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Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

Note that "Women naturally choose STEM less" and "The women who choose STEM are eventually driven out due to it's culture" are not mutually exclusive processes.

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I know four women with CS degrees who all realized that they hated programming for a living less than two years into their careers. Two of them were done after their first internship, before they'd graduated and started looking for their first full-time job.

All four of them switched to design, and they're all Photoshop/Sketch experts now. They're extremely happy with their decisions. They stayed in tech, and still work/interact with the "culture" on a daily basis.

I wonder how many people just assume they were driven out when they find out that they did CS but didn't pursue a career in software development/engineering, when in reality they just didn't like it and wanted to do something else.

I wonder how much of it is how they were managed. I'm a man working in a technical field, but I tend to be more emotional/intuitive than other people I find in Engineering roles(yes, even women). But other engineers tend to assume that I'm motivated by the same things they are when that's patently false. I gravitate to the kinds of roles that your four examples gravitate to because there's more room for intuition and more opportunities to connect with people there than in software engineering.

The best manager I ever had was a woman, because she managed by connecting and by learning about me. Contrast this with the male engineer managers that I've had, who've all been average or sub-par because they assume that the only correct way to motivate me is to give me more money, and they assume that all I want to do is work on "interesting" problems. In short, they don't take the time to actually learn who I am or to connect with me, they just assume that I work exactly like them. It's a very cookie-cutter approach to management that fails to create diversity.

If your friends' management is similar then it doesn't surprise me that they left the field. The job I'm leaving made me question on a weekly basis whether I belonged in software engineering despite management telling me I was a good engineer repeatedly. And I'm a lot more interested in the types of problems UI/UX designers solve than I am in solving traditional software problems.

Luckily I'm moving to a company where management is less "technical" and more intuitive/connected. If it pans out I'll stay in the field.

Except there’s plenty of evidence for the former, and close to none for the latter. STEM is a field that has embraced diversity and equality of outcomes, with a genuine sense of desperation. STEM and especially technology companies are completely dominated by liberal and feminist thought. Sure you can point to a couple of ‘bad apples’, but you can point to far more examples where those ideologies drive organisations decision making from the top down. Not only is the culture argument weak to begin with (any competitive environment is going to be hostile on some level, to everybody), but it’s entirely laughable to say this applies in STEM, an industry that has embraced ‘diversity’ above all else.

>Except there’s plenty of evidence for the former, and close to none for the latter

> Sure you can point to a couple of ‘bad apples’

> you can point to a couple of ‘bad apples’, but you can point to far more examples where those ideologies drive organisations decision making from the top down.

I sure would love to see some citations for those opinions.

The evidence is clear in the choices people make. There are very clear gender differences in what people choose to study, and the jobs they subsequently pursue. You can’t simply blame ‘systemic oppression’ or ‘hostile environments’ for this, as our universities and tech giants all embrace liberalism and feminism to an extreme degree. How can environments that implement ‘safe spaces’, that provide systemic advantages to women, and that have 0 tolerance policies for anything that could be perceived as sexism possibly be perceived as hostile? Yet those environments are the norm now, and women are still far less interested in STEM than men.

Hmmm, not even anecdotal evidence.

Yes, decades of enrolment data is what we would call ‘empirical’.

>universities and tech giants all embrace liberalism and feminism to an extreme degree

I would say that's a bit...extreme. lol.

I would say it's reality.

I prefer my reality to be based on facts. But hey to each his own!

Ya got me. “All” is a hyperbole. But it is undeniable that contemporary feminism dominates universities, you really have to be quite blind to miss that. It is also the dominant culture in Silicon Valley, of which Alphabet and Amazon are major proponents. Google pushes diversity so hard that it’s currently facing lawsuits claimings it’s diversity practices are illegal and discriminatory. Yet even after years of such practices taking place at google, it’s engineering workforce is still 80% male.

"Sure you can point to a couple of ‘bad apples’" - Literally every female colleague I know well enough to be comfortable talking about it has encountered more than a couple "bad apples".

And nearly every man I talk to has encountered terrible managers, working conditions etc.

I was referring to companies that are perceived to have ‘cultural issues’, like uber. Not companies that have a few dickheads working for them, which is going to be just about every company over a certain size. The presupposition is that there’s systemic oppression (which there isn’t), not that some people at work aren’t very nice.

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