Why women leave tech – and how we can fix it

I'm a white female. I'm also gay, disabled, from a rural area, and neither of my parents have college degrees. Yeah, I'm TOTALLY proportionally represented in tech.

Same for say, a blind gay white dude from an Eastern European country.

A women who leaves the workplace is following a socially acceptable script to do so. If she has kids, absolutely no one will accuse her of being a deadbeat, useless, etc. But God forbid, should a man express a desire to leave, it's a big problem, even if his wife is happy providing.

Not saying it's right or it's wrong, but I feel a lot of these articles about women in the workplace ignore the fact that the main reason there's so many men in the workplace is that the men basically have to work, so will stay even in jobs they hate. It's why the stereotypical "do-nothing" employee, the guy who's burnt out but been there forever and no one's going to fire him, is a man -- women leave, men don't.

It‘s simply one of the many logical fallacies of feminism.

https://wiw-report.s3.amazonaws.com/Women_in_the_Workplace_2...

It goes from a 92:100 ratio for hiring to a 72:100 ratio for manager.

A fundamental issue is that people in management roles are often not evaluated on how they treat subordinates. When this is addressed, it helps everyone, but especially (I think) marginalized groups.

We have a few women on our team, some in developer roles. I’d like to think I’m doing a decent job, but I’d have to ask them. I don’t even know how to get their honest feedback without being intimidating. I hope it’s as easy as “tell me honestly, how do you feel about your inclusion within the team? Anything I or the team can do better?”

Getting 13-year-old girls interested in computers turns out to be not that hard. Lots of programs do it. (Maybe it's harder to get them interested at the same rates as boys, but I wouldn't die on that hill.)

1) Founders are entrepreneurs. The article seems to be focused on non-entrepreneurial roles, which is a very different situation.

2) We don't seem to have the same attitude about other professions such as medicine, law, stock trading, etc. Do successful surgeons have to operate at age 13? Do successful lawyers have to try cases at age 13? No, that's nuts. So why in tech do we have such a fetish about teenage hackers? This already seems like a kind of bias, and maybe we should correct that.

Even thinking of myself (for whom open source was very important personally and career-wise), I didn't learn how to program until college.

There are plenty of opportunities to improve diversity in tech at many stages of the pipeline. Hiring and retention are part of that pipeline. I think it's disingenuous to imply that tech companies are not at fault in any way here, and that there's nothing they can do short of time travel or investing in middle school education.

I'm not saying everything in the article is the right answer, but there are a lot of good suggestions.

The reason it's labeled as aggression is the theoretical framework people are filtering these interactions through. That framework tells them that race, gender, and other axes of marginalization are extremely important in all interactions, and it is appropriate to reach for marginalizing oppression as a prima facie explanation for anything negative that occurs.

I won't blame the original inventors of the term "microaggression" for this, since I do think it describes a real phenomenon, but it's been abused and overextended.

It is. That said, I don't think tech execs are sexist or racist so much as they are classist and money-obsessed. They don't necessarily want a crappy culture; they just don't care.

> Or are we really to believe that all these huge corporations full of incredibly brilliant and skilled individuals are somehow too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to fix these problems?

The huge corporations may be "full of" brilliant people, but the people at the top are the same schmoozing or generationally-connected mediocrities that have always run things, and they're the only ones whose input matters. Having a team of people in your basement with a 150 average IQ doesn't mean you're magically going to make better decisions, not if you never listen to them.

> I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems or that it's even worth trying.

It clearly is possible, because human systems do get better or worse over time, both on the small scale and the large. Scandinavian countries have better societies than the U.S.; the U.S. is still miles ahead, in this regard, of true autocracies (e.g. Putin's Russia). The vast differences in quality of human systems make it very clear that they can be improved (or degraded). It's just incredibly difficult.

I think of it like voting. Even when everything works and elections are fair, voting isn't really about making the decision. That's not why you do it, because mathematically, you probably won't cast a deciding vote ever in your life. Voting is about holding accountable those who do make the decisions, and at that, it often works very well--black neighborhoods saw improvements in public services after civil rights legislation made it easier for them to vote. Ultimately, of course, you're right: it's still up to forces out of your control whether you win or lose.

I imagine the above is why, although it certainly doesn't require a Western theocentric faith, religiosity (note that I make no claims about whether religion is or is not true) is associated with well-adjustment: it's one of the only ways we have come up with to hold an internal locus of control in a world where, quite frankly, almost everything that happens to us in the objective material world is out of our control.

The truth is that corporate capitalism wasn't built for people like us, people of conscience. It was built by obscenely wealthy ghouls to direct all of society's resources toward themselves. That's it. They will allow technical progress if they believe they stand to benefit; they will oppose it if they think they'll lose. "Meritocracy" is a sham, and corporations aren't built to last... they're built to extract wealth and then wither as invested resources are reallocated. A private company will never be a utopia because it's literally designed to be the opposite (perhaps not a "dystopia" in the classic sense, but one in the realistic sense whereby every dystopia is someone's utopia).

Trying to build a "good" company within corporate capitalism is like building a house on sand. It's not impossible, but it's extremely difficult. You're going to be competing with ruthless bastards and gargantuan institutions that could destroy you just for fun. You're playing a game where evil people win because it's designed that way. The only long-term solution is to destroy corporate capitalism forever.

Yes, indeed. Large-scale organizations are plagued by this sort of pathology; bad treatment of workers is only one of many instances of such. Individual skill does not translate to effective behavior on the larger, collective scale. We put up with large organizations despite these flaws, not because of them.

> I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems

Large, hierarchical, command-and-control structures are what they are. If you want improvement, it must come from designing better ways for humans to cooperate at a grassroots level, such as ordinary or "smart" markets.

Women almost invariably marry men with more or at least equal earning potential. For women in tech, one of the consequences is that basically their husbands have the means for them to quit work, and many make that choice.

We'd have to know where in the pipeline the women are leaving to investigate causality.

Anecdotally, I ended up working on my own for most of my programming because while it was fine when I was a child (under the age of about 12 or 13), mostly single-sex spaces of adolescents (including college students) are REALLY hostile. Being a 16-22 year old female in a room full of 20 to 30 something males is REALLY uncomfortable and I felt literally endangered on some occasions. Adolescents are both insecure and new to their sexuality, which they take out on other people. It's gotten much better now that young men see me as old; they don't hate or resent me as much.

I've seen similar dynamics with, for example, men who want to work with young children. There are some young women who really invested their sense of self into being the person who's good with kids, and someone of the opposite sex coming along and being just as good/interested in the topic makes their insecurity and nastiness flare. Teenage boys who want to be camp counselors, babysit, etc.

Children would have an impact (on every job category), but I don't think it's as extreme as you say.

Part-time roles would be a thing before talking about decade-long gaps, IMO.

Myself, I like my job, but not as much as some. I've certainly hated my job before. But that doesn't matter. As the sole income earner, I have to keep working. It's not an option for me to 'leave tech', since that's the only career path I can follow at this point that provides as much income. So, when things suck at a job, I find a new one, but I don't have the option of leaving. I joke with my wife that I should probably find myself a husband so I don't have to put up with this shit.

“There's no intrinsic reason why it should be considered usual for men in heterosexual relationships to earn more than women, but emasculating and odd for the reverse to be the case”

I think there is an intrinsic reason for this. Women choose partners, at least in part, based on their ability to provide resources. This makes higher earning men more attractive even too high earning women.

Smart men are more likely to seek more lucrative fields, too.

Software is sort of a second tier profession. We're constantly trying to dumb things down to the point that we can fill all the open positions with human livestock. At least since COVID, most of us don't have to work in bullpens anymore.

Women end up choosing a lot of lower paid fields whereas men choose higher paid ones. You can makeup whatever reasons you want for that but that’s just facts - and that’s what the “pay gap” is from.