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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote: my wife works for a biotech company and her firm has more way more women than men. She does statistical programming and her entire group (I think 4-6 people?) are women. Coming from more conventional engineering companies that always lean overwhelmingly male, I've found this fascinating.

I don't know if it's a feature of biotech specifically or just her company (which offers good maternity leave by the way, and the employees make use of it).

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In Eastern Europe during the Cold War the trend was also the opposite -- with women in the majority. Women occupied the majority of those "dev" roles as it was laregely seen as womens work.

mm and a lot of the first computers where in fact women

This was the case in the US too, until about the 80s; not a majority of women working in programming but a much more sizeable portion of the workforce was.

This was a time (there was a similar period in the U.S, but it was earlier) when the direct operation of computers was essentially secretarial work, a level more sophisticated than operating a typewriter; it was not some magical era where women were the majority of people designing and implementing computer programs at the highest levels.

I think east Europe is also leading the numbers for rate of women in tech, especially as coders and they are ranked among the best in the World.

Anecdotally, there's also variation between engineering disciplines.

In my undergrad, EE's were overwhelmingly male followed by MechE.

ChemE was 50/50 (and as I recall ChemE was one of the more selective at the time, owing to the notion that starting salaries were the highest among all the engineering disciplines -- this was during the era of oil & gas dominance).

I'm one of 3 women in my graduating class of ~100 in EE. It's still a male dominated field.

I’ve been to a few biotech conferences and biotech definitely has more women than machine learning conferences.

I worked for a sequencing centre a few years ago that was pretty even mix of men and women. However there was wet lab part and a bioinfomatics part. The wet lab was almost all women and the bioinformatics part mas mainly men.

> The wet lab was almost all women and the bioinformatics part mas mainly men.

This was my expectation as well, which is why I was surprised by my wife's company.

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