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Comment by brink | Hacker News Reader

Is there any evidence to show that men in general are working to keep women out of the tech sector? From what I've seen, any woman who wants to commit to learning and getting a job has been completely free to do so. For example; my sister, who's a software engineer because I got her into it years ago. And from what I've seen; nothing has stopped her. It just seems to me that women in general aren't interested in the field, and I'm not sure of the specific reason for it at this point.

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Here's a detailed survey of women in Silicon Valleys' experiences with sexual harassment from a couple years back: https://www.elephantinthevalley.com/ . And a more recent one focused specifically on women YC founders: https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on...

Yes. I suggest doing a google search for why there are so few women in tech; you will plenty of articles, including some that point to recent studies. For example:

https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/stanford-research-explains-...

It’s also interesting that your sister’s experience is reflective of the findings in various studies. Would your sister have pursued tech without your support?

I've worked in companies both in the mid west and in Silicon Valley. I think this culture is much more pervasive in the valley. In most other parts of the country where normal people work, women are accepted just as well as men. In fact, every company I worked for in the mid west had a reasonable amount of women, whereas the Silicon Valley companies had very few if not at all.

Looking at the public and complete data from Sweden we see that gender segregation is very universal human behavior. There more freedom a person have the more biased their choice is to groups that share similar traits to themselves.

A now few years old government study on gender segregation, they cited a older study that found that being in a minority makes a person less confident when faced with a challenged compared to being in a majority. Not massively so, but adding up every small and big challenges a person face in life while being a student, to finding a job, to being a professional for several years, and the results is a significant higher risk of leaving a field where one is a minority.

The big issue with this kind of research is that we don't have any gender to blame. It is equally male and female behavior, and the result is almost unbelievable similar results where in Sweden 88.6% of women and 88.4% of men work in gender segregated fields. The 12.5% that work in non-gender segregated fields, where no gender is bigger than 150% than the other gender, is a shrinking minority and there is no evidence to show either gender being behind it.

Would that not argue for a more proactive policy approach? Just because something is "universal human behavior" does not mean society should accept it: violence is universal human behavior too.

Yes, a proactive policy approach that address the underlying human behavior. Those 88.5% should preferable not reach 100%. Segregated professions is often also often severely undermanned since by limiting recruitment to only one gender effectively cuts the available pool in half.

The question is what policy to apply. We could use a progressive affirmative action based on the severity of segregation, but that would mean for example a complete stop of new hire of midwifes that identify as female as that profession is the worst gender segregated profession in Sweden with over 99.9%. It is also the only higher education program currently that is 100% single gender. Last summer the government even had to cancel vacations on a national level because they could not otherwise cover minimal standard of health care. Its a professions that would greatly benefit by recruiting from the whole population, but its very unclear how to reach such goal.

They could do a tax based incentive to encourage individuals to go beyond their own comfort levels and give progressive higher tax cut based on the severity of gender minority status you have in a profession. With Swedish taxes and gender segregation that would mean a male midwife could get up to 100% tax cut and increasing their wages with about 33-50%. A female programmer would get a tax cut around 25-50%, translating to a 10-25% pay raise.

Alternative one can try to lower the difference in confidence between those in a majority group vs minority. Mentoring programs are great for that and has shown good results for professions that have average gender segregated. This work nicely on a per company level, but I have not seen any policy action on a national level to encourage such programs. It doesn't however address the initial choice when a individual select a higher education program, so the leaky pipe model still apply.

Yes, there is. It is often, but not always, less active and purposeful than you seem to be imagining, but even things like "believing a company is a meritocracy" and "believing that the most important thing is to hire smart developers" end up in practice leading to discrimination against women, who are less likely to be seen to be "geniuses" with innate talent or leadership potential and more likely to be seen to be hard workers.

Then again, I saw a woman get put on a PIP the week after she filed a sexual harassment complaint, because the (major tech) company would rather pay a big severance than tell the dude programmers to stop sexually harassing their coworkers, so there are also explicit dynamics that play into the alienation of women.

On the whole, though, it's about disproportionate impact. "You are welcome to join this sexist work environment" is a selling point to far more men that women, so we end up with more men than women. This isn't rocket science.

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