Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

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A problem I have heard female friends speculate about is with promoting women in higher positions. If the female population is too low, and you try to get them into higher positions, two effects occur according to this theory.

First of all, with a low female population there probably aren't enough proven and qualified women to fill the desired number of slots. This leads to imposter syndrome / worry about people thinking "she only has this position because of gender". It also leads to these women sometimes doing poorer jobs, just because there aren't enough qualified women in the company to fill those positions.

Secondly, you drain the lower rungs of the company from women. This leads to under-representation in the lower rungs. Meaning fewer women getting the training time one needs to properly move up the ladder. It also means a dearth of female perspective on the lower rungs. Hurting both diversity of views, and the culture. That second point makes the company less attractive to women trying to enter the company, which perpetuates the problem.

Women were well represented in the early days of computing. The gender imbalance only started in about 1984. Some researchers think that was because home computers started to become affordable at about that time and were mainly marketed to men.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

Women are also currently well-represented in computing in Eastern Europe, Iran, China, and somewhat in Russia.

None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech", and most of them are certifiably more patriarchal than any of the Western countries currently suffering from under-representation of women.

One can conclude from facts on the ground that neither gender equality nor pro-diversity movements correlate with desirable representation outcomes. Yet, those appear to be the only approaches attempted here in the West.

We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.

According to an article in the Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more..., "nations that have traditionally less gender equality [tend] to have more women in science and technology than their gender-progressive counterparts do".

There's a plot of % women STEM graduates vs. a measure of opportunities for women. Algeria has the highest percentage of women STEM graduates on the chart. The Nordic countries have some of the lowest.

> We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.

Could it be that women tend to care about stuff like a healthy work-life balance, and things like the 996.ICU working week can discourage them from applying? Whoops no, we've been told that's sexist wrongthink.

Could it be that computers are boring af and most of these people who genuinely care about computing are somewhere on the autism spectrum (which is mostly populated by males)

We’re all in the spectrum. That’s why it’s called a spectrum. :-)

If women were afraid of long, brutal hours then they wouldn’t make up 52% of all new doctors.

Your comment is great and more observant than most everything in this thread. The answer is freedom, when women have lots of choices they don't choose to play with things as often as men.

>Eastern Europe >None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech"

there are initiatives of promoting IT among women in Poland, afaik.

Women's representation peaked at around 1/3rd in the mid 1980s. While higher than present days, it was never close to parity. The narrative that personal computers were marked to boys is criticized: a significant market segment was secretarial work, which was predominantly made up of women.

The drop in women's representation in computing corresponds to the elimination of overtly sexist policies in other fields. E.g. medical schools removed gender quotas (maximum not minimum quotas, sometimes as low as 10%). Mary Ann Wilkes initially wanted to be a lawyer, but changed to computing when she encountered explicit sexism in law firms. After the expansion of women's right, women in her position were able to pursue their original passions.

I doubt it boils down to any one cause, but I think it's crucial not to ignore women's agency in making career decisions.

I know quite a few female programmers. Almost all of them wanted to be something else, and only became programmers as a second choice.

Another thought: compared to other technical careers, programming careers are uncredentialed. No legal or even social prerequisites other than skill.

If you want to be a doctor, you must apply to college, be accepted to college, matriculate, graduate with a degree in sciences. Then you must take the MCAT, apply to medical schools, be accepted to a medical school, graduate, apply to a residency, complete the residency, and become board certified.

And then you are an entry level doctor, licensed to practice in a single state, with no job, no patients, no practice, and no insurance network contracts.

If any of those steps are sexist/racist, a woman or minority is less likely to make it past that step.

Programming doesn’t have as many gatekeepers. That’s good for people who have been kept out of things.

Any history of the industry needs to address what analysts did vs. what programmers did. “Programming” was clerical work, converting flowcharts or pseudocode into machine code on cards or tape. That role was obsoleted when computer time became cheap enough to spend running compilers and linkers, which enabled analysts to write code by themselves in a higher-level language.

It wasn’t until later that obsessed nerds could teach ourselves from scratch at home.

You assume that all applicants are of equal attainment, ability, and motivation.

However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us.

Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point.

I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. So it's not surprising that female programmers tend (on average) to be better; they're more motivated, they really want this, and that's usually because they're good at it (if they weren't they'd have given up earlier).

> I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement.

As a male growing up in the 80ies and 90ies in Europe I must say this must be somewhere else.

If this was the case then there would be some merit to the idea of "male privilege".

From what I saw encouragement came in two forms:

- generally for everyone

- and in addition, specifically for girls

I.e. I've seen activities for "kids who code" or "girls who code" but never for "boys who code".

I also have some personal experience regarding encouragement: from I was a young boy and until I had almost finished my Bachelors degree I was more than once discouraged from IT and encouraged to get a "real job" so either I was very special or the idea that boys get "nothing but encouragement" is plain false

The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice.

Do you mean I should have quit my Bachelors degree in IT?

Sorry, but I don’t understand what you are seeking with this question.

Did your BA in IT limit your access to good advice? Did it contradict the good advice you received?

I don’t see the conflict between a BA in IT and good advice.

Could you maybe ask the question again in a different way?

I'll try:

I wrote about being a boy and getting what I think is bad advice.

You comment "The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice."

I wonder if you think that what I got is good advice.

(BTW: BSc, not BA :-)

> while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement

I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.

Yep. In elementary school I was called a computer nerd every day. Want to know who usually flung that insult? Girls. Typically ones that would say "ew, math is gross."

Now they're the ones posting the 70 cents on the dollar misinformation to their FB feed.

Exactly. The narrative changed when iPhone / Smartphone took over the world. Now everyone knows what is an "App". And somehow Silicon Valley took over the world. Mainstream Media has all sort of Tech reporting in their front page. Stock investment are also dominated by tech. All of a sudden software programming is cool and you get some sort of social status with it.

But in the 80s/ 90s picking up a Pascal or Delphi book was about the dumbest thing you do in social circle.

I get that. But talk to a female colleague about her experience with it. They get not only the "nerd" label but also the whole "choose something that's feminine, no boy wants to marry a girl smarter than him" thing. It's fucked up.

Me too. I suffered few years being called "Clive" and "Sinclair" by bullish peers.

In the UK there is an often-repeated statistic: the 20% of girls who take A-level physics outperform the 40% of boys who take it.

And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions.

The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typically outperform the larger cohort of (necessarily) more average men.

You don't need tales of struggle or diversity to explain this. Minority groups will tend to perform better.

You're so close! If the majority group and minority group have equal distribution of ability in a subject, why are the minority a minority?

Women are 55% of the population. Why aren't they 55% of tech workers? Why are only the 20% who are really good at it working in tech?

Saying "the minority are always going to be better" doesn't explain why. And the why is really important.

Pro tip: talk to women who would like to work in tech but aren't for an answer.

You say you don't need discrimination to explain it, but your explanation assumes discrimination ie. you have to be really damn good in order to even have a chance as a woman. There is another explanation, the distribution of IQ between men and women:

> Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom.

https://www.newsweek.com/men-women-and-iq-87117

You also see a similar situation with "places in society". The majority of billionaires are men, but the majority of people in prison are men too. Women in general seem to have a more "stable" place in society compared to men. It seems harder for them to climb higher but also harder for them to fall completly at the bottom. If I wanted to sum it up, it would be something like "the glass ceiling comes with a glass floor". This is just my speculation though, and not in any way a judgment of value.

An important point here is that this glass ceiling or glass floor is only relevant to talk about on the level of all women. It has no bearing on an individual.

I'm not attempting to explain the under-representation of minorities. I'm explaining why minorities in teams will naturally perform better than average.

> However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us.

I’m very skeptical about this. Firstly, the popular studies that purport to show bias against females are variously flawed (including using old data from other fields) but also because women have done very well in other fields at other times which were much more hostile to them (medicine and law, for example) than tech. Similarly, women do well in tech in countries that have much more gender inequality than we have in the West (indeed, there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s gender equality and its female representation in technology). All of this suggests that discrimination isn’t responsible for as much of the gender gap in tech as we suspect.

> Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point.

This is very much the case if promotions are done without considering gender diversity. This can be compensated for by considering gender diversity when looking at applicants. However, that compensation can overshoot. This is especially likely if, for internal promotions, a goal of diversity is set that is too high compared to the total number of women already in the company.

That specific overshoot, caused by having diversity goals that are too ambitious given the number of women in the company, is what my comment was about. I raised the issue because women have raised it to me. Specifically when discussing blanket boardroom diversity quotas that were being considered by politicians in the Netherlands. Such quotas are more likely to cause this specific scenario, because they are made without consideration for the fraction of women working in the company, or even industry.

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