Struggling with the Gender Gap
jeanhsu.com
jeanhsu.com
My impression is that these and other blogs have been tremendously successful in letting young female scientists learn about extremely successful female role models in academia. They've also been extremely illuminating personally to me (a male engineer) because they call out instances where folks are "innocuously" sexist, and helped me understand how even certain cases of well-intentioned male behavior is actually discouraging from a female PoV.
All I can say to the OP is:
(1) she should keep writing so that young women entering CS know that successful female s/w engineers exist.
(2) encourage other successful female s/w engineers to start blogging.
(3) don't ever hesitate to blog about instances of sexism - well-intentioned or otherwise - because at the very least this can help clueless male engineers learn how to behave.
(4) Don't ever hesitate to confront people for sexist speech or actions. The problem is only going to away if we create a culture where sexism would be career suicide and the first step to this is confronting the sexists.
All I see is "Look how cool and special I am! I'm a girl and I can navigate in the men's world!". She tries to bring up a problem but I cannot quiet see a real problem there.
"Already at a disadvantage, they are playing a seemingly impossible game of catchup with very little positive feedback or support. The culture, the standards, and the norms are all male-centric, and the book talks about women in computing being guests in a male-hosted world."
It's a big problem if you want to become an average programmer that has to rely on that feedback and support. Guess what? Most truly skilled people learned almost everything by themselves. Generally speaking most intelligent people learn by themselves (if there are means to do it) and find themselves a little alienated from the general culture.
My point is simply if you want to achieve exceptional results you will most likely be an exceptional person too. And being a woman, being ugly being whatever will not have much influence. In some situations it will help, in some it might do the opposite, it's random.
If you want to be average then yea, as a woman it will be harder in IT, but if you want to be average why not pick a job average woman does?
Another way is to reject that environment and build your own, and I suspect that explains a certain number of startups which have been surfacing of late. The alternative is continuing to power the hate engines of the Valley, and that's just not going to work.
Really? Have you seen a case of somebody that had truly amazing, useful strengths and was still somehow being "blocked" from success by the environment as a whole?
It sounds like a huge conspiracy to me (the way I rephrased it, of course it might not be what you meant).
Like I said amazing people will always have trouble fitting in, but if they can produce amazing results there's always a way to reap rewards from that. There's nothing that's only exclusive to the "gender gap". It's a general fact that being different is not being average. I don't even see a problem!
For me it's like saying 10 sticks out amongst 2s and that it's a problem. Well no wonder it does as 10!=2. It's a fact not a problem.
Either accept that you're different or make yourself more similar, you cannot have both.
Meanwhile, amazing folks on the wrong side of the gap will be cursed in public through a variety of interesting ways, and will be held back unless they find those rare environments where they can thrive.
So really, it's not just a 10 vs. 2 thing. It's a "allowed to be 10" vs. "not allowed to be 10" thing.
Put it this way -- why did the author of the original post really leave Google? Her reasons might be like mine.
You make a distinction of amazing people being on the "wrong side" and the "right side". Ones on the right side do have some trouble but can progress in a fairly fluid manner aka did have some setbacks but could still progress without major environmental changes (got that right?). Those on the wrong side get more trouble and have to do a lot of searching for that perfect niche where they can succeed，right?
Well, then I think most amazing people ARE on the wrong side, I'd say that's the way things are for most amazing people. Ones on the "right side" are lucky or very very amazing.
Anyways those are some general facts about amazing people that go along with everything I said so far and still show no indication of the "gender gap".
I feel like I'm missing your point maybe, if so then we all love examples :-)
An example, because you asked: I had a manager tell me I was not doing anything more than meeting expectations because folks at my level are expected to be "fire and forget". Apparently, because we had been having conversations about things going on with my project and how broken the code base was, I was not meeting his expectations of how engineers are supposed to behave.
I had to inform him that just because a great number of software engineers in his experience don't like talking about problems doesn't mean that everyone is like that. Indeed, some of them may be more likely to approach a problem in that way, and automatically treating that as bad is a pretty clear sign of biased behavior!
Note that I'm not saying this particular trap is a 1:1 with gender bias, since there are women who will never trip it and men who will, but you wanted an example and that is one from my life.
(Side note: I was delivering plenty of technical goodness during the period in question. When they can't find anything technical to fault, they invariably turn to something "soft" as described above...)
Everyone, male or female, is expected to meet or exceed the expectations of their boss, male or female. It's called "employment".
My original point was that a women that truly loves hacking and is exceptional at it won't have it harder to succeed, which does not mean it will be easy, it will be as hard, because most of the time if you're really good at something where performance is hard to measure you WILL get a lot of trouble breaking through.
My second point is that a women wanting to be a simple, average programmer that nobody knows about might indeed be less appreciated than your average man. But if she want to be a simple, average one than I guess she doesn't love programming, so why not pick something else?
I got the feeling that the article was trying to make us believe that there is a problem that should be solved, but I see no real problem.
Do you disagree?
(replied to my own comment because couldn't see the button under yours)
Honest question: is that your experience? I'm not a programmer (currently doing a PhD in crypto), but I was under the impression that female programmers encounter lots of "innocently offensive", "maladapted" and "uncaring", but not so much "vicious and mean". (Which is bad enough, but "well-intentioned-but-stupid" is easier to fix than "evil".)
I'm pretty sure that you have more experience being a female programmer than I do, though. ;-)
If she [the author] cares so much about the social aspects of being in IT industry then I don't know why she cannot accept the way it is.
Why should she have to accept it the way it is?
As human beings we all have the basic right and duty to improve things for the better. If the situation is not the way it should be and I believe the comments agree to that premise then WHY should she try NOT IMPROVE them?
If the same topic were addressed by a male programmer we would all be talking how chivalry and good people are in abundance who want things to change, would not we?
Thank you for the downvote that you shall soon exercise but someone had to say this loud even if it shows mildly irrational side of me.
Because she's not trying to improve them - she's trying to skew the game. Maybe it's "male-centric" to insist that only the quality of the work matters - but personally I say that quality of work transcends gender and speaks for itself. Because my long experience of this industry is that we are the least biased people on the planet, gay, straight, black, white, boy, girl, fat, then, it doesn't matter if you can deliver. And if you can't deliver - the excuses that work in the rest of the world - don't cut it with us.
The thing is if she were talking about how people are extra rude with her when she commits a mistake or how she is given lesser opportunities than male counterparts I would totally agree with your point.
However, all she is saying is that the environment and attitude as a whole is not as supportive as it should be. That includes things like 50 females in 1000 programmer group at random, even if it is not within the control of you or I.
We might just need to be a bit more welcoming and receptive to these issues before we start saying that Hey, we have done enough and we no longer have that issue anymore.
Just saying it from a third person's perspective. I have not worked extensively with tech teams where this is a problem but maybe I was naive enough to just not realise that the one female programmer in the team of 25 programmers was not always supported to voice her thoughts about how things can be made better; in code and beyond it.
The problem, though, is that this isn't the case. Women in the United States aren't shying away from STEM disciplines because they're generally intellectually incapable of it; it's because they encounter strong societal pressures against doing so. Other countries--I'm thinking of Romania in particular, which sent a large number of IMO medalists to my university during my years there--have many more women in math and science. (And no, they're not bad at what they do.) Unless you're going to try to claim that Romanian women are somehow different or more talented than American women, it seems clear that the ways that our society and educators are affecting them are responsible for this disparity.
And once you take that into consideration, the argument for improving this problem starts to become a lot more reasonable. It bears a lot of similarity to that line from Lyndon Johnson: " You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." It's pretty similar here. Jean (and others dedicated to this cause) aren't interested in "skewing" the game unfairly. Instead, they contend that because of issues earlier in the process, whatever they may be, the gender gap isn't and shouldn't be the natural order of things.
But if she truly believes that being a woman that truly likes programming (aka does not want to be just another average person gluing code for a big company or equivalent) there is so magical force that makes it harder for a woman then she is basically wrong. And that is a feeling I got from reading it, so my "accept" meant recognizing that it's not any harder to be an exceptional programmer for a women and move on.
As for the down-vote I wanted to do it after reading that trick sentence, but somehow I cannot find that option :-). I never vote here anyways.
The writings of (e.g.) Knuth and Stallman consistently refer to programming as a communal activity. It shouldn't be necessary for it to be a calling—or to use a perhaps more objective term, a niche (that you've created for yourself)—for someone to participate in a economic/professional setting.
People beside the top 1% are still people, and the impact on their life does matter.
Sorry, I don't get it. What are you trying to say?
By the way, the most beautiful result in physics was discovered by a woman, Emmy Noether. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noethers_theorem)
True equality is when everything is the same. Period. If we want man and woman to be truly equal than men have to equal women. If you have to make a distinction of a female schlub and a male schlub then you have an inequality right there.
The odds are really freaking good, and only some of the goods are odd. Sure there are a bunch of socially awkward engineers, but because of the sheer scarcity of women in the field, if you are a single female you can have first pick of a lot of really nice available guys.
I thought the days were past when women only got jobs to find husbands, seems not!
Me, all I care about is the work, same as everyone else who's not got an agenda of their own.
Jean -- if you don't want to be known as the person who only talks about gender issues, at the very least, try to intersperse some technical discussions into your gender articles. Or, better yet, write articles about tech instead of the fact that you're female.
As an aside, it's not like men are actively encouraged to become programmers by their social peers. There are a small group of men who program and support each other in that vein, in the general population it doesn't exactly represent the hopes and dreams of parents of male children. (Eg. Mom and Dad statistically would encourage becoming a lawyer or doctor much more than a programmer).
I think as a society we should encourage women and men to do what they want rather than that they should fill some predefined gap that we think needs filling. I could care less about the gender gap in computing or the gender gap in nursing.
* There's a variance between the number of men and women in field X.
* This gap does not correlate with the number of men and women in the general population.
* Therefore field X must be discouraging women from going into the field that would otherwise be interested in the field.
I believe the thinking is that if everyone did what they wanted to do, then the gender balance in any random field would probably be relatively close to the gender balance of the general populace.
Maybe you should check the actual contents of her blog before you post condescending BS like this? Only two of the eight most recent articles are about gender, less if you go further back.