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Comment by Communitivity | Hacker News Reader

Surprising study results regarding women being more likely to receive a callback than men. From personal experience and the teams I've been on, women have always been in the minority, along the lines of 8-10 men for every two women. However, I am not in Silicon Valley.

We need more studies in this area. I'd also like to see studies that include other possible sources of discrimination (gender identity, age) that are known to exist in some areas. Without those other sources included in the data it's possible those sources could be skewing the data.

One scenario might be that most of the women were young (20s-early 30s), while many of the men were older (late 30s to early 50s). Just one possible scenario, I'm not saying that was the case. But in that scenario the bias could be against older candidates rather than for female ones.

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There are less women in the tech industry, so it is very possible for them to be more likely to get a callback and still be underrepresented.

>From personal experience and the teams I've been on, women have always been in the [minority], along the lines of 8-10 men for every two women.

That's because fewer women overall are applying for such jobs relative to men. Those that are applying are more likely to be hired.

That could be. I have seen women managers in charge of hiring who had a more balanced team. However, my anecdotal experiences are nowhere near enough of a sample to draw real conclusions from.

If there are fewer women going into tech, that also may represent a problem. Here I have more personal experience, as my daughter is interested in digital graphic design and programming. She has faced criticism for this choice from peers, and from teachers, and online. Several people commented that the tech world is too hard for women. Perhaps fewer women are going into tech because they are being discouraged at a young age, if this pattern of discouragement turns out to be widespread.

There are some efforts to fix this that have been getting more attention, including Girls Who Code [https://girlswhocode.org].

Also, thanks for the s/majority/minority catch. I've edited the original post to fix.

In my anecdotal experience the split happens pretty early, in early high school at the latest. All the people who were interested in computers in my grade 9 class were male.

"We need more studies in this area. I'd also like to see studies that include other possible sources of discrimination"

I'd love to see this based on culture and personality too.

I've been on teams that seem to look down on you if you live within your means and thus aren't able to fully participate in discussing the latest gadgets, like people's new Tesla's and BMWs when you drive a no-frills work truck that doesn't even have blue tooth. I actually had a manager tell me I need to discuss gadgets and sports more with my coworkers. Even if I like gadgets, I like the lower cost and hands on stuff like setting up a Zoneminder server rather than installing a Ring.

I'm also a quiet person who tries to focus on work when at work. I speak up when I have ideas or can help out. Yet I'm constantly being told to speak up and form stronger relationships with my team. I feel we have a good working relationship. Why can't I value them as a coworker and have them value me based on our work interaction?

You mentioned personality, which would be an awesome study to see.

I knew a manager once who insisted every person who joined his large project take a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality profile test [https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-ba...] and give him the results. No idea if that's allowed, but as far as I know nobody refused. He was government, I'm hesitant to try it as a contractor team lead. I also don't have a big enough team where I need to do that, and prefer to let folks self-organize organically. My job is to remove friction, not add it.

He then used that information to organize his teams with the goal of improving collaboration and team performance, and it seemed to work well.

The graph on page 13 was interesting. The gender distribution of applicants stays about the same, but the gender distribution for hires has dropped for men and risen for women. So were the women previously dropping out of the workforce? Do we now have men dropping out of the workforce? Or are they simply being reshuffled among the various companies within the industry? I ask this because there are other studies that say the industry in the US is facing a shortage of tech workers, so it seems unlikely to be that a significant number of people would be dropping out, or that this study accurately represents the industry as a whole.

There's a contradiction in your second sentence, I'm not sure what your meaning is.

>women have always been in the majority, along the lines of 8-10 men for every two women.

From context I think they meant that "men have always been in the majority".

Yes, thanks - it was meant to be minority. I've fixed in the original post.

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