Am I wrong or all the issues seem to be not gender related but about management and they apply to both sexes?
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.
Indeed, both men and women have a superset of human concerns.
The union is never instantiated.
[...]
> 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.
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.
> "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.)
Isn't this kind of the point? Am I missing summat?
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
Nobody's born with bias or opinions.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
The two are not mutually exclusive (and, indeed, can be mutually reinforcing.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Teaching, nursing, child care. Care to take a guess which group doesn't fit into those industries?
My comment was out of an interest in not being lied to more than anything else.
The subconscious forces that shape the way people think about these issues are the most pernicious.
"Men fail to enter [teaching|nursing|child care] at a rate much higher than other industries. The only conclusion is that [teaching|nursing|child care] is a hostile environment for men, or that men are intrinsically unable to perform in [teaching|nursing|child care]."
Which is it, in the areas I listed?
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.
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.
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...
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
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.