Not to mention the fact that most programmers used to be women!
The problem is that our community isn’t very friendly or welcoming to women. How can we make that cultural change?
The problem is that our community isn’t very friendly or welcoming to women. How can we make that cultural change?
Be precise, how is your community not friendly to women in ways you cannot fix in five minutes? If its obvious, its trivial to list them, if its subtle then its worth doing the exercise.
We have to accept they may just not want the gig. Just like most men don't go into pre-school teaching.
One of the more obvious problems is that software especially seems to have issues with sexual harassment. An example of that can be readily found with Susan Fowler's blogpost about Uber's rotten workplace culture.
Techbros. Techbros everywhere. It's not what people want to hear, most people would love it if the field and the educational pipeline leading to it had more professional norms all-around. But it's a real thing. (FWIW, I don't think of Damore as part of the problem, indeed his proposals would help a lot if widely adopted.)
https://www.businessinsider.nl/coronavirus-kushner-impact-te...
>Jared Kushner’s coronavirus ‘impact team’ mocked as the ‘Slim Suit Crowd’ and a ‘frat party’ descended from a UFO
Incidentally the techbros you describe are majorly young cs graduates from my observation. Why are unis teaching them to be tech bros? Are unis at fault for making tech non inclusive and toxic?
Me and my wife are both AI academics in the UK who do a bunch of programming. I have no "interesring stories" to tell, my wife has a dozen including men punching walls because they were beaten by a woman in a board game, being sent death threats and dick pics (not from the same person), and being assumed to be my non-tech wife when we go to events where she was invited and I was going as her partner.
Now, these events aren't daily, or even weekly, but they stick with people and make then feel unwelcome and unsafe.
> Toxicity
Probably you don't need to go further than that.
* A strong focus on being "right" over working collaboratively (especially in domains with no right answers).
* Hyper competitiveness - to the detriment of effectiveness.
* A lack of empathy (e.g. PRs with "your code sucks, suck it up and stop being such a baby").
These things are hardly good from the perspective of any software developer (except particular kinds of men who thrive under these conditions) but they're particularly off putting to women.
I tend to find that this aggressive behavior is most frequently exhibited by "senior" developers who aren't actually very good or clever but have built up a reputation that they wish to protect. Some developers are very territorial.
This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different (otherwise why would these things pose a greater challenge for women relative to men)?
Let me get this straight:
1. Most women were programmers.
2. Women aren't sexist, so they let men in.
3. Men overwhelmed the women.
4. Men are sexist, so they stopped letting women in.
5. Now we need to deliberately reverse the results of stage (4).
Is that the sequence of events as you see it?
Women would not have been in charge of hiring, so no to 2. (The programming jobs men were hired for would likely not have been considered the same kind of job.)
Not sure what you mean by 3.
Roughly yes to 4, although the issue is systematic sexism, not the personal prejudices of men and women. Society in general, including many women, disapproved of women becoming programmers once it began to be seen as a high-status high-skill profession.
Yes to 5, with the preceding caveats.
These arguments seem to go in circles a lot.
First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women. Ok. Then it's society in general that is sexist, but actually it's only certain professions where this "general sexism" manifests itself, for no apparent reason. Ok. Then you have the most egalitarian countries in the world seeing more disparate outcomes than other western countries. But this is apparently because sexism and cultural norms are so nebulous and hard to pin down that there must still be some sexism going on there too, we just can't see it. Ok.
There are a lot of claims being made with no evidence whatsoever. While I personally don't put much stock in psychology, at least Damore's points had actual studies behind them. And though it has been thrown around in this thread that "some of the authors disagreed with Damore's interpretation!", I have actually read the studies and found nothing factually inaccurate with the interpretation. That's what is so difficult about a lot of psychology – the hard facts are few and far between, so effectively every result is subject to interpretation. An author of a paper can disagree, but that doesn't make Damore wrong.
Because those industries accepted that they had a problem and took steps to fix it. Altering the perceptions of the broader society can be a big part of that. People no longer see anything unusual about a woman being a lawyer or a doctor. Fifty years ago, that wasn't the case. So there's no paradox here. "General sexism" includes stereotypes about appropriate occupations for men and women. These can change over time, as we've seen in the case of lawyers and doctors.
>First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women.
It matters because it shows that women were, at one time, both interested in and capable of programming. No-one has said that it doesn't matter, so your 'but' makes no sense.
You're quite right that there's nothing to be learned by throwing around citations to half-read and half-understood studies (which is why I haven't done any of that). All you have to do is listen to what women in tech say. If James Danmore had done that for five minutes instead of wasting his time on his half-assed "research", none of this would have happened.
Anecdotal evidence is worse than psychology studies.
That's not necessarily true. Hence the analogy.
If you have many good / attractive options and you choose one, you probably have an interest in that thing.
If you have precious few, not great options, and you choose one, it does not necessarily indicate the same.
I shouldn't need to provide copious examples for this to be obviously true. Money is only one of many motivators, but it is often strong enough on its own to overcome your interest (or lack thereof) in something if it means you get paid for it.
Take another example: many women throughout history have chosen sex work. That does not mean that sex work interests them. It just means they decided sex work was better than alternatives, for whatever reasons.
Doing something of your own free will does not mean you have a genuine interest in that thing. It can (and often does) just mean that thing is better than alternatives, for a multitude of reasons that are not "I find it the most interesting".
Even assuming that your assertion about sexism in tech is not in fact speculation, how exactly is introducing more sexist policies into tech going to help eliminate sexism in tech?
Because my stance (that sexism is a significant factor in putting women off from tech) can be trivially verified by, say, asking 10 women in tech about their experiences of sexism. Not to mention that it would be a minor miracle if tech were somehow completely isolated from the sexism that's clearly present in society as a whole.
Out of interest, have you ever tried talking to women about this issue? Or have you (ironically) formed your opinion that there is no sexism in tech without listening to their perspective?
I generally don't try to collect facts about life by asking randos for their opinions, no.
But yes, I have talked with women in tech about sexism. I have also encouraged other women to get into tech in the first place.
> Not to mention that it would be a minor miracle if tech were somehow completely isolated from the sexism that's clearly present in society as a whole.
Is this the same sexism that is causing the current generation of young women to go to and graduate university at a higher rate than their male counterparts, earn more money than their male counterparts, or commit less suicide than their male counterparts?
And this attitude is why it's going to be hard work to change things to the better. You have no interest in listening to what women tell you. You'd rather cherry pick studies of dubious quality and relevance, and tell your female colleagues (if any) that they must just be imagining it all.
>[young women] earn more money than their male counterparts
This seems bogus, at least in reference to the USA. At most, it may the case that women earn slightly more than men straight out of college. The gender pay gap still clearly favors men overall.
As for suicide, I think men have pretty much always been more prone to suicide than women. If that's an argument for the non-existence of sexism, then you'd have to draw the absurd conclusion that, e.g., there was no sexism in Victorian Britain. See figure 1 here: https://watermark.silverchair.com/dyq094.pdf?token=AQECAHi20...
All that being said, it is a common misconception that sexism is by definition something that harms women and not men. Sexism certainly harms men too. The root cause of sexism is the power asymmetry between men and women. Generally speaking, men exercise that power in their own broad interests. But of course there are plenty of individual men who lose out.
The root cause of much disagreement on the subject of sexism is on the claim that there is a power asymmetry between men and women, and the methodology of measuring personal income as the sole means of measuring power in society.
As far as I understood it, this wasn't the bit of the memo that people were attacking.
There are some low-level differences (e.g. ratios of different cell types in the brain) but there’s no conclusive evidence linking that to academic skills or job performance (just how does 3-d reasoning affect your ability to write Python, anyway?), but there has been a history of earlier results attributed to gender not holding up under scrutiny.
I don't see why it's the crux. It's really only necessary that men and women be socialized differently for this to be true - to grow up surrounded by people telling you that you need to be more "agreeable" and "not too pushy".
I think whether it is true or not is rather beside the point. Toxic working environments are anti-meritocratic and anti productive. Even if we didn't give a fuck how many women entered the profession we should fix them. Intellectual dick waving leads to worse code, not better.
It's not clear why these should be any more acceptable than the claims Damore made.
Incidentally:
1) An environment filled with intellectual posturing is not "hyper competitive". The fact that you could confuse the two is concerning.
2) My post may have seemed to you to make a set of assumptions about women's abilities but it didn't (just their preferences).
Because, if you really, really want gender parity, most programmers don't work at Uber or Snapchat. They work in mundane jobs at faceless companies.
Even more so when you leave the USA. (Since this is about principle).
In my experience, those below average places where people tweak payroll software (where I started out in my career) are the worst. I would expect the below average people in Uber and Google to be among the worst of the worst too, though (they are the most insecure, I think). A lack of psychological safety is what drives a lot of this.
As always there are exceptions, but as a rule, mediocrity breeds insecurity and insecurity breeds toxic behavior and no, none of this can be fixed in five minutes.
I don't see an equivalence to nursing or primary school teaching since by and large it's not the toxic aspects of these careers that puts off men, it's the lack of pay and status.
If this is true it's probably because the community isn't very friendly or welcoming to women like the poster said…
That being said, I don't think this is true. My only evidence is anecdotal, but at a previous company when we tried to recruit at events that weren't primarily male dominated, we got roughly equal percentages of responses from people who identified as female or male.
> Just like most men don't go into pre-school teaching.
Let's assume for a moment these statements are correct: you're not starting from the right place. Why don't most women want the software job? Why don't most men want to teach pre-school? It could be because they've been raised in a society that says that the burden of child rearing should be placed on the women and that pre-school isn't a "manly" profession. Just because people don't want the job doesn't make it less discriminatory against women somehow, it just means the reasons are likely ingrained and harder to fix.
Amusingly, the damore memo was an attempt to address just this very question. Are we not beyond pretending responses outside the proscribed woke ideology will be engaged with in good faith, at this late stage?