Barriers to Equality in Academia: Women in Computer Science at MIT (1983) | Hacker News Reader

Barriers to Equality in Academia: Women in Computer Science at MIT (1983)

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63 pointseaguyhn33 comments

I remember this report when it was issued (I was at MIT at the time) and feel that things haven't changed a lot.

This is despite the fact that it was well received by the people around me (see "reactions" in the paper). But I don't feel it changed much.

That's terrible news. I was undergrad there in mid 2000s, and perceived that some, but not all, of these issues had improved. Being a man, and less attentive to the issues at the time, it doesn't surprise me that I missed it. It could also be that the undergrad experience is better than the research staff experience.

Is there anything on the list that has improved?

Could you explain more about where your feelings come from?

It looks like it's from 1983. How relevant are these points today?

Possibly somewhat, given that the same issues seem to be mentioned often recently.

"The principal conclusions of this report are:

"Although not a generally accepted fact, the women here are as qualified as the men.

"In order to realize their potential, women must be given the same opportunities as men to participate in and benefit from all aspects of the professional community.

"Many individuals in the community, either consciously or subconsciously, have expectations of women that are different from their expectations of men.

"Pervasive subtle discrimination can do as much damage as, if not more damage than, isolated incidents of overt discrimination.

"An uncomfortable social atmosphere interferes with a woman’s ability to work productively.

"Responsibility for change rests with the entire community, not just with the women.

"Many problems would be alleviated by increasing the number of women."

I think a lot of people would challenge the applicability of many of those statements to the modern incarnation of the industry.

Can you be specific about which of those statements you think don't apply anymore?

I'm skeptical that there is a significant part of the industry that considers women less capable than men; I'm also skeptical that women have fewer opportunities than men. I believe there are a few bad apple companies, but mostly I see companies tripping over themselves to hire and retain as many women as they can. I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence, and I know that there is a large group of powerful people spreading misinformation about discrimination against women (e.g., wage gap myth). Lastly, the different-interests hypothesis seems to better explain the various gender/tech gaps and it fits pretty perfectly with my experiences. I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise, however.

There is also a large group trying to hide the issue under some "different-interests hypothesis" but it's in fact the core problem. Just look at other cultures to see that there is nothing inherent to women not interested in CS.

The debate would be more honest if the "different-interests" group were just saying that they don't want our culture to change. As for me like I said there is no evidence that there may be some genetic predisposition other than cultural ones.

An interesting talk that gave me some perspective (not sjw, just someone's experiences): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FEeTLopLkEo

Edit: clarified second paragraph

Through, the culture is not just what people in tech do. These debates often comes up as accusing men in tech of being worst, but the "I am girl therefore I can't possibly like it, a girl who like tech (cars) have something wrong about her, it is not for me, wow I did not knew women can be programmers you must be smart" is internalized much sooner.

What also definitely does not help are odd ideas about what kind of personality can enjoy tech work. The best predictor imo is willingness to solve puzzles and personality that likes to learn. Meanwhile, people use "playing action games or clash of clans" as proxy. When i was studying, dudes who spend all their time on irc or muds were seen as potential genius programmers, cause they spend all time with computer. Most of them could do only a bit of administration, but they acted confidently.

Different interest thing is cop out. Tech is not magic, interest in it develops exactly like interest in anything else - starting from litterature and art, continuing though biology to astronomy or sport.

Whenever topic came out, it was "women just have different brain and are not naturaly as good". And people truly believed that. So I am kinda glad for "actually women have same aptitude" change, but if you are convinced the child is incapable in x, child will grow less interested in it - even if it is a music.

I don't think the different interests group is being remotely dishonest. Their started claims are pretty consistent with what you would expect from someone who is skeptical of the discrimination hypothesis. Namely if discrimination isn't the primary driver of gaps in tech, pushing for equal representation is going to pressure some women into jobs they don't really want and prevent some men from getting jobs they want. As for dishonesty, the discrimination hypothesis group can't even seem to debate the issue without misrepresenting their critics and accusing them of bigotry (for example, the reporting and comments here regarding the Google memo). I don't want to get into a tit-for-tat, because I'm sure discrimination skeptics have some pretty silly or dishonesty arguments as well, but dishonesty seems like the rule for discrimination hypothesis folks, not the exception. I'm happy to agree to disagree on this point since it's not likely to go anywhere productive.

Regarding the "just look at other cultures" point; that actually supports the different-interests hypothesis, because those other cultures are almost always those cultures with the least gender equality. The countries with the greatest score on the gender equity index have larger gender occupation gaps. The discrimination hypothesis actually fails to explain this, while the different interests hypothesis does a pretty good job.

Lastly, given that women achieved parity with men in law and medecine in the 80s and 90s (fields during a time that were far more hostile to women than now); women didn't need special programs, diversity officers, scouting programs, pipeline investment, etc, none of which are significantly helping tech now. The discrimination hypothesis fails to address this as well.

Hopefully this at least makes it clear that there are legitimate reasons to be skeptical of discrimination. At worst I'm simply wrong, not dishonest.

Sorry for typos, sending from phone.

I didn't talk about the discrimination hypothesis group, let's not fall into the trap of a false dichotomy. Did you watch the video I linked? It's a long time since I did but I don't remember the word discrimination being even pronounced.

I specifically presented a third hypothesis, that the primary driver is cultural (in the sense opposed to natural, not the "tech culture") i.e women having internalized since childhood "it's not for me", and men internalized "women have a different brain", like stated in the sibling comment. Different interests is not wrong but it's a symptom, same as discriminations exists but they are more of a symptom reinforcing the cause for me.

I don't think the different-interests hypothesis group is dishonest, my opinion is that they are wrong and that some might instead switch to "my culture and gender roles are fine, don't want to mix things up with feminized men and women having boy's center of interests etc..." (and that's often what comes out when I start digging when debating this topic). I disagree with this opinion but at leat it's debatable (vs some pseudo-scientific genetic predisposition).

Edit: for the other cultures point, I didn't say the gender equity was good, just that more women were interested tech in some.

"Although not a generally accepted fact, the women here are as qualified as the men."

I'll believe it when I see the admission statistics. Do they have gender segregated admission statistics for MIT? Anecdotally, I had a (male) friend in high school who was waitlisted with a 34, yet a girl in the same class with a 32 got in (no waitlist).

Are those ACT scores? Surely you realize that an ACT score is not a sole determinant of "qualification" for admittance into college. If it were, there would be no such thing as an admissions department. Everyone would just use ACT scores instead.

The difference between a 34 and a 32 on the ACT is the difference between the 99th percentile and the 98th percentile. This is well within the range of an individual's personal variation. A given ACT taker's score can vary by a couple points around their "true talent" based on short-term environmental factors (e.g. the quality of their pencils, the temperature of the room, their luck with guessing...) An admissions process that admitted a student with a 34 and not a student with a 32 would be deeply arbitrary. Which is why every college admissions officer I've ever spoken to has said they use standardized test scores as a rough initial screen and then never look at them again.

The relative qualification of students should be measured by their performance at the school, not by their standardized test scores.

A CS student at my university (not MIT) just raised the exact same points yesterday, so I'd say it's pretty damn relevant. It may have become less overt, but it's no less of a shit place to be a woman in 2017 than it was in 1983.

I was involved in a long discussion about this recently, as well.

It was a surprisingly noisy conversation involving far more angry young men than I expected.

Anyway if the subject comes up, I recommend pointing people to the ENIAC story. Women have been buried in most tech, and at least computing, history for much longer than the past 30 years.

The women in the following articles were practically unknown to history until the 1980s, even though they were involved in one of the monumental technical projects of the 20th century. For the period up until the discovery of their roles, the photos of them were thought to be "refrigerator models" showing off the machines:

https://iq.intel.com/how-female-eniac-programmers-pioneered-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB848012407846877000

Of particular note is Betty Holberton:

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/17/business/frances-e-holbert...

In my university (not US), women are over-represented in academic positions. With an equivalent resume, a woman is much more likely to get hired compared to a man.

This is becoming true for most of the first world. Women are more successful in educational institutions than men on average already.

That's not just an anecdote, and not just restricted to outside the US: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

Well why wouldn't you hire the minority candidate given otherwise identical qualifications? Among others, this encourages students of said minorities to apply, leading to more qualified applicants. How you construe this as a negative is beyond me.

Furthermore, there's still only around 15% women in CS here. Less among faculty. And you respond with a critique of diversity to a story detailing the awful crap women have to face every day during their studies?

If that report accurately describes what was going on in 1983, then I can see where radical feminism is historically coming from. Not as excuse for excesses, but as explanation of why some people might support that.

My work experiences were mostly positive. Where I experienced some of those things (like being unable to ask question without having to subsequently fight for control over my task, assumption that I will happily do all simple boring tasks and no interesting ones, etc - reasons why I hate agile setup basically), they take pleasure away from work big time and had me doubt choice of career at some moments.

The part about assuming girl is there to get husband is away entirely. I think it is much more ok for women to be aggressive now. People are less open about prejudice these days too.

Majority of male collegues is absolutely fine.

The part about assuming girl is there to get husband is away entirely.

A lot of women still do this or are expected to do this. I'm not sure how many of them are going to MIT or enrolled in CS, but it's common for women to go to college with the expectation of finding and husband and being a house wife, or working a few years, then having kids and doing that.

Well, ok, you do assume that.

Overwhelming majority don't assume that. Traditionalists I know complain about women not wanting to do that anymore.

It's not an assumption, or about a majority or minority opinion. I know actual women that feel and act this way.

I think my post was intrepreted as something that applies to a majority of women or that I think women should act a certain way. I was just saying that anecdoctally, the practice of going to college to find a husband is not dead.

The complain in the article was that teachers and other students assume the girls are in MIT not with the goal to learn or work, but that she is there only or primary to find husband.

So, unless you assume your classmates are in school just to find husbands and assume all girls are like your friends, the preferences of your friends are irrelevant.

I knew people who had trouble to keep up in school, because they came basically for party life and procrastinated too much. I don't assume all guys are like that. Similar thing (through being family oriented and willing to accept negatives of being at home is more noble I guess).

Very: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20161011-00/?p=...

>Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return.

A tangential point - do men like the environment any more than women? Or do they work there because of social expectation and the need to keep a high paying job (men being bread winners and all).

During the two years at my previous job I didn't see many men who did like the job, but yet they stuck around for the pay. Women who didn't like the job just left for to pursue something with lower pay / something they liked.

the need to keep a high paying job (men being bread winners and all

Right, the study is useless if it doesn't say what they did instead - did they cross train and become successful lawyers, for example?

If you click through a couple of links to the Fortune article, it seems to say that most of them simply stopped working altogether. That's an option most people don't have. Presumably they had partners to support them, as you say.

So maybe we should stop talking about men in tech as if they were all so obessed and passionate about work? Because I can confirm I met quite a few dudes who disliked the work itself. And it universally shown at their output, but many of them still climbed the ladder due to being good culture fit (meaning they were fun to chat around ping pong table and could talk well) and I always thought we would all do better without them.

The problem is that this report runs aground on the fact that the percentage of female CS degrees was nearing its peak in 1984. So, apparently this is was "success" should look like, right? (I'm being sarcastic. It is not. There were quite a few structural reasons in the US economy while all this occurred. The massive dislocations in the manufacturing sector being the primary drivers).

As for the complaint about "3.2 Invisibility" ... welcome to the fact that it sucks to be male, too! It always annoys me when women somehow think that men magically get noticed without active efforts. That fact that you are invisible does not imply that everybody else is visible. Go talk to your introverted male friends and ask their opinion about the corporate environment. "Squeaky wheel gets the grease" is a saying for reason.

Maybe this should not be. However, if so, acknowledge that it should not be for both genders.

The primary thing that amazes me is that it really does seem that while institutional sexism does seem to have gone down, individual misbehavior seems to have gotten dramatically worse.

Most people will point out that is just as bad or even worse; because erring about how much any minority its in disadvantage its always better seen than erring against it.

I just wanna give a bit of historical context when this was written, back then these were acceptable ads on magazines: http://cdn2.independent.ie/incoming/article30576661.ece/128f... http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/536a53836da8110b266... http://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/p5hte68.jpg

Well, the last one is quite something :). Not sure why this was downvoted. For one, the last would attract more duses to computers then girls. For the other, context matters - 80 were more sexist overall and it puts this article in proper context.

Possibly relevant, this Techcrunch article on how Harvey Mudd College fixed the problem there:

https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/10/how-harvey-mudd-transforme...

There is a PNAS paper which asks this question. http://m.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.abstract?sid=cf741177-d...

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