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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

This is not new for sure, but it deserves discussion in light of the #metoo movement. In SV we're supposed to be innovators, why aren't we leading the way towards a more equal society? If our holiday parties are boring because we've hired a masculine monoculture, then maybe the solution is to hire more diverse people the entire year. It's objectifying to women and minorities if the only time we're hired is to make something more exciting for a few hours.

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Because the honest truth of the matter is that the nerds that got bullied and discriminated against when they were young, only ever wanting to just be like others and fit it, got exactly what they wanted. They are just as bullying and obnoxious and discriminating as the people that bullied them.

Who is being bullied in the article's situation?

Do you realize that they are tech companies and need engineers, and only 16% of CS graduates are female? Where will they find the balanced ratio if the supply is so bad?

You can't just wave a magical wand and suddenly make more women engineers.

Most tech companies genuinely want to have balanced gender ratio in their workforce, but they can't as there are just not enough women that graduate on CS.

"By dividing the school's number of female graduates by this overall average, we discovered the average percentage of women in computer science programs; 16%."

Ya, and with limited supply, as more bigger richer companies strongly focus on gender diversity, it will make it worse than it was before for the rest of the industry. The problem will have to be corrected in the universities before it is in the industry. Many higher end CS programs are making great strides here, so I think it will happen in a couple of generations.

But you're presupposing a problem. It's possible that women don't enter CS due to personal preference. Not because CS is hostile to women but because the subject matter isn't interesting to them.

I heard somewhere that there are just as many women in undergrad math as men, but the ratio dramatically decreases in graduate math because so many women leave... to teach.

Yet somehow we don't see the same self-sorting phenomenon in other cultures. Russia, for instance. Maybe the one good thing communism accomplished was to create a culture in which everyone knows women can be technical. (Maybe that was part of the culture before -- I wouldn't know -- but the Soviets certainly encouraged it.)

To be clear, china has the same problem, perhaps even worse despite its reputation of gender diversity. Our big boss when I was working in china made it abundantly clear to us that we had to hire more women, and that there were supply issues from the universities, etc.... Maybe India does better?

Also, I find it weird that while I’ve met many Russian developers, I’ve never met a female Russian developer. That is just anecdata of course, take it with a grain of salt.

I do know two very good female Russian developers. I know a lot more male Russian developers, but few of them are as good as these two. I also know a couple of good female Russian QA engineers.

Stanford has done wonders getting is to almost parity between male and female. Now, CS was already oversubscribed, so I’m not sure how much shaping is going on, but many departments don’t have a shortage of female applicants if they are competitive.

I do wish there was more research on how the gender gap arose in the first place, e.g. why that drop occurred in the mid/late 80s.

In light of the #metoo movement and the numerous sexual harassment accusations, all across the board, this is what I see: things aren't that different SV.

Where is the "In SV we're supposed to be innovators, why aren't we leading the way towards a more equal society?" narrative grounded?

> Where is the "In SV we're supposed to be innovators, why aren't we leading the way towards a more equal society?" narrative grounded?

Mostly in the minds of people who are still trying to convince themselves that their advertising and surveillance code or "social" skinner box is "making the world a better place".

> If our holiday parties are boring because we've hired a masculine monoculture, then maybe the solution is to hire more diverse people the entire year.

Perhaps companies are hiring based on performance at work, rather than performance at parties?

no need for more hiring diversity, just keep calling them out. diversity hiring is one way some of these creeps mollify their conscious and excuse themselves for keeping these activities. plus if you can find other people whom you don't agree with you can redirect the guilt.

the simplest method is to make known our displeasure and just call them out. it can be stopped. the culture of men will be men and women will be quiet will end in SV but only by going after the problem directly, not indirectly through hiring practices

I don't believe SV has the kind of culture to do that. It's clear to me that liberty, equality, and fraternity in this place died a long time ago in pursuit of power and money. You can try to reform them, but the system at its heart encourages these kinds of behaviors, behaviors that are at its root symptomatic of inequality.

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