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Comment by HeroOfAges | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've found very interesting is that even though the majority of software developers in an enterprise or organization are male, with the ratio being as high as 80/20, the ratio of male to female managers directly managing software developers is closer to 50/50. I would say this is evidence of bias in favor of women.

edited for clarity

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Doesn’t have to be bias. Could just be that a higher percentage of women in engineering are here for the big money and not for the love of spending 14 hours with their head down coding. If that’s the case you would naturally expect a significantly higher percentage of them to jump on that management pay raise when offered instead of turning it down for a pay raise.

Not in anyway stating I believe this is true or is what is happening, just offering a counter point for how it could happen with no bias on anyone’s part.

I'm curious where you got that measurement from. It's quite common to overestimate small fractions, do see 3/10 and believe it's half, because one stops noticing the multiplicity of the majority.

Here's a link to an article by the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are.... It was published in 2017. The third paragraph points out that 20% of Google engineers are women, and they further go on to claim that statistic is roughly matched among big tech companies. I work for a large employer (30K+ employees), and 4 of the 5 software developer managers I interact with on a daily basis are women. I work on a team of 8 developers. We have one female developer. Two of our sibling teams of about the same size have three female developers between them.

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