A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech | Hacker News Reader

A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

kapwing.com

167 pointsjenthoven444 comments

Speaking not only as a Woman but as a Mother (Happy Mothers Day everyone) nothing would of persuade me away from STEM career. My parents were both in STEM and the love for science was as early as I can remember. HOWEVER on my most difficult days I feel like it is so hard because of the awfully short maternity leave, not enough vacation days to spend with family, no sick days to care for sick kids, 40 hour weeks when I can be done my work in 30 or less.

I dont feel negativity about interactions with other males in the industry. The bad interactions are usually from socially awkward individuals in general

I think the author may really be onto something here. I have teenage and twenty-something daughters. My youngest is very excited about her stats minor but when I suggested computer science to her the horror that crossed her face...like it was a personal insult. Another one is into math and science and also wouldn't consider CS if her life depended on it -- physics or chemical engineering, sure, but never CS. Both do have very active social lives -- maybe that's it, or maybe it's because their parent wants them to do it -- kids never want to do what their parent suggests. Whatever it is, as a mom who fell into tech who would love her daughters to get a CS degree, I have yet to find way to make the degree appealing to them, even though they like what I do and actually find the act of coding enjoyable.

> physics or chemical engineering, sure, but never CS.

I think ultimately a career in real engineering field would be easier and more satisfying to your daughters than CS. Because CS is thick with toxic lord of the flies man child's at this point.

See, that's the thing: I haven't experienced that myself but I may just be lucky -- I don't know.

Most of the theories I've seen about the women-in-tech gap don't resonate with my experience because there was a very obvious 'women-in-tech' gap in about... 5th grade? in my (typical, I think) American elementary school.

It was nerdy boys, almost entirely (I remember one exception), who wanted to stay after school playing games on the iMacs in our classroom, and I am pretty sure that it would only be the boys in my class who might have, for instance, received and gotten excited about a copy of "C++ for dummies" in ~2000 (granted, the book was terrible and I didn't really start coding for 6 more years, but the spark was already there).

Sure, video-game-interest is not the same as going into tech, but it correlated a lot as I grew up -- these kids ended up being the ones who were, like, coding on graphics calculators or in HTML/CSS a couple years later. There were a few more girls involved by then, but the ratio was still very skewed.

An interesting data point here ia that girls at all-girls schools tend to take much more interest in STEM subjects, which suggests that he issue might be more to do with social percpetions of what is for girls and boys rather than inherent interest differing between genders.

Can you share sources on this? I'd be very curious to see how this changes relative to coed schools.

Maybe, but there is selection bias when looking at just girls who go to all-girls schools. Assuming they are mostly private, this would likely select for wealthier families, which may have a correlation with STEM careers. Furthermore, girls from all-girls schools have parents that are willing to enroll them in all-girls schools, which likely correlates with a certain personality type, whatever that may be.

Not sure why this is getting downvotes. The point that all girls schools are not even close to a random sample seems pretty uncontroversial.

NB: "computers" != "STEM"

In many science fields, women have reached near parity or are even in the majority now. Computer programming is much different.

Bio, Chem, (and Bio E, Chem E) and Med seemed to have good gender balance when I was in college 10 years ago. Physics, Mathematics, and the other Engineering disciplines seemed to have much more skew (my EE class was something like 40 men and 3 women).

Stanford CS was apparently 70:30 in 2015, an improvement over 80:20 just 3 years prior. As CS is increasingly seen as a pragmatic, lucrative career, we will likely continue to see the gender gap shrink. https://medium.com/@jcueto/race-and-gender-among-computer-sc...

This is really interesting. Would you mind sharing a link?

I keep reading about a "women in tech" gap, but if it exists, it must be regional. I've lived and worked, as a programmer, in the Dallas, TX area for over 20 years across 5 different employers. There have always been _lots_ of women in technology-related roles, everywhere. The vast majority of them (as well as the vast majority of the men) have been Indian, though. Is this different in San Francisco/Silicon Valley?

I think the gap varies dramatically by ethnicity. Its possible, perhaps likely, that different cultures have different biases towards women in tech fields. If you add that as a variable to all these charts, I think things may look significantly more skewed than they already do.

I've held a few software jobs in Iowa, Kansas, and the valley. Between the three places I worked at in the midwest, I worked alongside a total of four women doing engineering work (the numbers get much, much larger if you include support and QA roles).

I've worked with many more women in engineering roles here in Silicon Valley, but the percentages are still low.

> Most of the theories I've seen about the women-in-tech gap don't resonate with my experience because there was a very obvious 'women-in-tech' gap in about... 5th grade? in my (typical, I think) American elementary school.

I think your experiences are typical, thanks for sharing.

I'm curious what theory-of-the-gap you've found that you like more than the ones you've seen? You were (intentionally or not) a little cagey about your ultimate position. :)

For my part, I usually see that young girls are the ones who are pressured the most to stay out of STEM. I'm sure that by the time they got to 10, the little girls in your class already "knew" that afterschool computer games weren't really "for girls". Kids are very impressionable to even off-handed comments, and they will self-censor if they think they don't belong.

Anyways, it's all to say that I think there's no secret--if you actually make little girls believe they can do math or code, they'll do it. It's just that as a society we spend a lot of time telling them they can't.

Ah, it's really complicated. My hunch is that that's part of it but not the full story. I think it takes a mix of factors to make a person self-define as a 'computer geek' by high school, which is -- imo -- a point at which the gender divide in college is already determined. Various efforts blend the categories later on, but they're fighting against the categories that already exist by HS-age.

Some factors:

1a. being socially allowed to love computers, OR 1b. not caring what's socially allowed <- me

2. obsessiveness (3rd-grade me would happily play videogames for 12 hours straight if allowed. Or read, legos, etc. Other kids would, like, learn everything about airplanes.)

3. not caring very much about socializing. 'play over people', if you will.

4. being intelligent

5. having 'growth mindset', the idea that you could go learn something if you wanted to. (I think I got this from books and RPGs and from not being demoralized early on.)

6. not caring very much about pop culture (in my case, because I didn't know about it. sports and music weren't on my radar).

7. being competitive: wanting to learn cool things to, basically, seem cool to other nerdy kids.

8. an innate desire to build things

I would characterize (1b) and (2) and (3) together as being, basically, the 'autism spectrum' angle, which is (I perceive) more prevalent in boys, and I think that's where the main difference comes from.

I think what the social effect you mention exists, but it might come before these categories -- ie, from a young age I was constructed so as to not care what was socially allowed and to want to obsessively play, and so I was basically destined to be obsessed with computers. I don't know how much is nature vs. nurture though.

I also think that on average girls are less (7) naturally competitive and (8) naturally motivated to build things (citation needed), but that very well could be a social effect also.

I think lots of people of any gender have their (5) 'growth mindset' squashed from a young ago.

I also think lots of boys have almost everything on the list except for '(8) desire to build things', so instead of learning to make games, they get really good at Halo and play every day in college, or whatever.

I also think that by the time college rolls around, these categories are all smeared together, and people end up going into tech or STEM (and I guess I mean specifically CS/Math/Physics) for lots of reasons. I'm only trying to describe the commonalities across the nerdy kids in HS.

Disclaimer: all of this is hunches and is from ~2000-2008 and is probably not correct or true and if it was it probably isn't anymore.

I know lots of really smart women, many whose careers pay less than software. When I asked if they ever thought about coding all but one basically said they weren't interested.

The one who was interested said she didn't pursue coding(is a PM instead) because during her first year of college she felt behind because some of her fellow students had 5-6 years of coding experience and she'd only had 1-2. So she switched to MIS.

Girls aren't interested in playing games?

No, that's an uncharitable simplification. I'm talking about statistical trends, and specifically about games- and nerdery- _in lieu of all socialization_.

And I'm rejecting it as unfounded. What specific statistical trend are you talking about?

It's a bit more complicated than that.

First: it's 'founded' in the sense that it's my opinion based on my experiences. Yes, it's subjective. I meant trends in my own anecdata / observations of the world. But I share them because I expect that many people have seen the same trends and might agree if they see them in words, which seems to be true.

Second, lumping all video games into one category and then talking about statistical trends among them is going to drastically misrepresent the actual picture of who's playing games and how much. But beyond that I'm not really talking about 'playing games at all' so much as playing in an obsessive, anti-social style -- like 12 hour sprints, all night, instead of playing outside, etc.

Third, I'm talking about ~10-15 years ago, not today. Not sure what things are like since then. I assume it has evened out somewhat as gaming became more normal.

I think in the 80's,90's and early 00's this was true because very few computer and console games were targeted towards women.

Actually that's one possible explanation for why boys tend to grow more interested into tech today, that they become interested in videogames at early age, videogames that are mostly targeted for boys, so in order to "fix" this we'd have to have more diversity in videogames target market.

https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

> It was nerdy boys, almost entirely (I remember one exception), who wanted to stay after school playing games on the iMacs in our classroom

I wanted to as well. I used to sort of hover behind the boys playing Oregon Trail or making stuff in Hypercard or whatever, trying to participate. They ignored me like I wasn't even there. Gave up after a while.

It wouldn't surprise me that both angles are true: that the divide exists by ~elementary school, but still for the same reasons commonly cited (social pressures / etc).

Sorry that happened to you, though. In my school we had 1 girl in our nerd group. I like to think we weren't exclusive; there just weren't many people interested. But I was 10 so I dunno.

> Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy.

"Honey, there is this random blogger who thinks I should befriend a girl in my company. It's supposedly not creepy or anything. What do you think?"

If I didn't care what my wife thinks, I'd still have to think twice and consider the gender-political climate of the modern age.

The mere perception of having some intention of wrongdoing can harm you.

In all corporate ethics training courses, you're always hammered with the message of avoiding even the perception of a conflict of interests and such.

Usually, those "avoid perception" messages are with regard to corruption. The rhetoric isn't used in sexual misconduct training, but the concept naturally carries over. If I'm to avoid creating so much as the perception that some official is being bribed into signing a deal, of course it must also be good to avoid so much as the perception that I have some sort of designs of a female coworker. I want simpler rules that are more general.

Here's your simple rule: https://medium.com/@annevictoriaclark/the-rock-test-a-hack-f...

Quoting: "It’s as clear cut as this: Treat all women like you would treat Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson." and "But definitely don’t hit on her. It looks like she could kill you with the chair you’re sitting on."

It's really that simple.

If someone happens to idolize "The Rock", the rule doesn't go down very well.

It possibly devolves to "behave like a bumbling star-struck fool around all women".

Or possibly to "treat women like goddesses". Example: if I run a cafe, and idolize "The Rock", should I give every woman a free coffee and muffin, because that's what I would do if "The Rock" walked in?

People who are famous get all sorts of unwanted attention that would easily amount to sexism or sexual misconduct if it were lavished upon a person because she's a woman. Fans want to get near you, touch you, take a picture with you and whatever.

Ctrl F: "People's" -- 0 results found. Ctrl F: "Bottom" -- 0 results found. Ctrl F: "it doesn't matter" -- 0 results found. Ctrl F: "smell" -- 0 results found.

Yeah I'm going to ignore this advice, I think any sane person ought to do the same. Or at least if your mental model of the Rock consists of more than generic tough guy in some recent films who may have hit people with chairs in the past or something.

This article is pretty condescending.

This seems like a pretty awful way of approaching it.

"Hey, how much can you squat?"

So, basically, stick your head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Isn't that just the problem? The moral of that insufferable article is not to treat women like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but to fear women as if they're going to smash your head into the pavement like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson for saying the wrong thing. If women as a group actually want men to see them this way, it's no wonder men don't want to #mentorher.

This completely misses the point. The Rock isn't going to take things to HR or try to ruin anyone's life. The Rock is going to handle things like a man.

> In all corporate ethics training courses, you're always hammered with the message of avoiding even the perception of a conflict of interests and such.

Some years ago I participated in a first aid course (these are required around here for many things). One of the others did it as part of retraining after leaving the navy. Problem for him was: He couldn't do any of the practical exercises in a group with women, because it seems the Navy had a sexual harassment problem some time ago and kinda overshot in the "teaching men not to touch women" department. It's of course entirely possible (plausible, even), that this guy had some issues before that, though.

I actually remember reading somewhere that women are more likely than men to die in situations that call for CPR because men are so shy about touching women's chests.

You remember correctly: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-11/uops-psf1110...

The first part of this had great citations to cite that women are more social. Where the data was lacking is that 1) software is perceived as anti-social and 2) that other anti-social careers face similar problems to software engineering.

For example if socialization was such a critical decider, why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization. Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.

> Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization. Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

Another question would be, why in the early days of computing, programming was predominantly seen as women's work? Does it mean its social factor changed somehow?

See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...

"why are so many women maids or professional housekeepers?"

Same reason so many men are janitors.

>software is perceived as anti-social

My experience is that this perception has a strong grounding in reality.

IME about 90 % of that is enforced and actively pursued by the workers. E.g. preferring HCCH-based reviews over pair reviewing, "don't disturb me", [noise-cancelling] headphones, locked office doors, mail and instant messaging over talking and so forth

Why is that different from anything that requires concentration?

Also, what's HCCH? [Human-computer-computer-human?]

> IM, email

Maybe programmers are just lazy and picky, so they want to get things done quickly and at their own workstation?

Perhaps software is perceived as anti-social because software developers are perceived as people you don't want to socialize with.

> Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

That's the difference though. Accounting is professional. Software engineering is often not. Moreover, while accounting is often asocial (not much social interaction), many software engineers (male and female) can be downright anti-social (against common means of social interaction).

Pedantic, but

> why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization.

is this actually true? I've gotten the impression that housekeeping services often send multiple people to the site.

Maybe safety? Hotels seem to have just one housekeeper cover a block of rooms.

Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men?

Women were programmers very early on. I think we should look for some common thread between computer programming in the late 1950's/early 60's and accounting and book keeping today.

While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes.

I don't think you should be characterizing it as "blaming." Things are as they are. I remember reading a paper in grad school finding that software engineers actually had more need of interaction than other fields, despite stereotypes. I think there is some important factor we don't quite understand.

Programming started as a field very similar to Accounting. You manually assembled a list of operations to get the necessary numerical result. There was creativity, but in the same vein of creativity in accounting it was confined to the realm of statistics and business intelligence. Computers were used to calculate numbers from other numbers, and rarely did much else. The set of computer instructions were limited, and nothing was automated so there was a lot of tedium in physically writing programming out on paper.

With the advent of personal computers and monitors the fields diverged rapidly.

The way I've read it, "programming" was the name of a job where you take a flowchart from a "systems analyst" and punch machine code onto card decks. Then computers became cheap enough to run compilers, and that job was automated away.

> software is perceived as anti-social

IMO anti-socal wasn't the best choice of words. I'm pretty sure in this context she intended "social" to mean "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent interacting with people", and "anti-social" meant "a pursuit where the bulk of your time is spent time interacting with things".

>Between the ages of 16 and 24, girls have more sophisticated social lives than boys of the same age. Young women talk to their friends more often [1], care more about their reputation [2], spend more time talking about their friends [3], and assign more emotional value to close relationships [4]

I admire that she provided links for these, but I really don't believe any of those statements. That list of 4 things is difficult to measure because they probably occur in different forms for boys vs girls and the studies consequently "found" what they were looking for.

Sexism is dripping in irony. Damore can't say there are biological differences between males and females, but it's ok to say that as a male I care less about my friendships.

Try to be nice, try to be fair, try to be honest. Ignore everything and everyone else...

Thank you! I was thinking the exact same thing about this particular part. I don't think it tanks her argument, but it is irritating to see this repeated so often.

It seems to me that the author would generally be sympathetic to Damore's memo (but who knows for sure) based on the views espoused in this post, so I don't quite understand your point.

The point seems fairly clear to me. arkis22 is pointing out that this author is making unfavorable generalizations about men, and stating that these generalizations are probably partly due to biology. Here, it is that women assign greater value to close friendships. Later, she states that:

"My experience confirms that teenage and college-age girls care more than boys do about solving real human problem (as opposed to competitive, self-oriented gain), forming close bonds with peers, and earning colleagues’ respect. I will not comment on whether this is caused by society or by biology; likely, it’s both and many factors in between."

This isn't wildly slanderous, but I think we can agree that caring more about real human problems is more admirable that pursuing "self-oriented" gain (or maybe not, randians might say self-oriented gain is the highest moral pursuit there is. I'd disagree, and I suspect the author here would as well).

So, we have that men pursue self-oriented gain, and women pursue solution to real world human problems, and this is partly due to biological differences between men and women.

Personally, I'm really not offended or bothered by this. She has every right to make this claim, and overall, I though it was a good essay.

I also think that arkis22 is interpreting these comments somewhat uncharitably. I don't need someone to go through a million footnotes and provisos and stating repeatedly that these are just averages. I am nearly certain that this writer would agree that some men care deeply about real human problems and relationships, and some women care more about self-oriented gain. I certainly don't think it improves the conversation when people get bogged down because they have to protect themselves against every possible uncharitable interpretation of an argument (she didn't say that arkis22 cares less about his friendships).

But we do live in a world where people who make comparable (perhaps less dramatic) claims about women face pretty serious censure.

I see, their point is that this particular woman can talk about biological differences but Damore can't. (I misinterpreted the poster as saying that the author was contradicting herself by rebuking Damore, which she wasn't, but that's not what they meant.)

That is a valid point. But the issue should be taken with Google's leadership and the individuals who unjustly raked Damore over the coals (his post-termination behavior notwithstanding). A reductive "women can get away with saying this but men can't" complaint doesn't really help anyone. It has truth to it, but it also feels unnecessarily confrontational and simplistic to me.

The poster also dismissed her claims with a mere "I really don't believe any of those statements" and then backed it with what seems to be a random assumption that the studies are biased and must have been seeking this particular outcome from the start, without any supporting evidence. I think the more sensible position is that Damore's gender difference claims and the author's gender difference claims are both correct (at least with the scientific evidence currently known). The us vs. them attitude is irritating.

The nuance of male friendship and popularity is probably just as complicated as female friendship and popularity. Complicated in a sense that I doubt any questionnaire captures the real truth.

Of course, but friendships between males and females is a whole other dynamic entirely.

I actually don't think that it's about who can make the criticism, I think it's more about what the criticism can be. A woman really isn't any freer than a man to make a sweeping generalization that is unfavorable to women, especially if it's attributed partially in biology. Interestingly, you really are largely free to do this in reverse, as we see (admittedly in a fairly mild form) from this article. Though be careful here - what seems like a compliment can in fact be very condescending.

Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? Is mathematics more social than CS? Because CS is almost (not quite: physics is almost as bad) unique among STEM specializations for its gender disparity.

I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people. And yet if you go to a cryptography conference and then a technology convention, the difference will be starkly apparent: there are far more women in the former than the latter.

I don't think this is a persuasive explanation for the whole phenomenon.

I think part of the programmer stereotype is that you basically have to be socially handicapped to fit in. Which may draw more people like that in and keep more well adjusted (or socially conscious) people out. In general, it seems that from a relatively young age women are given the impression that "nerds" are to be avoided at all costs -- we're stereotypically "weird" (meaning creepy perverts). Even though I haven't met a single person out of hundreds of people in this profession that overtly acted that way (although I've heard 2 anecdotal stories from people who had). Of course I'm not trying to say that there isn't a legitimate problem there, because there likely is, and especially with the small proportion of women in this profession they are very likely to run into those types. But I think the perception of the problem, or the quality of the people who are in CS, is probably greatly exaggerated by the stereotypes and that keeps people away.

I feel like if you talked to code conference runners, you might have a different opinion - being one of the few women at a social event really brings out the socially awkward or aggressive advances.

I'm sure it's more of a problem at these events than others, but I doubt it's never an issue at any type of event with that much of a gender imbalance. I'm absolutely not suggesting that there isn't a serious issue with harassment in our industry, I just don't think that is the actual root cause of the gender imbalance that exacerbates this issue. Clearly workplace discrimination broadly is an issue, but that all happens after the talent pool is heavily skewed towards men.

The math majors in my upper-level math classes had significantly better social skills than the people in the CS classes I took.

This is only an anecdote, but it's not obvious to me that mathematics isn't more social than CS.

I don't know how true this is; I've also had the experience of sitting around a restaurant table with academic math nerds and other times with computer programmers, and the differences there was pretty stark as well.

But another point: pay attention to the distinctions we're drawing, because "computer science is less social than other STEM fields" is not the same argument as "computer science is more forgiving of antisocial behavior".

The latter statement is one I could easily be convinced of! We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior, and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience. A lot of this is well-studied human behavior: you pay a different kind of attention to the only woman on your team, or the only black person, than you do to the nth 20-something male nerd from central casting, and that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.

We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior,

I think a part of the problem is that the programming field is immature and flubby with ideology masquerading as principles. I think the programming field inadvertently trains us to become ideologues and engage in behaviors reminiscent of sectarian religious conflicts of the past.

and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience...that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.

Sure. I think one such event at Google recently was widely covered in news media, though it was ideological narrowness, not social narrowness. I saw a whole bunch of false attribution across social media.

> Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS?

This guy actually put some pretty decent work into researching this - he found that women dominate "sociable" STEM fields like veterinary sciences and obstetrics, while men dominate the "cold" STEM branches like surgery and computer science.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Alexander believes a lot of things. But you can just look up the stats on STEM fields yourself; they're not hard to find. There are STEM fields that approach parity, there are a couple in which women slightly lead men, and there are a bunch with more men than women. But CS is, by what to a casual glance looks like multiple stddevs, worse than the rest.

Unless math is "warmer" than CS --- it isn't --- this explanation doesn't hold much water.

Maths is clearly warmer. Go look at the stats for undergrad vs postgrad. There's a huge difference. Women get maths degrees to become teachers, more or less.

Women do not get math PhD's to become math teachers, nor do they publish cryptography research to do that.

Playing devil's advocate, it's possible that someone winds up getting a PhD or publishing crypto research after finding out that they really like doing math, after initially choosing it with the intent to teach.

I have absolutely no idea whether that matches reality for enough people to make any kind of a difference.

He address that in the article

"Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors" ...

"I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.

Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school."

No, the numbers hold up all the way to PhDs. Women aren't obtaining math PhD's to become "math teachers" (and, if you read my original comment, you can also predict that they aren't doing academic crypto research to go teach math either).

Could you provide a citation on "the numbers hold up all the way to PhDs"?

I found https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-p...

https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...

Over 40% undergraduate degrees go to women, while less than 30% of doctorates.

https://imgur.com/a/nNHqwsP

Science Magazine, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", vertical axis is PhDs, 2011 numbers.

If nothing else at this point I think we can put a bullet in the "they just want to be math teachers" hypothesis.

That url works, but no image loads.

Big difference to me is how does the core work get done. If it’s like coding where you need zero distraction time and actively have to turn off socially, it becomes less appealing. As a former PM turned dev, the difference is striking in how isolated the work can require you do be.

I believe this. The problem is, it's not unique to CS (it might be unique to knowledge work, but CS is far from the only species of knowledge work). So for it to have demographic explanatory power, it would have to account for the intense solitary concentration required for elite research in other STEM fields --- including fields like math, which are very closely related to CS, and the multitude of random STEM fields which have been taken over by computational approaches where the underlying work is really just domain-specialized programming by another name.

In some sense yes. I don't have the stats at hand, but women who study math are very n likely doing so because they want to become math teachers which I would say leans social.

I have friends from other STEM areas, and we jokingly agree that my major has the weirdest people. That includes me.

I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people.

I recall a paper I read in grad school which found that programmers actually had more need of interaction than other fields. As jdavis notes elsewhere, accounting and bookkeeping employs more women nowadays. I also note that very early on, computer programming was seen as a desirable job by women. Is there a common thread between computer programming in the very early days and accounting and bookkeeping today?

I don't know. But I do know that the masculinization of computer science seems to line up chronologically with the emergence of the home computer movement, which was began as a male-dominated 1970s hobby.

And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.

just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.

Do you have citations? I do think you're onto something here, though I don't think it's necessarily the best idea to vilify men or the masculine. Anthropologically speaking, didn't the subculture of hobbyist programming come out of the subculture of model train building?

I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars. I don't so much like video games, but only because I'd rather code or yell on message boards. I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men. The problem with the field is not that "men are bad".

Would you like to try asking me that again? It's also OK if you and I just don't try to have a dialog on this thread.

I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars.

Glad to hear it.

I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men.

Well, likewise. I don't want ideological conflict, though sometimes I feel it's foisted upon me. I'm also quite open to the idea that something in the subculture of programming could be pushing women away. Please don't take my mention of vilification as an accusation, and my apologies if it came across that way. I don't think anyone can deny that the whole area of discussion has a history of someone vilifying someone else, so I think that steering away from that is useful.

When have I ever tried to ideologically trap you? If there was ever anything ideological I'd associate with you, it's this phrase about, "the social compact." (Not that I'm absolutely against redistribution. It just sounds like reparations between sovereign powers from centuries ago.)

I didn't say anything about men being bad, I don't believe there is anything intrinsically bad about men, and in fact I reject a lot of hypotheses about gender disparity based on "masculine behavior" explanations, such as the notion that women are put off by competitiveness (I am married to an extremely competitive woman engineer and, through her roller derby escapades, have met more than my fair share of other competitive women).

You implied that I did. I'm shutting that down hard. Thanks for acknowledging.

Like I said: I think our field is weird in that home computing deprofessionalized it. I think programming methodology also deprofessionalized. I don't think it's a weird observation to make that our field stagnated or even regressed and that a lot of practices and technologies we work with today are (a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research.

Since you can trace a lot of badness in our field back to home computing (which: to be clear, was a very good thing! life is complicated!), I find the "we're male dominated because hobbyist computing in the 1970s was an insular and chauvinist culture" explanation pretty powerful. I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.

I didn't say anything about men being bad

I never said that you did. You only impute that from the juxtaposition of the sentences. I only said that vilification wasn't such a good idea. Given that we are talking about the potential downsides of "an insular and chauvinist culture," I think it's useful to say one should be circumspect about vilification. Assume incompetence before maliciousness, and all that.

You implied that I did.

Not at all. You are stating that I implied that you did, however, and that's simply not true, which I have stated above. In this, you are implying that I am a liar. Let me "shut that down hard." I've already apologized so either provide your evidence, or be calling me a liar.

(a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research.

Aww, hell. Also ignore research from the 60's and from common practices of just 5 years ago!

I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.

Are there other de-professionalized fields?

I don't know. Are there? The home computing revolution was a weird inflection point. Medicine got more scientific over the last 200 years, steadily so, not less. The law has steadily remained formal and accredited since the founding of the country (and presumably long before). I'm sure there are similar cases, but this might be the biggest one in recent memory.

Again, part of my claim is: this is not really a surprising or weird argument. It's pretty obvious from the recent history of the field. You can argue that it doesn't have as much explanatory power as I'm giving it, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that the underlying phenomenon didn't occur.

I don't know. Are there?

Popular Music? Fiction writing? Journalism? Creating video content would qualify. (Possibly relevant: YouTube's audience is mostly male, while Tumblr's is mostly female. IIRC, the audience for video pornography also tends to skew male, while written erotica skews female.)

The home computing revolution was a weird inflection point.

Basically, it's the start of when computing went from a tool for accounting/administration/bureaucracy to also broadly encompassing media. Many of the de-profesionalized fields I mention above are associated with media.

Again, part of my claim is: this is not really a surprising or weird argument. It's pretty obvious from the recent history of the field.

I do think you're onto something.

Journalism seems like it could be a good example!

I agree, Math and Physics are in many ways similar to CS, and yet have more women. And I can think of a pretty good reason to explain it: Math and Physics are more classically respected and authoritarian. CS is the wild-west by comparison.

In Math and Physics in high school and college, you can just study what you're supposed to study, do the problems you're supposed to do. You can mostly do that in CS too, of course, but that's not ubiquitous. In CS you're programming, and when programming you're running into bugs and devising work-arounds. Some stuff does not work like it's supposed to. Sometimes the best implementation for a purpose is a clever but not-quite-correct shortcut that's way faster. Some of my CS classes had automated code submissions testing and grading systems, and some students managed to hack the system in novel ways, and were given full points for doing so. My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more. CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.

My dangerous 2c ;)

I agree, Math and Physics are in many ways similar to CS, and yet have more women.

I think it might be useful to ask: In what ways are Math and Physics are different from the programming field? I think the requirement to work together on larger projects is different. What is the gender distribution of physicists working at CERN?

My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more.

Sounds about right.

CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.

Is it? Back in the day, there were CS professors who proudly declared they didn't like programming.

Back in the day, there were a few more women in CS :)

I still agree that CS being "less social" is a huge factor. But have to admit it seems like there's some other factors too, and I think the "less social" and "wild west" combo is pretty significant.

> Back in the day, there were a few more women in CS :)

I actually think this is probably wrong. Back in the day there was a higher percentage of women in CS. It's possible that in absolute numbers there are as many women today in CS as there was then. That's because there's probably a lot more people in CS overall.

I also think it's likely that back in the day most college-educated programmers had EE degrees, not CS degrees, so what you'd really want to look at is the percentage of women in CS and EE, not just in CS.

Back in the day, there were a few more women in CS :)

The professor I was thinking of was a woman, actually.

> Is mathematics more social than CS?

Many people who major in math are aiming to become math teachers, so yes.

You're like the 3rd person on this thread to write the same comment. No, see the other comments, that explanation falls flat.

It seems to me less a question of how social the various STEM fields are than that CS is more closely tied into the larger internet culture. Especially for young men I can see this making them more insular as a group even if they're, in lots of ways, just as social

I think CS is unique in two ways. The first one way is it has a unique pipeline. Many CS majors started off tinkering around with their computers in ways that many high school girls don't.(where as most people's first experience with math/other stem is through classroom instruction)

The second is that programmers are perceived(rightly or wrongly) to be more lacking of social skills than other equivalent professions.

i.e. the office versus silicon valley

> young men are less likely to approach women and invite them to join a study group or happy hour, poker night, or whatever else they do with their male peers/coworkers.

As a man I've never been approached and invited to anything like this..

I wonder how many men get invited to the inverse 'girls night' also.

Maybe you should invite some others, then. Be the change you want to see, and all that.

But I'd rather stay up all night and clear Black Temple.

Interesting that popular perception is that it is hard to be a woman in STEM because you get so much unwanted attention, but in this case it was exactly the opposite. She wasn't able to find lab partners for projects in male majority classes and felt lonely.

I just don’t see how that could be. When I was studying, we had 2 girls in a peer group of roughly 90 people. All they had to do to find a lab partner is have a pulse. Interestingly, both have graduated, and neither is using her degree now.

What is this phenomenon called? I've seen it plenty of times; there must be some research etc on this.

The word you’re looking for is “chivalry”. An outmoded concept in these modern times, but alive and well back then.

> I just don’t see how that could be.

I'm not sure what you mean? Why would the women be inherently attractive as lab partners?

Many men in the lab would probably think that the women would be weaker, or wouldn't know how to interact with them, so wouldn't want them as lab partners.

And the men may have a higher chance of knowing each other already from outside the class in sports teams and fraternities, so they would team up with people they already know rather than someone they didn't.

Why would they be “weaker”? I don’t get what you’re trying to say.

I don't think they would be weaker - where do you think I said I thought that?

But lots of men definitely do think women are likely to be weaker in computer science. I don't know why they think that - you'd have to ask them?

But you're making the claim that men think that. You can't just pass the buck to your own premise with "dunno, you'll have to ask them."

> You can't just pass the buck to your own premise with "dunno, you'll have to ask them."

Yes I can. It's completely reasonable to be observe something even if you can't offer an explanation.

I don't know why some people are racist but I can see that they are.

I don't know why some people are sexist but I can see that they are.

I don't know why some people think women are inherently weaker at computer science, but I can see that they do think that by what they say and do.

We have no evidence that people do think that though. I have never heard that women are 'weaker' in computer science than men. My guess is most people think that competence in computer science is independent of sex.

If you're presenting that they don't, where is that information coming from?

> My guess is most people think that competence in computer science is independent of sex.

I don't know how to break this to you... but a lot of people in this world unfortunately discriminate against people based on gender, either consciously or unconsciously.

> where is that information coming from

To give you a concrete example, I was at a conference just recently where the speaker took questions from the audience and when a man asked a question the answer was highly technical, and when a woman asked a similar question the answer was patronising and non-technical as if he thought the woman wouldn't understand like the men did. It was really obvious, and there was no other variable. I see this kind of thing all the time.

I don't know what more to tell you - if you can't see any evidence of men making assumptions that a women isn't going to be as competent in computer science just based on her gender then I think you must be blind to what is happening around you.

Wasn't the group project at the end of the semester? It seems people would have had a good idea of their classmates' strengths by that point.

I have a hard time believing your anecdotal data point about a third person is enough to claim a person exposing their own experiences is wrong.

> All they had to do to find a lab partner is have a pulse.

Eh, that sounds a bit like those lab partners may have had dubious motivations.

I figure it's on those of us who strive for the highest degree of professionalism to take the lead on inclusion.

So, summarizing the comments here:

A: Dudes, go befriend a girl, include her! It's not creepy!

B: My anecdata experience suggests girls in my lab, where they were in minority, had no problem being included if they wished to, dudes were very eager to do it.

C: Motivations of those dudes sound very dubious and creepy!

Yup, yup.

You left out the creepy “have a pulse” part.

No, creepiness exists in your mind only. Believe it or not, we valued the fact that those women were there and we tried to help them out in whatever way we could. My field of study back then (guidance systems, weapons design) is even more male dominated than CS. All male peer groups are not a fun thing to be in.

To preclude the question, yes those girls did get asked for a date every now and then. If that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I read “have a pulse” as “it doesn’t matter how qualified or pleasant these women were, the men were eager to have any contact with a woman and would have taken them on just for that.”

Does it mean something else?

It means they didn’t have to make any effort whatsoever to get attention and help of their male peers. Interpret this as you wish.

So, creepy.

What's creepy in having a pulse? It is the thing about discriminating against Zombie-Americans?

If you're utterly terrified that cross-gender interaction will end badly for you, then maybe it's not best for you to take the lead on outreach.

There are lots of other people who don't feel such an extreme level of fear and discomfort, yet who probably could do more in terms of inclusion. Those are the people I hope the author of this article reaches.

I hope the many commenters on this article who feel so uncomfortable with female colleagues do find some way to improve their situation though -- their alienation is bad for them, bad for women, bad for all of us collectively.

Also notice that even though she had the option, she didn't approach anyone to try an secure a lab partner. She posted her own position opening and waited until all spots were taken. She could very well have clicked on anyones post and that would have been the end of it.

Yeah, this is what bugs me with the advice to "Go befriend a girl". How about they come and befriend me? Like with dating, there's the expectation that the men need to make the first move. (Whatever, it's not necessarily a bad expectation, but when it's implicit like this I'm not always sure it was intentional...)

Of course in the friend case I think it's more of a function of your local environment than anything else. At the same company I've experienced a large difference in the local atmosphere between the Seattle and Vancouver offices, the Vancouver office was quite a bit more welcoming and more people would randomly introduce themselves.

It's hard as hell to befriend anyone. I probably have superficial conversations with 100 people before I find someone I connect with on a friendship level. I don't know if it is because people in this industry (myself included) mostly talk about work or the technical problems we're interested in. In my experience though, it's so rare that people open up personally to each other. I don't have any meaningful commentary on the gender stuff, just been thinking about making friends a lot recently.

This seems to be a common symptom in most of these 'women-in-tech' articles. Each one of them has advice for men who are in the industry, but never for any women trying to get into it.

Because the idea that gender disparities are due to the choices men and women make is some sort of ideologically impure heretical thought, for some reason. If it's not to do with oppression/awful men then where's the fun? Where's the virtue in fighting for it?

Or if you generalize it all the way, the advice is "men should be more like women" but never "women should be more like men".

[This is Julia, the OC] I agree, and have many times thought back to why I didn't feel comfortable just claiming a partner for the project. I remember I was doing something else and happened to notice that a few people had posted and been claimed, and that made me insecure, wondering why no one had claimed me.

I think it's more natural to work closely with someone of your same gender, at least when they're a stranger. I'm not blaming men (or women) for that - I'm just describing how that can lead to unintentional exclusion, which is particularly painful for students who values inclusion a lot.

There are lots of opportunities for outreach, if you look for them. From the article:

"Include her, ask her for advice, introduce her, learn about her work and her life in the same way you would with any male friend or coworker. If you’re an investor, professor, journalist, or manager, take it on yourself to sponsor a young woman’s career."

I've done a number of those things over many years, and found it very rewarding -- both in the interactions with my individual colleagues, and in how it affected the wider teams.

Maybe the chilling effect of several decades of gender politics put a damper on the unwanted attention.

Boys are hammered with messages about sexual misconduct, and so even ones without any such intentions want to avoid the mere perception that anything is going on.

It puts a damper on attention in general, but the attention that is less dampened is precisely the unwanted attention.

Think about it. A considerate well intentioned person might mistakenly overcompensate and give too little attention to female colleagues, while an inconsiderate person who doesn't care about gender politics will keep doing what they were doing all along. The result is that the ratio of unwanted/wanted attention goes up, even as total attention goes down.

This general principle is called "the asshole filter"[1] and it applies to all sorts of social interactions, not just sexual harassment.

[1]http://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html

A lot of us probably wouldn't immediately approach a woman in this situation because we don't want to be perceived as being "creepy". In professional settings I generally keep my distance until I've had enough brief casual interactions with someone that they seem comfortable enough with me not to assume something like that. Do I seem like I'm being a dick sometimes? Maybe, but I'm just genuinely trying not to make people uncomfortable (although in part because I've definitely got a bit of social anxiety).

Or maybe it's just that you don't get normal human "let's hang out and shoot the shit" or "let's work on this together" interaction; and the attention you do get is disproportionately (and awkwardly) sexual or romantic "I like ogling your boobs" and "I won't stop asking until you agree to go on a date with me" interaction?

I am a female engineer and I studied CS in Europe. I never had issues socializing. My classmates were fortunately very inclusive, maybe because the men-women friendships have a different dynamic in Europe, or I was just lucky. Either way, my class was still 95% male. I would say we have to look at even younger girls to see the issue.

I have a brother who is really into computer games. When we were children, my parents got him games and didn't mind when he was sitting behind the computer for hours. I also liked games and I was trying to write stories, draw, install programs to get(ehm, pirate) music too. We had one computer and when my brother was using it I had to wait for him to finish playing. When I was using it, I was sent to play outside or read. Computers were always a boy thing, so I was never really seriously considering studying CS until we did a career test in high school where they encouraged me to go to a STEM field and do something like math or computer science. I gave it a try and loved it.

I think we have to start early and stop dividing professions into for men or women. Let men be nurses and women firefighters. Look at your childrens personalities and let them grow in whatever they enjoy, girly or not.

I think you just pointed the biggest issues in the article: the problem starts before any of the solutions proposed. You can do whatever you want during the job/university but if you still get 95% males it won't fix the issue.

> I think we have to start early and stop dividing professions into for men or women. Let men be nurses and women firefighters. Look at your childrens personalities and let them grow in whatever they enjoy, girly or not.

I would just add that we should do this even if it doesn't change anything. Just let people do whatever they like and don't judge them with stupid stereotypes. Don't force girls to be CS and boys to be nurses if they don't want to.

It's funny that the author disparages this Quillette article as, "discouraging theories of biological superiority," when a fair reading of it actually includes the author's point. Much of it addresses skews in preferences. Even James Damore's memo devoted a portion to consideration of preferences, and suggested changing the field to better fit preferences.

http://quillette.com/2018/02/15/sex-stem-stubborn-facts-stub...

Many fields have demographic skews, and many of these are a result of preferences, some in favor of women, even in highly technical areas. (And these can change over time for non-nefarious reasons.) No-one you should take seriously thinks men are somehow biologically anointed to be "superior." However, no one you should take seriously thinks men and women are biologically identical blank slates, particularly if that is really motivated by an ideological feel-good story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8

Part 2: As a profession, computer engineering is perceived to be [X]

There is some important kernel of truth to this. I've known women who can code, but who definitely don't want to, including my wife who actually feels sorry for me whenever she tries to imagine what my day is like. Furthermore, I would say that there aspects of the culture of programming which act to degrade its meritocracy, and some of those are culturally skewed against women. I don't think that an attitude of witch-hunt and inquisition is the way to do that, however. Rather, I think the kind of discussion which James Damore thought he was going to have when he penned his memo is the solution. Note that this is entirely independent of what he said in his memo -- the kind of discussion he reportedly imagined would happen.

As jdavis notes below, accounting and book keeping employ more women than men. Computer programming was once seen as a preferred career for women in the very early days. I suspect that there's a common thread here, which is mediated by culture and social factors. One which is not nefarious, and one which would be useful to figure out.

Normally, this would be pedantic, but since the author is delving into terms from psychology, they should avoid conflating the terms pro/antisocial with social/asocial.

In particular, antisocial [1] means something very different than asocial (preferring a less active social life). Plenty of people are asocial but thankfully very few are antisocial.

It matters in the case of the article because it juxtaposes pro-social behaviors like community consciousness with asocial behaviors. These are different dimensions. One can be simultaneously asocial and pro-social, and one can also simultaneously be social and anti-social.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disor...

I notice that the big decline in female enrollment in CS came around the time the Hollywood stereotype of a computer programmer changed from a well-intentioned labcoated professional whose creation might have gotten a bit out of control to a basement dwelling hacker carrying out a solo fight against the bullies, the man, etc.

Which also corresponded to home PCs and gaming consoles becoming common. So computers became more about a hobby with often limited social interaction as opposed to being solely about something that college students and adults pursuing computing as a profession did.

Which arguably also led to this idea that if you haven’t been doing computing recreationally since you were a kid you obviously are not Passionate enough to join $disruptive_startup.

I have to admit if you only started programming after you went to University your going to struggle with the course and afterwards work.

You would not expect to do a Degree in English lit and have done no reading of the cannon before getting to university.

The idea that, if you have no experience programming going into college, you’ll struggle, is strange to me. About a third of my graduating CS class had no prior experience. Did we take more time to finish the first semester projects? Sometimes. But after the first semester prior experience seemed to have very little effect on class performance.

I think it does depend on the curriculum. I have experience programming, although I don’t really do it professionally. I’ve taken an intro programming MOOC course from an elite school and I have trouble believing someone coming in completely cold would have a chance. (Admittedly in a campus environment there would be TAs and other students but the contrast to when I took intro programming at school was night and day.)

You're assuming CS class performance correlates with ability.

Most of the people on my CS course hadn't programmed before, and they mostly all passed. But many of them couldn't code at graduation and went into non-programming jobs.

They passed anyway because the university carefully rigged the course to ensure it was possible to get good grades despite being unable to write any sort of non-trivial program. After all what are they going to do, constantly fail 90% of their class and attract questions about their own competence as teachers?

I’m honestly not so sure about that. The number of Western classics the average incoming English major has read is probably pretty small.

And it really isn’t true of just about any other branch of engineering or science. How many bridges do you think someone majoring in civil engineering has designed?

The fact that a lot of CS curricula only address those who have been programming as a hobby is a bug not a feature.

Many other countries mandate that you study at school the subject (or direct precursors) you take at Uni.

You not going to study Physics at Oxbridge if you don't have GCSE and A levels in the Subject why is EE and CS considered different.

Some lists of the "English" cannon are 200+ texts and that's not counting some of the classical authors you should have read - and that's not counting any BAME texts you might want to look at for diversity.

The English cannon should be shot.

:-)

The word you're looking for is "canon".

And Dyslexia sucks :-)

And now I feel like a heel for picking on your spelling. :-<

> The number of Western classics the average incoming English major has read is probably pretty small.

You think there are a lot of kids declaring English Literature as their major who haven't really read any English literature? What type of college are you assuming?

I think there are a lot of kids who declare English majors who took a fairly typical high school curriculum. Which is to say that they read a fairly modest number of "classic" books for school and liked reading various things on their own. They have an interest and ability to study English lit.

That's a very different level from what it takes to get into, say, Juilliard in the arts or what some seem to expect with respect to programming/CS.

Reading "harry potter" does prepare you for reading classics. Sure the specific subject is different, but the practice reading makes you better at reading. When I went to college the only language I knew was BASIC, which of course was never touched in any class. However the practice and thought patterns that knowledge gave me did help.

I suppose civil engineers are more likely to start on an even ground because so few kids build a bridge. Even then I'd expect the kid who built a few "tree forts" to do better.

Sounds little more than a self-aggrandizing belief to me.

The thought that other people can't run your gauntlet. You'd be surprised that not only can they, but all they need is more motivation or discipline and then they can lap you.

Just like someone who didn't learn to exercise until later in life.

The chair of the CS department at Stanford majored in Trombone.

Alex Aiken double majored in Music and CS.

I had a very smart and talented professor for several undergraduate classes who entered the computer science field after getting an BA in Music and a PhD in Musicology. It didn't seem to slow him down.

The only thing I programmed before I switched from a music major to computer science was a TI-83 calculator for a few weeks in the 8th grade. Technically that counts as experience but I have a feeling you meant more extensive experience.

Regardless of whether my experience counted or not, I find the notion that only those who start programming before university will not struggle to be ridiculous.

There's a big difference to formal exposure in a programming class in high school and a lifetime of hobbyist tinkering with tech.

It was also around the time CS because a high-paying and desirable career path.

I personally love me some alone time, but yeah, as a lady, tech is a little too lonely even for me. Something that I think would help is if the social types in the engineering department (often men!) would post interesting tech events in Slack.

Maybe I don't enjoy sports or poker; maybe you don't enjoy sci-fi book readings or craft nights, but chances are we both want learn some new tricks (with free beer and snacks). I suppose the risk there is that it can feel like an obligation -- and I actually had a boss accuse me of networking for my next job by going to tech events.

actually had a boss accuse me of networking for my next job by going to tech events.

Someone who works in tech who is interested in tech and goes to tech events. I don't buy it :).

> Something that I think would help is if the social types in the engineering department (often men!) would post interesting tech events in Slack.

I think this is really important. But should add that if you want to do something don't be afraid to make said post. If you feel lonely, reach out.

I moved across the country and had no friends there (into an engineering firm, in an engineering town, with few people my age (mostly engineers)). Being mostly an introvert I was fine being alone 99% of the time, but everyone needs friends. I figured out that when I need friend time that I had to be the one to organize such events. If I didn't then no one did anything, or the groups that already existed would just do their own things. (Can't blame them for excluding me. Not like it was a malicious act. Just no one knew me.) It can just be something simple as "Hey I was going to do $X on $DAY, want to come too?" (direct works better than an open invitation) After learning this I did actually develop friends and got invited to things.

So what I'm saying is that if you feel lonely you have to reach out. I completely understand that this sucks as an introvert. But you do have some control over this and you can't completely rely on others to invite you to things.

Anecdote: My niece was on a female floor in her dormitory. Supposed to foster a supportive environment for the women to pursue STEM. What happened? A few gave in, turned to Liberal Arts. They began to chatter to the rest about "why bother". After 1 semester, only my niece was still in a STEM field (ChemE).

If someone could please explain to me how this is an issue entirely completely uncoupled with the rise of "Tech" to be trendy (read lucrative) and the insistence for some people's assertions that THEY deserve this as much as others, it would be much appreciated. It feels like everyone is just turning a blind eye to the obvious parallels in deep sea welding or some other gender dominated profession because they don't want anyone to get hurt feelings and start a witch hunt.

Because "tech" as of late has become comfortable and more publicly accepted, even garnering a certain cachet and prestige because of get-rich-coding billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg. It'd be a non-issue if tech was full of geeks with slide-rules who only make an average salary and have to wear a tie to the office.

I've never understood the anti-social stereotype of working software. In order to do the work, most of us need to interact with users of all stripes. It's rare that we're isolated in a bubble of men. There are business analysts, project managers, users, stakeholders, scrum masters, QA testers, story development meetings, and daily scrums.

It's one of the most social professions one could arguably enter. Sure we have to code in a cube for most of our week, but anti-social?

Hardly.

In fact, the most successful software engineers are the ones that _are_ social, understand complex social environments, listen well, and know how to engage.

I do agree with the OP that there's a _perception_ of anti-social stereotypes, but I'd argue the problem is that there are few women in tech, men would _love_ to find a tech-oriented partner or date, but the odds of that one woman in your group lining up in all other ways with us is narrow (we're analytical daters - we do the math), we tend to just resign ourselves to staying away from disappointment. And there is the whole sexual harassment aspect too. When we're doing the coworker math in our heads, we're worried about saying something stupid.

It's a self-fulfilling cycle. An unbalanced gender environment creates discomfort by both genders.

We need to actively reconstruct social dynamics within tech circles to break this cycle or it will just continue.

How do we break the cycle?

Colleges need to get out of the business of teaching CompSci the way the do it now. Less emphasis on science and engineering and more on team building, project management, business analysis, and more. Don't make programmers. To me that's like forcing everyone that plans to work on cars to only understand how to repair brakes. There is a whole lot of car outside of repairing just the brakes.

Colleges need to engage in team-oriented software development practices. It shouldn't be computer science specific. It should be business oriented, social, teams, projects, testing, planning, white-boarding, _and_ programming.

This is how a lot of businesses run, so we should mimic the environments these graduates will end up in.

If we made this one valuable change, we'd possibly attract a more balanced gender population, create social environments for men to evolve properly, allow women to feel comfortable and respected, and generate advocacy for diverse and respectful work environments.

Are you implying that science and engineering are problematic for women? ಠ_ಠ

Hell no. I’m saying our current working population is out of gender balance and women who would otherwise choose software engineering probably prefer to turn towards gender neutral professions, especially given all of the news of places like Uber.

We need to change the foundation of tech education to weave in other disciplines so gender balance is achieved.

Granted, if a college tried and they still struggled to meet the goal of gender balance, my theory goes out the window.

But except for brave and determined women, this imbalance will remain. Let’s take the need for bravery out of the equation, if it’s possible.

Is CS really “lauded as a haven for antisocial people?” Ouch. Some of the evidence in this article is anecdotal (female friend at a hackathon gets excluded by males, etc.).

Has no one else seen the plethora of “Women in Tech” meet ups, events and hiring fairs? Anecdotally, I have several female friends that have interviewed and been hired at companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. I understand this isn’t statistically significant but does the cause have to be the fault of men (being less social, being perceived as weird, not welcoming women to the industry)?

Maybe there are less women in tech because women (generally) are less interested in the field?

Anecdotally as well, of the (few) women in the graduating class of my CS department all of them were hired almost instantly from a "Women in Tech" conference..Furthermore, I see anytime something become "glamorous" liking the idea of living in Marin and programming all day, there will be those who use any tactic into something they didn't start.

Such anecdotes are also exemplary of how a lot of women(meaning not all) fail to question why it is they are being excluded. I think much of that comes down to how a lot of women don't understand just how intimidating they can be to men.

Women who are reading this should understand that you are undoubtedly intimidating at some level to some men out there. This is because we are not only frequently perceived as being "creepy", or trying to court women, but the perception is that society is asking a lot of specific treatment of women from men(one wrong word and we might have offended you somehow). Unless a man is attractive, it's much easier to avoid women all together.

I'm not saying it's a perfect system. It's mostly flawed. But I just wish that women would have a little more compassion and understanding to the male perspective. This article and others like it come off as externalizing that's basically concluding that men are being themselves too much because of ignorance and therefore need to change their behavior to comply with the wants of women, even though the reverse isn't being demanded of women; not often will you hear a man in tech say that women just need to toughen up. (by the way, I'm not even implying that)

"Women in tech" events are a good example of how women exclude themselves. A typical event has the following attributes:

- Men strongly discouraged or banned from participating.

- Many of the attendees are "women in tech" but not "technical women", it's common to see women who describe themselves as co-founders, activists, HR staff and so on but relatively rare to find someone who actually spends all day banging out code.

- As a consequence of the above most of the talk at these events revolves around gender politics, not tech.

Source: girlfriend has learned to code and attended one or two meetup events advertised as being for women in tech, also from reading agendas or blog posts about such events.

Meanwhile the men are creating inclusive events that focus on knowledge sharing about hard tech topics. They use what they learn to build new things, they scope out each others talent and form professional relationships that can be used to build companies. True geek girls go to these events and are in the minority. The rest self-select out and create the exclusion they then blame men for. I have no sympathy.

That's an interesting theory, but do you have any evidence that most of these events are more political in nature than actually talking about programming and technology? Your girlfriend's one or two anecdotes aren't really sufficient to make a generalization like that.

It's not a theory, it's a description of my observations.

I've presented my sources. Why not go find counter-examples? I bet you'll find it's harder than you expect. But OK, I'll make my case more strongly.

Here's a simple exercise. Pick a buzzword, say blockchain, search for "women in X" and let's look at some of the top results.

https://www.womenontheblock.io/ - check out the speakers. The first is a PhD student in cryptography, not a bad start. But then there's a co-founder, another co-founder, another founder (of "Investing in Women" i.e. an activist), a lawyer, an actual software engineer! Sort of - in 2011 she was an intern, she spent two years doing support tickets and is now a PM, but hey, that's at least something. Then we're back to a lobbyist, another founder (of a foundation), another lawyer, "Chief Discovery Officer" whatever that is, lawyer, digital content lead, shareholder (?), co-founder, business development executive, CFO, lawyer, CTO of the World Bank Group whose background is actually management consulting and "thought leadership", sales, "human capital officer" etc etc.

You get the picture. I just worked down the list and of all the people listed, only two appeared to do anything actually related to writing software: a cryptography student and someone who spent a couple of years as a support engineer but then quickly moved into product management.

Notice the pre-ponderance of women calling themselves founders and co-founders. That's very common. They are not what HN readers would recognise as a startup founder. Often they've founded entities that don't do anything, or are just organising more "women in X" meetups, or in the rare case where they're making software, have partnered with men / outsourcing shops to do so.

Here's another example: https://www.blockchainbeach.com/live-2018-women-in-blockchai...

Look at the agenda. It starts with a basic intro to blockchain, ok, slightly technical but nothing you can't find on YouTube. But then we're right into a discussion of "her time in the middle east and dispelling misconceptions about women in that region" i.e. about general women's issues, not tech. Then a panel whose first listed topic is "social impact" and one of the members is a musician (at least two of the women do appear to be at least somewhat technical). Then a marketing pitch for some random alt-coin whose relevance appears to be mostly that the marketing person for NEM is a woman. Then a keynote on "diversity in blockchain" - women's issues/feminism again. Then a panel on "women empowerment and inclusion". Useful observations like "42% of all the women in the world do not have a bank account" (men's problems of course don't count). And so on.

Really, if you have never investigated these events before - don't bother. They are mostly just non-technical feminists complaining about men, engaging in outrageous sexism and generally making the whole feminist cause look bad.

I read this article and can't help to see how much cultural views and media representation is blending facts with fiction. Starting with the statement "Compared to almost any other industry, women are underrepresented in technology", looking at gender segregation statistics per profession paints a very different picture. Taking Swedish statistics (which get collected as part of taxation and made public), technology profession are usually very average with around 75%. It sounds huge thinking that for every 1 woman there is 3 men, but that is about average for every employed swede for both men and women. You take a random person of the street and there is around 80% chance that the person is working in a profession which has higher than 2:1 gender ratio. The official definition of a gender segregated profession is 60/40 or higher, and 88.5% of the population falls in that category with about 12% women and 13% men working in gender equal professions. Going from the other end, I am manually looking at the list and there is 40 professions with 90% or higher gender segregation none which clearly fits as a technology profession. Top 1# is midwife with 99.7% women (total 5692) and #2 is floor installation with 99.4% men (total 3581). The first recognizable technology profession (system programmer) is listed with 80% men, ranked #75th worst of a total listed 156 professions (including the few gender equal profession).

Without this context, discussing numbers like "women hold only 25% of technical roles" is impossible. 75th position means (given equal distribution) that taking a random person of the street should give a 50% chance of them working in a more gender segregated profession than technology.

What is causing half the population of Sweden to choose gender segregated professions where the majority outnumber the minority with 80% to 20% and do the theories of the article explain it? Personally I don't think so. If social behavior would be a major source then we should be able to predict which professions would be dominated by men and which by women if we ranked the social engagement in the work place, but such prediction model seems poor when I manually go through the top worst segregated professions where both male and women professions are mostly team based.

http://www.duochjobbet.se/nyhet/nio-av-tio-har-jobb-med-ojam... (for a 2012 list that was easiest to grab, but one can always go to the Statistics Sweden (SCB)).

> In addition to these perceptions about people in tech, tech actually is less social for women than for men. It’s harder for women to make friends and fit in, both in university classes and at tech companies. Because it’s unnatural or might be taken the wrong way, young men are less likely to approach women and invite them to join a study group or happy hour, poker night, or whatever else they do with their male peers/coworkers. They don’t just sit next to women without a desk neighbor, ask them unsolicited questions, or offer to help. They’re less likely to joke with them, complement them, or even chat with them casually. The exclusion is unintentional, not malicious, but made worse by the fact that women are more socially aware than men at this age.

I wonder how much of that has to do with how young, male engineers are hammered with the social mores of creepy, harassing nerds pushed as one of the reasons for less women in tech. Maybe they're trying to take the safe route and just not interact.

I like to compare STEM to Harry Potter when it first came out. I remember being one of those dorks in middle school who couldn’t get enough of it, and I thought not many people enjoyed it as much as I did. Only a handful of people mentioned it, and I was pretty social back then. Then the movies came out followed by the “cool kids” going crazy over them. Suddenly you have to like Harry Potter in order to fit in!

The only difference is that STEM isn’t labeled as cool by “cool people” yet.

I am just confused.

I think we might agree that how social women vs men are in the certain age group are relatively constant through time. IE in 60s men is about as social as they are now, but the number of women in STEM decreased through the same time period.

I think it is just market forces in play plus gender roles in childhood. Women get discriminated in tech(study and jobs), resulting in subpar outcomes for women. This information propagates through the market so women choose not to participate in that kind of work because opportunity costs are too high and they choose to do something else.

Very similar situation growing up where gender roles and parents push girls away from STEM.

If companies and educational institution in STEM treated men and women the same, we would get much better distribution.

Not rocket science here. Education plus equal treatment.

I see this as a problem companies need to solve, not individuals.

A man intentionally going out of their way to befriend a woman has much more to lose (potentially being considered a “creep” leading to a poor reputation that may spread) than they stand to gain compared to if they tried to befriend another man. But the main reason that can occur is the intentionality of making an “approach” like that. And yes, it will be construed as creepy a significant portion of the time, especially if you are unattractive or have poor social skills - that’s a fact of life.

If instead your boss/professor mandated a few small social events to get new hires to meet each other and existing employees one-on-one, there’s no way you can misconstrue getting to know someone as trying to flirt with them. Everybody wins.

That Google photo[0], which the author thinks is a good example of diversity, properly reflects the current SV definition of "diversity": (a) all white and Asian (b) 25% female (c) all in their 20s and early 30s. No older females. No older males. No black females. No black males. No apparent Latinos (perhaps far right in the second row).

[0] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/IKDqAFRmbc_c4-rbLJ5WjCq58H...

The cited statistic "Women make up 57% of the workforce" is very misleading. Chasing down the chain of citations, this number appears to be the percentage of "Professional and related occupations" jobs occupied by women according to the BLS (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm). But by far the largest sub-category of this is "Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations" which is heavily female--outside of this sub-group the gender ratio is roughly 50/50.

You can't just cut out parts of the workforce that you don't want to include in your data.

I'm not advocating that. I'm just saying that this is, contrary to how it is cited, a specific subset of "the workforce", and pointing out that this subset furthermore is not necessarily representative of what one might think of as the "professional" workforce.

Tech in general and software in particular is hard to learn. So hard that you can't progress beyond mediocre level unless you have strong passion for it. Only that passion pushes you to spend hours and days fighting a problem. Only that passion makes you stay awake late night reading about beautiful programming concept. Only that passion gives you a bliss when you finally figured out something and made it work. Better social interactions won't replace that passion. So no, I don't support her theory. Innate interest in technology is necessary and sufficient.

What I read from this is that women are less interested than men in a job by itself and more in what the job fits their desired lifestyle.

I and many other programmers I've talked to got into the career they have because the craft is naturally compelling to them, with the lifestyle of programming being secondary or even tertiary. I don't think most male programmers do what they do because they particularly like each other, nor are they necessarily interested in an anti-social atmosphere. Sure, some are going to have contrary preferences, but if it wasn't generally true that male programmers are primarily interested in their craft, then I wouldn't expect the most horrendously competitive tech companies wouldn't still get plenty of male applicants and even fewer female applicants.

Put simply, I think tech companies could all be run like sweat shops, and you'd see nearly as many men working for them and probably fewer women.

Yet again, we have a woman who enters an arena that women don't want to enter(by her own account) and requests that it be changed to fit her and other women. These are the suggestions she makes for making tech more hospitable to women:

* Create communities (set people up with “buddies”, mentors, lunch groups)

* Emphasize tech’s potential to impact humans and community wellbeing

* Invest in social events

* Offer opportunities for engineers to do user- and team-facing work

* Confront unconscious bias

* Go befriend a girl in your class or company

As a man, these are all distractions from getting my work done. I am intellectually excited about software development but, when it comes down to it, I want to show up to the office, accomplish things, and go home. Being overly concerned with the wellbeing of others is not that interesting, and I don't have a job to make friends; if I make friends, that's through happenstance. I want to be the best at what I do, but I don't need communities/buddies, social events, unconscious bias training, or the opposite sex to do this.

> Go befriend a girl in your class or company

I wish someone would tell women the same thing of men.

Coming from someone who has more female friends than male, there's a lot that can go wrong in a man trying to befriend women, especially at work. On many occasions, simply being friendly has clearly lead to a woman perceiving that I was interested in her. If you're lucky, you're met with distance and radio silence, but most men are going to be treated as "creepy". As engineering is going to be made up of a lot of nerds who already have experience in being "creepy", there's little incentive for those nerds to willingly subject themselves to rejection when they weren't even looking to court these women in the first place.

Again, I have lots of female friends, including some from work, but that's because it took an incredible amount of effort to get to know them without setting off the "creepy" flag. For most guys, this effort isn't worth it.

Right, given the option for a man to try to befriend two people: a man and a woman, it's far lower risk to try and befriend the man, assuming both friendships have an equal probability of being fulfilling.

> Part 1: Young women are more pro-social then young men.

That's just another gender stereotype.

Backed by science.

Science doesn't back stereotypes.

But stereotypes can be backed by science.

Stereotypes aren't backed by anything. They're just things people beleive for no good reason.

Likely an unpopular view, by why is this a problem? There are unequal gender splits in many fields, but I don't hear a big outcry that men are underrepresented in Nursing as an example, or that there aren't enough women lumberjacks.

Not everything needs to be in a 50/50 balance.

> [If you’re a dude and you’re reading this article] Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy. Include her, ask her for advice, introduce her, learn about her work and her life in the same way you would with any male friend or coworker. If you’re an investor, professor, journalist, or manager, take it on yourself to sponsor a young woman’s career.

While I totally agree with this advice, I think this is very difficult to get men to do in the tech industry. There is a real concern, and to be honest I don't totally think invalid, that many men don't want to be perceived in any way as doing something that could be construed (or misconstrued) as harassment. I think there may be an subconscious/unconscious evaluation going on where men think "Well, I might be socially awkward talking to this girl anyway, so I'll just avoid the complication."

I think one of the unfortunate unintended consequences of the #MeToo movement is that men don't want to even get close to the line of doing something that could be perceived as inappropriate, which unfortunately results in more isolation of women, not less.

I agree with your first (non-quoted) paragraph. Please don't blame this on #metoo. it just happened, and I think the first point you made was just as legitimate before #metoo

> men don't want to even get close to the line of doing something that could be perceived as inappropriate

Yeah I am wondering why someone would stick their neck out, especially if they have below-average social skills. Lots of personal liability for little personal gain, and #MeToo just publicized the existing uneasiness with professional interactions. It's not like any women helped when I was evaluating a career in nursing.

Because social skills can be practiced and learned. #MeToo is about physical abuse and abuse of power, not some peer who has a hard time making eye contact.

There's a large grey area. There are also false accusations.

I agree that social skills can be practiced and learned. But I think something like Toastmasters, improv classes, or Meetup groups are a much safer way, instead of the corporate environment.

Not yet. But there's clearly some trend towards making smaller and smaller transgressions into #metoo issues. I'd hate to find out that I rolled the dice on ostracism (or worse) just to be friendly to someone who doesn't care enough to reach out to me.

In fact, it's much riskier for me to reach out to them than for them to reach out to me. If they're too stupid to realize that, I'm not interested in being their friend. And if they're perceptive of my risk and they still expect me to submit myself to it for their convenience or whatever then I'm not interested in being their friend.

Many years ago (almost 20, I think), I was working as a contractor on a remote contract in a foreign country with one other person from my company, who also happened to be a woman. Since we were the only Americans there, and were staying at the same hotel, we naturally ended up having lunch and dinner together, and talked quite a bit. She was married, and I knew that. She commented once that she was spending more time with me than she normally spent with her husband and I laughed and said, "yep, next thing you know I'll be at your house for thanksgiving dinner this year". She laughed, I didn't think much of it. Well, quite a while later, we had sort of a "falling out": she had sounds turned on on her computer (remember when you could configure windows to play a sound every time you deleted a file or got an e-mail?) I asked her to please mute those sounds because it was really distracting. She refused, and I asked to have my desk moved so I wasn't right next to her, which irritated her, since she relied on me for quite a bit of technical assistance and now she had to walk across the floor to talk to me. We argued about this for a while, but then the contract ended and we were back in the states. Next thing I know, I get a call from my boss that she's filed a formal sexual harassment claim against me, based on my comment that I was "going to show up at her house for thanksgiving dinner". As you can probably imagine, I've been very cautious about my interactions with female coworkers ever since.

This is such a big problem that is almost always thrown under the rug with an "exception" label.

Yes it's an exception but it's a possible life/career wrecking exception. If you look at it objectively, this entire scenario is only possible with a man to woman interaction.

If the woman had said the exact same thing to a man, he could never file a sexual harassment complaint against her. In fact he'd probably be laughed at if he tried. The same situation would happen if both were men. Logically speaking, why take the risk?

I don't know how we tackle this though.

Yeah, I get the impression that it's rare, but... it's just not a risk I can afford take.

How did that play out in the end if you don't mind sharing? Did you make "no comment" as to whether you actually said that, deny saying it altogether, or be honest (as I think is an engineer's inclination) that you said those words as an in-context joke? Did you wish you tried one of the other approaches?

LOL, yep, I was completely honest about it. My boss said something like, "Hm, I guess maybe things sound different here under the cold lights of the office environment" (I don't remember his exactly words, but "cold lights" was something that actually did come out of his mouth). In the end, they filed a report, gave me a warning to keep their bases covered, and I got on with my life. She was as difficult for everybody else to deal with as she was for me to deal with, so she left not too long after that anyway.

Any consolation, quite a while later means that while you got on with your life, someone else didn't

The way I see it:

1. Making friends isn't even remotely close to a line. The line is way out in workplace romance and sexual power politics land. The very basic mitigation strategy you have is simply not to go there. If you can't not go there, then you have other problems to deal with first, and the sooner you go about that the better!

2. If making friends isn't crossing a line, it's therefore not sticking your neck out at all.

3. There is no more liability than any other workplace friendship, and just as much potential for gain as any other workplace friendship. Plus, if you are socially awkward as you claim, you know darn well that the potential for gain is ginormous. If it's hard for you to make friends, you need all the good friends you can get!

4. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with nursing, but it's silly to hide behind that as an excuse. You need to get on with your life.

5. The less you put women on some weird fetishized platform of unobtanium, and the more you just treat them as fellow humans and geeks, the less likely you are to cross a line. At least, that's my conviction, and it seems to work pretty well.

Making friends isn't even remotely close to a line. The line is way out in workplace romance and sexual power politics land. The very basic mitigation strategy you have is simply not to go there.

As it stands now, this line is very easily "shifted" by spin and outright lying.

And how often do you think this happens--where there is an accusation with absolutely no basis in reality? What data do you have to back this up? Would you really cast out all women from your professional circles because of it?

Sheesh.

Men talk about how aggrieved they are in this new world of transparency and accusation. This transparency has come about because many women have been subject to some really, truly awful stuff. Yet reactions like this this are unbelievably unfair to women too. It's almost like it's _women_ who are in a lose-lose situation here, not men!

What on earth will it take to get men to simply treat women as reasonable, decent people?

And how often do you think this happens--where there is an accusation with absolutely no basis in reality?

From what I have seen, it happens fairly often.

Would you really cast out all women from your professional circles because of it?

What!? Strawman much? Put words into another's mouth much? Sheesh!

Let me tell you this. I was pretty much a butthead (lowercase b) in my 20's. The older I get, the stupider 20-somethings seem, and the wiser my parents seem. Heck, I was still plenty stupid in my 30's. Younger people have a lot of good things going for them, but there are going to be overreactions and, let's say, "deficits in experience." This is entirely an equal opportunity phenomenon, too, across genders, races, orientations, religions, heights, etc. So no, no probably one gets cast out. Human beings need checks and balances, and groups of humans working together sometimes need the check and balance of experience and another's point of view.

Men talk about how aggrieved they are in this new world of transparency and accusation. This transparency has come about because many women have been subject to some really, truly awful stuff.

At a fundamental level, this isn't about men vs. women. It's about transparency, fairness, and due process. I know firsthand about how really, truly awful stuff can happen under the surface of things. I know because those things were done to me. Both in the fashion of racial bashing and sexual abuse. I could probably talk for hours about the things done to me by white males. Still you can't abandon principles just because something was so very bad. Those principles are what separates good people from the brutal vengeance of purely tribal thinking. You can't have true justice without those principles, because power corrupts and human nature will pollute what happens. "An eye for an eye, making the whole world blind."

"Listen and believe," is okay as a first step, but taken as a substitute for due process, or as an excuse to throw it away, it's morally bankrupt and it denies human nature. There are reasons why we have things like courts and the 5th amendment. It's very, very easy for people to fall into groupthink and for lives to be ruined for absolutely no reason. This is something which is cognitively difficult to understand, but which is a hard won lesson of our society. It's also something which I've seen firsthand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMQYB2Coufg

Women are human beings too. And human beings have the capacity to and sometimes lie. They have lapses in judgement. They get corrupted by power. They sometimes lack the experience or haven't processed their experiences. If "listen and believe" is the full extent of how you would treat with women, well, that's about the most dehumanizing and belittling thing toward women I've heard someone suggest today.

You're right, taken out of context this would be a strawman. But you responded in the context of someone explaining why making friends with women in the workplace, in this day and age, is just too risky a proposition. Your critique is in support of _that_ mentality, and it's _that_ mentality that I'm arguing against.

You say this isn't about men vs. women. But specifically, all of this is in response to (what I assume is) a man refusing to make friends with a woman, because of whatever politics they think currently govern _that_ specific dynamic in the workplace. It _is_ what this is about, fundaments be damned.

But you responded in the context of someone explaining why making friends with women in the workplace, in this day and age, is just too risky a proposition.

Don't strawman me again. I never said that it's too risky to make friends with women in the workplace, and that men should never do this. My actual position is this: Right now, in many different contexts, it's a bit too easy for a woman to make a fabricated accusation against a man. There's an imbalance here, both socially/culturally and institutionally.

But specifically, all of this is in response to (what I assume is) a man refusing to make friends with a woman, because of whatever politics they think currently govern _that_ specific dynamic in the workplace.

So what? He's free to associate as he wishes. It's not what I would want, however. It's not how most men behave in most contexts, from what I have seen. Furthermore, there have been adjustments and readjustments of the politics and the balance of power in the workplace, between workers and bosses, between men and women, etc. It's an unlikely one sided fallacy to suppose that justice means that all of the power should flow to one side, only. In our history, an important inflection point was when we realized that due process was required, to prevent the abuse of power by authorities and the powerful.

It _is_ what this is about, fundaments be damned.

Men and women are of the same species. Groups of men and women have been cooperating productively since time immemorial. Again, it is you who are coming out with the idea that anyone should be cast out. No one need be cast out, so long as we are honest about everyone's humanity -- both the good and the bad sides of that.

I was a part of an organization in college that naturally maintained a 50-50 male female ratio. There was no system of quotas or any attempt at adjusting populations. Women who were a part of it, years after graduating, talk glowingly (sometimes longingly) of the equality they experienced in that environment. If men and women -- really people in general -- are to get along, people need to do four things: 1) Be tough. 2) Be kind. 3) Respect. 4) Trust. It also seems to work in culturally Chinese companies in SF. (One good thing about a lot of Communists, is that many of them really are sincere about the equality of men and women.) It's the organizations where people act like they're in Mad Men and the organizations where people have bought into Social Justice where all the drama seems to happen.

"Fundaments be damned?" When you abandon principles, you get chaos. That's precisely when you get injustice.

You seem to be misinterpreting my comment:

a) My comment about nursing meant that the workplace barriers within opposite-gender mentoring exist on both sides of the spectrum...not acting as an excuse. Your reaction is just like telling the author to "get on with [her] life."

b) Who said anything about "weird fetishized platform of unobtanium"? I was just pointing out the legal realities that exist within the workplace.

c) The line is not in "workplace romance and sexual power politics land", the line is the HR department. Who may share your sense of humor and attitude. Or not.

What I'm trying to tell you is, and I believe the legal and HR "reality" back me up on this, that the vast majority of friendships struck up in the workplace do not lead to legal or HR headaches. Certainly this has been my experience, and nothing has changed in the past few years to make me change my mind. The people who should be afraid, and I'm glad if they now are, are the people who do regularly get up to, or cross, the line into inappropriate behavior.

I say you are letting your fear of sensationalized stories, and/or general fear of the Other, lead you astray.

Sexual power politics land starts in the grey line between saying hello in the morning and giving someone unwanted attention.

There is a massive, massive gulf between the two. Unless there's something weird about how you say it?

Or you remind them of some who has assaulted them in the past (by looks, posture, attitude, language, etc).

I have a hard time simply coping with people being behind me, much less attempting to interact with me without first entering my forward field of view.

That took me three times reading it to get right.

To avoid anyone else misunderstanding: That's "remind by looks, posture, etc", rather than "assaulted by looks, posture, etc".

JFC. If you're afraid of accidentally harassing or molesting someone I think you have the wrong idea of how to interact with people.

What you think is harassing might quite well disagree with target female view of what harassing is, complicated by the fact that HR department might disagree with you both. And should that whole thing become public, you'll be judged by the entire office, with the entire spectrum of views on what harassment is.

Personally, as a male, you have absolutely nothing to gain, and everything to lose. The most rational thing is to not engage at all.

> as a male, you have absolutely nothing to gain, and everything to lose.

Having friendly, healthy relationships with your colleagues isn't valuable? Or just with the ones who are women?

Some of my best friendships/allies/contacts have been women who I worked with. I'm very thankful for the opportunities they have provided me and the value they add to my life.

The fact that you see /zero/ value in having genuine connections with women has me even more worried than the fact that the OP was afraid of harassing someone accidentally.

> Having friendly, healthy relationships with your colleagues isn't valuable? Or just with the ones who are women?

Just with the ones who are women (from a male perspective). This specific point is because of #MeToo - this movement normalized the fact that "friendliness" and "healthiness" of a relationship is judged post-factum, sometimes years and decades post-factum, and the male perspective is rarely taken into account.

Think about it this way, even if one follows OP advice, and builds what he considers very healthy and friendly relationship, he exposes himself to (based on recent news stories, very real) risk of the relationship being second-guessed by the female, at any point in time in future, with the severe penalties resulting from mere accusations, not convictions, even if not true.

Not the OP, but is the value in having a genuine connection with a female coworker worth the potential downside? I've got 29 years in. I'm not going to bet that on reasonableness in a world like the one we live in.

I think you are seeing a more extreme position than they were taking.

It's not that there isn't value in having friendly relationships with your colleagues no matter their gender. The issue comes up in comparing the value of a specific relationship with the potential costs of it (or attempting to create it).

Right or wrong, befriending a male colleague has virtually zero risk. The chances of anything happening to severely damage your career or social standing are essentially nil. Even in a severe situation, there isn't much you can do to cause a problem without acting in a pretty horrible way that's also documented. There just isn't much you can do there to really provoke a highly emotional reaction or scare HR.

The same cannot be said of attempting a relationship with a woman. People are very sensitive about sexual harassment and HR wants absolutely nothing to do with it. The exact lines for sexual harassment are necessarily a bit blurry. Even if they existed, continually just barely not crossing them would seem like harassment to me.

Is the friendly relationship with a woman coworker so much more valuable than a man that it is worth taking on additional risk? I don't think so.

I don't intend to have a particularly strong relationship with all my coworkers and I imagine most people are the same. This means I get to be choosy about which ones I engage in this way. The risk-reward ratio just doesn't seem favorable to engaging women in this way.

Now, personally speaking I have slightly more female friends than male friends, unless we're counting people I might talk to once every few years. My oldest friend, by far, is female. I would never suggest men should not be friends with women. That's insane. I'm just not sure what the incentives are for me to try to specifically befriend female coworkers.

I don't think that's what they were saying at all. My interpretation was that people don't want to risk the perception of any kind of special friendly treatment of women, because of what people might read into it.

This is the problem. I have enough friends that I feel content, guy friends and some women friends. Why the fuck do I risk my life and job by trying to interact with women in office and accidentally come off as harassing. There is absolutely no benefit for me with a risk of losing a great deal.

I hear this often enough, but I don't buy it.

I think this mostly comes from being less than totally confident socially, or perhaps even having some social anxiety.

To my knowledge I've never accidentally harassed somebody and can't imagine it happening. But it's still something I worry about because I'd really hate to do that to somebody.

It just adds another layer of concern onto an already somewhat uncomfortable proposition.

I even found one of my good friends (who is female) by offering help in a CS lab. I still worry about these things, and all things being equal, I know I have and would ask a question of the guy sitting next to me rather than the girl. It's just easier.

> "Well, I might be socially awkward talking to this girl anyway, so I'll just avoid the complication."

This is exactly how I am, but it has nothing to do with the #metoo movement. The reason is because I discovered at a young age that girls didn't want a ugly boy talking to them. It makes them uncomfortable, and as a result, it makes me uncomfortable.

So in my mind, avoiding attractive women is being polite.

Something nobody will admit is that "creepy" is really 90% based on the looks of a person, and 10% what they are doing. People aren't comfortable with the idea of an unattractive person potentially having a romantic interest in them (regardless of whether they do or not).

edit: My horrible solution to the issue of a lack of women in tech is to get more conventionally attractive men in tech. More guys like in that Napa photo and less ones like that chubby, 1980s stereotype one.

Something nobody will admit is that "creepy" is really 90% based on the looks of a person, and 10% what they are doing.

It's based mostly on relative status, and it mostly exists in the mind.

People aren't comfortable with the idea of an unattractive person potentially having a romantic interest in them (regardless of whether they do or not).

It's different between women and men. Men are a bit more physically dangerous to women, so a man liking a woman carries a bit more risk than a woman liking a man. Also, the state-of-nature potential downside cost of unwanted attention, should it go very badly, is higher to a woman than it is to a man.

I think if you approach someone with "this person is very attractive" at the fore of your mind, you're likely to present in a way that could be perceived as creepy, and maybe not approaching that person could be a good move. If very many people have that effect on you, it might be worth checking to see if you want to change something about yourself, though.

This is exactly me. All my, maybe >10 (of course in college, not in work), attempts ended up me being called out for being creepy so I basically quit trying because I don't want to make women uncomfortable. When I say this to my friends they act as if I'm inflicting self-harm. We should really let people being at peace with their sexuality.

I'd also add partners and gossip into the mix.

It's very easy for a third party to see a man and a woman having regular workplace relationship and associate that with flirtation and even cheating.

Of course this varies wildly in intensity depending on companies/partners, but it almost inevitably generates gossip. It's even worse if you're above her in the company hierarchy.

I know I would probably stray away from attempting this sort of work relationship with a woman for both my job and my partner's sake. It's a really thin line to navigate on both cases.

I've seen people get fired because a woman hinted that a man harassed her when I knew it was not the case.

But as said on another comment, this was true way before #metoo, that just brought even more visibility to this.

This is dead on. To be honest, girls can get creeped out whether I have platonic intent or not. Part of what defines a guy as "creepy" is the mere fact of whether or not he's reading a girl's signals correctly. This can be problematic, since it doesn't necessarily follow that failing to read a girl's boundaries correctly means I have anything other than platonic intent.

This can be circumvented for sure, but my usual method is simply to keep conversations about work only, and not to linger when a work topic has concluded. This might seem like overkill, but I'm trying t err on the side of caution here.

I've seen women call men creepy for literally no reason (this is more common in pre-college aged girls), I assume it's equivalent to "you're ugly and not a person to me and I'm offended you tried to talk to me (even if it was purely school assignment related)". I've even met one girl who _wanted_ it to be a term of endearment (considering the above, there was no way that was going to work). I've also seen a shit-ton of creepy borderline sociopathic behavior from males, much of it gone uncalled out (by the supposedly sane males who were standing by), which often will lead to a woman calling the person creepy (and hopefully she isn't physicslly hurt in addition to merely the scare of something terrible about to happen).

As I understand it, a woman doesn't know which men are threats or not (and some certainly are) -- so a man who can't read their boundaries is really a canary in the mine for them. Moreso, this tends not to be an intellectual calculation, but an intuitive emotional reaction -- to the degree that a woman might not really be able to articulate why she finds a man creepy, except that it's obvious to her and her female friends agree.

Although this problem is frustrating to me, I fully admit it didn't arise out of nowhere. Women have some real bad actors they need to be on the lookout for. That this is an intuitive reaction (instead of an intellectual calculation) really implies this is not a new problem. Unfortunately, though, it does mean observing some old-fashioned boundaries with women is the safest course of action.

I've seen women call men creepy for literally no reason

I'm corroborating this.

I've also seen a shit-ton of creepy borderline sociopathic behavior from males, much of it gone uncalled out (by the supposedly sane males who were standing by)

Let me guess: It was from the highest status male in the immediate vicinity?

You've described "calling men creepy for no reason" and then described the reason. I think you're really saying that the word creepy means something different than its 'face value', as it were.

Put differently: the word "creepy" means one thing. Actually saying someone is "creepy", however, is a social signal with a very different meaning (namely: your attention is unwanted / you are lesser / something like that).

Parsed that way, it makes sense that that message would not be sent in situations where it doesn't seem socially unacceptable to send it, even if everyone is thinking it. One of the better things about being an adult is that it becomes socially acceptable, usually, at least in good company, to do what's right even if it violates some status-signally thing.

> it doesn't necessarily follow that failing to read a girl's boundaries correctly means I have anything other than platonic intent

Failing to read a _woman's_ boundaries correctly may not say anything about your intentions, but intentions don't matter if you're violating someone's boundaries. People shouldn't make excuses for not reading other's boundaries, they should learn to read other's boundaries and if they're repeatedly incapable or unwilling to do so, they should be treated as either children, adults with social disorders, or violators. There is NO acceptable excuse for violating another person's boundaries.

Which is why men who aren’t able to read those boundaries prefer to simply avoid getting anywhere near those boundaries. The easiest way of not transgressing is to avoid contact altogether.

Reasonable enough, but if that's the case, we should be blaming the avoidance on men for their social incompetence, not on women for having boundaries.

Or we shouldn't be blaming either men or women and instead should work towards more open communication and solidarity regarding these issues.

You're right.

What exactly does a man get for going out of his way like you suggest? Most of the time, nothing. Unless I can read that a woman is receptive to friendship, trying to befriend women because they're women is time better spent on working. It's a two-way street, and while I have had my share of female friends, the majority of women are either not receptive(i.e. won't give men the benefit of the doubt) or content to wait for men to take the initiative.

A man is not entitled to get anything. And if he's trying to get something, that seems like a pretty good reason for a woman to not be receptive to him. How many times have you walked past a homeless person trying to be "friendly" because you knew their motivation was to get something from you?

I'm a man, nerdy, below average attractiveness, but a majority of my friends are women because I don't approach them trying to get something, and I've found that a majority of women are extremely receptive to being friends.

Of course they're not entitled to get anything, but a reasonable person doesn't continue performing the same action when it benefits them in no way. There's nothing irrational about a man not going out of his way to befriend women in the workplace because he's had bad luck doing it, or because of the risks he's not going to have befriending other men.

If you have a lot of women as friends, that's great. Your experience is not the experience of a lot of men. A lot of men can't relate to women on a platonic level, and that doesn't mean they're misogynists.

I think it's problematic, if you're interested in having equality in tech, that men can't relate platonically to women. So if there are a lot of men who can't relate to women, why do you think that is?

This is so ridiculous. Obviously there are some boundaries that are unreasonable. What if I don't like when anyone of the opposite sex sits within 50 meters of me? Should everyone cater to my boundaries, or am I just being ridiculous?

Who is apportioning blame?

Young conflict-averse man starts life being a little socially inept. Tries breaking the ice with unreceptive women, typical human psychology sets in and this behaviour is generalised to all women. Now socially inept man continues through life with underdeveloped social skills while the people he wants to interact with are developing more complex social skills.

Who is to blame? Nobody in this scenario, Consider looking to why the man is conflict averse in the first place.

>People shouldn't make excuses for not reading other's boundaries

This statement doesn't hold up on its own --- boundaries are not always clearly marked, nor are everyone's boundaries compatible, or even fair.

This comment is in every single one of these threads. I am not trying to be hyperbolic here, but it reminds me of people that act as if "laws" are the only thing keeping them from murdering their annoying neighbor. I don't know how to read it without thinking "wow, this confirms what women are saying about men".

I mean, I guess I should be glad there's some self-awareness?

Maybe I just can't empathize as a gay man though, but I've never, ever felt this way around a male coworker, gay or otherwise.

edit: To further explain my thinking... what's the alternative? The only way I can understand the comment is "Oh, well this is a witchhunt and I'm afraid of being swept up" ... or else, "I have done those behaviors that men are getting in trouble for and am worried about doing them to a coworker." Maybe there's another interpretation that I'm not able to understand? Trying to understand here. Thanks.

I believe comparing murder to sexual harassment is plain misleading.

If someone acuses someone else of murdering his neighbour they will have to go to all lenghts to prove it and it's a major moral line to cross.

If someone acuses someone else of sexually harassing a woman, whether they're guilty or not, they'd most likely lose their job straight away and be labelled as a "perv" or something similar.

I can't see how you can compare those.

In your particular case, the equivalent would be a man screaming "sexual harassment" from another man. There's a huge stigma accompanied with that. It's just not socially acceptable on society today. On top of that the homossexual community is another minority with all the weight of discrimination following it.

Let's say that happens. It's easier for you to prove he fired you because of your sexual orientation than for him to prove you harassed him.

I believe there's a reason you don't feel this threatened. It's because unfortunately that's how society works today.

[Edit: grammar]

>It's easier for you to prove he fired you because of your sexual orientation than for him to prove you harassed him.

So, I can't understand as a gay man because I'm immune to accusations of sexual harassment because I can just use my orientation as a discrimination shield? Eh, no, not really. Frankly, it doesn't make sense and er, it doesn't address the fact that the other person could be gay?

While I concede that a false allegation of sexual harassment carries a different weight than a false allegation of murder... false accusations are lies and presumably will happen even if you avoid all contact with someone, no?

I guess I don't know what the alternative is. If I have to choose between ignoring workplace harassment and having folks err on the side of caution in the workplace behavior, I know which way I hope for us to err.

I didn't mean to imply you can't understand that because of being gay. I merely think sexual orientation changes the entire thing. The tension people feel comes from society and IMO that's very different when it's not the traditional heterosexual dynamic.

As much as I'd love to live in a world where everyone is truly equal, that's not the world we live in.

> false accusations are lies and presumably will happen even if you avoid all contact with someone, no?

Absolutely true. But lying about sexual misconduct is relatively easy compared to a murder.

If someone does decide to be malicious against you, it's easier to prove them wrong if it's known that you stay away from the other person. Because of gossip and perception if you're close to someone of the opposite sex on the work environment people assume the worst.

As I said in another comment, I fear approaching women because I don't expect people to be any more charitable with me than I am with them, and I do not think highly of men who approach women. If a man approaches my girlfriend without a very good excuse both her and I automatically assume sexual intent (even in the absence of any overtly sexual, creepy or inappropriate behavior) because in our experience that's usually correct (probably some confirmation bias at play there I don't doubt). I know several of my friends feel the same way and I don't get the impression that this is an uncommon default. I simply don't want people to suspect me in the same way so I avoid approaching women and if I do I try to work in the fact that I have a partner so as to make myself appear a bit more harmless. This comment captures that fear for me, albeit dressed up in hysteria about falsified sexual harassment allegations.

We recently got a new female analyst. We invite her for lunch and sometimes have small talk. Thing is, there's literally zero chemistry. We can't include here in our dumb Skype chat because its usually filled with incredibly dumb offensive memes - so we just try to keep our laughs down. We tried invite her to video game night and even organized board games just because she wasn't into video games that much. But again, there just isn't any chemistry. I genuinely think that the border isn't just between anti-social/pro-social. I also wouldn't ever consider making deprecating jokes towards her. What's considered inappropriate is too blurred also. I can make fat jokes/racist jokes/generally inappropriate jokes with most guys, since we know there's no malevolent intent. It's kinda cathartic and it's a two-way street. I genuinely don't think I can be like that with any woman in the workplace. I know comedians can have such a relationship though, so maybe there is a chance? Maybe not now when people are publicly executed for speaking their mind but in the future.

I just don't buy into social stuff. People at work to work. As long as she is treated with respect and provided the same opportunities as everyone else it should be cool.

People have different interests and it is totally fine. At our place some people are into Fortnite, some people into crypto, some people into playing the piano.

So when Fortnite people stay after hours to put some games in, it doesn't mean I have to stay back and play with them.

That's not really what I was getting at. Most of the guys are just like you described. We usually can't even settle on a video game to play. However, even with the one thing in common with the whole group (slight interest in board games) we just didn't hit off. And it's not like a singular attempt or case either. It's like there is a cultural divide. Now that's not the case with everyone, my example is anecdotal. I have female friends that dig board games and some video games and there's no divide there but just in the workplace, that is not the case. From my current experience and environment it seems very unlikely I'll ever meet someone like that though.

You should probably re-examine whether any of these things are necessary for a fruitful professional relationship and to what extent your merger of your social and professional life excludes current and potential coworkers who are not some close variant of you and your pals.

Seriously? Maybe the interactions just make him happy?

Absolutely seriously. The solution to a team member not fitting into your extra-cirricular-but-also-work clique is not tweaking your clique a little so that maybe it's a little less off-putting to the new person. It's being more mindful of the effect your clique has on others that aren't in it and maintaining a better separation between your clique and your professional life.

He should probably not. If it works for the majority of the team (which from the grandparent comments seems it does), the impetus is on candidates to fit in existing culture, not the culture to change to fit candidates.

Most effective teams are usually ones with least communication impedance. The less you have to judge your words and go through diplomacy/"re-examination" dance in routine conversations, the more time you have to do your job. That's the reason "team fit/culture fit" is such an important criteria when hiring people.

impetus

Maybe you mean onus? And no, it isn't because that's exactly the sort of thinking that keeps the field as non-diverse and exclusionary as it is. What you're describing isn't some sort of property of an effective team. It's one of a hostile workplace.

That's where we disagree. All effective teams are exclusionary; I've never seen an effective team chosen by lottery tickets. And effective intra-team communication is their most defining trait. In my experience, so long as diversity does not impede communication, it is a neutral trait (neither positive nor negative correlation).

Not having a discriminatory environment is not the same as 'chosen by lottery ticket'. And for certain classes, having it is against the law no matter whether you feel it's neutral or chaotic or whatnot.

My goal wasn't to bolster a "fruitful professional relationship". She probably wouldn't have been hired if that was not the case. She excels at her work and there are no HR problems. Article focused on women feeling anti-social in the workplace. I don't think it implied being anti-social will put you in a rut. It will however deter future generations. Goal of the 'merger' was not to put her on a scale and see if she measures up to be in our "in-group". The goal was to get to know our new employee. That being said, it was clear that there is a culture divide and while the relationship is fruitful, it's not as fruitful as it could be.

I think this comment may give us a lot of insight into why there aren't more women in tech...

> There is a real concern, and to be honest I don't totally think invalid, that many men don't want to be perceived in any way as doing something that could be construed (or misconstrued) as harassment.

This is very real. Why complicate things if I can be more relaxed and free talking to my male colleagues? They will even tolerate childish jokes I'd never do in front of any women (and as we all know, some people did and lost their jobs because of that). No, thank you.

I see this not as a consequence of the #metoo movement and more of a consequence of the lack of social intelligence & skills education. Because it IS entirely possible to befriend a women and not come across creepy, regardless of your physical appearance.

As the author mentioned, girls tend to "engage in more prosocial behaviors" than boys. This means teenage and college-age men - especially those who gravitate towards fields of study that are "perceived to be anti-social" - may come across as socially awkward in their interactions. And while their interactions may be entirely innocent, that awkwardness can be interpreted as "creepy" by some.

IMHO, one viable solution to this is to add and strengthen social and emotional intelligence education in our schools. And perhaps, offer workshops for parents as well. Many schools are already beginning to do this. We just need more of it - and to continue it all the way through higher education.

Because it IS entirely possible to befriend a women and not come across creepy, regardless of your physical appearance.

This is very highly dependent on perceived relative status. I remember just standing in an entryway literally doing and saying absolutely nothing, watching a woman melt down into delusion and accuse me of being a creeper. If you can be mistaken to be a homeless person, it's a lot more likely. If you dress well in an expensive suit, you're immune. Heck, you're a bit over-immune.

Very true. And there are cultural and ethnic biases to this too.

I still see people who are able to bridge these divides and still establish rapports, if not acquaintanceships.

Friendships/acquaintanceships are also two-way streets. Some people will have a very difficult time forming such bonds, no matter how socially intelligent the other party is, regardless of gender.

> Because it IS entirely possible to befriend a women and not come across creepy, regardless of your physical appearance.

This depends on a lot more than your social abilities such your the way you look and your social status, none of which can be changed easily.

If you are referring to ethnicity, than yes, I definitely agree. If you are referring to your clothes, then yes, there are definitely cultural biases (e.g. reactions to burkas).

With that said, I still do see some people (albeit rarely) still find a way to bridge the gap using what seems like infinite patience and grace on their part (which I would say are part of social intelligence).

But even then, there are people who will always allow their implicit biases come to the surface, no matter how graceful you are.

I'm not quiete sure what you're suggesting, sorry. I think there is a distinction between people who are very attractive and very unattractive. If a very attractive person does something stupid -- like getting hella drunk and asking a random stranger out -- people laugh and it's a fun memory. If an unattractive person does the exact same thing it's creepy. I think that's just a fact of life for me, I also don't care how much people here will tell me this is not true, I have seen consistently that the probability of attractive people being labelled "creepy" is significantly less than unattractive people.

It is also true that some people are really adept at social skills maybe due to experience or maybe due to innate, genetic factors. Some people are really fun and fascinating to talk to. Even nerdy, unattractive people! Like, sometimes I get to know people whose only passion in life is mathematics and they're generally very unattractive but they are extremely fun to talk to. I just wanna be around then and listen to their jokes. But some people are not like that, and this makes social interactions inherently harder for them.

I wasn't thinking of cultural biases (I'm mostly thinking of Bay Area cultural context since this is the one I know but I'm assuming it's pretty much the same in most Western cultures) but I guess you can say something about that too. My main point is: talkign to women is extremely easy for some people, and the hardest thing in the world for other. When you simply can't talk to anyone comfortably in non-work context, it's almost impossible to make friends with them. I honestly do not know how to properly make women friends and I'd much rather not make women friends than make them and myself uncomfortable which for me disproves the whole article.

I see what you mean. Yea, I hear you. There've been studies showing how attractiveness can shape the perceptions and behaviors of others, so unfortunately, what you're experiencing seems to be baked into the behavior of many people. I like to believe that not everyone is like this, but I'm not going to lie and say this doesn't happen...

With that said, I do think there are some situations where physical attractiveness is much less of a barrier. I've seen some friendships grow from interactions on Discord for Pokemon Go, for instance. Those people may interact in person pretty rarely, but seem to have pretty deep discussions online. Same could be said for other online communities, of course.

While this may be a contributor now, I really doubt this is the main reason why men in tech don't talk to women more at school or work. I'd guess it has more to do with the fact that there are usually fewer overlapping interests and experiences between men and women than there are between men and men and many guys in tech have a hard time socially to start with, so it's just easier for guys to hang out with other guys (as I'm sure it is easier for women to relate more with other women).

Also, a lot of men use certain body language and tone when they talk to other men that just may not be appropriate when talking to most women (of course there are exceptions). As one example, at least the area I work in, guys are constantly challenging each others egos. If you grew up as a guy, this is totally normal treatment for our culture, if not welcome treatment. I've heard of at least a few stories where a bunch of guys tried to treat a female colleague like one of the guys in this fashion and it usually turns out very poorly.

In my previous job, a women moved from a different country to join our group. We had common mutual interestss, we talked often, had a couple of drinks and dinner once. I did the same thing with a male coworker. However, the relationship with a woman is always going to be a little different, especially if your both single. After a couple of weeks I asked her if she was interested in dating.

She said it was not a good idea as we were coworkers, and thinking about it I fully agreed and immediately backed of, tried to do the professional thing and did not ask her to join me for coffee or dinner anymore. It was only later that I realized that this was also not what she wanted - she was in a new country, didn't know anyone, and now she kind of lost one of the coworkers that she did have a good (friendly) connection with.

It was only about half a year later, after we were both in a relationship with different people, that we reconnected as friends, and we still speak occasionally today after we moved to new jobs.

I guess the point of this post is to say, it is more complicated to be friends with someone of the opposite gender than to be friends with someone of the same gender.

I'm in full agreement with you here.

This, plus seeing some of the "social media star women engineers" on twitter calling out the "White dudes" on some guys just for trying to have conversations with them.

This #MeToo movement gave power to a minority of women that know how to use it in their political advantage, while creating a bigger separation between women and men in general.

Having many social interactions can be a competitive disadvantage:

"Army scientists recently found that the best, high-performing cybersecurity teams have relatively few interactions with their team-members and team captain."

https://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?article=3209

Thanks for posting this, a refreshing perspective, on which I couldn't agree more. I founded and operate a software startup, and have > 20 years of semiconductor manufacturing and software development experience. As a very extroverted male, when I meet new people they almost always show genuine surprise when discovering what I do for a living. It’s a fact: there’s a social bias in tech. Personally, I can’t stand the term nerd, or anything like it - it’s derogatory to me, making it appear there is something lacking socially. Thanks for the positive advice here, I am already practicing a lot of it in my daily work life. And you’ve given me a couple more things to add to that practice.

Total aside, but where did her "baggy-eyed programmer in a dark cave with Red Bull or a unintelligible savant who can’t get a date" picture come from? Know Your Meme just says "unknown".

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/9L-mUL4tDVCe322V-fYpUHbQxP...

Was it a staged stock photo, or was it just some guy? If the latter, I wonder how he'd feel about his role in her article?

Here is the politically incorrect view, most people at the high end of the IQ are men. Like it or not, nature is not egalitarian. Why is this so f*ing complicated? Programming as a profession roughly falls under the high IQ spectrum. Ok, now some of you egalitarian nuts reading this _will_ interpret what I wrote as discriminatory, _waits for the backlash_

source?

poke111, I looked at your other posts and I belive you really needn't be convinced with a source as such.( if by source you meant a research paper) I noticed that you have already figured out that there differences in IQ among races. Anyway - my 'source' is my observation over the years, the smartest people that I'm aware of, both among developers or otherwise are disproportionately male. As a corollary some dumbest people are also disproportionately male. Never in my circle of acquaintances have I seen women being discriminated solely based on their gender. Infact I have on occasions seen a clear discrimination against men. I did do a quick search to see if there were research papers on the subject, I could not find it. The few that I could find did not show significant differences. Now ofcourse the broader question to ask is, do we take main stream science at it's word always, ? No, is my answer. A large proportion of mainstream science is biased and rigged. I have heard/read that any research paper that shows difference in IQ among genders or race is unlikely to be published by journals.

I'm not fond of talking about how much "experience" I have so I've made this throwaway. I've been programming for most of my adult life. I've worked on every level of the tech stack from writing byte code for CPUs by hand to front end web development. In my college classes I helped many people survive by offering advice on tooling, implementation, and even sometimes direct one on one tutoring. I would never say I know everything about software development but I've had a lot of practice and I know how to find out how to do anything and I can teach and or exercise that same skill to anyone.

Unfortunately though I am what this author would call "a baggy-eyed programmer in a dark cave with Red Bull or a unintelligible savant who can’t get a date."

I'm extremely nervous in social situations to the point where I don't enjoy ordering something different from restaurants I've already been to for fear that the person behind the counter will ask me to clarify something and I won't know what to do. I've been getting much better at talking to people and I'm usually extroverted when I'm around people I've already met.

As for what the article asks as a solution, as many point out, this is very difficult.

> [If you’re a dude and you’re reading this article] Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy.

I'd consider the engineers I work with to all be my friends and that's only because I work with them on a day to day basis and I had time to acclimate to them.

The women who I've met university however did not pan out this way. I have many male friends. Many of whom have either noticed me, or who I have noticed, have terminals open and have been vigorously typing during a lecture. Whenever I see this I make a point to lean over and ask "what editor do you use?", "what class is this for?", "that's cool! Do you have any side project that you do outside of school".

I've made some very good friends by doing this but women for the most part are creeped out. It's understandable. I'm a weird looking dude with a 12 year old thinkpad that sports stickers from OSH Park and I'm likely going to be talking to people who I already know about anime or something else equally as strange.

One thing that has never happened to me, and that I've never seen happen anywhere, was see a women lean over and do what I have just described.

Unfortunately just due to the nature of the possible sample size (<20% of my degree track's population) this may just be a coincidence.

I love teaching and I want to get better at making friends. It's just very difficult for me, and the many others like me, to be the one to reach out. I think it would generally be positive if encouraged women to try and ask "what editor are you using?"

I'd definitely go to meetups, talk shop, work on projects, etc with someone else in the NYC area. I've got a lot I can teach and much more that we could learn together. I just don't know how to make that happen. Facilitating an environment where that could happen is probably the best bet if this author is correct imo.

An aside, but I would absolutely want to approach someone with a 12 year old thinkpad and ask what the internals are like, how the keyboard is holding up, which model you chose and why, etc.

Up till the middle of the article the arguments could be made either way (if we were somehow in a parallel universe and 75% of the CS workforce were females).

The part that got me thinking was whether CS is less social compared to other industries and careers.

I think that is the perception and reality. If by social we mean interaction with other human beings than a lot of the interaction we do is between a human and a computer. Not human to human. Of course there are lots of exceptions but expectations are there as well. The expectation that you are solving a problem as a group or by yourself.

Even in a number of CS programs you can't work together on problems. We have programs that scan your homework to see if you "cheated". Other business classes I took though regularly focused on group projects early on. CS early on is about learning to code and interacting with computers.

Thoughts about picture "The APMs at a social event in Napa"?

The lady is kind of left out. Not sure if it's american hover-hand culture, but to me it looks one of the problems.

Pretend you're a woman and then read the comments on this post. That makes it pretty obvious that one of the reasons women have a hard time feeling welcome in tech is because men don't listen to or empathize with them when they speak about their opinions or perspectives.

I've been browsing this thread for about 45 minutes. Not a single comment is rude, most of the comments are trying to debate about the issue.

If you post a submission on a forum and expect everyone to blindly agree with you or you else you consider it as "hate", then the problem is perhaps with you.

You must have missed all the comments of men complaining that they can't be friendly to women because they're an unattractive man. Not sure where you got the word "hate" from. I'm not saying anything about hate.

You must have missed all the comments of men complaining that they can't be friendly to women because they're an unattractive man.

I've missed them. Can you aggregate links? I honestly find this interesting. (You can "cheat" this using the reply links.)

CMD+F unatt

I'm not gonna do your work for you.

I see. You, "won't do labor." Most of the time I see the phrase, it's not from good people. It's not like you can CMD-F a sentiment.

So, I just tried it, and I found exactly one match for "unatt" that fit the sentiment discussed from the 1st person. I only found one person who said he, personally, couldn't be friendly to women because he is unattractive. The rest are talking about people in general, and aren't necessarily attached to the ability to be friendly. From what I saw, the issue of being friendly with women is more attached to the problems of risk, and this risk is correlated with relative attractiveness.

Most of these commenters don't appear to be whining about their situation, but rather replying to the question of why men in tech positions don't try to befriend more women. Their answer is that they're concerned about the optics of trying to initiate the friendship.

And by unattractive, they don't necessarily mean "ugly" but rather geeky, asocial, with niche interests, no fashion sense, little in common with most women, etc. It can be the way they carry themselves, their posture, the way they walk, the sound of their voice, stuttering, lack of vocal control... For someone like that with poor social skills and a lot of anxiety, it's not at all uncommon for a woman to misconstrue their efforts at friendship as a romantic overture or worse. It can also just be shyness due to inexperience interacting with women.

This is not necessarily the fault of the women; they likely do receive a lot of uncomfortable romantic overtures from socially awkward people like this. The commenters aren't placing blame on anyone, but describing the reality of their situation.

Some of the commenters have a rather rude and selfish attitude about it, but this is a genuine issue for a lot of men and explains part of the reason why some women in CS may feel isolated. If anything, I think people should try to have more empathy for this particular predicament, so that men and women can hopefully become more comfortable fostering professional and platonic relationships in the workplace.

And by unattractive, they don't necessarily mean "ugly" but rather geeky, asocial, with niche interests, no fashion sense, little in common with most women, etc

Young men and women in their 20's usually don't have a very good self awareness of their own inherent attractiveness. There's that which Iain M. Banks termed, "the elegance of the newly matured." By that, I mean something which is natural, and of the natural world and natural beauty. That cat over there might have a slightly squished face and a weird toe, but hell, it's still a cat. You don't have to have much in common with women/men. Dress neatly and be well groomed. Genuinely have fun with something and genuinely be yourself. Do socialize, but don't limit yourself by thinking that bros or sociopaths need to rule your life. Do try dancing and see if you genuinely have fun with that. If you do, then know that it's very potent, but you have to be in the moment to let the real magic happen. Actually, that last part applies to everything else as well.

Most 20-somethings, males and females, are too mired in their preconceptions and their contention in the social hierarchy competition to have a full appreciation of their own natural beauty. (And often, each other's.)

That is easier said than done for people who have been struggling with social isolation, ostracization, loneliness, mockery, anxiety, awkwardness, zero self-esteem, an inability to relate, and little or no contact with the opposite sex for their entire lives. They don't know how to dress in a fashionable or appealing way. They probably don't know proper grooming beyond the basics. And even if they were to improve their physical appearance, many will likely still have a lot of difficulty carrying out normal social interactions (in the minds of others), especially with the opposite sex.

You say "genuinely be yourself", but many people are unable to be themselves without unintentionally and unknowingly creating aversion and discomfort in others.

Of course many of these people can and do improve themselves and gain a lot more confidence, but the reality is that in tech careers, they exist in large numbers and will continue to exist. Many will have experienced situations where a woman feels uncomfortable or threatened despite purely good and platonic/professional intentions. Many will choose to limit all interactions with women to a minimum as a result of this, if for no other reason than instinctive and learned fear.

And on the flip side, many women will probably have experienced romantic/sexual advances, stalking, and harassing behavior from awkward people like this (perhaps sometimes from people who don't realize they're coming across that way and sometimes from people who know exactly what they're doing), so they've been conditioned to have this reaction as well.

This is not to put blame on either party, but just to describe the reality of the situation and one of the potential reasons why women may feel less connected to their coworkers at such jobs. Many women also struggle with anxiety, awkwardness, isolation, and the other issues listed, but on average it tends to be less common and less severe than for men, especially in CS-type fields (as the article describes).

That would also have been me, to some extent. Many things that are worth doing have an element of challenge. Easier said than done.

They don't know how to dress in a fashionable or appealing way. They probably don't know proper grooming beyond the basics.

Those are big ones, and they are fairly easily fixed if you have the resources of a white collar worker. Isn't that what happens in those 80's movies? The awkward one gets cleaned up and turns out to be a hottie?

You say "genuinely be yourself", but many people are unable to be themselves without unintentionally and unknowingly creating aversion and discomfort in others.

This, too goes for just about everyone, to some extent. Dancing or some other kind of physical activity can help. The point isn't to let all of your guts spill out. The point is to get you out of yourself, without being artificially impaired. Being artificially impaired actually never actually helped me one iota. Not even Ecstasy, at least not in the long run. In terms of good relations between men and women, I think it largely hurts on US campuses.

Many women also struggle with anxiety, awkwardness, isolation, and the other issues listed

I dated one for most of a decade and asked her to marry me. She said no. Didn't end well. I would say, that finding a partner who is well adjusted pretty much trumps every other concern. The first well adjusted partner who you'd trust to save your life: I'd say one should marry her/him.

One last thing I'd say: Don't be a nihilist. I'm an atheist, but I would also say that I have a purpose driven life. Go and see enough of the world, so you know how both ugly and beautiful it can be -- until it brings you to tears. Then you will be able to find and live for some meaningful goal. Getting past nihilism can be a huge leg up on finding good relationships. (College aged women can sometimes mistake nihilism for depth, but for me, I was too psychically beat up to "benefit" from that.)

Are you saying that the men here aren't being empathetic because they feel like when they talk to women they get called creepy and therefore don't want to? Please, be specific.

Otherwise it just sounds like the pot calling the kettle black.

Specifically, dismissive comments full of excuses like "I'm unattractive and women aren't nice to me" are lacking empathy.

It is not dismissive if it's true.

That's not how that works.

^ This comment is me being dismissive of you, and it's also true.

You have the right to be dismissive, but you don't have the right of proving me wrong without arguing against my point with a coherent argument.

You are basically saying that women have never treated men differently based on their attractiveness, which is absurd.

> you don't have the right of proving me wrong without arguing against my point

Did you have a point? I missed it. The closest thing I've seen to you making a point in this thread was when you said "the problem is perhaps with you".

> You are basically saying that women have never treated men differently based on their attractiveness

That's not what I'm saying. But I'm tired of repeating myself, so please re-read my previous comments.

They didn't say rude, they mentioned empathy.

Julia Enthoven shared her experience as a Woman in tech, and this thread is filled with nitpicking, asking for sources, disagreement, alternate theories, debates, etc.

There is no empathy here. So I'll start:

Good for her for sharing her thoughts and experiences. It's a tough topic to talk about, and as we see here and elsewhere, people will immediately pick apart everything you say. Individual experiences like these are useful to read about for people like me who recognize that there is a problem but don't really know what to do about it. So thank you, Julia. I'm sorry it is such a difficult topic, but I hope you keep talking about this and that others are encouraged to do so as well.

Another way to look at the comments is to look at the audience. HackerNews readers are typically hard problem solvers. They discuss theories and solutions, and can't be afraid of avoiding potential causes because they make people uncomfortable.

So while your post has empathy, it doesn't really push the solution-finding process forward in the way that other, more active (vs passive), posts do.

You can't be sure you're offering a solution to the right problem if you haven't taken the time to empathize with what the problem is first.

And passive empathy without action is pointless. How much data needs to be gathered before an action becomes clear? Should we all not take any action until then?

I haven't seen any actions recommended. Just people nitpicking everything they think is wrong with a woman's opinion.

Because the actions that would be obvious outcomes of the identified problems are pointless to suggest, they will never happen.

For example, a key issue identified in this discussion is the perceived career risk of being friends with women at work. Stories have been shared about harmless comments that came back to bite innocent men years later, or being described as creepy, and of course, we've all seen the string of high profile men losing their jobs based on mere tweets.

An obvious action that could address this is for women to stop collectively insisting that they never lie and that they should be able to shoot down the career of any man based on nothing more than a complaint to HR. But there is no sign this will happen, why would people give up such power.

What you're calling empathy can be rephrased as "you go girl!"

Not sure I'd call that empathy.

That attitude doesn't help the cause of women in tech. It makes things worse.

Machines don't have empathy. They do not care about feelings. Code is harsh. So are professional code reviewers. Therefore if you're a programmer, you will in fact spend a lot of time dealing with nitpicking issues, finding sources for claims you make, debating alternative theories and so on.

If women can't even do that in debates they start then they should give up in being programmers. They won't make it and they won't get along with their colleagues.

I don't think they are incapable of such things, as I always get the impression posts like this one ("why can't you just respect her opinion") are actually written by men. But her compiler won't give her opinions automatic respect. Why should anyone else?

Wow, please get that toxic attitude out of tech.

There are lots of posts of this nature, but there's also many, many posts that give the other side of the story -- explaining why young men in this field don't engage with women.

So, I think there is a good deal of empathy here. We understand that women feel excluded and have offered insight into why they may be excluded, which in turn can help society figure out how to help the next generation overcome this.

>this thread is filled with nitpicking, asking for sources, disagreement, alternate theories, debates, etc.

Sounds fairly typical for a Hacker News thread on any topic.

> men don't listen to or empathize with them when they speak about their opinions or perspectives.

The comments I've seen are on par with comments on other posts where the author was male. The fact that someone disagrees with the cause of some statistical result is not the same as not listening.

I'm not talking about the comments that disagree with the hypothesis in the article. I disagree with it too. There's no statistical result being discussed in the article, but people are dismissing the author's opinion (saying things like she must be an outlier) and getting defensive about men's behavior (saying they have their reasons for how they act, like being unattractive).

I would appreciate a bulleted list as to why my 5,5 mixed race frame is somehow unequal in engaging my coworker as another's 6,3 white mans. If it could completely explain how my careful quests for affection were dismissed, regarded as unwanted then maybe I would have more sympathy with direct, out of hand dismissals.

Seems to me like a lot of people in this comment section read the article before responding? One of the things I like about HN is that the commenters more respond to the content of the article rather than the headline.

They read the article and then promptly dismissed it as a woman who doesn't know what she's talking about. I don't agree with the article, but I think we're too quick to dismiss the author's perspective and get defensive.

> Pretend you're a woman and then read the comments on this post.

To carry your point a couple steps further, HN demonstrates the huge gender disparity in tech. Are there any women in this discussion? Even the parent assumes the reader is male, with good reason.

Most of the discussion is complaints about how hard it is for the commenter because of #metoo and other actions against sexual harassment and discrimination, and then other people agreeing. Imagine how different it would be if half the commenters were women.

Those voices are not only missing from HN, but probably from your workplace and classroom as well.

So far one person has self identified as female, and 2 or 3 commenters have provided anecdotes from their female SO.

HackerNews isn't really a place to wave a empathy stick at. This is a place where years of work on startups and concepts come to die. If you came to find yes men, this is sadly the wrong place. Having said that, there are an unusual lot of people empathizing and acknowledging the issue that women are more alienated and that we should fix that. There is a severe lack of empathy on the other side though that cannot seem to fathom why men heed cautionary tales and choose not to risk their career over fighting for equity.

But also maybe think from the perspective of men when all throughout your life all your attempts to socialize with women were quickly labelled as "creepy" and it's very easy and comforting to ignore socializing with them. I would never discriminate against a women coworker, I do perfectly fine communicating with my female coworkers professionally, and I cannot see anything ethically wrong with what I'm doing. But it's simply too hard to properly socialize with women. I don't get mad at people when they don't learn something I find fascinating like automated theorem proving, and it drives me crazy when my friends get mad at me for not learning how to socialize with women. It really is not the end of the world.

It's a problem for HN if the threads fill up with disgruntled comments, but it doesn't say much about the world at large, because of sample bias. People are more motivated to comment if they feel strongly about something, especially strongly negatively. Here that means they've self-selected for the quality you're talking about.

Fortunately we're also getting comments from men who enjoy talking to women at work (shock!) and don't have an ideology about it. Those comments take longer to appear because they only emerge as a reaction to the first kind of comment. Why would you bother to post such a thing unless some other comment denied it?

Why doesn't she try empathizing with men before basically telling us that it's our problem and that we need to change? If women are so much more "pro-social" than men, maybe they need to use their skills to fix the problem, instead of "anti-social" men going and trying to fix the problem.

> Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy.

As an unattractive computer nerd, I've been regularly reminded my entire life that I am creepy. Skipping.

Dont give up, learn the basics of human interactions and get interested in people, your life will change.

I think it's a bit unfair to assume that people who are considered creepy must not know basic human interactions. A lot of people's initial opinion of you is guided subconsciously by how attractive you are. It's foolish to believe that looks don't play a huge role.

A lot of the attractiveness that they focus on isn't necessarily unchangeable, though.

Many people can significantly improve the first impression they make by having a nice haircut that fits your head shape and clothes that fit your body shape well, match each other well, and aren't out of place for the current season.

So instead of "befriend her", you're suggesting "get new clothes and a nice haircut and then befriend her"? No thanks--I have enough friends.

I'm suggesting that people who feel like others unfairly judge them as creepy and don't like it use the modifiable aspects of their physical appearance to change how people see them.

Apparently you don't care if you are perceived as creepy, which is fine, but other people do care and would be interested in doing something about it.

Science says creepiness is more about how well you can follow social norms, not about how attractive you are. https://dacemirror.sci-hub.tw/journal-article/189a70c9d3a2a3...

People who do that get regularly called creepy for just trying to talk to women. You're telling someone not to give up on the very thing getting them called out as "a creep".

Hell in some countries, you get called creepy for doing that for trying to befriend anyone outside of very specific social situations. When I was in Stockholm, approaching strangers and striking up a conversation was seen as generally rude.

Creepiness just means that you don't follow social norms so people aren't sure if you're a threat or not. Learning social norms will help. It's science: https://dacemirror.sci-hub.tw/journal-article/189a70c9d3a2a3...

Advice like this is similar to telling a depressed person to just be happier.

https://i.huffpost.com/gen/2271298/thumbs/o-ROBOT-HUGS-570.j...

The treatment social anxiety is often more exposure. Nothing is worse than just avoiding the things that give you anxiety.

Speaking from personal experience, this advice isn't as bad as the votes and replies are making it look.

I spent most of my time as a kid screwing around with computers and other whatsits, so I was really withdrawn and socially awkward after high school, and gave off the kind of accidental creeper aura that people here are talking about. (A mix of shyness, over-sharing, nonexistent small talk, and bad body language.)

Then I took a break from the tech industry for a while and ended up getting a job as a climbing instructor. It was an amazing change in a short period of time. I learned how to socialize quickly and easily with people I'd never met before, went out for beers, learned how to show people that they could trust me with their safety or their kid's safety really fast (because kids' birthday parties were a big revenue stream...).

Any kind of job or hobby that requires you to be social to do well at it should work just fine. (Retail and food service don't count.)

I'm sure there are people who are so naturally awkward that this is useless advice, but I suspect there are far more people who could benefit from spending more time around people than they do around electronics.

Organized roleplaying campaigns could be a good social hobby that is fun for the nerd brain, too.

I dont mind HN mob downvotes, I hope it helped OP

Some time ago we moved into a new office and I placed myself next to the only girl in our tean. Shortly after I felt a little creepy but she actually seemed to appreciate it, also because she mostly got non-technical tasks. So I also thought some technical collaboration would be possible, in fact we once talked about that.

Anyways, a week later the rest of our team moved in, placing themselves at the other end of the room from where we were sitting. So the other day my boss approached me and said: hey look, why are you sitting here? Move to us. Yay, now I'm sitting in the corner and I can talk to nobody!

Long story short, WTF. Other people make sure you feel creepy, if don't do already.

I know the feeling.

Something society doesn't accept that attraction plays a huge role in social development at a young age. An "ugly" person is not likely to develop the experience needed to feel comfortable befriending a member of the opposite sex at a young age. The other person can't help but be uncomfortable with the idea that you might be romantically interested in them.

It gets better with age though. I've found that telling women I'm married makes them much, much more friendly and engaging.

I feel like I am writing something ridiculous, but it's not uncommon for an unmarried woman to wear a wedding band to preempt advances by men. Could we have a world where unmarried men who are concerned about being perceived as making an advance will wear a wedding band to send a signal that they are not interested in the woman they are talking to? (obviously some/many married men make inappropriate advances but perhaps this helps somewhat?)

There are also female computer nerds that are not conventionally attractive. It might be worth trying to make friends with someone less intimidating.

I have a talented, and wonderful, female dev on my team.

One thing though:. She has described to me some of the male coders as being "creepers".

When I asked for specifics, she couldn't provide them. She simply stated it was a "feeling".

The one commonality I found with the creepers is that they are pretty clearly below average in looks. The question is whether this is a correlation or a casual factor.

But definitely challenged her to try to focus on actions rather than "vibes".

It's funny how that works. I heard one man say to a woman that he didn't schedule a meeting for a particular time because he saw that she had a conflicting meeting.

Later that same woman described (to another woman) that the man had been "creeping on her calendar". If it weren't for society's deference to women's feelings, that would probably be read as a hostile comment.

There's definitely a bit of a double standard here. I overhear comments like this fairly regularly. It's just normal and accepted behavior. (I wouldn't go as far as to say society generally has "deference to women's feelings", though.)

A sizable fraction of restraining orders are granted on women's feelings. And look at conversations around the social relations of men and women - women have rights and men have responsibilities. Women get to abort fetuses and unilaterally give children up for adoption, men get locked up if they dont pay child support.

If you're a man go into public with a woman and get her to cry. Measure how long it takes until someone angrily asks you "what did you do".

Haha crying is a great emotional hack. Most people are helplessly vulnerable to it. Over the weekend I was swimming with the family. We hadn't seen any neighbors all day. My brother threw his son into the pool, surprising him enough that he started crying. In 2 seconds, multiple neighbors were out on their lanai, staring suspiciously at the carnage down at the pool.

I don't know why you're downvoted. My 4 year old niece cries all the time if she thinks it will help her get her way. The crying stops on a dime as soon as she realizes it isn't working.

The downvotes, now mostly corrected, were probably from people who don't spend much time around children. When they hear crying, it must be that of an adult woman [0]. Therefore it signifies something very important. Or maybe their brains are just easily hacked. Few people want to consider that latter possibility.

[0] adult men also cry, but when they do so in public it is usually interpreted in radically different fashion...

Isn't checking attendees' schedules for conflicts standard procedure when scheduling meetings?

It's standard procedure but also a transgression against this woman if a man does it and isn't sufficiently attractive.

Once I was searching for the definition of a slang word and ended up on a teen forum.

One question there was along the line "What would you do if a boy you don't know came next to you and said you are pretty". One answer was: "If he was cute I would make out with him, if not I would yell: Get lost freak".

There is definitely something else going on in the background:

https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496

I frankly found this shocking and absolutely disgusting.

Be attractive. Don't be unattractive. Your job now depends on it. Unless you work 100% remote and don't use video chat.

"Incels" are a self-identified group that don't represent all sexually frustrated men, and "What are you going to do about it?" can have answers besides "root them out and fire them".

Not in this case. To some women, all 'creepy' men are potential rapists and now, thanks to the media, potential terrorists too. Do you really think women are going to 'feel safe' in their working environment if there is even one man there who is 'creepy'?

Thanks for reminding me why I don't Twitter, I guess. That thread is an atrocity from top to bottom. Previously I had sort of admired Pao, in a certain way.

There was a study done on creepiness awhile back. Pretty interesting read: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.20...

Interesting that creepiness is associated so strongly with non-normative behavior.

I think some of "creepy" is lack of responsiveness to social cues. Creeps are men whom you don't trust to take "no" for an answer and men whom you don't trust will ask in the first place instead of just taking (ogling, touching, rape).

There are geeks and bros and attractive and unattractive men in both columns; but geeks who aren't good at decoding and reacting appropriately to subtle social cues tend to trigger this reaction more often than bros whose social facility masks an underlying lack of respect for bodily and emotional autonomy.

One way to possibly look at this is that she opened up to you because she felt you might understand, to her you responded sceptically and out of professional self-interest she downplayed the whole thing. That doesn’t mean those guys are necessarily creepers but that you’ve definitely lost her trust.

What would you suggest a proper response is... "yeah, I know!"? To me, asking "what do you mean?" is a perfectly valid response to someone openly name calling people you know.

I presume from the general description the woman in question is a report so this is less gossip and more opening up to a manager.

You’re dealing with another person sharing something that is probably emotionally difficult for them to say. I’d suggest a subtler approach than immediately busting in with the evidence requests. It’s a slower process which is neither immediately believing or disbelieving the accusation but taking it seriously. Being open to the possibility and seeing where it leads rather than shutting things down because it’s uncomfortable. Because presumably the woman is also someone you know that you wouldn’t want to be hurt as well.

You're saying she found it emotionally difficult to describe her coworkers as "creepy"? I don't think so.

I'd say a proper response is one that conveys empathy and validation of her feelings. Grilling her for specifics could feel threatening, but showing concern or curiosity about her feelings could make her feel safe enough to open up. Possible things that could be part of a proper response: "Oh, yeah, I've noticed a few of the guys are unaware of social cues. Has anyone done anything that felt threatening?", "Yeah, sometimes guys don't realize how they come off. I'm sorry they've made you feel that way.", body language that is non-threatening like sitting down, relaxing your shoulders, standing far enough away, facial expressions that reflect the feelings she's expressing to you.

No, I haven't lost her trust, nor was my response skeptical. In fact, she recognized my purpose was not to doubt her but to correct any behaviors the men had that was making her and other females uncomfortable.

But thanks for assuming.

Wow, that's seriously unprofessional (of her).

The one commonality I found with the creepers is that they are pretty clearly below average in looks. The question is whether this is a correlation or a casual factor.

It's both. There was, in our ancestor's state-of-nature, a very high social and reproductive opportunity cost associated with the worst possible actions of a "below-par" male. This would have been true even before the advent of language. Furthermore, note that the opposite of the above is true with an "above-par" male. I think this explains a lot of female behavior with respect to men who are more and less attractive.

Maybe this observation is more apt for dating interactions vs. coworker relationships but......intelligence seems to be VERY high on women's checklist after a certain age. Not to mention the stability/security that can be leveraged via trading on your intelligence.

Awkwardly, StreamBright and ninkendo are both right. My best advice about threading the needle is to concentrate on processes rather than goals.

Don't worry about befriending anyone; but recognise that you have a little leeway to make small-talk to any human before it becomes odd. Use it (with everyone) for practice at getting funnier and more charming. Have fun practicing, let results take care of themselves.

Something similar goes for becoming less "unattractive". Don't worry about your body shape, but learn to enjoy exercise (perhaps you do this already). Or with fashion and personal grooming, figure out what you like and so develop your personal style as you bathe and dress each day.

You're conflating attraction and friendship. Being creepy means that you seem to have unwelcome intentions. If you're saying that your attractiveness is the reason you've been told you're creepy, the reason for your creepiness is that your intentions are to attract someone, not to befriend them. Fix your intentions if you don't want to be creepy. And listen, I'm not saying you shouldn't want to attract someone, just that if another person isn't attracted to you, it's creepy to "befriend" them while hiding other desires. You've got two options in that case, 1) change your desires and genuinely appreciate them as a friend or aquaintence (it is possible, but takes a certain level of emotional maturity) or 2) Be straightforward and respectful about your desires, and then respect their boundaries if they're not interested realizing that no one is obligated to reciprocate anything.

There is no reason to assume GP was motivated by that intention, in whatever situation you're imagining. You do so from a position of privilege.

I'm not assuming anything about his intentions. I'm saying that to be labeled creepy literally means that someone is suspicious of your intentions. And the solution is to be clear about your intentions or, even better, your lack of intentions when they are unwelcome.

Your post literally says: "the reason for your creepiness is that your intentions are to attract someone". GP's post never refers to intentions or situations or behaviors or anything. You are castigating GP for intentions and behaviors that exist entirely in your imagination.

I qualified that statement by saying "If you're saying that your attractiveness is the reason you've been told you're creepy...", because if that's what he's saying, he's admitting his intentions and I don't have to assume. If he's not saying that, then my statement doesn't apply.

Your "statement" is hopelessly wrong even if GP is saying exactly that. You have failed at logic, probably because of your privilege. You cannot imagine being conventionally ugly (poor, unstylish, socially inept, etc.) enough that your every communication would be viewed with suspicion. GP informs us that GP is at least that conventionally ugly. If GP says "good morning" while maintaining eye contact and smiling slightly, GP is seen as creepy. You have not lived like that and cannot imagine it.

Next, you'll be claiming that those who suffer racism should cultivate less racial intentions.

For someone accusing me of making assumptions, you sure are making a lot of assumptions about me. You've made assumptions about;

* My privilege * My attractiveness * My style * My social skills * My life experiences * GP's actions * GP's experiences

Not having a woman be attracted to you is not systematic oppression, or even oppression at all. No one is entitled to the attention or affection of another. People are, however, entitled to be treated with dignity and respect regardless of their race or gender.

Anyway, you're an obvious troll. Your profile even says so. So I'm done with this conversation.

You're still arguing with your imagination. GP did not complain that women aren't attracted. GP complained that because GP is unattractive, GP is destined always to be "creepy", which presumably entails a variety of social difficulties. Why don't you care about those difficulties? I really don't know! Privilege was merely the most charitable explanation. You're free to correct the misunderstanding. What you can't correct are the literal assumptions you typed about "intentions". We can read.

Any ethical person knows that no one is entitled to affection. No one has suggested otherwise.

As a nerd that grew up with nerd friends, I have seen firsthand how unsolicited social overtures may be cruelly rebuffed or punished.

When one of the consequences may be an uncomfortable conversation with the dean or with HR, it is completely unsurprising that male nerds will not make the first move socially. They have been trained to not do it.

Every last behavior that is rewarded as "flirting" from an attractive person is punished as "creepy" when it comes from an unattractive person. The best an ugly can hope for is to suppress their natural social grooming behaviors, and just be relentlessly neutral. It's much better than "creepy", as it still allows for a level of acquaintanceship that makes it possible to display non-physical qualities, such as a particularly well-developed skill, or a sense of humor.

"Go befriend a girl... it's not creepy." is something only a non-ugly person would think to say. Of course it's not creepy for them. Parent post is absolutely correct. If you're not pretty, it's creepy. If m'lady wants a friend, m'lady may approach on her own terms.

Have you decided that your looks are the reason, or been told? You may be assuming that it’s your looks, when it frankly isn’t. In my experience creepy usually means creepy, and creepy poeple lack insight... which is part of what makes them creepy. It might not be looks, but behavior, a sense of anger or discomfort, etc.

Women often have to go by their gut instinct with guys, because if they don’t it can end in them being very badly hurt. Any heuristic is likely to generate false positives. Someone who is very anxious or socially awkward may come across as dangerous simply because of the heightened emotional state and failure to respond to social cues. It may also be that there is a strong correlation between “socially awkward” and “unattractive” for obvious reasons.

So again, I wouldn’t assume that looks represent cause rather than correlation. For an analogy, it could be like someone who is afraid of dogs being disproportionately bitten by dogs who react to the fear that person has of being bitten.

It's sad to see so many people here saying that social situations, especially with women, induce so much fear. Here are some tips from a geek who was in that position, learned a few things, and now has slightly less crappy social skills:

* Stop objectifying people: 'Objectifying' is a kinda intimidating word, but the meaning is essential. Stop making people objects in your mental model of the world; stop making them characters who play a role in your private theatrical narrative of rejection (and whatever else you've lived through). That big scary monster who might reject you - that's the object. The real person has their own entire private universe, like you, of fears, desires, perspectives, priorities, needs, worries, and theatrical narratives. They haven't read your script, don't know their assigned part, and most importantly, don't want to play it - they want to be themselves! You and your interaction play a tiny role in their lives; the reason they respond in X way likely has little to do with you; they may be as scared as you are. Instead, be curious about them - who is this person completely distinct from you? There's a vast universe of emotion and experience you know nothing about - so much to learn! Give them plenty of space and assume nothing because you don't know shit; the variety is unfathomable; if they don't surprise you, you're doing it wrong. More importantly, step outside yourself and care. Grasp that they have a hard time too - this mortal coil sucks for everyone - and be compassionate about it. Genuine compassion is your greatest tool; it also turns your attention away from your fears and outward to others, and you also do a good deed. Humans crave it. (I'm not blaming you for objectifying; I know why; it's hard.)

* Be genuine about your emotions. That is, be honest. You're not hiding them nearly as well as you think; people have evolved and learned throughout their lives to pick up very subtle emotional cues, consciously and unconsciously. (It's a matter of survival for the organism - 'Will the one next to me kill me? Feed me? Parent my children?') And here's the trick: If you aren't honest with yourself about your emotions, then obviously you can't be honest with others. Too many males are raised to treat emotions like a crippled, angry dog they're forced to feed - great, you just kicked out the strongest leg of your little table of stability and capability. Your intellect is not nearly enough to compensate, but you probably noticed that by now; your emotions are actually your best friend and tool - amazingly powerful and they also provide stability if you take care of them. Be emotionally genuine and honest or you're lying to the other person (and maybe yourself); people don't like liars. That doesn't mean you have to act out on them (yell when angry) or announce them at every moment or that you shouldn't have some composure (be able to manage them), but be honest with yourself and don't pretend. Try this: 'I'm such a nerd! Talking to people terrifies me.' That's genuine, shows you can be trusted, and allows them to genuine.

* Pay close attention to their emotions. Ask yourself, 'what is their emotional affect[0] right now?' and also, 'what is their unsaid concern, what is their agenda?' Yes, it takes effort and concentration to do those things while also paying close attention to their words. That's called listening. And it also makes you shut up, stop interrupting, and again focus outward on them and not on your fears or the game/work you're obsessed with. When people see and feel you do it, they really appreciate it; it's like magic. And you'll be amazed what you learn from other people when you let them talk.

* Back way the f-k up and give people (emotional) space, lots of it, enough that they can go anywhere in their conversation and not meet any resistance from you (an uncomfortable look, an interjection, etc.). Enough so that they can develop an incomplete idea or pause without at all worrying that they'll lose the floor to you. Give them freedom; give them control. If you're like me, that's hard; bite your tongue, literally if you must. And that means that if you get the emotional cue that they don't want to talk right now, then swallow your fear and respect their completely legitimate wishes. Your fear, your insistence that they respond as you want, is about that object in your mind (see the first point above). That's on you, not them; they aren't there to serve your emotional needs. If you give them space when they want it, you'll find that they trust you when they are ready to talk. If you don't, then why would they want to come back?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_%28psychology%29

EDIT: Some minor edits

Or alternatively: Skip the females at workplace and focus on the job at hand.

Deleted comment

> Compared to almost any other industry, women are underrepresented in technology.

Except for the many industries where women dominate like:

Preschool and kindergarten education

Nursing

Accounting

Social Work

Psychology

Your quote agrees with you. Women are underrepresented in tech compared to other industries.

I think the point is there are only so many women to go around, so to have more women in tech we need to pull women out of fields where they are overrepresented like nursing, teaching etc.

Maximum diversity is not "100% women in every field". It's 50% women in every field. Women should be underrepresented relative to nursing, because they're vastly overrepresented in nursing.

Good point. If we feel we need to "fix" the number of women in CS, we also need to "fix" the number of women in nursing, accounting, education, etc.

Note the pay on those careers.

"Women's Careers" pay significantly less. And they're all 'emotional' and 'soft skill' jobs.

That's a problem.

Edit: So, at -3 currently. Is the -1's a "disagree" or "stfu"? Please state where I am wrong.

Why these jobs pay less? That is capitalism at work.

Tech jobs are now essential to maintain competitive edge and keep the big profits going at companies, and they want to bid up to get good talent. Even small barely surviving companies have to pay good $ to get developers etc. because of the market forces.

OTOH lets take a daycare teacher. They are being paid ultimately from the money average people have left over having worked, paid their tax, mortgage, bills, food etc, given it to another company who has paid their overheads and finally paid the teacher their salary. (Forgetting government subsidies - but still...) There is no way this can be a large amount of money (unless you have 1 teacher to 30 kids, but then there are safety issues).

The market is not a meritocracy.

Yes. I hope I didn't imply I like or condone the situation I described. I'm just the messenger.

Don't they pay about as much as the male dominated jobs?

brickmason, drywall installation, crane operator, roofer, etc

All of these jobs have 95%+ males. I can't imagine they pay very well.

That's genuinely a question, not trying to be smart. It seems to me like jobs on both ends of the spectrum might not pay the best.

Stonemason - $42,370 - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472022.htm

Drywall/Ceiling tile installer - $49,250 - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472081.htm

Crane and Tower Operators - $55,690 - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537021.htm

LPN - $45,030 - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/licensed-practical-and-li... !Requires licensure

Social Worker - $47,980 - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/community-and-social-service/social-... !Likely requires graduate degree

Preschool Teachers - $28,990 - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/presc...

Home Health Aides - $23,130 - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home-health-aides-and-per...

----------------------------

Long story short, the trades (AKA: jobs that primarily men do) requires a time of apprenticeship, then you can work. Whereas the "women majority" jobs all pay around 45-50k and they require advanced degrees or state licensure. The nonlicensed primarily-women based jobs pay around 20-30k.

So for women-dominated jobs, it's get a degree, get 20k more a year. No wonder women are getting more degrees!

(What's more, this would seem to indicate that class disparities might be increasing more for females than for males. Maybe this explains the vehemence of radicalized females.)

There's not really a huge variation in pay there. But all the same, why do you think we don't see discussion about striving for equality in these other male dominated positions?

You did leave out nursing.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/...

Interestingly, nursing salaries are very high in San Francisco - avg salary is $136,610 a year. This is for registered nurses.

Software developers make more money on average than nurses

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...

However, interestingly, in top paying cities, the BLS data (which this is based on) has them earning a bit less than registered nurses, though I'm not sure if this includes variable pay.

There are a lot of factors here that prevent an apples-to-apples comparison. Anyone can declare him or herself to be a software developer, whereas it is illegal to do this if you're a registered nurse without formal credentials (actually, take a look at most "top jobs" and you'll find software developer is somewhat rare in that it requires no formal credential). At the same time, people with advanced degrees in nursing typically earn more than registered nurses and don't show up in the stats, whereas people with grad degrees in STEM fields may hold the title "software developer".

Nursing is also a tough field, but I do think there is more job stability and less age discrimination.

Overall, there's plenty to recommend it. A programmer myself, I'd be very happy if my son or daughter expressed a greater interest in nursing than programming, though I certainly wouldn't discourage them in either case.

One thing that I always feel strange about here is that I don't consider software development to be as attractive as many people here do... that may not be a coincidence. The images in this essay may explain why - even the positive one, that shows a better than average breakdown at google, doesn't contain anyone near my age (how many people in that picture do you think need to leave by 5pm to pick their kids up from daycare?).

My life experience has taught the value of longevity in a career choice, and software has some really serious shortcomings.

>Invest in social events: It can take a lot of time to set up opportunities for your team to hang out , but casual socializing is awesome for the extroverts on your team and crucial for retention... and go out of your way to include everyone.

Going through this at work. The extroverts took over my department and now our (mandatory) team meetings have (mandatory) fun events that give extroverts time to brag about what they have going outside of work and give the extroverts an audience who can't refuse (the introverts who do the work). And it's awful for people who dislike forced socialization at work. And these are like 11 am meetings on Tuesday so it's dry and interrupts concentration workers.

But this article didn't seem very interesting - these points have been discussed before and it struck me as the bleats of an attractive-enough women who's upset that she has to put in effort and other people aren't giving her the attention she feels entitled to.

Say what you will about traditional corporate cultures, but things seem to work better for everyone when the decorum is universal, clear/well-documented, and free from empathetic demands.

You are correct.

> bleats of an attractive-enough women who's upset that she has to put in effort and other people aren't giving her the attention she feels entitled to

Between this personal attack and the rest of your gender-war comments, we've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Great article. Appreciate the point of view and I think all the advice is sound.

Agreed. not a perfect article but much better than most on the subject. Factually presented and yet it rings on an emotional level.

Nice theory. Sexism is still the most compelling reason though. What her mother told her was sexist. Most of her negative experiences can be categorized as sexist. The excuses about social stuff seems like bs coverings for general sexism that people try very hard to be in denial about. This is plainly obvious if you talk to women from other cultures who don't experience this stuff.

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