You Can't Solve the Gender Gap in Tech If You Don't Understand Why It Exists

It's also true that not all boys want to code, and not all boys want to take a STEM path.

But what if a larger percentage of boys want to code or take a STEM path? If this were so, it would look like a pipeline problem, and it would look like a pipeline problem that's quite hard to fix. It might actually look like the reality we currently see.

But wait, it used to be that computer science was almost evenly split between men and women, right? Where did all those women go?

This is a reasonable question to ask, but it's not the only reasonable question to ask. Another question to ask would be: 50 years ago, what percentage of the overall population had computer science degrees? And is that percentage larger, smaller, or roughly similar to what it is today? I don't know, but I think it was likely much, much smaller than it is today. It might be the case that there are more female computer science graduates today as a percentage of the total population than there was 50 years ago. But how could that be true, if (as we know) men with computer science degrees now way outnumber women with computer science degrees?

This isn't really a trick question, the answer is pretty easy: Today there are a lot more people with computer science degrees. That increase was disproportionately men, and that's a consequence of a pipeline that is disproportionately men.

So what's the difference between the pipeline 50 years ago and the pipeline today?

This is actually an interesting point and I haven't been able to find information about it.

Lets say we have X amount of women who are going into STEM... but say for example I used to live in the Detroit area. The universities at the time I was about to head into post-secondary were offering 'scholarships' where women who took their first year in engineering, would get the rest of their education for free and most of the engineering credits would act as wildcard credits toward any other degree if they chose to switch.

So perhaps we lack women in IT because they went to engineering instead?

There might be something to this. I've anecdotally read somewhere that there are now more women in med school and law school than men. If that's true, and women are over-represented in even higher-echelon pipelines, are they funneling women away from comp sci? It's not the solution, certainly, but the answer to that question might be interesting.

Because the focus of the article is about how the gender gap/discrimination in tech issue is nuanced, and the other is literally talking about default stereotypes in tech and how they are damaging.

Literally, the article invoked a stereotype, because the overwhelmingly common stereotype is damaging.

It's also frustrating when it's not discussed at all. It's hard to bring up the biases and subtle discrimination that occurs as a PoC without making a privileged person run for the hills.

I applaud people whose job is focused on bringing change to organizations. I can't imagine how difficult it is to do this work effectively.

Instead they have a different goal. They are collectivists. Their goal is that everyone gets paid exactly the same regardless of what job they do. They want a university professor to be paid the same as an elementary teacher.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304671

I'm not even joking.

Their goal is Marxism/Communism/Socialism. You can't argue with them that a professor should be paid more because of education and skills; because they dont consider those as reasons to be paid more or less.

Despite my distaste for the authors invoking basement coder stereotypes, I can see their point. We can keep blaming the "pipeline" if the industry is rife with sexism and harassment. Our current state of affairs influences the pipeline.