can not really speculate on finding a spouse that is fine with you being the stay at home parent. Nevertheless, such cases exist - they are just rarer, which is exactly what the numbers show.

Women are just as interested in STEM fields until about the middle school/high school level. What changes around that age? All sorts of external peer pressures.

I work with a lot of women. They're not anything near a majority, but the org I'm in is big enough that there are plenty to speak with. They almost universally have many bad experiences and stories to tell that are specifically due to their gender.

By no means am I saying this is unique to tech, but I do believe it's worse. Even if it isn't, acting as if we've reached gender equality and it isn't common for women to face issues specifically due to their gender in tech, is so off base I recommend you take the time to actual speak with women and listen to them. Over the more than decade I've been in the industry, the amount of women I've spoken to who have said they haven't experienced sexism is easily a single digit percentage.

> What changes around that age?

For tech, males become more introverted.

At that age, introverted boys stay at home, play video games, post on bulletin boards (back in the old days), program, read, etc.

That is how many boys get into tech. They played video games, became immersed in internet forums and tech culture and trolled the internets.

Why do teen boys spend less time socializing and more time on the internet and video games?

That is the main question we could attempt to answer to find the root cause.

> What changes around that age?

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with women being pursued by men at that age and generally having better things to do than sit in front of a computer screen throughout their teenage years.

Then, by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech. That and they don't want to be lumped in with the socially awkward nerds that they associate with tech by that point.

Just my hypothesis, of course.

> by the time they have to pick a university program, they feel so far behind the computer nerds that they don't feel they can compete or succeed in tech

At the college level, I think that the social gap gets even worse. Women can get into frat parties where they don't know anyone, though they don't even have to because they are much more likely to be invited in the first place. Bouncers at bars/clubs will let them skip the line and overlook them during ID check.

Women are better paid in the services industry which gives them bank roll to sustain their partying lifestyle, although this isn't even needed because they can get people to pay for their cover/food/drinks.

All these privileges drive them away from looking up buffer overflow errors on Stackoverflow late at night.

By this line of reasoning, shouldn't there be a lot of unattractive women flocking to tech?

Historically, the few women in tech were often not the most attractive ones. It seems to have gotten better. Likewise, the male nerds were often not the most attractive ones.

Perhaps there are not that many unattractive young women, so their number is not sufficient to increase female participation in tech by a significant amount.

Do you have a citation for the interest of girls in STEM? And also, especially, citations about the peer pressure? Not my experience from High School - in my Maths class, there were only 3 girls out of 16 pupils.

When I was in school, there was also nobody being encouraged to pick up Computer Science. Boys were into computers despite the disdain by society, peers and parents. On a scale of 1 to 10, how attractive did being into computers make you to girls in High School?

Also, much is being made of the performance of girls in High School Maths, but let'S be honest, Maths at school often is not really Maths, it is calculating stuff. So it is perhaps not the ultimate measure.

Also, significantly more women than men study Medicine or Biology - somehow they don't seem to count as STEM? Why not? Given the choice between Medicine or Computer Science, I am not even convinced that Computer Science is the better choice in the long run. My stance has always been that women are too smart to choose CS - they shun the long hours in front of a screen in a windowless basement, devoid of daylight and human contact.

Interestingly I worked in a DNA sequencing centre - so very STEM related. Around 50% of the staff worked in the wet lab and 50% in the bioinformatics part. Around 50% of the staff were female and the vast majority of them worked in the wet lab part. Most of the males worked in the bioinformatics side. So even within STEM there appear to be some clear divisions with the disciplines that attract females / males.

Perhaps you are not aware of this, but there are numerous studies that show bias, for example random shuffling of names on resumes and resumes with female names are rated lower than those with male names. Whether this bias is conscious or unconscious is of course hard to establish, but I think it's beyond dispute that it exists.

I am aware of them, but I am not convinced they tell the full story. For example there was the one of professors choosing PhD students (or assistants, something like that). It seems possible that they acknowledge the likelihood for women to drop out is higher than for men, so women are simply the worse investment. The bias was also shown by both male and female employers. The elephant in the room is: what if they had reasons to be biased (like having had the experience that women drop out)?

Also, it doesn't seem as if getting hired is the problem for women in tech, the problem is that there are not enough applicants.

And there also studies showing bias against men. For example the one where they made women conduct phone interviews with male voices and vice versa, and the women did slightly worse when they were given the male voices. There was another one were women were twice as likely to be hired for tech jobs than men.

I'm too lazy to look them up, but I find it interesting that only the "poor women" studies are being mentioned, and the others are quickly forgotten.

Edit: OK, I googled https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/women-twice-as-likely-to...

https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

Actually the title and the interview didn't mention "women's difficulties with the masculine tech culture", and none of the women who were interviewed brought it up, either.

It seems to be kind of implied by the approach (why ask only women), which is exactly what annoys people because it is such a sweeping accusation.

I wonder in discussions like this, how many people who bemoan the masculine tech culture consider themselves to be part of the problem? Do you consider yourself part of the problem and too masculine? Or do you think it is only the other men who are to blame?

14 day old anonymous troll account intentionally distorting several claims I made.

you wrote: "the context of this discussion is SPECIFICALLY women's difficulties working within the masculine tech culture"

In what way did I misrepresent that? It is the only one of your claims that I referred to.

Btw just because an account is young it is not automatically a troll account. Watch your ageism.

I share your frustration, but I've found the landscape to be more complex than most people are willing to give it credit for.

For example, my partner and I disagree on the value of things like "Girls who Code" or "Women in Computer Science" groups. I (male) tend to think "can't hurt seems like a decent idea, I'm sure there are unique challenges faced by people with two X-chromosomes in computer science that I'm not aware of, I'll take people's claims that it's valuable on face value - if smart people are doing it in reasonably large numbers, and I can't see obvious harm, then I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to disparage it."

She, on the other hand, despises those groups. She hates being singled out for her sex, and thinks sex shouldn't even be on the table for discussion. She just wants to work and be respected as an engineer, has never had any problem being respected as an engineer by her peers, and feels insulted every time she's invited to do something "on behalf of people with vaginas," (her words).

Interestingly, she also despises overtly feminine genderization and tends to think people who call themselves "girls" and dress/perform in an overtly feminine way are stupid (and acknowledges that this is unfair)... so I don't know. Is the whole thing targeted at the gendering of engineering rather than the physical sex of programmers? I don't really know. I don't think the people participating in it have a very clear view of that either, judging from the conversations I have with people.

At the end of the day I just try to take encourage everyone to blind themselves as much as possible when evaluating applications, reviewing code (impossible, generally), or assigning grades.

edit:

after thinking about this a little more I should specify that we're both pretty standard-issue silver-spoon white Midwestern liberals, and acknowledge that our personal views/experience on sex in computer science might miss a whole chunk of the spectrum of women's experience in communities where gender and sex are a bigger deal. My community expects women to be good at math and science every bit as much as men; that's not everyone's situation.

I don't want to speak for my wife, but she has been actively involved in Girls Who Code, and seems to have thought that it was worthwhile. As I understand it, it's more about letting girls know that programming is an option, rather than being about segregating female engineers. I think this is necessary because I have personally seen the assumption that men are engineers and women are support people limit the careers of women who were more accomplished and competent than men in more prestigious engineering roles. From my perspective, there's a lot of bullshit mythmaking in programming that plausibly dissuades many, IMO disproportionately women, from approaching the field, and which seems to have a tendency to funnel women to less prestigious/respected roles tangential to engineering.

Response to parent's edit:

> we're both pretty standard-issue silver-spoon white Midwestern liberals

I can see why you would draw that conclusion, but your assumption is pretty wide of the mark in my case. I grew up very poor in the deep South.

I agree about programming being full of "bullshit mythmaking". It is one of the things that annoys me the most about our industry.

Response to your response to GP's edit. Pretty sure GP was talking about him and his spouse not him and you.

Correct, apologies for the ambiguous pronoun.

Apologies for the ambiguous pronoun, I was referring to myself and my partner.

Oh, understand. Yes, I misinterpreted the subjects of the statement.

[1] edit: oi, changed "understood" to "understand". The former implied that I immediately understood what you were saying. I was trying to say that I didn't initially understand, but do now after the correction... sorry if that caused more confusion.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "bullshit mythmaking"? I'm not familiar with that turn of phrase.

I'm not sure, but my guess would be stuff like "10x engineers", lionizing certain celebrities, and generally downplaying how much of everything is actually incremental work that is the shared success of a great many different people.

I don't think software-development is unique in that respect though, humans tend to want to take a messy reality and make simpler stories with fewer and simpler characters.

It was my own off the cuff phrase. It's hard to relay the subtleties that I am trying to get across. I think that a lot of career programmers overstate the difficulty of their jobs, and how impossible it would be for people who don't closely hew to the archetype of the genius iconoclast hacker to contribute at all, even when they've demonstrated relevant aptitude and competence. These biases strike me as damaging to the motivations of people who don't look like, or particularly relate to anyone held up as a paragon of that archetype. Also, looking like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, or even Woz, doesn't actually strike me as being relevant to someone's potential as a programmer. That's why I call it bullshit. Because the tech industry selects for people who outwardly present as stereotypical hackers without even doing much to verify ability in many cases, while constantly relitigating the bona fides of people who don't outwardly present those superficial qualities.

Put another way, why have I seen many very good female programmers trapped in lower paying positions like QA and X-Analyst (but doing legit programming as their job) when there are men who are shitty programmers making 50% more and in a social position that gives them license to condescend to these women?

Or to put it the other way, are Gates, Zuckerberg, etc even their own archetypes, or where those labels foisted upon them by the zeitgeist's expectations of their role? And they went along because it was simpler, easier, or more financially beneficial?

In either case, agreed that changing the popular mythos is absolutely a prerequisite to resolving the inequity.

On one hand, I dislike the openly "only for girls" activities. It is opposite of integration.

On the other hand, programming and tech in general is already gendered in peoples minds. By people I here mean parents, children themselves, teachers and so on and so forth. Parents will refer to technical clubs as boy clubs (even if some girls participate) or mock boys doing dancing (that one surprised me), grandma will be visibly ashamed and kids themselves will argue about those activities being for boys/girls.

Kinda like with lego friends - too much pink to the point of being annoying, but the fact is that average grandpa is going to buy that toy to a girl where he would not any other lego cause even those gender neutral are clearly for boys in his mind.

My niece wanted a Lego Friends set from me for her birthday. It is not just misguided grannies...

And dancing boys will probably care more about the reaction of girls their age than about ashamed grandmothers.

The boy in question was 5, at that age he don't care about girls yet. Girls his age don't care about his dancing.

Yes, girls want things that belong to girls. But grandma won't buy boy lego even of kid wants it and ask for it. And definitely not randomly for birthsday or something.

If grandma won't give things that are explicitly wished for, maybe you should have a talk with grandma, or only wish for money in the future. Your sample size seems to be 1.

I must admit I also have mixed feelings about the disapproval of boys doing girlish things. The adults doing so might actually save the boys from embarrassment later on.

You might see that as proving your point, but there are different expectations from society to men than to women. The assumption that expectations should be equal is just that, an assumption, because there are differences (wombs, physical strength). So men can not simply opt out without issues, and neither can women. The expectation that men should literally do the heavy lifting makes sense, for example.

In one of the better turns of phrase from my college years, my 60s-era professor for "Violence in the Political System",

Question: How do we end civil wars?

Answer: Murder all the grandmothers.

Explanation: In the majority of civil wars, men comprise the bulk of causualties, thus leaving females as the only link between generations. Consequently, it is the grandmothers that teach younger generations to hate and perpetuate violence as retribution from that which was visited upon themselves and their family.

It's stuck with me ever since, and I think it's a good point for thinking about cultural evolution. Even if a new generation were a blank slate and completely compassionate on issue du jour, how is that affected by the historical impulses of those older from previous generations and thoughts?

> It is a continual frustration to me that the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues

Is it? The implication is that tech is worse than other professions in this regard. But it has never been compared to other industries full of young people.

Color me skeptical but I don't believe that a field full of introverted immigrants with language barriers would have a bigger harassment issue than the business/sales/administration fields that are full of extroverted Americans and frat boys.

My experience is that the diversity in nationality in the tech field has made it difficult for in-groups to form. Whereas in-groups form more rapidly in fields where people come from more similar backgrounds (fields with higher American %). When not part of an in-group, people engage in less risky behavior.

Yes, it is. The tech industry is bad at it, period. Other industries being better or worse doesn't change that fact.

I don't know. My wife is a dentist and we go to a lot of dental conferences together. Vendors ALWAYS think I'm the doctor and she's my assistant when we first walk up. Even women.

What it changes is the discussion of solutions. Is this a societal problem, or a problem just for the computer technology industry? Where do we attempt to apply fixes? Are we adding a bunch of strange work-arounds far from the root of the problem? Does it make sense if they are not actually working?

I only have experience in a few fields, and none of them are sales/administration, but my experience is that tech has been far worse.

Introversion is no guard against sexism, and I'd argue, it might actually make some facets of it worse. I don't think introversion in specific is bad, but the way it manifests in tech in this male-dominated industry often results in a lack of experience and understanding in how to work with women, and sets them up as very heavily other-ed.

Only in tech have I seen such a need for inclusiveness to be so stressed and pushed for - education, smaller businesses, and similar, it has been a much more natural thing.

There's a hell of a lot more challenges that women face in tech than outright harassment. Unintentional sidelining, the bar for proof being much higher, general unwarranted skepticism in their abilities, etc.

> often results in a lack of experience and understanding in how to work with women

> There's a hell of a lot more challenges that women face in tech than outright harassment. Unintentional sidelining, the bar for proof being much higher, general unwarranted skepticism in their abilities, etc.

These are very bold claims of sexism. No one can really comment until they're somewhat proven.

My comment was mainly about a "bro" environment and harassment which is more tangible.

If the bros in question assume I am competent, they are milion times easier to work with then dudes who assume my idead are bad without listening to them. Not that it would be exclusive. The things parent poster listed affect you career and ability to achieve more then sex jokes.

Focus on the code. Who cares how others see you.

How others see you determines whether they will cooperate with you, give you information you need to do your job, hire you, fire you, promote you, and how much they will pay you. Jobs where you can "focus on the code" to the total exclusion of dealing with other humans are practically non-existent.

Short of the military, and professional sports, it is. The difference is that in tech instead of being met with jeers and gropes, you're met with jeers, gropes, lengthy justifications, apologetics, and organizational inertia.

I will say, a lot of the feedback in the article does come across as, "don't manage people poorly".

When the first response FTA indicates that the "biggest factor [...] has been when an employer promises changes to how the tech team is managed and then doesn’t deliver on them", the comment of "manage better" is absolutely relevant.

The only real bits which are solely relevant to women in the whole thing DO revolve around sexual harassment, which leads me to believe that an enforced policy of "don't harass people" would go a long way.

We're not perfect yet. There are stupid men through the industry who sexually harass women. There are stupid men and women who have internal biases against women. There aren't enough women studying tech in the colleges to provide a truly diverse workforce in tech.

These are all problems which need to be addressed, but they will not be positively addressed by shaming people: comments like "the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues", "men might be silently stewing over their existence", and "It is a cowardly oblique swipe at these sort of organizations" don't advance the conversation, they attempt to shame people into agreeing with you.

WRT Girls Who Code; it is not small nor local anymore. It's nationwide and well represented in tech company volunteer activities, so I've found. At least for women; they frown on male volunteers in my experience.

Which was the top comment when you wrote this? Your comment is now self-referencing.

Awkward...

I believe the GP was referring to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969465

> It is a cowardly oblique swipe at these sort of organizations

How is it cowardly? They have publically stated business shouldn't support "MinorityCodingClub".

It's brave in this environment to go against this status quo.

Cowardice is using words like cowardice because you disagree, it's a weasel word use to undermine people, not arguments.

> which sounds an awful lot like Girls Who Code,

This is a classic kara collecting, stating the obvious like it's not obvious.

We all know what they mean because that's exactly they are implying.

This comment is why this issue will never more forward, it's all emotive fud.

Get everyone focused on thinking about the team's mission, role, and what it takes to get the job done. Drill that into everyone's head and stick to it. Let everything else go.

A mentor once told me that business fundamentally revolves around making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. I like thinking about work that way, as it has nothing to do with religion, sex, gender, age, height, phase of the moon (maybe you employ werewolves), etc.

Focusing on work can be hard though, because it might mean you will encounter a conflict when it comes to supporting a cause with good intentions. Say the MinorityCodingClub wants to host an event in your office. Personally, I think promoting diversity is generally a healthy thing. But what if MinorityCodingClub doesn't allow people not in that minority to participate in the event? You may find part of your staff wants to allow it, and part of your staff opposes it (perhaps silently).

Staying focused on making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. It's hard enough to get people to come together on doing that, so don't tolerate a culture that gets in the way of making that happen.

This is a wonderful message for those for whom the Status Quo works. It's what we'd like to hear and allows us to ignore tiresome issues.

Eventually it's Versailles time and everybody has to have their heads cut off. So you need to balance this "focused" (i.e. ignore the problem) approach with a longer term plan.

Or rather someone needs to. Or maybe we should just accept getting our heads cut off.

Wait, how does your advice answer your question about the event? Are you saying that you shouldn't host a diversity event because it doesn't explicitly match the four things you listed? Because someone might not like the event? I don't get it.

It seems like what he's saying is that you shouldn't allow it to happen because it's not strictly work-related but I find it hard to agree with that thinking.

The whole position is summed up as "Be a corporate drone." I think a lot of us would disagree with it.

Many of us don't care.

If you don't care then it seems like allowing people who do care to hold their women in technology groups or whatever would be fine.

except when its disruptive, which is when i do care.

I thought silicon valley loved disruption.

For instance?

Well I was just thinking of it interfering withwork

In what way would it interfere with work?

its happening at work no? what does it have to do with work otherwise?

Ok, it's happening at the office. So how is it interfering with anyone's work?

Just like any in-office demonstration interferes. Its not special in any way you know.

"Demonstration"? I've never met anyone who opposes any kind of workplace activity (say, charitable giving or birthday parties) whatsoever.

Now you have

I think this thinking is discouraging. Bot to men but even more to women and it might be the reason why there are so few women in STEM fields.

I think generally work places should be much more well rounded. We spend a considerable amount of time there, so why not allow it to be a place where we expand our lives instead of a place where we only "make money, save money, save time, and make customers happier"?

Many of us don't want it to be anything more than that. That's what the rest of our life is for.

That's completely fair. But my proposition was not about your preferences. I conjectured that a shift to a more whole view of employers (rather than just machines) would be beneficial for most people.

The purpose of my life outside of work right now is dating women so I think you are treading dangerous waters by asking people to bring a more "whole" view of themselves into the workplace when that is perceived to be the problem in the first place.

Again, a "more whole view" is not a complete view. I didn't suggest that we bring in all aspects of life. Why is it that people purposely misunderstand my words / does not see the scope? (I talked generally, not individually, and I did not talk about bringing all aspects in)

Careful. Plenty of STEM fields have much better gender parity than tech. Tech is singularly bad among the STEM fields; only physics is competitively bad. Mathematics, molecular biology, stat --- all have strong female participation. Worth noting: all these other STEM fields are also heavily dependent on software and computer technology, and women do fine in them.

Sorry, you are completely right.

Isn't 'tech' a broader term than those other subjects though?

Are you sure math is doing much better than tech? The others I know are much more balanced but I thought that women were underrepresented in math as well.

Yes. You can look up the stats yourself; they're not hard to find.

Actually, that's not true.

Generic "Engineering" is just as bad as CS. In fact, CS is slowly approaching the Engineering level (from the top).

What's interesting is that the graph that's often bandied about left off engineering, to show CS as the sole outlier.

Things that make you go "hmmm...."

I just said CS isn't the sole outlier. But exclusion of women is an anomalous state for STEM, whether or not you include "generic engineering" in the mix.

I went to Georgia Tech for Mechanical Engineering, I think generic engineering has approximately the same set of sexism problems as CS. I wouldn't try to use it as a way to say that CS doesn't have a problem

My sister and I(male) are both engineers, she is a mechanical engineer and has related to me a lot of the difficulties she has faced with this career.

I think engineering is probably worse than CS because there is discrimination from technical as well as non technical peers.

Among non technical peers (Operators, fitters, boilermakers etc) side of things there is a tendency for people to assume female engineers lack physical capabilities I see it out on mine/construction sites etc workers will refuse to let female engineers carry tool bags etc. They won't look twice when I heft a bag full of Stillson wrenches around yet I've seen on occasions they'll almost snatch the bags out of female colleague's hands.

As a male I'm pretty much left to my own devices when I'm out on site the workers assume I'm competent. For females there is a tendency for workers to "hover" they won't trust her ability until she demonstrates it. The culture out on construction sites etc is not really all that female friendly in general. I mentioned it to my sister once and she was pretty dismissive her response was something along the lines of "That's just the way things are they assume I'm just a clueless girl until I prove to them I know what I'm doing".

On the technical side I see it a lot with external clients when they visit the office sometimes they'll do things like assume a female engineer is a secretary.

Most of the diversity efforts are focused on technical side of things around inclusive office culture and things like that. There are not a lot of initiatives targeted towards non technical peers other than very token stuff like "Don't put up pornography in site sheds and crib rooms".

My sister ended up quitting her job at a power plant and works in government now she seems much happier there.

I think this is spot on. But I also think it is a structural thing: We have always been told "children and women first to the lifeboat, then men". I think this is a bi-product of the spare-the-women culture we are living.

Maybe men are more trying to be polite than hostile when they won't let women carry heavy loads?

> might be the reason why there are so few women in STEM fields

It might be, as is repeatedly suggested; but it probably isn't. If it was, we'd see more women study STEM in the first place.

I mean these Silicon Valley firms keep getting caught in blatant sexual harassment cases. I think a lot of them need, like, basic remedial education.

The irony is that these are "progressive" companies.

Well, that's a whole different rant but, really, you read about grown men texting their female coworkers incessantly with crude sexual propositions and you have to wonder how they ever came to believe this was acceptable behavior.

Presumably it's like spam, it works some percentage of the time and the consequences for it not working aren't severe.

Well, until your behavior is the cause for a massive lawsuit, anyway.

I'd say that the reason why sexual harassment is such a problem at SV unicorns is because of the SV startup culture, not despite it.

SV encourages people to move fast, be aggressive, don't be afraid to break things, ignore regulations, disrupt all the things, etc. There are substantial similarities to the way a VC-funded startup operates and the way a pick-up artist operates.

You'll notice that Susan Fowler's blog post also goes into detail about the Game of Thrones-esque culture with middle managers constantly and openly plotting to overthrow their superiors and take their jobs. A culture that encourages you to figuratively fuck your boss also encourages you to literally fuck your subordinates. It's a culture of aggression and proving your dominance.

Big traditional conservative companies on the other hand... well, they just don't have that culture. Their culture discourages people from taking risks at every level. In order to get anything done, you have to go through several layers of bureaucracy, put everything in writing, make sure your is are dotted and your ts crossed. It discourages aggressive, disruptive risk-takers from coming near the company. And without aggressive, disruptive risk-takers, you don't have nearly the amount of sexual harassment. Yes, it still happens on occasion, but it isn't nearly as systemic or as blatant as in a VC-funded startup.

So it leads to the seemingly-paradoxical situation where the best companies for women and LGBT people to work at are the kind of "conservative" companies that you can imagine Ned Flanders working at. But culturally conservative isn't the same thing as politically conservative; I've said this before, but I have a lot of politically liberal friends (most of them enthusiastic Clinton voters) who live in the suburbs, work 9-5 at traditional large corporations, and have traditional families.

Surely part of it has to be how many people in these companies are fresh out of college.

You might be shocked at the amount of misogyny men in their 30s and 40s think is acceptable. (Also, contra 'amyjess - some of the conservative fields, in particular finance and law, are also hideously sexist & contain a ton of harassment.)

I am positive that many (But not all) of these firms put their managers through sexual harassment training. I went through it before I received reports.

The problem is that it only takes one idiot to cause a problem... And the odds of at least one manager being an idiot approach 100%, as your company grows.

(In a place like Uber, though, the problem seems systemic.)

"Staying focused on making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier."

To be perfectly honest, that sounds like a recipe for a dull ass, penny pinching, unenjoyable work environment. The kind where you're treated as a cost center.

This is the mentality that leads to drama explosions like at Uber. They were all focused on making money and building a big company. Because of this, they ignored the "little things" like building a HR department that could support women when they were put in bad situations.

I think a part of "don't tolerate a culture that gets in the way of making that [making money] happen" is not tolerating sexism, juvenile behaviour, harassment, or bullying in the workplace.

All of those factors make some of your employees less productive.

Totally agree. The distinction I'm trying to make is that it's easy to let these things happen when you're focused on building and selling a product. I'm positive that no CEO wants their business to be a place where women are harassed or personnel problems slow down progress. However these things can and do happen without a lot of careful effort spent early on, focused on preventing them. By the time the problems become visible (e.g. through a shocking public blog post), it will be significantly harder to fix the underlying causes, which is very costly to the company in terms of attracting and keeping talent and maintaining focus on objectives.

You would think so, but people are very often willing to damage their own financial self-interest in favor of prejudices, especially when the former is long-term and the latter short-term.

That would fall under "tolerating a culture that gets in the way of making money".

My comment was a comment, not an employee handbook.

Boss: "Hey, my partner and I would love it if you'd like to join us for drinks at my place on Saturday night."

Employee (replies & CC's boss's boss): "I'm here to work, and this is making me extremely uncomfortable."

^^^ strive for that.

All work and no play makes Jill and Jack dull.

Get your work done and you can go home early.

Office dating is dicey but, I think, workable, but the issues with a superior asking a subordinate out on a date are so obvious that I don't see how you can think it's OK.

CC's boss's boss?

A bit passive-aggressive for a friendly gesture isn't it?

Do you think a male boss inviting a female employee over for "drinks" on a Saturday night at his home is nothing more than a "friendly gesture"?

Way more often than not, yes.

Is your default position to assume there's an agenda behind every invitation?

No, of course I do not assume there is an ulterior motive behind "every" invitation, but there is a strong sexual undercurrent to the invitation we're talking about.

You don't need to see an agenda behind every invitation to recognize the agenda behind this one.

For those genuinely unclear, it's a combination of things - the individual nature of the invitation, the private nature of the venue, the timing and explicit involvement of libations whose effects often include the lowering of inhibitions - all in all it's just a super sketchy thing to all of a sudden pop up in a previously professional relationship. Any one of those would be fine; any two would be a little questionable but probably okay; all three at once constitute a great big flashing neon sign that spells out "YOUR BOSS IS TRYING TO LAY YOU".

I mean that's the thing, I don't deny that if this a purely professional relationship then this comment is incredibly out of place. But often times professional relationships become less professional and more friendly. I don't deny that it is creepy from your perspective.

I mean sure, but if that's the nature of the relationship, nobody's going to be made uncomfortable by the invitation - that's probably why the context in which it was mentioned makes clear that's not the case in this hypothetical. My comments are addressed more toward the "what could possibly be wrong with that?" kind of response it seems to have elicited, and intend to supply that question an answer.

I see

And if said boss isn't trying anything, he still ought to understand the signals it sends sufficiently well to either 1) not do it, 2) invite more people (and make that clear in the e-mail), or 3) make it something much more casual than drinks on a Saturday night.

If he doesn't understand that, he'll be the kind of manager that creates liabilities by leaving e-mail trails of questionable invitations that might get caught up in discovery if/when something happens.

It could be. There's no context here. In this constructed example sure, it's not a friendly gesture. But it is a poor example. Here's the one I'd use:

"Hey employee #333 want to sex"

See? No context necessary

Which one of these e-mails do you think a boss looking to seduce his employee is more likely to send?

I'm saying that it's unhelpful in this example to not be more clear.

I don't think so. I think using a more realistic example makes the point clearer.

I agree that there isn't enough context. The example doesn't even specify that it's being sent to a female employee (that's an assumption everyone is making) and I can imagine plenty of scenarios - with context - where it wouldn't necessarily be inappropriate.

The context here includes the parent comment to the one setting out the scenario, and the reaction of sending a message copied to the boss's boss complaining about it.

They make it clear that it was sent to a woman, and that the scenario at the very least was interpreted by the recipient as inappropriate.

Yes, there are scenarios where it could be acceptable, but consider that they are (much) narrower than you might think:

* Men can be sexually harassed too.

* Sexual harassment is not the only problem with an e-mail like that. It may also create drinking pressure, or a feeling that you are forced to socialise with your boss. Of course that is context-dependent too, but for my part, as a man who doesn't enjoy drinking and doesn't want to spend my Saturdays with the boss, I'd fell put under inappropriate pressure by an e-mail like that as well, because I'd be concerned that a rejection could impact work.

A lot of behaviour like that is fine when it is not between subordinates, and can be fine with subordinates too if it is someone you know very well.

But even then you need to consider that e.g. it may negatively affect team dynamics or may be unintentionally discriminatory or become seen as discriminatory purely by e.g. including only those the manager knows well too.

> or a feeling that you are forced to socialise with your boss

Would you feel you'd be fired? Because sometimes getting to know someone is an appropriate pathway to success.

Scenarios like this are more common at start-ups, aren't they? If you just want to drone through work, with no social connections, the average american mega-corp might be more appropriate.

My experience is that it seems less common at start-ups, with the caveat that it's my experience and so definitively biased. At least the startups I've been in have been small, tight-knit groups where any socialisation have tended to be group activities, and where there's been little implicit imposing hierarchy, and standing up for yourself tends to be appreciated.

In larger companies, on the other hand, you get all kinds of weird little fiefdoms where getting on your managers bad side is potentially far more damaging because if your boss has sufficient support he will be able to musster a much bigger support system.

People hear what they want to hear. As a boss, you can choose to say what you want and see what happens. It might be wiser to choose words carefully, so your subordinates don't get the wrong message.

OP says:

> Boss: "Hey, my partner and I would love it if..

So, you think the partner being there is just a premise?

I don't know. The Uber post involved a manager talking about swinging.

Big assumption then..

I don't think the presence of the man's partner is enough to make the invitation not seem sexual in nature, is what I'm getting at.

What makes it seem sexual in nature?

Surely inviting a female employee, alone, is the unusual aspect that would make it appear suspect?

I'm not going to explain it any better than the other guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13970336

First things in that post:

> the individual nature of the invitation, the private nature of the venue

also:

> You don't need to see an agenda behind every invitation to recognize the agenda behind this one.

How does "that guy" know what agenda there is?

If you can't explain any better then I can't accept your argument.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

That reads to me more like a pass. If a boss made a pass at me, you better believe I'd be looping in someone higher up on that, too, because that whole territory is extremely fraught no matter the response.

Seriously? What an ass move.

I would have replied saying I will be coming with my partner and look forward having a good time.

If this was not a pass, the manager should have explicitly invited the employee's S.O. and indicated a venue that has no beds in it (bar or restaurant).

Too much vague-ry here, which, on a sensitive topic, is asking for trouble.

Nope. Uber case was plain simple case of sexual harassment. My question is, would Uber have arbitrated in same manner if female employees were accused of harassment? yes, they would have. It's not about women,men or trans. It's about equality at workplace. Should one be more sensitive to women employees concern than men? If yes, where is the equality?

I don't see what popping into stairways in the company building to have sex has to do with making money. From the outside, Uber seems to have gotten focused on a blatantly unsustainable, ultra-exploitative business model and on frat-boy hijinks at the office.

So put your head down and ignore the fact that women make up a small portion of people in STEM fields and are leaving those jobs once they get them?

That's not a solution, it's what most places are already doing.

That's a recipe for disaster!

It works well for delivering your MVP and maybe the first version of your product. But then you want your employee to be empowered, to feel relevant and be able to take matters into their hands. Otherwise it doesn't scale. But happy and satisfied worker could step up to this level. Unsatisfied and soldier like employees cannot do that, they will be just soldiers that fear for their position. And not having even patriotism (that is what bond soldiers) work for them, the best will leave your company, the worst will stay.

That's one of the differences between being a manager and being a leader. A leader takes the hard questions into his hands.

But don't trust me, there are years of research in company organization saying that. Go out and read any article on HBS on the topic of leadership, workplace organization or CSR and you'll see that.

So, your mentor was wrong, sorry about that.

Based on your statement, if the company gets more money by doing all sorts of terrible things to its contractors and employees then that's the right thing to do? There's going to be a ton of local minima in decisions and gray areas in things that you can't accurately value if you reduce it all to money. I think you haven't quite thought through this one completely.

This is either ignoring the problem, or circular reasoning. "Oh well of course don't allow that kind of behaviour; it makes employees uncomfortable and that doesn't help make money." Ok, but how do you define that?

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Sounds like the convenient POV from someone already well represented in the industry. Dismissing issues of diversity as being tangential to the core business of, well, business, is sensible from an, ahem, business-perspective. And from a human perspective, really flawed and problematic.

From a human perspective, humans are really flawed and problematic.

That extends to even the most well-meaning diversity initiative. If nothing else, diversity initiatives create implicit filters for the types of people that are excited-to-ambivalent about diversity initiatives.

no, that's how you get status quo bias. the current system makes money, so if that's all you focus on, you'll never address the fact that it treats some demographics worse than others.

also, this sort of "extrapolate to the absurd" list ("religion, sex, gender, age, height, phase of the moon (maybe you employ werewolves), etc.") is a classic red flag for someone not caring about the very real inequalities in the system - the most common variant is "i don't care if you're white, black, green or purple...", but what it really works out to is "i think we can just brush any black-person-specific problems under the carpet and everything will be fine".

Except all of this fallout is because Uber HR determined employee x with a harassment issue is valuable enough to making money that the potential to lose employees y and z is an acceptable risk.

Ethics do not logically fall into place magically because the ultimate goal is making money. It's easy to say "ignore those factors in favor of making money" but the reality of the world isn't that simple. Uber didn't tolerate a culture that got in the way of making money, and now they're here.

"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

Focusing on work and allowing harassment is polar opposites. Harassment is by definition something personal and not professional, and outside of those supporting hazing there is not much support that harassment has any place in the work place.

Reading the stories about uber, I keep hearing that the woman wanted to focus on work but the harassing person interfered. That is exactly what amorphid suggest that a company should work to prevent, fostering a culture that focus on making customers happier and getting people working together for that a common goal.

As long as the demand for engineers stay higher than supply, everything should fall magically into place, actually, according to economic theory.

Developer turnover is very costly.

What I got from these womens' answers is that their motivations are pretty much exactly the same as men's. Maybe with the exception of serial harassment cases.

> everything should fall magically into place

I'm not so certain. I agree, it should. But engineers don't like to talk about their salary; I have no idea what my peers earn, and it isn't easy to find out. Researching data such as discussion on HN, Glassdoor, BLS data, surveys from companies that are more open, etc. yield absolutely ludicrous ranges; I might ought to (depending on who and how you ask) be earning anywhere from 60k to 250k+ as an engineer; that includes throwing out some high & low figures. The situation is made worse by the huge disparities in cost of living between various geographies, making it hard to translate salaries in one area into anything sensible in the next. (You're lucky to get a breakdown to one of a geographical area, or actual line of work, but not both. I want to know what a backend vs. mobile vs. PM makes in Boston vs. NYC vs. SF; and ideally, along even more dimensions. Alas, it seems that blog-studies never release the data.)

If you think that interpersonal and morale issues don't affect how effectively a company functions, I kind of think you don't get how companies function.

Am I wrong or all the issues seem to be not gender related but about management and they apply to both sexes?

I think there's a case to be made that, in general, women may be more sensitive to some universal tech industry issues which men tend to shrug off or otherwise deal with differently.

I think there are valid examples, e.g.: 90% of my coworkers are male. Men: don't notice. Women: might notice.

Um hope I'm not being humourless but obviously if the percentage was reversed then the Men would notice and a majority would be somewhat bothered by it. Especially if they perceived a difference in how they were treated as part of that smaller group...

Isn't this kind of the point? Am I missing summat?

Do you have any supporting evidence to help build this case? I don't buy it.

According to Dr. Elaine Aron, http://hsperson.com there is a similar percentage sensitivity in both genders, 15-20%.

Your being down voted because no one wants to hear it, but there is some truth to it.

It isn't so much a biological difference (there may be some of that) but one that is likely a byproduct of how we socialize children [1].

Fixing this issue in adults is a hell of a lot harder to fix than it is in kids.

It doesn't help that software engineering as a whole, is to varying degrees, broken. From how we interview to how we manage projects [2]. We simply have no idea how to build something effective and repeatable within the constraints of the current system.

[1] I could put a million different links here, lets just use this one and you can do your own research after that: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-girls-bo...

[2] Again illustrative example, pick your own poison here as well: https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-experience-trap

Funny how you're being downvoted too. You're probably being downvoted for pointing out the naked truth about software engineering and its utter brokenness.

I think this is a more likely scenario -- nurture rather than nature.

Nobody's born with bias or opinions.

It's probably true that, for the most part, men are less likely to mind, say, crude sexual remarks about women, but I don't think it follows that we should just tell women to suck it up.

I had the exact same reaction. Common themes were along the lines of not having confidence in your direct manager, especially in cases where technical folks have been promoted into management positions. I hear this all the time.

Agreed - all of the comments or reasons given are not specific to a particular sex, and I've heard the same laments from men as well.

It's not like women are aliens with concerns that are completely divorced from male employees. They just have a superset of concerns that also includes the potential for gender discrimination from coworkers and managers.

There are likely a similar set of male specific issues as well, so it seems presumptuous to call it a superset.

This is important. There's a fine line between calling women's needs "special needs" and implying the primacy of maleness.

Indeed, both men and women have a superset of human concerns.

The union is never instantiated.

Supersets are not exclusive.

What do you mean?

Maybe each gender could have a set that's the superset of their common needs. Or maybe it was meant that the superset can equal the original set.

Correct on the former.

I would hazard a guess that a weak manager, manages all employees poorly. However, I would bet a lot of money that, like so many things in life, when you are bad in all quadrants on one thing, you'll likely be bad at other things like managing women. Realistically, they are the nearly the same to manage, but you can do some dumb things to make them feel excluded or make them feel like there is a boys club (probably because there is.)

Susan Fowler's team, for example, a bad manager thought it was a good idea to save costs by not purchasing leather jackets for women on the Uber DevOps team. Spare the few hundred or thousand dollars (even if it were in the thousands) and make your employees feel equal and like they are a part of the same tribe. It's common sense. Pocket change to Uber and it makes people feel comfortable around their coworkers, and they will enjoy being part of a team and being passionate about their work-unit, co-workers and take pride in their company.

Here's some anecdotal evidence. I had a product manager last week tell me she thought it was great that our company bought women's jackets for the team instead of making them wear bulky men's sizes like so many companies she has worked for in the past. That cost me less than $150 for them to set up the plates/screens/whatever with the printer but it bought me thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in good-will. Great investment. For me, this was a small gesture on my part and the companies behalf. But, it went a long way. The ladies on my teams are strong contributors, and it's table stakes for me to make sure they feel included and part of the team. Even if I have to tailor to them. Pun intended.

My direct management of every employee is a little bit different based on who they are, their communication style, how they receive feedback and their work-style. I assume that gender goes a little bit into how I interact with each person on my team and I am willing to admit I probably have some biases but overall if you're already managing your team with a high eq, you'll fare well and create an inclusive team.

If these are your issues as well, you can join in and help fix them. No one is trying to invalidate your problems; this is a call to action for better engineering management practices.

Except when you interview only women about reasons they leave companies, what you hope to discover is why more women than men might be leaving. This article offers no insight on that question.

I guess we disagree there.

Agreed - I am not female, and these are the same reasons I'd be unhappy with a job or leave.

Well, due to the outrageous skew in gender, I think you have to read these things more deeply. There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries and a field that is open to all (by means of a computer science undergraduate program.) Look at something that is much harder than becoming a software engineer: becoming an MD in the United States. It has far higher mental and educational requirements; it's simply harder. An MD can learn C++ (to code their medical application) much faster than a C++ engineer can learn even a tiny part of the MD's domain expertise.

Here is the gender breakdown of MD's:

http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/

Women comprise 34% of MD's to 66% men. That is a statistical skew, but nowhere near the 93% male that programmers face. In essence when you reply to a comment here on HN you could carelessly say "he" referring to an OP without referring to their first name, whereas if this were a forum for physicians you would not make that assumption because it's not skewed enough for you to do so. (Here on HN there are lots of female engineers but they don't usually announce themselves explicitly.)

So software engineering has a gender problem. Now we're getting an interview about what some people cite for leaving an industry in which they can make six figures within their first five years, with nothing more than an undergraduate education or the equivalent self-learning of 25% of one.

So it is important to read the interviews extremely carefully and with a very open mind.

For example, what are some of the worst things about being a software engineer: insane hours; intense mental focus (it is impossible not to take your work home with you and I am sure many programmers routinely dream of the tasks they are working on); coupled with bull-pen open space offices:

However, open office plans[1] were not cited by the women in this interview. Zero mentions as far as I can see (I re-skimmed and also searched inline for "open').

The word hour or hours does not occur a single time.

So even though it appears that the issues cited are independent of gender, it is imperative to read these interviews very deeply. There could be more to them than meets the eye.

I don't know what it is, but it has to be in these interviews, lurking beneath the surface. Read more deeply.

[1] such as the monstrosity pictured here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan

Does software engineering have a gender problem, or a social validation problem?

It is no secret that women in nations where software engineering is likely to be a significant source of employment are far more socially attuned than men are; whether this is by nurture or nature is grist for another mill at another time. It is also no secret that software engineers rank lower on social validation than doctors. Empirically, look at a sampling of org charts, and statistically, pure software engineers (not counting Fellow-type positions, for example) rarely call the shots. Not that they should as a rule: I'm pointing out the reality.

Regardless of the US reality for doctors, with the constraints imposed upon them by the dysfunctionally-broken US healthcare policies, the social perception of doctors is "doctors call the shots". The phrase "doctor's orders" carries enormous cultural weight behind it.

To empirically test a weak form of this hypothesis, compare the number of women managers who were originally trained as programmers to women software engineers. If there is a statistically significant deviation, then some Maxwell's Demon-like mechanism at work performs a sorting function that emerges this deviation, gradually exerting an inexorable pull upon women programmers into management. A stronger experimental confirmation of this hypothesis would require someone with far more training in such psycho-social factors discrimination to devise an experiment to empirically test.

I'm not discounting the very real challenges women software engineers face. Personally, I have not witnessed first-hand any of the workplace vibe-killers described, and I've been in a lot of different workplaces by dint of my wandering consulting career, but I can believe it happens because I've also seen some really bad behavior in the species, and generally I tend to attract clients with pretty solid corporate cultures. But women tend as a statistical aggregate to pay attention to the nuances of social rankings far more than most men realize, and especially men in software engineering realize.

Putting "It is no secret" before a claim doesn't validate it, please provide some support/context for "[female devs] are far more socially attuned than men are".

Also, a phrase like "doctor's orders" is common, because most members of the public will have occasion to see a doctor, the profession having existing for a long time. There's no saying "CTO's orders", yet this is obviously a position of power.

Also, your observances wrt men and social ranking could easily be confounded if you don't have a complete knowledge of the filters on the men & women you see in IT.

Start here, and expand outwards in related searches:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_emotional_i...

Saying "C-level's orders" doesn't carry anywhere the same weight as "software engineer's orders". Given a technical decision, what weighting is the CFO's decision given over the software engineer tasked with understanding the problem domain? I deliberately chose CFO because it is a common refrain on HN and elsewhere that software engineers are summarily overridden by non-technical management on technical decisions. How frequently are doctors overridden on medical decisions by non-medicine-trained hospital administrators? I don't know the precise answer to that, but doctor/nursing friends don't complain about it.

I'm pointing out a possible line of inquiry that doesn't seem to come up in these discussions. Given the relatively low status of IT in most non-tech companies I work with, compared to Sales and Finance for example (where women are better represented than in coding and technical IT, yet sales and finance cultures can be notoriously misogynist in many orgs), it isn't an unreasonable question to pose whether or not that relative low status of programming turns off women in the general non-tech business world, which vastly outweighs our small echo chamber of strongly-tech-focused companies.

An observation I've been chewing upon. The US pharmaceutical /medical sales environment is heavily represented with women, with a blatantly cynical unspoken industry practice of hiring easy on the eyes women. This is an openly misogynist atmosphere, with getting hit on just a part of their daily sales calls, but women are not driven away by it to the point where beautiful medical sales women no longer is a cliche. Incentives matter. Might there also be the possibility the programming world's negatives outweigh the compensation, and at some point, the compensation can outweigh the negatives?

A related question is why, with so much money on the line, and as direct revenue generators, are so many women programmers in tech-focused companies relating consistently depressing stories of exclusion? In other words, are there no financial consequences for managers mishandling such valuable revenue generators in general, or is it only when the revenue generator are women?

> Start here, and expand outwards in related searches

No thank you, I'd sooner someone qualified do that.

> it is a common refrain on HN

> I don't know the precise answer ... doctor/nursing friends don't complain about it.

My point is, that this is weak subjective evidence. I do not see the same trends you do.

> it isn't an unreasonable question to pose whether or not that relative low status of programming turns off women

Isn't it? Lets establish that it is true first.

> are there no financial consequences for managers mishandling such valuable revenue generators in general

Does "so many women programmers in tech-focused companies relating consistently depressing stories of exclusion" mean that most women in tech are excluded, or that these stories bubble to the top?

Quite a few hospitals have women in executive roles, some who are trained nurses, and basically "call the shots" in that role.

At San Francisco General Hospital, At least 50% of the Administrator(s)-On-Duty are women. It's a mixture of MDs, and nurses. In fact, I've only personally met one AOD who is male (nurse). The AOD calls the shots on a daily basis.

BTW one recent CEO, Susan Currin is a nurse & the current CEO Susan Ehrlich, MD are both women.

IMO It's not a validation issue. Companies (Tech or otherwise) have the culture they reinforce, dysfunctional or not.

Respectfully, I think you missed the point of the parent comment.

Parent comment says: if `(former programmer) turned manager` is more equal in gender than `programmer`, that might mean there is a sorting function that is pulling women out of engineering and into management.

His/her hypothesis is that being a "regular dev" is not very socially respected, and thus, pushes women to want out at a higher rate than other professions, like say, Doctor.

The fact that Doctor gender ratio is similar to Manager Doctor gender ratio, actually fits his hypothesis.

Not saying I disagree with either of you, just re stating.

> Does software engineering have a gender problem, or a social validation problem?

The two are not mutually exclusive (and, indeed, can be mutually reinforcing.)

It's my observation that there are a lot more women in roles like project manager or scrum master or business analyst than software engineer.

> There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries [...]

It's entirely possible that I am extrapolating from my own naivety, but do young men really get into software development for the money? I don't think any of my friends were thinking about our future salaries when we started programming after school. It's just this hobby that people will inexplicably pay us money for. I know this sounds like a cliché, but I've never seen data to the contrary.

There are quite a few who do it for just the money. And there's nothing wrong with that, either.

Yes, it is an uncontroversial fact that the number of computer science degrees achieved correlates to the social perception of CS as a path to wealth, and the implication is that some people enrol in CS because they think there is money in it - http://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sci...

The majority of people I know do it for the passion. Nice salary is a bonus, but I'm 100% the men I know would do the same work even for pennies.

I used to think, every so often, "Don't they realize that I'd do this even if they didn't pay me?"

But then I got married, had children, the kids grew up and needed braces and cars and college. I really need work that pays well right now, whether or not I like the work.

I know very well how tough it is... but for a lot of guys, things like that are not a priority. For different reasons... I personally believe this is what makes the difference between women and men. Women tend to appreciate real things like family, kids, healthy lifestyle more than the geeks who are fine with staring a screen all day long.

It sounds more like the difference between 20-year-olds and older people with responsibilities other than themselves and work.

Not really, men tend to care more about work than family. That's just the way it is.

I think a fair number of people major in computer science and get programming jobs because it's a stable job, yes.

> Especially as a woman, I worry about being labeled hyper-sensitive, or that my gender will influence a person’s reaction to my feedback (e.g. the perception that women are hysterical).

[...]

> The final straw has typically been something like my manager making an off-hand remark that is thoughtless and rude, or perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise, or someone I care about at work is sexually harassed or gets fired.

To me these sound like issues that women are more likely to encounter.

I'd say they're issues that are harder for woman to navigate. Not because they're less capable I should add, but because what's considered acceptable behaviour is different.

Yeah, sure. Either way it is a difficult position.

To me the ones that sound more likely to be encountered by a woman are sexual harrassment, being labeled hyper-sensitive, or worrying that gender would have an effect on communication.

Yes. I agree, which is why I cited those excerpts.

I just thought you included some things there that aren't really gendered.

I just didn't want to go nuts with ellipses.

"perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise... or gets fired"

Women more likely to encounter this? This stuff happens all the time to everyone. I'm not sure how this is something a woman is more likely to encounter.

I assumed everyone could use their wits and understand what part of that very short except was salient. In fact, I think you have, since you've gone ahead and elided it.

They probably aren't, but if they express displeasure about it, the same way that their male colleagues do, some people would interpret that as them being overly emotional.

I am reminded of this quote from a fantasy book about the gender-dynamics of displaying emotion:

> "If she wept, wasn't it too extravagant; if she laughed, how odd that she should do so at her brother's funeral; if she spoke, he whispered that she was frenetic; if she fell silent, wasn't she grown strangely gloomy? And you could just watch men begin to see what he told them they were seeing, whether it was there or not. Toward the end of his visit there, he even said such things in her hearing, to see if he could frighten and enrage her, and then accuse her of becoming an unbalanced virago."

(The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold.)

You're wrong. Every industry has management problems. Women leave tech at a rate much higher than they leave other industries. The only conclusion is that tech is a hostile environment for women, or that women are intrinsically unable to perform in tech.

IMHO, tech is a hostile environment with a lot of poor managers. I think the Peter principle applies to a lot of managers in tech. Promoted past their skill set. Just because someone is a good engineer does not mean they will be a good engineering manager. Managing humans with needs, concerns, ideals and life goals is so very different than managing a code-base. Executive leadership needs to consider this when building teams and figure out how to make and/or recruit good managers.

I wouldn't scope this down to tech. Incompetence and professional disinterest is by far the norm across all industries.

Career meritocracy is, more or less, a myth. In technical fields, there is a merit baseline that has to be cleared, but after that, any further relationship between merit and position evaporates. That is inescapable. People sometimes think they've escaped it and found the promised land of meritocracy, but they haven't. That usually just means they have a politically-skilled manager who is good at keeping their belief in the fairy tale alive.

I agree that a good engineer is not necessarily a good engineering manager, but I don't believe there are good engineering managers who are not also good engineers.

I agree, this ain't just tech's problem.

>or that women are intrinsically unable to perform in tech.

The more accurate version of this is "women find less value in tech." It deserves more consideration than it gets. There are differences that aren't just cultural between genders, and its something that should be taken into account when forming a judgement on these issues.

Or it could be that "tech finds less value in women".

Historically, your argument has been used to suppress women and minorities. It's weird that every time a group doesn't fit into an industry or a culture, that group is not white men.

> It's weird that every time a group doesn't fit into an industry or a culture, that group is not white men.

Teaching, nursing, child care. Care to take a guess which group doesn't fit into those industries?

I wonder how they can genuinely maintain their position in light of this?

Note that women now exceed men as college graduates. Meaning for every profession where men dominate, you must have other professions where women dominate more. Otherwise the numbers don't add up.

Are you suggesting I have an interest in suppressing women and minorities? The only reason I'd want to do that is to decrease competition, and I can guarentee you that I share the same interest regardless of gender or ethnicity

My comment was out of an interest in not being lied to more than anything else.

I didn't interpret that comment as a suggestion that you have an interest in suppressing women and minorities. But you might have a subconscious interest in maintaining your own worldview, wherein you're part of a group of people that 'gets' or 'finds value in' tech, and others aren't.

The subconscious forces that shape the way people think about these issues are the most pernicious.

I don't usually find subconscious arguments very convincing. They're kind of like appealing to magic, if that were a real fallacy.

> Women leave tech at a rate much higher than they leave other industries. The only conclusion is that tech is a hostile environment for women, or that women are intrinsically unable to perform in tech.

Which is it, in the areas I listed?

Interestingly, I've heard women working in those fields lament the lack of male representation. In teaching and child care, some kids just respond better to men. In nursing, it's because men are generally going to have an easier time providing care for patients who are overweight.

Interestingly, I've heard men working in tech lament the lack of female representation...

I remember reading a study about female teachers grading female students more leniently, while male teachers did not show a bias.

Source: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp133.pdf

Each of those professions have considerable effort to increase the numbers of men working in them.

This is a tedious point, and it gets made every single fucking time there's a thread like this.

Use a search engine. You'd find, within a few moments, programmes across all of these industries to correct the gender imbalance.

> Each of those professions have considerable effort to increase the numbers of men working in them.

And yet the number never budges, and we don't hear the president and the media blasting said industries over their shameful employment ratios day after day.

Instead it's just "hmm yes, that's curious. Well we're working on the problem. Carry on..."

Whereas in tech if the ratio isn't 50/50 there's hell to pay. In comparison there isn't a damn thing being done to address the imbalance in the industries I've listed. Yet women in tech, that's a national crisis.

The American Counseling Association membership is 80% women. Only 10% of all social workers under the age of 34 are men. 70% of all psychology PhDs go to women. Minority representation is also very tiny. The vast, vast majority of mental health practitioners are white women.

Yet those are professions where sex-diversity has a real impact on society. It's far more serious than the sex of the person writing the code for a fucking social network.

There has been about 1 story in the NY Times about this issue in the past 10 years.

And tech sex-disparity? A near constant stream of articles.

By the way, 1% of carpenters are women and 98% of dental hygienists are women.[1] Is that catastrophic? Does it warrant NY Times articles or endless pontification?

[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...

Seems like the most logical explanation is that [teaching|nursing|child care] are inherently hostile industries for men. Gender norms in America make it so that men aren't generally trusted around children, and face difficulties in navigating woman dominated fields like nursing.

Are you arguing that tech hasn't developed into a somewhat hostile environment for woman because men face difficulties in some industries as well? Because if so that's a poor argument. It's completely possible for both to be true for the same reason while have different underlying causes

You're changing the argument. The OP said that women leave tech at a much higher rate than other industries. You claim that men enter certain professions at a much lower rate. This is apples and oranges.

Don't women also enter tech at a much lower rate than men? Because of said hostility issues.

You have a point there, it can be argued that there's a link. However I do think it's important to compare apples to apples, and not to apple trees. So we should be looking at why men and women leave the industry, and also why they enter.

> The only conclusion...

Yeah...no. That's such a distance that "leaping" to conclusions doesn't quite cover it. How about: women are (statistically) less interested in tech? So there is less intrinsic motivation, so extrinsic factors become much more important.

Not entirely coincidentally, that is exactly what surveys starting at high-school age right through professionals leaving the profession show. And "leaving" tech is often "getting promoted to management".

UPDATE: Note that even if this explanation were not the correct one (though I think it is the one that's most correct), it would still invalidate your assertion about other explanations being the only conclusions.

You are correct. And hiring is also management responsibility (not a job maybe but they are responsible in the end). So bad hires are also management fault.

That was my impression as well. Managers get shifted around to cover up problems and are protected by their superiors. And look at how a lot of low level managers come to be - there's no real training or requirements that are specific to management, they just want to go from dev the management. And there's also next to no oversight for the managers, just, "Did your team hit its goals?" They are the modern equivalent of medieval royalty. I think they person who talked about women leaving the company for better opportunities is probably right.

As a female engineer, I haven't actually experienced any sexism or gender related issues in any company I've worked in. I've worked in a good number from small startups to large companies. I've always felt really comfortable - but I am a really straightforward person and know how to decline offers after a company interview if the culture fit doesn't feel right.

What do I look for that's related to gender? Usually a college-y or informal atmosphere. If it doesn't feel professional, I'm not too interested. This stems from my experience in HS and college (I went to MIT). Most of my peers were fine but there were some gender-related jokes in informal settings that I don't care to experience in a work environment. That's pretty much it for me, but maybe I've been lucky!

Thanks. I've only worked at companies where the median age is well over 30, and when I read horror stories it often sounds like the problem mostly stems from overall immaturity, in both age and management experience. I'm sure age is no magic cure for all the assholery in this world, but the correlation between "family dad" and "decent, professional coworker" seems to fare nicely.

Since this is the only advice to women I can come up with, I'm glad to read that it worked out for one person at least.

> "family dad" and "decent, professional coworker" seems to fare nicely

I'm not a woman but I've had girlfriends who've complained about being sexually harassed at work and it's always been a "creepy, old married guy".

Of course, maybe they personally didn't perceive similar attention from younger guys as harassment, I don't know.

My experience lines more up with the poster above. I've only been harassed by a creepy, young, single guy.

So I guess the pattern is really creepy guys?

That said, the "Dads" I've worked with (men with children, who I know have children because they talk about them or bring them in sometimes) have always been very easy to get along with. Also, I sometimes overhear them comparing notes on stuff they do with their daughters to teach them tech and science, which makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Kudos to all you out there raising the next generation right.

My dev organization had, at one point, a fairly respectable gender ratio (relative to other orgs, which isn't saying much). Over time, the women in our dev org have had a much higher attrition rate, because they've moved on to other opportunities. I've never heard a complaint from any of them that women were treated differently here.

I have a suspicion that women who get into tech tend to be more self-assured than the average individual (by virtue of the fact that they're willing to fight what looks like an uphill battle to get into the field). And that those people are also more likely to look around for a better opportunity and not be afraid to grab it. Which would make them inherently difficult to retain.

(I also have a feeling that talking about women in tech in any kind of generality is a good way to get pitchforked and set on fire, so I hope I haven't said anything out of line.)

I disagree with your generality. I think women who work in startups and thrive/survive in that environment are probably more resilient than the average woman, but I also think that imposter syndrome is rampant in all women in the tech field, and that's usually not a sign of self-assurance.

As with everyone, there's things that you as an individual can let slide and be OK with, and there's things that another person can let slide and be OK with. My wife's an engineer (PE) in a very traditional male-dominated field, and she's good enough at what she does that she gets put on the big projects as the lead. When she deals with prejudice and outright insults from older men, it's like water off a duck's back, because she's dealt with that situation for her entire education and career. Other women or younger men who treat her as an inferior really get under her skin.

It's very likely to be down to differences in temperament, although I don't think it's self-assurance precisely. Typically, men are more driven to compete for status and place their career at the center of their lives, while women evaluate their situation more holistically.

This means they're less likely to put up with bullshit, and are more likely to be lured away to places that are less prestigious/competitive but allow them to actually have a life.

Generally speaking! I enjoy being pitchforked and set on fire, pseudonymously at least.

It's also those who are willing to put up with the bullshit and play the political game that tend to rise to the top in a business, tech or otherwise. True, optimising a career for a healthier work-life balance is a valid strategy and arguably the best one, but the fact of the business world today is that those who deal with the dog and pony show tend to get further than those who don't.

self-assurance is probably the wrong descriptor.

> relative to other orgs, which isn't saying much

If your org has a higher female % than the population it sources its applicants from, would that not raise more suspicions of sexism?

We have something akin to an in-house dev bootcamp, and the population we source applicants to that from is a different team at our company that has a pretty good gender balance.

But even if that were not the case, I'm inclined to reject your subtle insinuation that gender balance in the field isn't a problem companies should worry about.

The common thread running through all of this was that what seemed to drive these women from their own roles in tech were the incompetence or inexperience of management.

I'm young enough (born in the late 1980's) that during my entire time in the work force, I feel like I've only ever met ONE "real" manager. I've known many people in management roles, but I think we've definitely lost sight of what good management even looks like. If you're under a certain age, I wonder if you've even met a real manager before. From today forward, many of the people in management roles may never have met a real manager before too - how are they supposed to fill a role they've never seen before.

I think we need some good management role models, and we need to find a way to encourage people in management roles to grow to fill this.

I don't have any studies or hard facts to cite, but consider this - I feel like part of the role of a manager is to bear responsibility and deadlines, manage the workers and give them the access and tools they need to succeed. But what I see most often is managers (not doing the work) acting like slave drivers, pushing all of the responsibility and pressure of meeting the deadlines on the workers to stress about. I see lower level workers staying late after work, taking 'ownership' of their manager's responsibilities out of fear they will get fired. That's not what it's supposed to look like but unfortunately for most millennials it seems to be the common experience.

I found the same, but consider it to be bias. Once you have had a really good manager, you compare everyone else to them, and of course the rest fall short.

I agree. I've seen this same thing too many times.

My conclusion is that maybe the whole concept of "software manager" is deeply flawed. Upper management likes to have a single person they can pressure and blame. But the reality is that making good software on a schedule is incredibly difficult. Upper management doesn't seem to recognize that you can't just "bolt on" a good manager and just "force it to work."

Making good software in a way that's responsive to market pressures is not like running a lemonade stand. It's almost impossible to get right, even with a big budget, because upper management puts too many idiotic constraints on it.

At its most basic: Is a voice that isn't shouting heard and valued?

Is someone who seeks consensus from the team before moving forward rewarded? Or is someone who just goes out and does something rewarded more? You have to see what kind of styles are promoted within the organization, and if there's a place for the less aggressive/assertive within it. For those that may struggle with impostor syndrome, and not just assume they know everything.

It also really helps to see women on the team, especially in more senior positions, doing code reviews, etc. If there's a layer of men who are subtly sexist, the organization really as a whole won't retain, ever. A double standard is incredibly demoralizing.

But seriously, look at who gets listened to in meetings. Who takes up the time, is it just people who are loud and willing to argue about things, while those unwilling to interrupt never get acknowledged?

    The biggest factor for me has been when an employer promises changes to how
    the tech team is managed and then doesn’t deliver on them. To a certain
    extent all teams struggle with the trade-offs between spending time
    developing good specs versus staying agile, and between addressing technical
    debt and building new features. But I’ve left companies after years of
    chaotically fighting fires while simultaneously needing to build new
    features, or after repeatedly getting disorganized braindumps or single line
    descriptions from stakeholders rather than the thoughtful, detailed specs
    they’ve promised.

This is everything and describes my current situation perfectly! It's so difficult to program as well as design specs and UI and manage time as well. It teaches you a lot but it's much easier if what you are being asked to build is clear in the first place!

I don't think this issue is gender-specific, it's a problem for retaining everyone.

I have to wonder how anything gets built in any _other_ industry than software, if this is the caliber of management we get on these projects.

They don't tell builders "give me a house, I want turrets and a fence and 23 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms and I want it done to a really high finish by next week".

Instead they get a detailed, industry standard, multi-stage plan that has everything they need to start, as well as access to an architect that can check on their work and when things go wrong a process for change management is included. And no-one expects a house to be built well over a weekend.

And then change their minds the day before delivery ...

Please don't quote with code blocks. Use greater-than (>) symbols instead.

Why not? I've actually adopted this habit lately because I think it makes it easier to read, especially if the quote is lengthy.

It messes up formatting on smaller screen sizes and larger screen sizes.

That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting, and making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow, plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.

You can quote a long paragraph that is represented as one big line very simply like this:

> That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting ...

I cut and pasted my own paragraph above. I typed a single > character in front, a space, and a pair of asterisks around it.

Is the code block format not explicitly designed for quoting lengthy snippets of text in a non-disruptive way?

>You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting

Not much work, just a handful of keystrokes with the right software, and that's without optimizing the flow much. Could get it down more by making a macro.

>making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow

While true, if the quote is indeed lengthy, wouldn't this serve the reader better than a line of text that wraps many times? Those are hard to follow.

>plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.

Yes, this improves readability by making the barrier between quotation and response more readily visible.

The only downside seems to be that the block may clamp down to a horizontal scrollbox before some reader wants it to do so. For the record, on my computer (3440x1440 raw, some HiDPI settings make effective resolution significantly smaller), I never run across such blocks that require manual scrolling. On my phone, I do need to scroll horizontally, but I think that's nice. I have not yet seen it actually break a page or make it unusable.

I don't think it's a good technique for short line snippets, but yes, I do think it improves readability for long (paragraph-length or longer) quotes.

> Is the code block format not explicitly designed for quoting lengthy snippets of text in a non-disruptive way?

No, it's designed to preserve alignment and line breaks by using a monospace font and not wrapping, specifically for the purpose of presenting source code. It's modestly useful for tabular data for the same reason. It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.

>It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.

I mean, I disagree. It looks and seems better to me. I understand that the font is monospaced but I don't see that as a problem. I understand that the text is put inside its own horizontal scrollbox instead of wrapped automatically, but again, I also don't see that as a problem for a lengthy block of text. I agree it would be annoying to have to scroll on every quotation anyone made.

When I say long blocks of text, I mean a snippet that is 60 lines by 60 columns, like the transcript excerpt I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13976410 . Personally, I would rather scroll past that than scrolling past a long italicized, autowrapped block every time I came to the thread.

People keep saying it breaks the layout in some cases, and if so, then they are right to ask that people refrain from using it until the bug gets fixed. However, I haven't observed such breakage happening, and no one I've asked has shown it. At the moment, it appears to be a personal preference thing.

Most of this is good input for managers but the first answer from Adele complaining about "getting disorganized braindumps or single line descriptions from stakeholders rather than the thoughtful, detailed specs they’ve promised" seems misguided and counterproductive. It's simply unrealistic to expect customers and customer proxies (product owners / business analysts) to supply detailed specs. Their minds don't work that way and complaining about it just leads to frustration on both sides. Instead take the disorganized braindump as a starting point for the real requirements analysis process. If the stakeholders were capable of writing thoughtful, detailed specs on their own then they wouldn't need you and could just outsource the engineering work to the lowest offshore bidder.

in my experience, the "disorganized brain dump" is all too often considered to be a valid spec by the people who delivered it. then you code it. and then they change their minds.

As a developer you have a professional obligation to engage with your colleagues and educate them about the process. Sometimes this means building a mock up or throw-away prototype just as a tool to facilitate further discussion. But complaining about it won't get you anywhere.

Let me reframe the question to be my thoughts on how to solve the "problem".

Q: How can managers help retain technical engineers

A: Treat them fair and pay them what they are worth regardless of how many of which chromosomes they have. When people treat them unfairly or discriminate, stand up for them and show them that you care. Don't penalize them for their genetic ability to make more humans if they so choose to.

Other than the obvious of more money, most employees will feel loyalty towards those are loyal to them.

I didn't read TFA as I think the question is a bit wrong even if it is meant to be well received.

OK, so, in concrete terms, how do you propose people treat their employees equally regardless of sex? Empirically that is not currently what happens, and probably not because someone twirling his mustache said "let's deliberately discriminate against women."

Excellent question! Here is my imperfect idea that is much easier said than done. FWIW, I do work as a software engineer at a very technical firm that I think does a stellar job getting this right.

The biggest thing is the pay gap. Fixing the pay gap does make employees more equal as an employer trades money for an employees time. We have a long way to go to fix the current pay gap in tech at least.

Also I have heard of managers who don't promote women as tech / team leads for fear they'll get pregnant and be on leave for 2-6 months taking care of their child. I literally told a guy at my last job that was not cool when he said that. Even though it might shake things up in the business if a valued employee is off work for a few months that is not the employees fault. Punishing them for what "might or might not happen" in the future is discrimination plain and simple. Discrimination of any form results in a hostile work environment and ultimately a less effective team.

Another common one is someone making unwanted advances or propositions. The only correct response on this from management is swift and firm rejection up to and including firing the unwanted initiator. Look at the recent mess with that female Uber engineer who was harassed so badly she finally gave up and left. She did the absolutely right thing and told the person not cool and then spoke with HR. Because the initiator was a "valued employee" they let it slide, further alienating the now victimized engineer.

I'm a dude in tech who knows what it is like to be treated poorly. We must be the voice for those without one (my wife calls me more of a feminist than she says she is amusingly). To do anything less is to be complicit in this injustice. See the "first they came for..." poem about the Nazis.

My issue with your post is this: obviously those things are very serious problems. But they are only the most egregious ones. I feel like any company not run by dolts can manage not to allow punishing women with the rationale that they might get pregnant and to stop blatant sexual harassment -- after all, these things are completely illegal. But even if we solve them there are still lots of more subtle ways that companies can be made less welcoming places for women than for men and addressing those probably requires much more conscious consideration.

And my problem with your response is that it still happens every single day legal or not. Let's fix the egregious problems for good, then we can focus on the subtle ones.

Take a solid engineer like Valerie Aurora or Sarah Sharp or even say Jessie Frazelle (in addition to the previously mentioned Uber engineer). This happens to other human beings, it is awful, it should stop. I would LOVE to work in a team with any of them solely to learn from them and grow my own skills. All of them have publically written about how they've been wrongfully discriminated against.

Yoire welcome to believe this isn't a problem and that it is common sense to not do these things and yet we still here the same story over and over and over. If my daughter wants to be an engineer I want her to be graded on the only thing that really matters, which is her intellect and ability to sell her solution as the best given the business requirements. Nothing more or less.

I don't think addressing one precludes addressing the other.

I think what emodendroket is getting at is not that this stuff is unimportant, but that the vast majority of us have no occasion to address the egregious problems with any regularity, so we should also focus on the things we can affect on a day-to-day basis. While bad things do happen every day across the industry, at any given workplace (or more specifically, within an individual working group) they are fairly infrequent, and only a small number of people actually witness them or are otherwise in a position to take action.

In contrast, we do have opportunities every day to address the more subtle issues - talking over people, expecting women to take notes, paying more attention to ideas that come from men, etc. Even at a company where no woman is harassed or underpaid or refused a promotion, there are almost always things that can be done to make the environment less uncomfortable for women, and these are things that everyone can and should pay attention to all the time.

Thanks; you've done better justice to my position than I did.

Your biggest thing is a myth: https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/04/12/dont-buy...

> Also I have heard of managers who don't promote women as tech / team leads for fear they'll get pregnant and be on leave for 2-6 months taking care of their child. I literally told a guy at my last job that was not cool when he said that.

Has this ever made sense considering the ammount of turnover in tech circles. A guy promoted to tech lead for six months can probably get a decent salary bump elsewhere with that on his resume. And unlike the pregnant women, he isn't coming back with his knowledge and a newfound interest in job stability.

>regardless of how many chromosomes they have

Thats not how it works.

Edited to fix, you're absolutely right. Thanks!

Cadran here from YC's software team. This is the fifth installment of our Ask a Female Engineer series. Thanks for reading.

Here are the other articles:

https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-4/

https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-3/

https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-2/

https://blog.ycombinator.com/introducing-ask-a-female-engine...

;-)

Perhaps some of these "managers" should study Crew Resource Management [0] (CRM) for some lessons that were "paid for in blood". For Airline operations, crew includes cabin crew.

There was a notorious case, British Midlands Flight 92 [1], where the pilots shut down the wrong engine. At least one flight attendant (& several passengers) noticed the left engine was producing flames and sparks. The Captain said he shut down the right engine, which was working properly. The aircraft crashed, causing 47 fatalities, 74 serious injuries and 5 minor injuries.

Compare that to Qantas Flight 32 [2], with 5 pilots in the cockpit, and 24 cabin crew, along with maintenance, ATC and rescue crew on the ground, landed a seriously damaged A380 without injury or further damage.

Capt. Richard De Crispigny was later quoted: "We sucked the brains from all pilots in cockpit to make one massive brain and we used that intelligence to resolve problems on the fly because they were unexpected events, unthinkable events". This is CRM at its finest.

Another successful application of CRM was in Aloha Flight 243 [3]. After loosing a section of the roof, Captain Robert Schornstheimer & First Officer (& later Captain) Mini Tomkins landed the damaged 737 with all passengers surviving. One flight attendant, CB Lansing, was blown out of the aircraft.

Effective CRM (management) is what allowed QF32 and Aloha 243 to land safely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kegworth_air_disaster

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

Using Kim Malone's radical candor framework http://www.kimmalonescott.com/

The preferred quadrants are:

Radical Candor > Obnoxious Aggression > Ruinous Empathy > Manipulative Insincerity

The "defaults" are men being obnoxiously aggressive and women being in the ruinous empathy quadrant. Mean become radically candid by caring more, and women by challenging directly.

The defaults however give men the advantage with women in a more harmonizing role.

This is because the typical metaphors company act by are aggressive. The most obvious one is war or sports, but even a less aggressive one like trade requires a sort of aggression in haggling.

The defaults favor an affinity for competition and aggression because we primarily live in a world of scarce resources and requires drawing a line in the sand and watching over it with spears. Our 1st world cushy lifestyles are basically subsidized by people in poorer countries being willing to work more for less. (as indirectly as possible to assuage guilt as much as possible) In a purely equal world, China and India become leaders of the world (again) and everyone gets 30K. Is that something people in the U.S. really want?

A person with high empathy might feel guilt and be compelled to enact this situation. What mostly happens though is that these decisions are delegated to more aggressive and competitive people. Assuaging personal guilt while still reaping the benefits of disparity.

If companies start ingesting more empathy, their actions naturally tend to become more harmonizing, creating fairer conditions. But this ONLY is desired if the total wealth is enough for each person. As larger companies act at a global scale, the global wealth isn't enough for this empathy to be acceptable.

Smaller companies which act in a smaller sphere DO benefit from empathy though. They have to be indirectly subsidized by excess wealth from the environment they are embedded in. Knowing your hipster barista's name is only possible if the business of selling high priced artisanal coffee is viable.

Most of these issues are something that EVERY engineer has issues with. Male and female. I don't think a lot of these are female specific.

Absolutely! But I think that's actually a point worth making.

I hear all the time that higher-ups think that the key to retaining women is hosting diversity events, adding parental leave / mother's rooms, or other stuff specifically catered to women. Not saying those aren't good things to have, but for the most part, if you listen to your employees and treat all of your engineers well, you will see gains to retaining everyone, including women.

Women being so "in demand" for tech companies looking to improve diversity numbers also gives some of us the opportunity to be pickier with what kind of work environments we'll accept.

the perspective of women is really valuable and we should be thankful to hear from this group of women, speaking honestly about their experience.

HOWEVER...

it was remarkable how little of the issues they discussed had anything whatever to do with their gender. I think this is really important and should be a good clue for followups. How about YC opens up the question series to engineers from all backgrounds? I expect to see a remarkable similarity in answers about what constitutes a good (or bad) work environment.

Few things that comes to my mind

- Have clarity around what time people are expected to arrive/leave. If your company offers free food, dont schedule breakfast super early and dinner super late.

- Dont schedule meetings at 5:00 pm

- Dont change product direction/design based on meetings you had at an after work party

Basically acknowledge that people in general and women in particular have responsibilities outside work. Strive to have work life balance for everyone in your team and not just fresh out of college kids who can afford to sit at house till 9 pm.

"women in particular have responsibilities outside work"

Yeah? And men don't?

They do, but it is treated as much more socially acceptable for men to shirk those responsibilities than for women.

Interesting article. I think one thing to also consider is that women can also be toxic, so the question isn't really how to retain technical women or men, but rather, how can you promote leadership practices to women (and men) that retain women (and men).

I think women perceive technical work as a low status. Many men do too. It just that may be men get more intrinsic value from it.

I am (perhaps naively) encouraged at the familiarity of these engineers' daily gripes. That's progress, haha.

Ain't it great?

It's always alarming to read stories such as Susan Fowler's, that remind you sexism is still out there in force, in places. But it's great to read things like this, which implies at least a good chunk of fellow female devs are having the freedom to leave because their company doesn't care about software quality.

As you said, progress!

Hmm my takeaway from the familiarity was that it's harder for woman to manage up, which sucks. :(

I'm curious if you have a piece of the article that highlights that for you. I admit to skimming through it and thinking "Yeah, that's pretty much the gig."

Engineering is a hard job, there's no two ways about it. Tech managers have a doubly hard job, having to navigate a tech stack well enough to lead their team and the people skills to manage all their special snowflake devs on one hand (nothing gender or age related, I love all my lil babies, even the ones with gandalf beards and strong opinions on Richard Stallman) and some very difficult strategic objectives on the other. People who can be effective in that role are hard to find.

> If a company’s leadership feels too tightly knit – where all the managers and founders are friends that aren’t open to critical feedback from employees – I won’t even try to work out the issue before leaving

While not completely gender specific, I think that speaks to difficulty managing up.

Here is a podcast that had some insights in this topic [0]. Found it interesting yet I believe its hard to encompass something that works gender wide.

[0] https://thewomenintechshow.com/2016/08/23/retaining-women-in...

It's striking how many women in this article mention bad relationship with bosses as the main reason to leave. No question, this is a very legitimate reason. I'm just surprised that it looks like it happened quite often through their careers. I did have terrible bosses maybe couple times through my almost 20-year work experience, but it never was so much a problem -- low pay, or boring job were the main reasons I switched employers. I would assume from this article that women are more sensitive to relationships with their bosses than men. Which might require special training for the both parties to overcome. I'm pretty much sure that if several men were asked what made them leave, bosses would not be such a major issue.

Might be a selection bias issue- the type of women that would participate in this might also be the type to cite relationships a causal factor.

i'm pretty sure i read a study a few years ago that said bad bosses were the #1 reason for people leaving jobs, across all demographics.

Anecdotal, my impression is that women tend to have much lower tolerance for people they dislike. Seem to remember reading the theory that for men it was important to work well in random groups (like war or hunting parties), whereas the sphere of the women was usually more tightly knit, so perhaps it was more important to weed out unpleasant individuals in the tightly knit sphere.

Might have read that in the infamous "Is there anything good about men" essay, but not sure.

As an example for my experience: in the student hall, there were sometimes people who smelled bad or didn't integrate. The men would usually just ignore them (after all, most people only live in student halls for a limited time, so the problem would resolve itself), whereas the women would start banding together and mobbing against them. They would become more and more preoccupied with plans to get rid of the unwanted person.

To a lesser degree, I saw this kind of thing play out at companies or shared housing situations, too.

Why does this article prompt me to trust it for using WebGL? There's not a single graphic anywhere on the page! Is this some sort of browser fingerprinting or something? Just bringing it up in case it's a misconfiguration on their server.

> I’ve left companies after years of chaotically fighting fires while simultaneously needing to build new features, or after repeatedly getting disorganized braindumps or single line descriptions from stakeholders rather than the thoughtful, detailed specs they’ve promised.

I've had this same basic experience working for female managers. Chaotic, bad processes are not unique to male management. It's just fd up companies and dev environments in general.

Screwing up the process is an equal opportunity situation.

The pay factor is definitely something that should be looked at more. I should not have find out, after talking to any woman in tech who has a passion for it, that they're basically just barely able to make it when others with the same duties at the same or other companies make a livable wage.

Young women in software get paid 7% more than young men. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/pf/gender-pay-gap/

Where does this pay gap start to come into play?

While the salary trend in new hires out of school is an encouraging sign, your comment seems rather selective: the rest of the article you linked points out that in every situation other than "just out of college with no experience" the pay gap is real:

    > Overall, women hired for jobs in technology, sales and marking were offered 
    > salaries that were 3% less than what men were offered, but at some companies the           
    > gender pay gap was as high as 30%, the study showed.

     > Men received higher salary offers for the same job title at the same company 69% 
     > of the time

Another article: http://qa.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/g...

it seems the pay gap is more an age thing. When we say give women equal pay, we should be saying "give older women equal pay" . This makes me think its a lagging metric that will be solved as todays 20 somethings become 40 and 60 year olds. If we want to accelerate the solution its not to give young womena a raise, but older women.

Its also hard because depending on how the numbers are calculated it maybe fair to pay older women less once you account for a lifetime of choosing lifestyle over earning potential as many note women vs men typically do.

Sexual harassment and payment inequality came up a lot in the last women in computer science event I went to.

> payment inequality

Perceived or real? I'm yet to hear about a company that has policy to pay women less. Most have personally-discussed salaries though. If some ladies are paid less, they probably don't haggle as well. What should we do? Deny custom salaries and personal raises?

There are no companies which have such a policy, because it's illegal.

Speeding is also illegal. True, there are no companies that speed, but I think that's just because they can't drive.

Yeah, no kidding, nobody has a policy to do that. But there are several factors, including:

1. Women tend to negotiate less aggressively

2. Women who negotiate aggressively tend to be perceived worse than men doing the exact same thing

3. Implicit bias affects the amount of money an employer sees fit to offer in the first place

As to what to do, here some ideas:

* Massachusetts' law barring employers from asking about previous salaries as part of negotiations seems like a good idea

* More transparency about salaries would help

* Maybe a "Costco auto club" model, where the price is set up-front with no haggling, would be a good idea. Reddit tried to do this but it was kind of tied up with all the other issues they had. Not 100% sure on this one.

> Maybe a "Costco auto club" model, where the price is set up-front with no haggling, would be a good idea. Reddit tried to do this but it was kind of tied up with all the other issues they had. Not 100% sure on this one.

The negative to that is (unless every company plays by those same rules) you're limiting yourself in who you can hire. The more expensive (and, presumably, more skilled) developers will go work somewhere that will pay them more (based on that skill), while the cheapest (and, presumably, lowest skilled) developers will come work for you because they know you'll pay them more than others will.

There are benefits to being able to pay people what you feel they are worth to your company. Is it worth losing those benefits.

I don't know. Maybe you just offer competitive salaries for everyone and everyone wants to work for you. Maybe your superstars actually get a different title and responsibilities and you're just more upfront about how you decide. I think there are plenty of companies out there with a pretty narrow band for any given position and this way of doing things eliminates the anxiety about whether you negotiated well or not.

Also, I think most companies can't really hope to attract the world's very best programmers anyway. If everyone says they're hiring the best they can't all be right.

There will always be some companies paying more and some paying less. People who are not as good at getting a better salary in current system, would probably fail to get into better paying companies then. And we're back at square 1.

How do you figure? If they're able to pass whatever company's interview and negotiation is no longer a factor it seems more likely that salaries will become more equitable. I'd guess the correlation between negotiating skill and technical skill is small at best.

HN doesn't allow to go that deep in comment thread, thus replying there...

> How do you figure? If they're able to pass whatever company's interview and negotiation is no longer a factor it seems more likely that salaries will become more equitable. I'd guess the correlation between negotiating skill and technical skill is small at best.

In 2-tier (technical + negotiation) interview, candidates have to show they're good enough technically first. Then they negotiate their worth. In what you propose, they'd have to negotiate their worth right away. If company isn't willing to pay, why would they hire said person for higher wage?

Even purely technical job interview is sort of haggling. Well, aside from bullshit whiteboard tests which suck left and right.

The way the system is set up now puts the candidate at a disadvantage because he or she has no idea what the company is willing to pay or what their criteria are. In a situation where the cards are laid on the table -- here is the position or positions and here is the salary or salaries -- both parties have the same information and are free to focus entirely on the question of competence. A lot of the negotiation process now involves irrelevant crap like finding out your current salary -- so that then the candidate has set the lowest acceptable offer and the company can negotiate from there.

Besides penalizing candidates for lacking knowledge that isn't really relevant to work performance (like how to dance around offering a current salary, for instance), the current system also tends to perpetuate whatever disparity already exists by tending to base offers at least in part on current salaries, and also will reflect the gender disparity shown in responses to salary negotiations which I mentioned above.

I don't guarantee such a system would make things better but I do think there are some reasons to think it might.

Which is neither gender, nor tech issue.

IMO negotiating is part of relevant skillset. Especially for more senior (= better paid) positions. One has to know not only how to write code, but back up his decisions as well. Or prevent others from causing issues.

That skill has little to do with salary negotiation. And you keep on asserting that salary negotiation has nothing to do with gender, which seems to me to be skipping most of the work of refuting my arguments, based as they are on the premise that one's gender affects one's success in salary negotiation.

Also, I think that these changes would likely benefit male workers too, but not to the same degree as women.

Yes, you're correct, I think we shouldn't discuss this as a gender issue.

IMO you're mistaking correlation for causation. As you say yourself, changing current salary setup would affect both women and men. This is not gender issue and this should be discussed on other points than gender. Making it about gender is counter productive.

Looking at this form economical perspective, as long as we don't have objective way to measure programmer's productivity, I don't think we can get away from salary negotiations.

Right, so we've identified our chief difference. Would you like to provide any proof for your assertions?

1. That's not the problem of anybody except the person who does not negotiate aggressively.

2. People respond differently to men and women (a fact that seems to be true across all species). We don't have a clear, testable model for why this happens.

3. Implicit bias is not scientific and not relevant. Sorry for the lengthy write-up, but this should be called out for being farcical and/or psychologically dangerous.

Implicit bias scores have no meaningful correlation with actual actions and the scores themselves will vary wildly for the same person for reasons that are unknown and unaccounted for. This lack of correlation turns it into a baseless accusation.

Lots of people accept IAT (which has a super low predictive validity) as true while rejecting IQ which has an amazing amount of predictive validity in all kinds of areas. Interestingly, higher IQ is linked to lower rates of racism and other bias. Given that programmers have on average significantly higher IQ scores relative to the general population, you would expect such things to not be the primary issues of the field.

Even if we assume implicit bias exists, does it matter if you cannot prove it has any real world effects (and such effects have not been proven). If we assume even further (against good evidence) that such implicit bias exists AND has real world effects, is there a solution?

Lots of companies force their employees to undergo implicit bias training. There are ZERO studies proving that the training works. Much more scarily, we don't know if it has other negative psychological impacts. Companies messing around with peoples heads without any supporting studies and clinical trials is EXTREMELY dangerous.

Finally, let's examine the theoretical framework for fixing implicit bias (under the assumption that it exists and that the individual does not consciously desire to be biased). We must start by either assuming that implicit outweighs explicit (radical behavioralism with no free will) or that explicit outweighs implicit.

If explicit outweighs implicit, then teach people the golden rule, tell them discrimination is bad, and call it a day because that's all you can do. Implicit bias training is sold on the basis that this is not enough and will not work. It thus carries the implication that you cannot choose to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc, but if you give them your money, they have the magic incantations to "pray the <bias> away".

How do you change the subconscious? The first option is new age garbage. The second is hypnosis (we can't prove hypnosis even exists). The third is operant and/or classical conditioning of the most extreme variety (to reach past the conscious and modify the subconscious -- hopefully without ripping the individual apart in the process) may be enough to do the trick (immersive re-education camps are a must in order to ensure all aspects of the subject are controlled for). Basically no other ideas exist.

TL;DR With no solid supporting science behind the idea of implicit bias, there remains only moral panic and ideological fanaticism attempting to sell either snake-oil cures or barbaric, unethical psychological experiments of a most Stalinesque variety.

Well I suggested a handful of measures that don't involve "implicit bias training," which I agree is unlikely to work, but I question your claim that there isn't any evidence for implicit bias.

If you want to conclude that either women are just inherently inferior or else that they aren't but it's ok to systematically underpay them then I guess that's your prerogative but I'm not really interested in going down such a rabbit hole.

I would argue that women and men are different both physically and psychologically and have different interests arising from these differences.

I would further argue that negotiation is a skill that some people have and others do not. Should we refuse to reward someone for their skill in negotiation? Should we even try?

On the first count, the brains of men and women are structurally different (women have drastically more white matter and men have drastically more gray matter). The observation that men and women view the world very differently is universal. When looking at the big five personality traits, men and women consistently show far different norms. If all observations both casual and professional tend to indicate significant differences, the possibility should be seriously entertained.

If men and women are identical, why do we need women in STEM? The men we have would work just as well. If one is making the case for more people overall in STEM, then they are making an economic argument (and one that doesn't favor STEM workers -- only employers of STEM workers). If one makes a case for different life experience, then there is an acknowledgement of difference. If men and women are different, then there is a distinct possibility that one group is better or more interested in a particular field than the other. In either situation, there seems to be little case for drastic change (except for employers suppressing wages by increasing the supply of workers).

As to the second count, let's say we put two people (of the same gender for sake of limiting differences) with the same qualifications into the same job with the exception that one is more skilled at negotiation. We then force both to work for the same pay. Will that end the advantages of the more skilled negotiator? The better negotiator will still be better at getting the good projects or a faster promotion.

In the long term, the negotiation skillset will simply turn into more profit in other ways and the level of control required to prevent this from happening is so draconian as to be unthinkable.

> If men and women are identical, why do we need women in STEM? The men we have would work just as well

Because it is inherently unjust to discriminate against people because of characteristics that have no bearing on the job, such as their race and their gender. If you don't accept this premise I don't think we can have a productive discussion because it's the basic principle I'm basing my argument on.

> In the long term, the negotiation skillset will simply turn into more profit in other ways and the level of control required to prevent this from happening is so draconian as to be unthinkable.

Maybe. So what? Careless drivers are still more likely to injure themselves than careful ones even if we make everyone wear a seat belt; it does not follow that making everyone wear a seat belt is pointless.

You gotta wear seat belt because careless driver can bump into you too. Or careless deer which is even worse.

Even if we exclude accidents with multiple drivers from consideration seat belts reduce mortality.

I accept the premise of equal opportunity, but you are insisting on equal outcome (and asserting that it is a foregone conclusion). Everyone is equal under the law, but that does not mean that everyone has the same qualities or qualifications.

If you can show me a company that is refusing to hire a woman, then I'll be right there with you opposing them. If a company is forcing a woman to work for lower pay because she is a woman, then I'll be right there with you opposing them. When you ask me to discriminate against someone because they are better at negotiating, I cannot offer support.

Blind moral assertion IS NOT FACT.

You assert that we must have the same number of men and women because it is the moral thing to do. You further assert that this moral imperative is so absolute that the use of force to compel other people is perfectly fine.

At its basis, this is no different than relatively small things like prohibition or large things like the inquisition or communist re-education camps.

EDIT: to answer your first statement in more concrete terms, I believe men and women make different choices because they are different (as stated at the top of that post). If you are insistent on forcing women into STEM whether they like it or not, there should be more to that argument than symmetry. What you quoted addresses one part that line of thought.

Yes, if you take it as a given that implicit bias is fake or irrelevant then very few companies could be described as discriminatory. I didn't assert that we "must have the same number of both genders" either, or that any means are permissible to achieve greater gender equality. You're letting your imagination run wild.

> Because it is inherently unjust to discriminate against people because of characteristics that have no bearing on the job, such as their race and their gender. If you don't accept this premise I don't think we can have a productive discussion because it's the basic principle I'm basing my argument on.

Is it ok to discriminate based on one's personal characteristics?

I'm pretty sure woman who is technically good as well as good negotiator gets equal salary as man with same abilities. Women (and men) who are bad negotiators are discriminated because of their personal characteristics, not because of their gender.

Or are you saying that certain skills should not be valued in job market, because they're less prevalent in one of the genders' iconic image?

On what basis are you "pretty sure" of that? http://fortune.com/2016/05/02/woman-negotiation-success/

If you want to reply to a comment further downthread you can click on the timestamp. I do not know why it works that way but replying to a common parent is confusing.

That article just says women negotiate less/worse. I'm saying good negotiator will get paid regardless of gender. Wether women can negotiate as good as men is another question. But as I said in another comment, this is skill issue, not gender issue. Wage gap studies that have controls throughout the board show there's no significant pay difference. My anecdata confirms that.

We can cross "negotiate less" off the list, since the article controls for that and finds women who do negotiate are less successful. It is possible that women are three times worse negotiators across the board but it strikes me as far more likely that the well documented tendency of assertive women to be perceived as "shrill" or "bossy" is a significant factor.

> As to what to do, here some ideas:

This is jumping ahead of ourselves.

The first step is problem formulation. Is this a problem in the first place? Why? How do we quantify the problem? How do we quantify a resolution?

Ok. You can investigate that one for yourself.

It's for the benefit of everyone including you.

I find that in these topics, people jump to the problem solving step before problem formulation.

In the best case, there might be a response of "because sexism/racism" to "why this problem".

We have a limited amount of "diversity funds". If the appeal is emotional and one of righteousness, we should use the funds to aid the category of people with the most disadvantages.

That would be foreign immigrants because their native language is not English (almost all documentation, code and communication is in English) and they do not have a good understanding of American culture which cripples them in politics and communication.

Comparatively, the upper middle class white girl or african american is privileged.

No, I don't think so. Understanding English is germane to the job; your gender is not. Besides that, why exactly are you talking about "foreign immigrants" as a distinct category from women?

If only men predominantly "haggle well", is it possible that the ideal wage negotiation is modeled around an alpha male? It feels like rewarding productivity and giving equality in wage could be easily tied together, and benefit nearly everyone.

And how would we measure programmers' productivity? LoCs?

Claudia Goldin, Harvard economics professor, has some really interesting info on this I heard on a Freakonomics podcast a while back [1].

A big takeaway for me was that the data showed men and women being largely equal in pay for the earlier parts of their careers when you control for various things. When families start entering the equation, women often prioritize different things in their job, or consider changing jobs that offer these things. One of the big new priorities is...surprise...flexibility. When you have a family, flexibility because worth its weight in gold. If women are still predominantly the primary caretaker at home, it makes sense that they would need to optimize for whatever gives them the best balance there.

However the dark side of this, as discussed int he podcast, is that it can often lead to things like bosses not giving out choice assignments with lots of travel for example, because they don't think the employee would want that or be able to manage it. That sort of thing compounds over time and leads to slower progression, less leverage when asking for raises, etc.

The episode was a real eye opener for me because it brought some interesting data to the table.

[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...

It's not up to the managers alone to retain technical women, it's up to everyone.

I've worked in this industry since the 1990's, which is enough time to see quite a bit, and I've definitely seen behavior hostile to women during this time, and also ham-fisted attempts to fix the problem which also breed resentment towards women, causing even more of the behavior.

This whole "situation" simply boggles my mind. What could possess a guy to send a dick-pic to a coworker, or a manager to demand sex in exchange for promotion? These people are clearly messed up human beings, and need to be fired. Most of the time they are, and it takes an exceptional bro-culture for them not to be fired. However, these obnoxious pigs aren't really the core of the problem, they're just the ones we think of first.

What I've seen over time is that most people have a double standard when comparing technical men and women. These are good people who respect their co-workers, and would never do something like mentioned above, but they still make it harder for women through either unconscious biases, different expectations, or different treatment.

For example, I worked at one pre-eminent bay area company where there I saw a lot of policies meant to help female engineers and managers succeed. They were very strict on any sort of harassment policies, and usually took action against inappropriate behavior. Yet, my female co-workers were frustrated. There was a double standard in engineering. Say you go to a design review meeting for a big feature. If a man was presenting, he had the benefit of the doubt of his colleagues, presented his idea, got critiqued it, job done. A woman giving the same sort of presentation doesn't get that benefit of the doubt as frequently, and her ideas are scrutinized more, sometimes in a condescending way. I've seen this play out myself, it's disgusting! It's also not just men, women are harsher towards technical women as well.

Women who noticed such problems and tried to point them out were either treated either as whiners, or management heard and over-reacted in a way which made the men feel threatened, which made the problem worse.

I really don't know what the fix is here, but I can't see how managers can fix a cultural problem. The culture of tech needs to change to be fair to women. Perhaps this comes from having too high a concentration of one gender, since male elementary school teachers share the plight of technical women, but that's just my speculation based on people that I know.

What I am happy to see is that the ratio of women to men in technical degree programs is much greater than when I was in college in the early 90's. I do college recruiting events for computer science grads, and if I was to wager a guess, the ratio is about 1/3, and approaching half at some schools. When women are more present in the tech workforce, and their peers have always experienced working with women, perhaps then things will change.

To answer some questions regarding the comments about how these things are different from men to women. They may not be. The reported answers may be the same and related to issues both men and women struggle with.

However, I think theres been some more chatter in the industry trying to get to the bottom of some issues that have come up recently with gender in tech one not so recent and more general. Here's what I mean

1. In the 1980s, for reasons everyone can quantify but noone can understand why, is why women stopped going into computer science in the 1980s: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Particularly data scientists and computer scientists and economists who are skilled at teasing out data in large and seemingly choatic data sets cannot figure this out, which is ironic considering they are the group in which this gender disparity occurred which such a dramatic and relatively sudden dropoff.

2. On top of the dramatic drop of women in computer science, 41% of the women who do go into tech leave compared to 17% of men: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...

3. A number of studies have shown that identical job applications, resumes AND VC pitches are evaluated differently based on whether they are labeled with a male or female name. https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...

4. High acheiving women, and particular women in tech show

   a. more negative feedback in reviews compared to men

   b. the word  abrasive is used positively with men, negatively with women in reviews

http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...

5. Alot of women get into entry level tech jobs, but far fewer climb the ladder/wages stagnate

https://qz.com/645587/a-mckinsey-report-on-female-leaders-fi...

6. Female leaders: Founders, CEOs, CTOs receive far more public criticism AND HOSTILITY than male CEOs and CTOs ie.e Ellen Pao as leader of reddit, Marissa Meyer, Sheryl Sandberg * The things that have been said about these women and their bodies and how evil they are I have never ever heard with male CEOs no matter how evil, nor have I seen criticism as harsh, unrelated to the business issue, cruel and emotionally punishing as these women have faced. Dear god, how could any women aspire to be a leader when the women who aspire to are bombarded with a nonstop barage of sexual and emotional humiliation 24/7 on the internet male CEOs never face. It's ridiculous.

* I am not saying these things happen (the disparities by gender noted above) because men are sexist and evil. I don't think anyone knows why this is happening, which is why more women who are in tech are being asked to open up and speak out to get their personal perspective since all the data and studies in the world don't seem to be providing these answers

* My personal opinion for what its worth: I have to say as a woman in tech, an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science who now does graphics engineering and GPU software layer dev, I don't think it is fair that large corporations are being blamed for the gender disparity in STEM fields. The gender disparity is documented in highschool starting with the number of women in advanced STEM related classes like Calc and Physics all the way through college majors to then the workplace, and yet Microsoft and Google need to fabricate highly skilled and experienced technical women out of thin air or take on the effort to create fund and integrate their own ideas for education in highly unskilled and complexly funded school systems. I think its great they are doing these things, but I think the expectation society has suddenly placed on them since they decided to be angry about it this year is unreasonably punishing and creates more anger and blaming than it does objective awareness and productive conversations, of which I think this convo was an attempt to counteract on YCombos part so thank you

( and to go back to my mid-sentence point, as far as people being angry about big tech corps and the lack of women...ummm yeh Ive been a women in tech for almost a decade now so thanks for suddenly caring out of thin air but how about asking women in tech about it instead of just finding the biggest tech corporation around and blaming them for everything, which is why Q&As like the above listed are nice)

Lets address the gender disparity in STEM at age 8 and work our way up. Need help start with Toys R us and just do a study noting toys based on level of difficulty/problem solving/building creating and colour versus child care, clothing and social itneraction based toys...and start there. DONT start at google and blame everything on them. Start with YOU and how YOU raise, dress, spend time, talk with your own duaghters as mothers fathers sisters teachers etc before you assume everything is googles fault.

There is no "bad guy" guy we get to blame for this as much as mass media these days loves bad guys to blame for everything. This is a very complex cultural issue for which atleast in my experience my parents, teachers, school, cultural demographic of the area I grew up in, politics, media, men in college, magazines for women, AND THEN on top of all of that and all the warped ideas I had about myself and my capabilities due to that yes also there were cultural clashes between me and men at my tech university and also at work.

I have also on top of all of this faced blatant sexual harrassment cases which were quickly resolved just because, there was no debate about whether they were harrassment or not. They were. Even though these issues were resolved, they were horrrible experiences, emotionally traumatizing, and embarassing and annoying because other employees always find out, not to mention distracting me away from that thing called my job that I came to work for.

*The amount of times men have shockingly stated to me after getting to know me that they now realize I'm not in the industry to husband shop...is too damn high.....

This is a topic of great interest to me. In part because I love coding and think that anyone else that does should have the same opportunities. In part because though I'm a cis straight male, I've generally gotten along with women better as friends and colleagues. And in part because I'm generally socially liberal, so something like this where the TREND line is going in the wrong direction is particularly bothersome. (Racism, on the other hand, is something that is definitely wrong and definitely exists, but it's easier (though not "good") to be blase about it because the trend line is in the right direction.)

I've had two relatively recent discoveries on the topic (these may or may not be known to everyone else):

* One workplace I was at had an annual summer internship for high school women that had taken AP Comp Sci. Overwhelming the interns had a good experience, and a thing they commonly said was that they didn't expect coding to be so social. Given how U.S. women (at least) are socialized to be social and being judged by their success at being social, I can see that impression subconsciously turning away potential CS grads from ever entering the field.

* I've attended and read talks on the problem for the last decade or two, and I've seen a change in the messaging. Originally it was "women need to stand up, get mentors, and push harder". More recently, the messaging has been "Common male behaviors tend to push women away. Those places that are more diverse have been more successful. Let's reduce how much we push women to socialize like men, and perhaps teach men some of the positive ways women socialize".

That is, teach behaviors like:

* Don't shut down discussion, promote it

* Don't insult ideas

* Don't talk over people

* Make suggestions, not declarations

Now, I'm not saying that the behaviors women are taught are all good or positive, but within the realm of building consensus and being open to new ideas, these specific behaviors have been shown to work better.

Also, this change in messaging has been more useful to me: Originally, if I wanted to promote women in the field the advice was "Don't be a sexist jerk, and provide mentoring for junior coders that are women". Now the advice is "look to your own behaviors and improve them, and both men and women will benefit". It's way too early to say if this messaging is really an answer, but I feel like I've made positive changes based on it.

[ Side note: I've noticed that comments like these tend to inevitably kick off comments about how backstabbing and bitter the socialization between women is, a position often vigorously promoted by women themselves. I really can't say, other than the specific qualities I list above are positive ]

>Side note: I've noticed that comments like these tend to inevitably kick off comments about how backstabbing and bitter the socialization between women is, a position often vigorously promoted by women themselves. I really can't say, other than the specific qualities I list above are positive

Yep, my ex-wife could easily go on a tirade about that, and that was her #1 complaint about working in the legal field: other women. But it wasn't all women, it was just a certain, small minority of women, and also the HR department for refusing to do anything about it, or somehow blaming her for these women's crazy behavior.

as a mother with young children, i value time flexibility and work life balance over everything else. I don't have to put every hour or half day taken due to family or school events into PTO. everything else is negotiable.

Stop Focusing on Gender and focus on the work. Strike a balance where necessary, but focusing on the things that make people different creates a division by virtue of the differences being consciously observed.

How were the interviewees recruited?

Promote them.

I will hazard a guess that the popular answer in these parts will industry gentrification.

Please read all the way it does sound pretty blunt, kinda a rant. I'm a guy. Not a very liberal response.

Men make money.

Women look good.

As terrible as that sounds. It is true. We are different species and have different advantages as the other.

A pretty girl can literally take pics of themselves and marry in to wealth. We see this all the time. A actress is now dating Prince Harry, she is not a programmer or engineer. Bieber "finds" Instagram models and you know... he doesn't look in a cubicle of his agents company.

A pretty guy gets no same benefits. There are girls on Instagram with literally millions of followers, even pretty male models barley crack a million.

A smart girl who is not pretty gets no real benefits unless she works like a dog and turns her personality in to a man. Look at CEOs, almost +90% male. Leadership trait of males?

A smart guy who is ugly has no problems being a star in the work force.

These are the way things are. Should they be changed? Absolutely. But let me tell you how...

but first a side note -- I do not approve of women in the military. Unless they can do their job as good or better then their male cohorts. I do not approve of slower lap times or lighter weights just because of gender. The enemy doesn't care about your gender, they will not go easy on you or slower. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/22/letter-to-th...

Using this same liberal premise, in high school we had 2 girls on the football team, because they wanted to be equal. one was actually bigger than some guys, but still not as skilled, the other was a "pretty girl". How do you expect a 200lb guy to treat the girls the same? As you know they quit in a couple months and practice was back to "normal". We lost a game because the coach had to put one of them in because their parents we upset.... --

So lets take this in to corporate america. If woman are as equal or better than a male candidate no problem they are good for the job. it is in the companies interest to hire them. But im sure in a extremely male dominated field it makes it very hard. I would assume, and from my own experience, guys get along with guys more than guys and girls. This is just fact. It is the same for women too. They feel more comfortable.

So now we have a male dominated industry where many more men are hired than women and this further makes it harder for women to be in the industry. It seems pretty f tough.

A short fix, a near sighted fix, is to start your own company, make your own "club" your rules, hire who you want. You can now be biased and shape things to your whim. Sorry if this is a let down but big companies are "club" and then the labor. big difference.

So why dont we ask another question, this will be extremely unpopular but the truth.

Why dont we each do what we are good at? Why dont we do what we have the best advantage in?

Woman outnumber men in many industries.

http://www.businessinsider.com/pink-collar-jobs-dominated-by...

Now your question will be, but i dont want to be a nurse i want to be a programmer! I dont want to be x i want to be y!

Then you shouldn't complain when it is difficult because you are swimming upstream.

I really wanted to be a basketball player when i was young you have no idea. Well guess what? im not above 6 ft, let alone a proper 6,6 so you know what i did?

I accepted that i could be a basket ball player and moved on with my life.

To be quite honest with you there are many more things i would rather be that a programmer.

I would love to be an actor. but i dont think im 9/10 pretty, nor tall.

I would love to be a doctor, but i couldn't think of doing surgery

I would love to be a race car driver, but im not rich enough to start.

I would love to be an entrepreneur, im working on that one.

I would love to be a better developer, im working on that one.

I would love to be free of debt, closer by the day.

what i do now is merely what i believe to be the easiest and most enjoyable path to what i deem a better future for myself.

if i had a million dollars i would not be doing much of what im doing now.

TLDR; kinda hard to do without sounding like an a$$, but do what you are good at and what is realistic. If you are good technically you will get the job but realize it is an extremely upward battle compared to numerous other "paths". Understand that, don't push for unrealistic compensations for it.

Would love to hear everyone's opinions. Sorry if blunt but sometimes i believe the truth gets shot down that only similar comments ever get read on grounds of "approval bias".

> Please read all the way it does sound pretty blunt, kinda a rant. I'm a guy. Not a very liberal response.

I approach this sort of writing with a stern charity.

Asking questions is never wrong. And I even entertain discriminatory assertions that have a compelling basis in reality. This is the charity.

But you damn well better be right, or at least not obviously wrong. If you have no compelling reason to believe what you preach -- if even the most cursory investigation would disposes you of a controversial and harmful if incorrect belief -- then you're just a bigot. This is the sternness.

So, let us evaluate your claims. Namely, that "you [women] shouldn't complain when it is difficult because you [they] are swimming upstream". I.e., that women are somehow naturally predisposed to poor software engineering.

Engineering requires a combination of technical aptitude and clear communication.

Let us first consider technical aptitude. It is instructive to consider other fields that over-lap with Computer Science and Software Engineering -- Mathematics (obviously important in CS and SE), medicine (requires systems-oriented thinking), and other sciences (requiring general technical skills).

Mathematics is more gender balanced than Computer Science. The most technically difficult aspects of Computer Science are basically applied mathematics. So technical competence cannot explain the CS gender disparity.

Medical Doctors are, on average, smarter, better credentialed, harder workers, and even better compensated than software engineers. And yet, the gender disparity among MD's is much lower than among software engineers.

Women outnumber men in several sciences, none of which you could reasonably call "pink-collar" fields without completely ignoring a good 20 years of history (let alone 100 years).

So, is it possible that women are somehow innately impoverished in the technical aptitude required in Software Engineering? I don't think so. But even if they are, this alone does not explain the gender gap in Computer Science.

Technical aptitude does not provide a compelling justification for your viewpoint.

That leaves us with communication. A technical genius who cannot communicate -- in code, in documentation, and in conversation -- makes for a dreadful engineer.

Perhaps innate communication ability explains the gap between men and women in software engineering? But all the women I know write much more clearly than you have in this post! And surely you are an excellent engineer.

So it seems I've run out of charity.

Your whole objection is to his statement, "you [women] shouldn't complain when it is difficult because you [they] are swimming upstream", but you misunderstood what he was saying. "When it is difficult because you are swimming upstream", he is talking about a case...in the case that it is difficult. It may not be difficult for all women. For a stubborn woman who doesn't have the skills, she shouldn't complain. So his statement isn't bigoted. Not in the least.

Then his whole post is off topic nonsensical rambling...?

Parent pretty much doubles down rather than correct me, so I don't think you're correct.

Is it only because it doesnt fit with your opinions?

I am pretty broad with this.

Do you care to defend the military or football premise? - i will admit i am extrapolating a little

What is your current position/job if i may ask?

You said his whole argument hinged on a point that you chose to interpret one way...and then you did it again:

"So now women don't belong in tech not because they're under qualified, because you can't imagine not wanting to have sex with them?"

You choose to draw conclusions that he never made. He said:

"I find this friendship to be almost impossible from a woman's point of view. There are so many hints of sexuality it make a genuine friendship from an older man to a younger girl so to speak almost taboo? really? no sex or favors?"

He's clearly talking about what outside people think of an older man befriending a younger woman, and you draw the conclusion that he "can't imagine not wanting to have sex with them". This is an entirely different thing than articulating what other people think(liberals AND conservatives FYI).

Making it personal doesn't help your argument.

Hello and thank you for your response :)

Actually i am quite an average programmer at best but thanks for thinking highly of me for your response.

To be quite frank, and ill add another point to this discussion, i got the job i currently have because i believe i just have more personality than most, me and my higher ups get along quite well.

I find this friendship to be almost impossible from a woman's point of view. There are so many hints of sexuality it make a genuine friendship from an older man to a younger girl so to speak almost taboo? really? no sex or favors?

My second point which i might not of elaborated as much in the first is that, perhaps we have reached "critical MA(n)SS", where the tech industry is so populated by men, hiring more men that it makes these friendships from a woman's standpoint increasingly hard to get. Let alone the reasons mentioned previous.

Men hiring men because they get along with them better? Sexism they cry!

Promotions are made in the bar and the golf course. I like to think of companies as 2 separate populations groups, the management and the help.i believe to cross the line would be extremely hard in late stage companies , without being quite the star.

Thoughts?

So now women don't belong in tech not because they're under qualified, because you can't imagine not wanting to have sex with them?

At least we are all clear on what the actual problem is.

You are ignoring the fact that i said males like to hang around other males, and it makes it exponentially hard for a woman to enter the "club".

I assume you are a woman. Is your best friend a man or girl?

I'm a man and work in a sane work environment where genitals and drinking habits don't effect promotions -- especially among engineering staff where the whole point is to minimize the impact of those sorts of petty politics and instead focus on shipping product.

It's a shame we probably aren't in competing companies.

I'm a woman, and my best friend is a man. I have many more male friends than female ones in general, just due to my interests.

I've never once had the faintest idea of sex cross my mind when making relationships with co-workers or other male friends (I've been in a steady relationship for 7 years though, so it's not like I'm looking). Never once. And all my male friends I've made have never once conveyed anything sexual to me because they either don't feel that way, or if they ever did, they respect me enough to not make me feel uncomfortable (with the exception of one former coworker who I refer to as a harasser for his continual flirting + uncomfortable advances. I cut off all contact with him)

You're projecting tbh, many women are perfectly capable of creating strong platonic relationships with men. Usually it's the man who has an issue there, but that's not really my problem is it? If you think of sex any time a female befriends you and you let it get to you and damage your friendship, that's something you need to work on personally.

Also, do you think Gay dudes are unable to make friendships with straight guys for this reason too?

somewhat yes.

I really dont believe your best friend is a guy.

I used to defend tech against radfem until I realised I was just lucky and guys like him exist and do well there.

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest

2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

It doesn't even need to be "young males beating their chest".

I've been in plenty of hostile reviews with completely harmless, introverted, soft spoken INTJ-types who simply can't get past some nitpick because it doesn't fit into their perfect, logical world view and refuse to budge an inch.

Our industry has a personality problem as much or more as it has a sex problem.

I agree, maybe I should have said passive-aggressive. It's certainly also an issue from the physically 'meek and mild' types.

You nailed it.

Unreasonable people come in all shapes and personalities.

Oi - I resemble that remark!

I've also been on the reviewing end of plenty of types who think all small things are inconsequential nitpicks which excuses them from having to change anything. Then people moan about a lack of standards and consistency between teams...

I've also died in a ditch over naming conventions for unit tests - whilst not my proudest moment - it drives home one of the key points in the article, that good managers work with all their people to make a cohesive team. Everyone has things to improve on and can benefit from constructive criticism. Management is far harder than technical work as humans always have state, there's no such thing as a pure function for humans. Knowing how to coach, mentor, advocate for, protect, encourage etc is not something you are born with, and you can't really spin up an AWS instance of a team of humans to practice on.

As long as it's idiomatic... I'm sorta fine with it.

> Our industry has a personality problem as much or more as it has a sex problem.

The data suggests our industry has a massive sex problem. Refocusing the debate onto yourself is a blocking factor in solving this problem.

Nope, the data does not suggest that.

> 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

Also paid maternity leave, funded by taxes.

Include paternity leave while you're at it.

If the question is "How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?" - how is paternity leave relevant (unless the father in the relationship works for the same company, I guess)?

If only women have legally mandated paid time off for new kids it'll provide even more reproduction-related disincentive to hire women, which is reason enough for it to be relevant, I'd say.

Exactly! I have anecdata from German managers """jokingly complaining""" about how one can't hire young men any more because of their potential paternity leave. This is a good thing.

As a woman, I'm much more likely to take the amount of maternity leave I desire if I think there's no professional penalty for it. Ensuring that men can take leave lowers the chance I'll be penalized for my decision since it's now a 'cost of doing business' and not a 'cost of hiring women'.

Point number 1 is ridiculous and sexist. Oh yeah let's ship code that hasn't been reviewed because the young males in our company will act like chimpanzees, and those pesky technical debates let's scratch those too. Let's just use whatever piece of technology is trending today on HN

It's not about women even introverts won't fit in this kind of situation. How many agile poker are played where only two chimps are arguing ?

Sure, but to a certain extent I think a woman who behaves in the same way is going to unfairly be perceived much more negatively.

I didn't read that as suggesting that you shouldn't do code reviews.

The issue is when code reviews become a competitive sport, and more about technical oneupmanship than they are about improving code quality and team knowledge.

Can you point me to the part of the sentence where OP says not to review code entirely? You sound like you're just making his point.

I didn't say "no code reviews" I said aggressive. I've personally seen a world a difference in response from (mostly) young female engineers when the review is less about "you did this and this WRONG, FIX IT" than talking through design decisions calmly and without the (passive) aggressive stuff.

Yes this can apply to males too, but my empirical observation is mostly more applicable to females.

No one's saying we shouldn't have code reviews or technical debates, just that we need to avoid being overly aggressive. A lot of young males (including myself previously, and sometimes currently) can be very aggressive in presenting their views. This disenfranchises less outspoken people in our teams, particularly woman who generally can't be as aggressive without negative social ramifications.

my wife had similar concerns, she took a few negotiation classes and is doing fine now.

there is that..

then there are managers and engineers who tell ppl to 'f off' or to 'gtfo' .. and thats deemed acceptable by culture - that needs to be dealt with.

I'm male, barely progressive, of below average couth, and probably seem like a dinosaur to younger colleagues when it comes to gender issues, but I think your item #1 is without question the most endlessly frustrating and pointless source of tedium in the software business and its only gotten worse during the last 20 years.

I've found myself finding more common ground with young women on my teams than with the young men for this reason, and for the reason that when I do have something constructive to offer during a review then young women generally respond to it in a way that I like (e.g. they make a value judgement about what advice was worth taking and what wasn't and do it).

The kind of men you're describing seem to find a way to turn everything into a sport, and seem to be oblivious to the effect that they have on people whose attitudes toward competition don't match their own. It is frequently embarrassing to watch, and definitely my least favorite aspect of this work.

Code reviews may have grown in importance due to scaled back formal design documents and formal qa staff and processes.

> young women generally respond to it in a way that I like (e.g. they make a value judgement about what advice was worth taking and what wasn't and do it).

In my only 10+ years experience, I noticed women seem more defensive about their code being reviewed and I have to write long formal arguments if I'm suggesting any more than a trivial change. Then there will be a discussion afterwards and based on that it's 50/50 whether it gets done. Now I pad reviews with positives about the work to soften it in some probably transparent attempt to placate the reviewee.

With men, I review the code, make a suggestion, I usually get a note "sounds good, will do." That's not all men of course, there's always at least one guy who doesn't want his code reviewed at all, too good, doesn't see the point, etc.

>I usually get a note "sounds good, will do."

This is me, but not at first. I think it took me a while to realize most arguments aren't worth it and not rocking the boat has a lot of social value, especially from a "get on with my day and let bygones be bygones" perspective. I suck up some really questionable criticisms from my boss on the regular. Its not a big deal. I find women in the workplace seem to learn this lesson much later than their male peers. I think female social culture is often argument and verbal heavy and that translates poorly into the workplace. I feel this is the downside of being more socially aware earlier on than boys. Girls seem to become very sensitive to perceived slights and that hyper-sensitivity doesn't translate well into the workplace.

I work with women in their 40s who will argue about the something trivial thing until they're blue in the face. I almost never see a man act like this, especially past age 30 or so. I think older men are just taught to take arguments and conflict more seriously and take on a certain level of stoicism, if not a strong level of emotional repression, at work. In the world of men a conflict could turn into violence quickly while women on women violence is much more rare and with much less serious consequences. A 110lbs girl isn't going to be able to murder me but a 200lbs guy could easily or accidentally do so. I think subconscious knowledge of that permeates our work life and affects how we develop. By the time we enter the workplace we've internalized certain attitudes, if your attitude is 'conflict is everywhere and needs to be constantly addressed' then you'll have a hard time at work, regardless of gender.

I remember being the only man in a group of girls at my first professional job and the gossiping and negativity was extremely high with them, now I can't ever imagine socializing like that at work. It just seems crazy and a guaranteed way to ruin your day and hate your coworkers and bosses. Some of it was absolutely justified but dwelling on it was counter-productive (no one went to HR or went to resolve things, they just seethed endlessly).

Nowadays, I've picked up the 'male stoicism' that always bewildered me about older guys when I was first starting to work a 'real job.' Now it makes perfect sense to me as it limits conflict, drama, and seething resentment. Meanwhile many of my female peers never made this advancement so we have to make special exemptions and treat them with kid gloves if they're even on the receiving end of anything they'll perceive as a slight. Its exhausting, frankly, and I wonder why women, with their ultra-refined social skills, don't see that this kind of behavior is ultimately self-defeating.

That said, the above is a generalization, but its definitely an 80/20 kind of things. 80% of the women I've worked with are like this, with 20% being the exception.

> 1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest

I'm sure whatever you'd like to replace these processes could be described in equally sweeping sexist terms going the opposite direction, you know.

Good to see someone can see the irony.

Seems difficult given how few tech companies are female-dominated, actually.

> 1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest

Frankly this is something I'd welcome too.

>Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest

I get what you're saying but at the same time... code reviews and conversations not debates/arguments are important regardless of gender. You're saying you want to built a tech org without that being a central idea to the way men and women on the team should work?

The key word is 'aggressive' - yes it benefits all, but the topic here is about 'retaining females'.

It's not like the industry figured out how to retain men to begin with.

Almost every tech company I've been in, I've seen people of both genders move in and out constantly.

Programmers have been complaining about management since forever.

Is there any evidence that women in particular are facing different issues from men when it comes to job satisfaction?

I've never heard a question from women: "What can WE do to be more suitable for modern IT?" All I hear is that I, /u/ar15saveslives, personally, should act differently, look differently, speak differently to make those vulnerable sensitive shy females enjoy working with me.

Why nobody asks "what women have to do to be more comfortable in IT" question? Learn more, participate in OSS/SO, start your own projects - why doesn't it work for "female engineers"?

How can Hospitals help retain Male Nurses? (male nurses: ~8%)

How can Schools help retain Male Teachers? (male teachers: ~20%)

How can we help Males dying on the job? (male on the job deaths: ~90%+)

I wonder what your point is.

Naturally, these questions do get asked in each industry. Nursing [1-3]; K-5 teaching [4-6]. There are entire federal and state agencies with copious regulation dedicated to workplace safety. As a society, we spend millions upon millions each year making inherently dangerous workplaces (mostly occupied by men, as you note) a bit less dangerous.

And I don't even know anything about those cultures; I'm literally "just fucking googling it". A mere investment of a few minutes would've easily dispossessed you of the misapprehension that men aren't explicitly recruited and retained in female-dominant fields.

Hopefully it's blatantly obvious why we're discussing gender disparities in software engineering on HN -- a message board primarily frequented by people in the software startup industry -- instead of gender disparities in these other professions.

[1] http://minoritynurse.com/men-in-nursing/

[2] https://www.corexcel.com/courses/men-nursing-handout.pdf

[3] http://www.asrn.org/journal-nursing/374-men-in-nursing.html

[4] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.659...

[5] http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:73946

[6] http://www.menteach.org/

You sidestepped the workplace death question. Why are we so worried about forcing women into STEM no matter what, but we don't care about forcing them into the jobs that cause all those workplace deaths? As a corollary, why do people without STEM jobs constantly complain about other people not having STEM jobs instead of leading by example? After all, as we're constantly told, we need every able-bodied STEM grad we can get our hands on.

Lip service doesn't matter; change matters.

If you look at nursing stats, men leave at a much higher rate than women. Sexual harassment, liability when caring for women and children, getting saddled with the harder jobs (because he's a man), pay sucks, and a general every day attitude from everyone about being a male nurse (with the added bonus that generally speaking, old nurses really hate new nurses and the more different you are, the worse it is). Generally speaking, you'll tend to see male nurses gravitate toward specialties or travel nursing where most of these issues are less prevalent.

What about teachers? The split used to slightly favor men over women once upon a time. If there were ever a profession where male/female diversity were important, it would be in the education system. Instead, we see the huge male pedophile scare of the 70-80s followed by a large drop in the number of male teachers in general and in younger grades in particular. Most male elementary school teachers are there for PE. Factor that out and it's extremely easy for your child to go through almost a decade of schooling without meeting a male teacher.

To tie that particular idea back to software engineering, are the majority of female elementary teachers self-loathing, backward individuals who believe in the inherent inferiority of women? If not, then why do they work so hard to keep their female students out of certain parts of STEM?

> You sidestepped the workplace death question

No, I didn't.

We have an entire legal and regulatory bureaucracy dedicated to improving working conditions in dangerous work places.

I'm pretty willing to bet that the cost of that bureaucracy -- per year -- is easily several orders of magnitude more than all the money spent to date on encouraging women to take STEM jobs.

I could Google it for you, but this is apparently an issue dear to your heart, so I'm sure you're well aware.

Are these protections perfect? No. We should strengthen them! Also, we should have less gender disparity in STEM. I'm really still missing the zero-sum relationship between these two things... could you help me out?

> Why are we so worried about forcing women into STEM no matter what, but we don't care about forcing them into the jobs that cause all those workplace deaths

1. Who said anything about "forcing"?

2. HUGE elephant in the room: because this is a tech-focused message board. Again, why is it so surprising that we're discussing the tech industry as opposed to the healthcare or education industries?

> nursing... teachers

Great. Someone should do something about that.

Still not sure why you think any of this is a reason for software engineers to refrain from discussing and addressing similar culture problems within software engineering firms.

Discussing gender disparities between different fields is not, in fact, a zero-sum game.

> Great. Someone should do something about that.

The institutions pushing for change in IT are often not IT specific. The question is why do they focus on IT. They are the "someone" who should be doing something.

This is all starting to sound extraordinarily conspiratorial.

Who is this "they"?

To re-iterate, I'm still not sure why you think any of this is a reason for software engineers to refrain from discussing and addressing culture problems within software engineering firms.

> This is all starting to sound

I believe this is my first comment in this thread. Want to substantiate that?

> refrain from discussing and addressing culture problems within software engineering firms

That's not the issue, the issue is the unusual pressure and increased scrutiny tech receives relative to other industries. The various forms of tokenism, and HR risk-avoidance has nothing to do with a "discussion", it is very much one-sided.

The most important for me is directing social conversations. Most people think that social event is a time for everybody to talk freely about whatever topics, but no. The point of social event is inclusiveness. I see this scenario happening over and over again:

Social event starts off friendly. Gradually, the conversation starts turning very technical or very sci-fi, then women turned away and formed their own social group. Worse, the only woman engineer on the team spends the night sipping on her drink quietly wishing she found these topics more interesting or wishing she took more CS classes so she could appreciate the intensity of the conversation. (Note, I'm using women as an example because of the posted question. But this applies just as much to the minority race, age group, etc.)

I think it is important for the manager (or any teammate in general) to make social inclusivity their top priority in a social environment. Look around, if you see that someone in the group is not engaged, steer the group conversation towards the interests of that person. Its a hard skill do develop, but its a skill managers should be actively working to improve.

> The most important for me is directing social conversations.

You want the manager to micro-manage a happy hour? Sounds like torture.

Yes, but how else would you build empathy and diversity amongst your team? Say you hired a minority who has different interest with the majority on the team. If left unchecked, the minority will always feel excluded (unless they have a strong personality).

If I were on a team where management tried to micro-manage conversion toward some ideal of "diversity", then believe me, "empathy" would not be the emotion I would be feeling.

Okay, make me unhappy. I'm just another toxic male. I can go, right? My leaving will just make the rest of the team more vibrant or whatever.

Well, I produce 10x more code than the rest of the team put together, so good luck.

Hi, please take the time to self evaluate and see if your approach will lead you to where you want to be in life, whether it be having alot of money, being happy, being a great parent, etc. From your comment, I'm getting this vibe "If people don't like me, fuck it. I'm better than everybody else."

It sounds like you are a very intelligent and motivated person , so lets think about this logically.

Here's an alternative scenario: lets say you take the time and effort to get your team to like you and inspire them to improve to your skill level. If you are the 10x engineer, then produce code at 1x and spend the other 9x learning and doing what it takes to inspire the rest of the team to get to your productivity. If it takes the team 1 year to get to your productivity and the team has size of 10, then the team collectively will have 100x productivity by the end of the year. You would be able to accomplish way more than what you could have accomplished yourself. (Obviously, I generalized the math. But you get the point).

Counter argument: "I don't plan to stay in the company for that long to reap the benefits"

Fortunately, if you inspire somebody to become 10x the person they were, you would have made a lasting impact in their lives. Companies come and go, but relationships stick around. If you leave to do your startup, chances are these 10x engineers would be more than happy to join (at various stages of success during the life of the startup).

This is all I have time to write. I hope this helps. Good luck.

Why would a work group be going to a happy hour in the first place? That's bad because it assumes everyone is OK with drinking alcohol. Now you're alienating Mormons, ex-alcoholics, people who choose not to drink, and people who get physically ill from drinking alcohol. How about keeping workplace socialization at the workplace instead? Or perhaps at a decent sit-down restaurant where people can order food instead of getting liquored up and potentially saying or doing something embarrassing or harassing?

> Or perhaps at a decent sit-down restaurant

And what about people who choose not to go to restaurants?

Seems like you have a chip on your shoulder about drinking.

A "chip"? So what's your answer to people who get physically ill when consuming alcohol? Don't get a job? Because in American drinking culture, they're going to look bad if they don't drink with everyone else at one of these stupid happy hours.

Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.

I become ill at the smell of alcohol.

I sit out the usual Friday bar nights and have to turn down the occasional offers of alcohol from coworkers that don't interact with me frequently (and thus either don't know or have forgotten that I don't drink)

They get to go get wasted at the local bar. I get to enjoy my Friday night playing video games alone. Win-win. If they do something like GoKarting I get dragged into something I'd rather not be doing since I feel obliged to attend since I sit out of the many alcohol-related events.

I'm agreeing with Chris2048 here. Sounds like a chip. They can enjoy their alcohol without me being a downer about it or forcing the majority of the company to comply with my wishes of non-alcoholic expenditures.

If they have fun drinking, let them have fun I say. I'll go home and play some video games.

Right, and then you miss out on important work dealings and decision-making, you're seen as "not a team player", you're passed over for promotions, etc. Staying out of all work "team-building" events eventually looks really bad for you and will work against you.

Maybe I've been extremely fortunate - but that just hasn't the case at where I work. I'm very clear about why I don't attend these things and people are very understanding.

Perhaps it is because I have a very visible impact on my department or maybe because all decision making is done during office hours. The bar is for play and karaoke - not to talk about work. The company culture treats any work discussion during team outings as taboo. You won't be punished for it but you'll be told kindly to shut up and have fun - work will be back again next Monday. Talk about it then. :)

If I had to guess, that probably plays a huge part into why the company doesn't have those sort of problems.

>The company culture treats any work discussion during team outings as taboo. You won't be punished for it but you'll be told kindly to shut up and have fun - work will be back again next Monday.

Many places are not like this.

How do you know? Is this fact, or fear?

If you deserve promotion for a non-social role, but aren't because you don't go out with the team, that is not good, but that's a tangent to banning work related drinking events.

Another question is, do you go to non-alcohol related work events?

> So what's your answer to people who get physically ill when consuming alcohol

My answer is it's a rarity, and a distraction that you included it.

> Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.

Does it? Strange given I neither binge drink (which isn't the same as a drink after work anyway, and so I reiterate that you have a chip) nor am I American.

I couldn't care less if people don't want to participate, I'm not going to suggest they be forced - unlike your suggestion that people be forced not to.

When your team visits this hypothetical restaurant, will you ban anyone from ordering steaks, because because a baby can't chew it...

Food restrictions can cause alienation as well, unfortunately. I agree that that the expectation that socializing=drinking is a problem.

And if someone in tech isn't interested in tech and doesn't like conversations about tech and feels excluded when others talk about tech... remind me again why they are in tech?

"Tech" is a very broad and very diverse term. If an employee is design focused and a group is having conversations about the latest Linux kernel API change there is a very good chance the design focused employee won't be able to follow the conversation making them feel left out. Not to discourage design field, they have their own deep technical niches.

Not everyone can participate in every thread of a conversation but it's important to change the topic often enough to allow people to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.

Thank you for understanding.

> the only woman engineer on the team spends the night sipping on her drink quietly wishing she found these topics more interesting or wishing she took more CS classes so she could appreciate the intensity of the conversation

Women might have different interests than men, but why do you think they might be stymied by technical conversation? She's an engineer the same as the rest, unless she was hired because of tokenism she should absolutely be able to hold her own in a technical conversation.

A friend graduated from a bootcamp and she loves coding. But sometimes there are conversations that goes deep into SSDs vs HDDs, bitcoin mining, and other topics unrelated to work that alienated her and she couldn't participate.

I was trying to share what I learned from speaking with a few of my friends. Put yourself in the shoes of a woman who wanted a career change and joined a bootcamp. You learned the necessary skill and took an engineering job on a predominantly male team. Already, you are self conscious about not having a 4 year CS degree. Now they consistently talk about cryptography, hardware, that doesn't seem to relate to your work. As if gender wasn't an issue already, now there is also a technical exclusion.

I am also open to suggestions. Is this an okay scenario?

OK, that makes sense, I thought you were talking in the general, not discussing a particular subset. But I'd argue the issue is more due to not having a 4 year degree than being a woman in a male-dominated field, though that certainly doesn't help. I don't know the statistics, are women in tech more likely to be from bootcamps than men?

However, this does remind me of a phenomenon in child psychology, where girls in a classroom setting are much more likely to participate in class if it's an all-girl class vs a mixed-gender setting. I believe the literature says this is largely due to some learned cultural behavior in early childhood, but I can't remember the specifics. I don't know if this phenomenon persists into adulthood to some degree, but your example reminded me of that.

The percentage of bootcamp grads that are female is much higher than the average across tech (~30% for bootcamps v ~15% across industry/university). I don't think bootcamps make up a large enough group for that to make it 'likely' that any given woman is from a bootcamp, but it probably means there's a few pockets where all the women at a company went through a bootcamp.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3050171/where-are-the-women-in-t...

Are there stats that there are more women who career change and come from bootcamps or don't have as rigid technical backgrounds? Are bootcamp graduates not technical enough or interested in technical subjects? These generalizations are unsettling to me.

There's a general flow of conversation in any social situation that organically arises from the composition of the group of people involved. Unless your friend's teammates are jerks, she should be able to easily influence the direction of the conversation. Perhaps instead of suffering from an issue because she is a woman, she is simply too shy. Maybe this industry or society at large is bad at including shy people general.

How would a manager even know where to direct the discussion if the person who feels alienated doesn't speak up during the conversation? The last thing I want is a manager to try to point the discussion to movies, pop music, fashion, makeup, or whatever else women are supposed to like. I would absolutely be offended.

I think this can happen to a lot of people, depending on the discussion. Personally, I've taken almost no CS classes; I'm a EE by degree and moved into programming (mainly embedded) on-the-job.

So when people start getting into heavy CS discussions about algorithms or whatever, that can alienate me to an extent too. I've read the basics and all and picked up a lot, but only what I really needed to know for this kind of work. I'm more interested in getting hardware to work and programming near the hardware level than some B-tree or whatever.

Another thing that really alienates me: when men at work talk about sports. I don't give two shits about spectator sports, and I think they're a complete waste of time. I'm a male, of course, but unlike many men I really hate sports and sports fanaticism. I don't see this too much at work (as it seems my attitude toward sports isn't that uncommon among men in tech), but I do see it now and then, especially with older and more outgoing/managerial type men.

So I don't think it's entirely a male vs. female issue: certain groups of people working together will frequently have certain common interests, which will not be shared by other people in that workplace. If I worked with a bunch of women and they all started talking about some current TV show, I'd also be alienated, because I don't own a TV or watch any current TV shows (except Game of Thrones...). Should I insist that women refrain from talking about TV shows? That seems a bit extreme.

Someone else already addressed the issues with your "woman = less technical" implication, but I think the meat of your topic is actually going in the right direction.

People who are good at socializing know how to have conversations with anyone of any background. Many know when people are being left out and will go out of their way to shift the topic or make it more inclusive to the person being left out. If you've ever been at a party where you didn't know anyone, and someone who you didn't know before introduces themselves and is able to make you feel more comfortable being there, then you probably know what a relief these natural socializers can be.

Unfortunately, many engineers (myself included) are not natural socializers or otherwise well-practiced in the "manners" required for creating positive social situations. Folks like me are much more interested in topics I know a lot about and have strong opinions on, so it can be hard to break away once one of those conversations start, even if I know people are being excluded by having this conversation.

I think the important thing here is that socialization should be organic, and if one person is obviously uncomfortable or left out, the polite thing for anyone to do is to bring them in somehow. Every person on the team should strive to improve their ability to make people from different backgrounds feel included, and you're right in saying it's a skill that can be improved through work. This applies equally to women, minorities, immigrants, new people, anyone who doesn't feel like an "in-group" in a particular situation.

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