Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
Why is there such a resistance to the idea that there might be differences in what groups of people are interested in at any given time? Not an issue of genetics or competence, but a complicated web of social influences that make people less likely to be interested in one path or the other?
If there are truly unjust and discriminatory barriers, then by all means let's remove them. But if we succeed, and it doesn't change the numbers much, does it matter?
If certain groups really think it's a problem then let them do the work of encouraging their group members (alert, this feels condescending - who says they'll even self-identify with that group) to get into tech.
It's certainly not my fault. I'm a cheerleader for tech careers. The more, the merrier. But if you're not into it, then you're not into it. There's a lot of things I'm not into, either. Whose fault is that? And why should it matter?
That's certainly not true. I'd be curious to see the reaction of you telling a woman who is satisfied with her life that she's wasted her potential.
There are people out there who could make meaningful contribution to this profession. There is a demand for people who could make a meaningful contribution to this profession. There are artificial barriers, based on gender/race/class/whatever that make it marginally harder for some people to contribute.
A more concrete example: The unemployment rate in my country is very huge, and yet my organization is still having a hard time finding talent. Is it because none of the millions of people looking for work could possibly do what I need done? It seems more likely that the complex system of forces has dissuaded talented people from getting skills in this profession.
Can you provide an example of the barriers of which you speak? I find that a lot of the time I'm told about how people with qualities distinct from mine should be cut some slack or given extra incentives to get into industry to correct some sort of imbalance, and that the imbalance is somehow evidence of barriers that we can't see, and that incentivising these groups (and in effect putting barriers up against people like me) is the way forward.
To me, discrimination is discrimination, regardless. I don't take issue with any qualities of anyone - the right person for the job is the right person for the job. Perhaps historically barriers meant that the right person for the job was a white male (bearing in mind societal pressures, the availability of education and options etc.) and the prevalence of white males is a hangover, if so like all hangovers it will die down.
What I do know is that in my profession (technical infosec) there's a hard time finding talent, but that's because your average graduate student won't cut it. So we're stuck in a pool where you have a subset of CS grads, with some security interest and experience, subset of which have a particular mindset and abilities, and in turn a subset of which won't run away at the prospect of learning a staggering amount of information about systems, programs and all kinds of stuff are what you're after. Then on top of that I get told that because there's a skew further up the chain that I should incentivise particular groups to 'correct an imbalance' I have no direct control over.
Here's a real-world example: A workplace where most of the (all-male) development team is using the same "bikini babe" screensaver. It's a small thing to a guy, something you may not even notice. It's a small thing to plenty of women, too. Some other women may see that as an implicit message that they aren't taken seriously as anything but a sex object.
Sure, it's a small thing, but small things add up.
I don't want to say that you are the problem or that you should hire unqualified people to correct an imbalance. All I want is for people to be honest with themselves that this world isn't a pure meritocracy and that you may be (as I am) the beneficiary of privilege based on sex or race or class. Is that really controversial?
I am embarrassed for you.
Turn it around for a moment. Imagine you work in a mostly female industry. There's something that you, as a man, care about, that your women co-workers don't (I don't know, scheduling you to be on-call during the World Cup finals). What do you do?
Option 1: Say nothing, suffer in silence, and feel like they don't know or care.
Option 2: Say something to try to improve the situation, and have people accuse you of getting your boxers in a bunch over something minor.
What he described is illegal in the US, by the way, and can get both you and your employer sued. It's not minor: it's part of culture bonding based on women-as-sex-objects rather than as possible equal participants.
The demographic makeup of tech careers may simply be the result of billions of people just doing what it is they do.
If we assume there aren't any differences between men and women, but speculate on what the world would look like with significant differences, what would the distributions be like (as compared to today).
On the reason why, I would say the level interest is very tied up with ability in any case. What is more innate ability probably causes interest. I don't think it is a scientific statement to say it is only a social phenomenon (or vica-versa).
Are people in nursing worried about the field underperforming as a whole because it has so many women?
Proponents of this theory in tech jobs don't seem to understand this. They just see that if the numbers don't add up to a perfectly even split, there's something nefarious going on.
Both fields are concerned and do talk about ways they can address the imbalance (and act in limited capacities).
Eg: You can make an argument for or against a mixture of two things in differing ratios, but the moment you use the words "balanced" and "unbalanced" to represent the two states, the it is harder to argue for the "unbalanced" side. Likewise for "core" vs "surface" (de Bono's example) Who would want to argue against balance, 'core', or in this case, "diversity"?(What are you, some kind of bigot?).
"Diversity" is automatically assumed to be a positive, before the argument on whether it is desirable begins, and there isn't a value neutral or value positive word that is its opposite.
Specifically in this post, there are plenty of value laden words - 'diversity', 'meritocracy' etc put together to slant in a particular direction. Not much solid argument or content there - the power of the argument comes instead from the values attached to the specific words used, which makes it a bit iffy - Martin is a gifted writer and clear thinker - this just isn't one of his better efforts.
[Due Disclosure: I know Martin from my days at ThoughtWorks. I respect him immensely and think he is a very impressive person, who has given me a lot of very useful advice on many occasions.]
Fwiw, I am not saying Martin is wrong - he is a smart guy and he is a probably right. I am just saying his argument uses subtle tricks of rhetoric to, essentially, circle back to his assumptions.
Also I disagree with this line from the article: "A diversity imbalance suggest that there are many women, who would have good careers as programmers, who are not getting the opportunity to do so." If women are denied opportunities as programmers there will be an imbalance. An imbalance can be caused by any number of other factors.
As an aside, my boss at the moment is a woman, and a few years ago she had to staff up significantly and hired several young women at the junior level. The interesting thing is that her team hasn't really changed because of "the diversity" since it turns out that women who like programming act pretty much like the men who like programming: they're kind of socially awkward, have sometimes unreasonable expectations that the world will be a meritocracy, make a fetish out of liking cartoons and movies that most people don't, and so on.
At least, I've certainly seen no research suggesting that is true; you may believe it but "most" people don't and if they did they haven't provided evidence for that belief. If your hypothesis is correct, how do you explain the massive variation over time in gender gap even just in the United States? (citation: http://phrogram.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityS...)
First, no one really knew what kind of career path getting a computer science degree entailed until around then anyway, and once women had figured it out they decided they didn't want it.
Second, in my opinion women are much more sensitive to their career's stability and predictability than men are, for the simple reason that they're the ones who have to plan out when to have children. You'll notice that the drop-off more or less coincided with the first (or second, or maybe third - I forget which) big bust in the PC industry in the 80s. Mainframes and even microcomputers did not have boom-and-bust cycles like PCs did in the 80s, although individual companies might blow up the industry as a whole was relatively stable. College students looking for stability around that time might sensibly decide "computing" wasn't for them any more.
My favorite reference in this discussion (well, about women in science and engineering as a whole) is Philip Greenspun's article (http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science) who basically makes the argument that the median scientist who doesn't win Noble Prizes actually has a pretty crappy career and that women are smart enough to stay away.
One point of view I hear fairly regularly is that these diversity imbalances are natural - because men don't have the aptitude or inclination for child care. The big flaw here is a simple one of evidence. There are (roughly) 50% men in the world, so we should expect the ratio for men in child care to be 50% - unless there's real evidence that some other ratio is natural.
This waste hurts our society, too. We need more and better child care to nurture and support the next generation. By not bringing enough men into the profession, we are handicapping ourselves. How can we say we are hiring the best people when we ignore significant chunks of our population?
I think the point is, that when "women in tech" comes up, the default assumption that people (particularly feminists) tend to jump to is that sexism is keeping women out of tech. More specifically, that sexist guys in tech are keeping women out. Even when not stated explicitly, this accusation has been made many, many times, and underlies every discussion about this topic.
But the immediate assumption when it comes to nursing is almost never that women in nursing programs mistreat men. In fact, I've almost never heard that accusation, even though it's considered the null hypothesis when it comes to "women in tech". People are much quicker to look for other explanations, for instance that men are more likely to be bothered by the working conditions, pay, autonomy, etc. than women are.
I'm sure you can come up with reasons why men may choose not to make their living caring for children, even though they'd prefer to do so. Is this not a problem we should attempt to fix?
Absolutely, we should address these problems. First we need to know what they are, though, and I think the discussion about this topic has been much more productive in nursing than it has been in tech, because sexism is not considered the null hypothesis there.
In particular, most of the links related to nursing seem to be making arguments analogous to the much derided "women aren't interested in tech because the work doesn't appeal to women" theory, arguing that men don't like nursing because the work is not perceived by them as male enough in various ways, not that they have any perceptions of anti-male bias in the nursing community. Quite frankly, I'd reject any such notions, since there is no such general feeling, at least none that I've ever heard, so that's not what's keeping people from walking through the nursing school door in the first place (otherwise, I figure I would have been at least cognizant of such a general perception).
Similarly, I'm skeptical whether tech really has any significant misogynist reputation once we look beyond feminist-in-tech bloggers and male me-too hangers-on - none of the women I know seem to have that impression (though granted, they're from pretty varied and non tech-centric backgrounds), and I certainly have not seen where I've worked.
When I have asked my female friends about their impressions of the computer world, they tend to think that yeah, it's a circle-jerk of forever-alone dorks, but they generally assume that they'd be more welcoming to women and more accepting of them than guys in most fields, not less. When asked why they don't do programming-ish stuff themselves, most have said stuff like "that's for the math geeks", and "I study people, not code" (crank the superiority knob to the max on both of those, btw - when I asked this, I got the definite sense that they thought the subject matter was distinctly below them). Not once have I heard "because I've heard that guys in tech treat women like shit" as an answer, which makes me very suspicious when people point to that as the definitive root cause...
And people wonder why the ladies don't want to hang out with you kids all day. Could it be that ladies are smart enough to figure out when and where they are unwelcome? UNPOSSIBLE
signed, a lady who is interested in programming
Oh those ladies and their feeble, overheating lady-brains!
In software development, we seem to be beset by an astonishing array of incompetence. The bar is so low that nobody should argue that any particular sub-group of the population would, by nature, be worse.
However, I am always intrigued that when people talk about "diversity", they always look to balance the high end of the spectrum, and never the low end.
For example:
Between 2003 and 2008, over 39 out of every 40 deaths in (US) military operations in Iraq were men. Where's the outcry about gender imbalance?
Who is in prison, the world over as criminals or political prisoners? The vast majority are men. Where's the outcry about gender imbalance?
In the US, most homeless people are men. Where's the outcry about gender imbalance?
Over 90% of people killed while performing their job are men. Where's the outcry about gender imbalance?
Men on average die three of four years younger than women. Where's all the research into finding out why?
Why on the news, when reporting exam results, is it a triumph that girls have outperformed boys for the last several years?
I read an article once that said that two industries showing the greatest gender imbalance were "programming" and janitoring. The article then went on to talk about systematic gender discrimination in the software field (yes... "geeks" and "nerds" came into it a lot). But why did the article make no more mention of the need to get more women into janitoring?
The latter in particular gives lots of detail, not just in describing the situation (the imbalance isn't the same everywhere, in every company or in every job description) but also in in explaining how (historically) and why (causally) the situation became what it is today.
True. But are underrepresented groups being actively denied access as was the case in the example above? Apple and oranges. Not saying there isn't a problem, just saying it's a different problem. I think in this case more passive cultural than active cultural problem.
There are imbalances everywhere. Line cooks. Where are the women line cooks? Photography. Where are the women in professional photography -how many women street photographers do we know, other than Vivian Maier? Where are the straight people in fashion? I think, at least in some cases, there is self selection going on. Different airports have different pluralities of ethnicities doing lots of the service work. SFO is different from JFK is different from BOS, in that regard.
Instead I prefer to take constructive action to change this, without worrying if (1) it is natural or unnatural or (2) it would be better. I accept that the current state is unnatural and a more balanced population would be better.
If you agree, please post replies here with what you think can/should be done (or what you are already doing). If you disagree, please reply to one of the other threads.
What can be done. I think that's difficult. It has to be something pervasive, insidious in the culture. Via TV, internet, radio, entertainment, education, propagated by not only peers but all via all media. Everywhere. There needs to cease the archetyping of human roles. Something on that scale could happen, but it would take a generation or two. Kind of like the deprogramming of National socialism in Germany, or deprogramming of Religion in (soviet) Russia. 100% success isn't necessary, just enough to overcome the momentum or steady state.
Very vast, very pervasive with both incentives and punishment. Piecemeal I don't think would result in fast enough turn-around in attitude.
To me the problem is cultural. It's not men or women, it's the whole body of the culture which results in the skewed numbers.
I have also noticed behaviors that work to systematically lower participation by women, and I have worked to reverse them. For example -- noting that invitations to speak at a tech conference included no women, even though there were many qualified choices (I gave the conference organizers a list). I think the issue was that we invite who we know -- we need to break out of that -- our networks are probably overwhelmingly male.
I suggest more discussion (not here -- everywhere) -- but focused on ideas to increase the number of women in programming -- not meta-discussions. Try to notice when the ratio is bad and comment on it -- insist on something being done. And --- if you notice behaviors that work against changing the ratio -- do something about it.
And, I don't think it's very constructive to keep meta-arguing about it. If you want to, go ahead, but it's starting to sound a little silly. Almost all of these arguments were used to stop women from becoming lawyers 100 years ago. When, instead, we started working to include women -- their numbers grew to half the profession. 100 years from now, many of these arguments will seem outdated, especially the ones arguing natural aptitude.
What kind of constructive action am I advocating? Nothing less than to continue the argument, in the most charitable and reasonable spirit we can attain. We are arguing about the most important of things: our moral aim. That is, "what is it we ought to do?" Should we promote diversity in computing? Tied up with this question of aims is the question of facts, namely: "Does promoting the politically correct notion of diversity mean the same as promoting the kind of diversity which will make computing as a profession more capable at achieving its ends?" Certainly, if there is a kind of diversity that brings the profession of computing closer to its ends (whatever those may be, and that too is in question) then I imagine that promoting such diversity is considered wise by all here.
What is primarily in debate is whether or not politically correct diversity (diversity of gender and race, primarily) is the same as effective diversity. If, like you seem to think, both kinds of diversity are the same, then doing what you suggest is in fact constructive. However, if politically correct diversity is orthogonal or (Ada Lovelace forbid) contrary to effective diversity, then your actions will be at best ineffective and at worst destructive. The whole point of this argument is that we want our profession to do what is constructive, and recognize that we need to sort out as a profession what in fact is constructive.
Hacker News is a great place to have this kind of discussion since a) you have willing and able participants, and b) the clear tree structure of posts helps considerably since well-formed arguments all tend to take such a structure. There are other sites for discussing what "can/should be done (or what you are already doing)" for a particular agenda.
The attitude you give off in your post is one of "deeds, not words", which in my experience is equivalent to an attitude of "words, not thoughts". You are dealing with a crowd which is perhaps best known acting upon those beliefs of which they have been rationally convinced. Do you not agree that it is better for people to hold and act upon beliefs of which they have been convinced by means of reason? If so, why then do you speak so glibly of "tak[ing] apart the logic, rhetoric, and nitpick[ing] every word" which is nothing less then the process of analytic reasoning? If not, why are you here?
P.S. Note that I have not actually taken a stance on the issue in question in this post.
Let's pick some other topics. What's the percentage of men vs women that knit as a hobby? Crochet? Cross Stitch? Scrapbook? Ok, those are hobbies. But I'll bet if you asked most programmers, at least the good ones, they got started programming as a hobby and that happened to end up leading to a career.
How about nurses? In the USA is 93% women. 7% men (or was 14 years ago, not sure about today)
Are you going to argue that 50% of the participants of all those things should be men and that something is wrong because they are not at 50%?
I 100% want to see more women programmers but I'm at a loss on how to get more women interested in being a programmer. Should we try to do more? Of course! But there's a part of me that feels it's like saying "I wish more people didn't like pop music". I can wish all I want but if the biggest problem is culture it's going to take some serious concentrated effort to change. I'm talking like every 5th Hollywood movie and every 4th TV show needs to start showing women as programmers and in positive light the same way in the 70s they all started making anti-discrimination stories and girls can do anything stories. It's going to take women's magazines running articles on how awesome programming every month for years. It's not enough just to say women can do anything. If you want to change culture it's going to take a lot more than just a few words on a blog or a few more male geeks being aware of things they do that drive women off.
What I do think anyone who wants to see more women programmers can do is this: if you hear that women (or a woman) is discouraged from X for reason Y do not dismiss their concern. First, reason Y is probably a symptom not the main reason. Second, dismissal is in itself a discouragement, as it implies that their opinion is not worth anything. It would better to reflect on what the main reason might be (or what assumption are you making that may be false).
The stereotype of the white pasty male computer nerd is vanishing. With it is the pressure for those who don't fit that stereotype to choose a different field (Fowler mentioned this). I feel like this lack of diversity was almost purely societal and as society changes this will.
You are already seeing the enrollment of women at universities increase from its post-bubble years. It will probably keep going up. I don't think it will ever be on par, but it will get closer.
this isn't an issue that is going to self correct and people trying to take steps to remedy a problem should not be lambasted by the community.
The worst things humans have ever done to each other have all centered around the notion of "meaningful group variations within the human species". Without hard science, it's a scary and dangerous place.
That is an extremely strong statement to make without justification. It sounds like a forbidden knowledge-type of argument. Science should decide if there are statistically significant intergroup variations. But right now, that is strictly verboten by the type of arguments you just gave me. This strikes me as an echo of the resistance to understanding human evolution, but by a group that considers itself to be rational and scientific. It seems some people literally have taken the notion of universal human equality as a revealed truth in the religious sense. These people are hostile to inquiry into the matter because it would literally upset their entire worldview.
With hard science, you can do things like determine that some ethnic groups are more likely to develop particular kinds of illnesses or respond differently to some kinds of medications. That's great!
But looking at the status quo and saying "I guess women just aren't any good at this whole programming business" isn't hard science, it's ex-post-facto rationalization.
But assuming you are actually referring to nationalists (who probably rank #2 on the list of "worst things humans have done to each other"), I'll just quote a blog post Bryan Caplan wrote today:
We've learned so much from human genetic research. But when I read Fisher, I understand why the subject terrifies so many people. Hereditarianism combined with inane, half-baked moral philosophy does indeed logically imply Nazi-style homicidal mania. But don't blame the facts of human genetics. Blame the inane, half-baked moral philosophy.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/the_demented_pa....
If you think that communism is worse, that's fine by me. It doesn't change the fact that history is littered with cautionary examples of group-based determinism gone terribly wrong. It's naive to pretend otherwise.
"Meaningful variations between groups" does not logically imply that concentration camps are good policy, just as a belief in equality does not imply that gulags are.
Supposing that Jews are only half as smart as Aryans, it doesn't imply that they should be killed. Similarly, if I'm twice as smart as my maid, it doesn't follow that I should murder her. In both cases, you need some intrinsic moral belief that killing is acceptable - and that's where the real problem lies.
Also, need I point out that you are employing the logical fallacy of "appeal to consequences"?
I'm not saying it should be so hard. If we had a greater understanding of differences, that would probably be great. But it is hard, and it helps to be honest about that.
Sorry, but that is just bullshit. Everybody who is in IT and has talked to a bunch of women in his life has collected some evidence on this. When would Fowler accept it as evidence? If you have asked 100 women, or one million, or one billion, if they are inclined to go into IT? What do you suppose would be the result if we asked everybody on HN "what percentage of women you know have an inclination to go into IT"? I think there would be thousands of samples with a fairly obvious result.
Why there is little inclination is another question, but the logic Fowler employs here is simply bullshit. It matters because I don't think he'll be able to sway people's opinions if he simply dismisses the evidence they personally collected for themselves. Who are people supposed to trust, if they can't even trust themselves? Also, if he deals with evidence like that, I can not trust his argumentation because it seems as if he only wants to see or accept "evidence" that supports his viewpoint.
here are (roughly) 50% women in the world, so we should expect the ratio for women in computing to be 50% - unless there's real evidence that some other ratio is natural.[2] So far there's no such evidence.
But, er, doesn't the observation that the actual ratio is different evidence constitute "evidence"? Aside from direct observation, what other definition of "evidence" would you use? Or are you assuming that because one ratio exists in one set (the general population of humans) it must exist in any subset? This would require that the subset have no defining characteristics, which effectively prevents it from being a subset. (A bit loose with my language, but you get the gist)
Then his sheer audaciousness when he calls observation of the data circular logic! If I there are 20% blue trees in the world, and I see a lot with 40% blue trees, is it not natural to conclude there is some agency at work here? The question becomes one of intelligent design -- was there a external intelligent agent causing the blue tree delta? With complex systems, this is as much a religious question as anything else. We simply don't know. Very intelligent people could creatively speculate on all sorts of prime movers, natural or not.
Men have spent centuries using this kind of argument to deny women equal rights in all sorts of fields. Over the last century we've seen tons of evidence that this isn't true elsewhere, so why should it be true in software? As far as I'm concerned this shoddy history should make us doubly wary of the any suggestion that a diversity imbalance is natural.
I'm really not sure what to do with this. Is he arguing that since a certain type of rhetoric has been used to ill purpose in the past that it should be looked upon extra critically now? If so, how would I go about picking and choosing which methods of reasoning might be better or worse to use? It seems to me that he's arguing that based on some conclusion to the argument (there might be a natural difference) that we should hold the methods of reasoning suspect. But if we got a different conclusion using the same methods, that would be okay? This is like a generic ad hominem -- don't trust that reasoning because it's been faulty in the past! Well sure, all kinds of ways of reasoning have been faulty in the past. This has nothing to do with anything.
That is, given we have a unnatural imbalance, is it a problem that's sufficiently serious to spend energy on fixing it?
But he hasn't shown an unnatural imbalance at all, he's just made broad statements about how he feels about certain kinds of tools being used in the discussion.
Lack of diversity is itself a problem. Different people think differently, and consequently come up with different ways to solve problems. If you have a bunch of people with the same background, they miss lots of ideas - leading to inefficiencies and lack of innovation. A diverse group is usually more effective.
See here I completely agree with him -- a lack of various backgrounds, opinions, and personalities hurts small groups. But he seems to be saying that these good qualities -- opinions, backgrounds, personalities -- are inherently part of being a female, being a Norwegian, or of being black. So it's okay for him to say that in general being Norwegian is cause to make you so different you have value as a team member, at the same time he's saying that there are no natural differences to account for the difference in observed ratios? Huh? Who is using circular logic again?
Fowler seems like a nice guy, and I'm sure he likes puppies and ice cream and all of that, but this is tripe. I am a firm believer in having as much possible diversity as possible in my teams as long as we can hold the group together. So count me in as being a huge proponent of diversity.
But diveristy is all about things that you can't see -- not bullshit like your skin color, how tall you are, or your gender. Lots of teams fail because nobody on the team had good empathy skills. Nobody fails because there wasn't a person on there wearing glasses. Don't confuse the true greatness of diversity with some kind of flavor-of-the-week political bullshit.
Here it is: nobody knows. It's a complex system full of individuals all acting in their best interests, not something you can perform a logical proof on. The variables and systems involved are legion. If you would like to discuss the story of just one person, we could do that with some clarity. But if you start waving your hands around and claiming you already know the answer -- whether you want it to be a natural ratio or whether you see prejudice in the world -- we're not going to get very far. I can assure you that whatever happening is natural, but by "natural" I mean it might be that the society at large has major problems that need to be fixed. Or maybe not. Beats me. This is a topic for moral discussion, not logical discussion, and bringing these kinds of logic tools to the table only makes things worse, not better.
Must be in angry-old-guy mode again today. Sorry about that. I'm just really disappointed that Fowler couldn't see the errors of his own thinking and then presumes to lecture us about it. Man I find that really annoying.
but fowler is using "natural" in a sense more like "unbiased by historical accident" or "what we would get if a bunch of people were suddenly created out of nothing and formed a society from zero".
so there's nothing new here. grumpy, indignant old men (self aware or not) believe the status quo (which only incidentally favours them) to be natural. people like fowler do not.
[edit: i've removed fowler's superlatives to be less unpleasant (sorry - in my defense i have been configuring maven all day...); the grumpy old man characterisation is from the parent post]
Yes, you are correct. I made an edit to that effect.
If I observe something, it is occurring, correct? Or I could not have observed it.
The question becomes why is it occurring? We can observe "simple" things like trees and rocks and disagree on the reasons happen the way they do.
I'm not trying to argue from ignorance here. Certainly you could ask each and every person and draw some general conclusions. But that kind of approach is very fluffy and you could spin the results to say just about anything you wanted. If you have a master's degree in computer science and decided to be stay-at-home dad, is that because the system is flawed? Perhaps you just prefer being with your kids? Most people don't make those kinds of decisions for any one reason. It's complex.
Like I said, I love diversity. I think my biggest problem is this continuing thing we do where we define diversity as external characteristics. It's the internet age. I could care less what your sexual organs are or skin color is.
EDIT: Just to be sure I am advancing the discussion, the moral question is this: Assume I run a company with 100 employees. Only 20 of them are a member of a sub-group that is 30% in the larger population. Is it the moral thing for me to do to hire another 10 people of this subgroup, even if it means not hiring people of another group that might be better qualified just so the ratios match up?
If the answer to that question is "yes", then I have two follow-up questions. One, how many kinds of subgroups do I need to track? One-armed people? People who have beards? Who gets to decide what subgroups are special or not? Two, is it moral for a voter to make somebody do something because they personally find that it has a moral outcome? If I wanted people to be nicer in the world, could I pass a law that required all of them to give 10% to charity? Does something I feel morally outraged about automatically mean I should go mucking around with somebody else's freedom? If so, where's the stopping point?
As for Jim Crow laws, please note that I am not saying that society shouldn't evolve. I'd argue that some degree of legislating morality is necessary for society to move along -- even though I find it most distasteful. But there should be time limits on these things. That's why I bring up the internet. I really don't need grandpa's generation telling me how I should think. This is something each generation needs to settle for itself.
Even if you don't care about those things, it feels shallow and dangerous to pretend to live in a world where nobody cares about those things.
He is clearly starting from a conclusion and looking for the evidence and/or complicated logic to satisfy his own conclusion. In discussions of inequalities you will always find evidence to support the 'but it should be equal stance', because
a) Egalitarian assumptions invalidate otherwise valid explanations (which as sherlock holmes/bayes have it means all other explanations are more likely)
b) The world is a big complicated place, with lots of unknowns and ambiguities
c) Positive feedback may have reenforced an inequality, exaggerating it and thus making it hard to explain the magnitude using only simple explanations.
In this argument, he is only smart in the sense that he is taking a socially acceptable/convenient position.
All rhetoric should be looked at critically, and there's nothing wrong with being extra critical of rhetoric that's historically dubious.
What's your initial response to the phrase "separate but equal"?
Yes there is. It biases our thinking.
Here is a non-controversial example of this: "Millikan measured the charge on an electron...got an answer which we now know not to be quite right...It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..."
(The narrative comes from Richard Feynman.)
If we look on some hypothesis extra critically, and others only reasonably critically, we will bias our views towards the beliefs which we apply less scrutiny to.
(See also this discussion, where I defend a paper claiming to prove the existence of ESP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068699 )
I'm going to stand by the notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, even if that may create a small bias toward conventional thinking.
In Bayesian terms, it sounds like you are merely stating that you assign a very small prior to the "natural reasons" hypothesis. I.e., you are claiming that before looking at the evidence, you believe "natural reasons" has a 1 in 1 million (or some similarly large number) chance of being true. Is this correct?
These discussions aren't theoretical; to pretend they are is actively harmful.
Further, it's not even a correct use of the Appeal to Consequences fallacy. If the natural causes hypothesis is true, it does not logically follow that anyone should be oppressed.
It does, however, logically follow from the "natural causes" hypothesis that you can't have both equal rights and equal proportions (i.e., either you discriminate against men, or you have fewer women).
For instance, there is plenty of evidence women are less likely to be very good (or very bad) at math: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941
There is also evidence women are more risk averse, making them less likely to work in startups: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full
There is evidence women avoid computing specifically because they are intolerant of geeks: http://web.archive.org/web/20100106021904/http://scicom.ucsc... (The original article was taken down)
This report also pushes the intolerance hypothesis, as well as women being less dedicated, being fearful of text interfaces, and preferring more collectivist environments: http://web.archive.org/web/20091007234852/http://opensource.... (Please go read the report before criticizing me for citing it. It's written by a woman who is allegedly a feminist.)
It's safe to say that none of this is ironclad proof that the only cause of women not being present in computing is natural causes. But the author's claims that "there's no such evidence" is utterly wrong. There is evidence, he just ignores it.
Lastly, the author completely ignores the fact that computing is very diverse. We have whites, all different types of asians, israelis and a smattering of euros (and of all sexual orientations). Our diversity may not be statistically identical to the general US population, but it's nonsensical to claim a lack of diversity in computing.
I can't see any reason why being genuinely good at math is more important to effective programming than being good at chemistry (layers and sequence), biology (complex systems) or languages (building meaning from abstract or incomplete signals). You do not need to be good at late high-school math to understand Big-O.
I suspect people who are good at or passionate about math are far more likely to stroke their ego with premature optimisation.
Also, there's a vast difference between aptitude for maths, and performing well in maths tests. Attention to detail, regard for the education system, interest in the topic all play a part.
> There is evidence women avoid computing because
> they are intolerant of geeks
I would strongly suspect that just as math and CS ability are correlated, so would math and chemistry. Biology less so, since biology is mostly just memorizing (at least for the first 3-4 years of college).
Anyway, I cited math data mainly because it's so widely studied. I get so many downvotes when I discuss this topic with data that I'm not even going to attempt to write about stuff I have no readily available data on.
I see a different pattern that goes in mostly the reverse direction. [...] young nerds [...] are therefore undesirable to be around.
Um, that's not the reverse direction. That's the same direction as what I said: women avoid computing because they are intolerant of geeks.
Note that young nerds also often act "bizarrely" towards men and each other. I certainly did before I learned to pass. But the claim of the author of the studies I cited is that women are less tolerant of "bizarre" behavior.
> I get so many downvotes when I discuss this topic with data
I accept your correction in that we're making the same point about young men. What I should have said is that the way you phrase it makes it seem like it's women that initiate the pattern. I don't think that's so. Although perhaps you could go back further and ask, what made the men neurotic in the first place, was it cruel rejection or bullying by prom queens - no idea. I just found the phrasing backwards.
Fair enough. I thought the link was obvious enough, but you are keeping me honest. I have no data proving this link myself.
However, I just messaged a friend of mine who occasionally dabbles in math-ed stuff. He recommends these (paywalled) papers as starting points:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1500963&dl=ACM&col...
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1047480
And an older paper "Identification of Computer Programming Aptitude", by Alspaugh (one of the early works).
I'll asked him to give me copies next time I see him in person (I'm no longer an academic, so I can't access university libraries).
I would strongly suspect that
just as math and CS ability are correlated,
so would math and chemistry.
Anecdotal evidence here: I'm pretty good at math, but failed several chemistry exams in high scool. I just didn't "get" it. Maybe I would be able now, because I'm better at thinking abstractly and systematically than when I was 16, but that would be because I'm a programmer today. For me the correlation definitely doesn't hold. Same goes (to a lesser extent) for biology for me.
Agreed that perhaps not all women are like that...but for one that is nice there is at least a hundred shallow bitches around!
For women not to be represented in the population that practices software engineering indicates some intrinsic flaw or inability with them --
but for one that is nice there is at least a hundred shallow bitches around
-- But for you to fail to achieve representation in the population which can acquire a mate or find a willing sex partner is ALSO a flaw with women!
Brilliant! Heads: you win; tails: women lose.
"but young nerds in particular tend to act bizarrely towards women, and are therefore undesirable to be around."
and a personal explanation of why I as a young nerd is slowly developing this kind of a bias.
You can't change other people. Focus on the things you can affect, like finding ways to make yourself a more relaxed and relaxing person to talk to.
Some people are trying to give you feedback in other parts of this thread. Much of it is not constructive, but some is. But you seem to be focussed on reiterating your points rather than taking it on.
Work out how you can be more open to feedback. Find someone who will give you honest feedback. Distinguish between people who give good, direct feedback and people who get off by demeaning you.
I assume you created this account as a throwaway because you had an idea what you were saying would be controversial but this stuff is troubling you you and you wanted to talk about it. Good move. Now take the next step.
a) Most people dont have any prejudices. b) I care about the societal acceptability of my thoughts before thinking them c) One's thoughts should be discarded if they can somehow be negatively viewed in job interviews d) I cannot have my own business and therefore not need anyone to give me a job.
Yet, somehow I manage to keep the perspective that technology isn't populated by sexist assholes - sure the ones that are there stand out and make up a lot of the things that come to mind when I'm stressed. But really it's a small percentage [even though that small percentage can really get to you].
Try to keep the same perspective about women, the vast majority of us aren't "bitches".
I dont think you have been in a situation where "Can I buy you a drink" is replied with a "you're ugly ...go away".
Everyone wants to be seen as desirable, but it is not an entire gender's fault that the specific women you've approached don't respond to your advances. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the best way I've found to get dates is to treat women like interesting people instead of potential dates, while putting effort into making myself conventionally attractive (working out, getting regular hair cuts, careful grooming, conversational techniques). It's a lot of work, but it's been more effective than deciding the problem is women. Women talk to each other: the friend you make today has a bunch of friends she can set you up with tomorrow. I mean, if the problem is "all women" you might as well give up.
Plus, in the meantime I've met a bunch of interesting people and had interesting conversations I'd otherwise have missed out on because I was only considering women as potential romantic partners. It is possible to have fulfilling intellectual, emotional and social relationships that have nothing to do with sex. If you do care exclusively about sex, I recommend escorts or online hookups.
If you are interested in relationships, those 20% are unlikely to provide them. I think online dating is a much better choice: I know several friends, including married friends, who met on OkCupid.
The problem I have observed is that nerds assume the problem is women. It's like if you're linking in a common library and it's failing to load: what's more likely, that there's a bug in the library that thousands of other people use or that you accidentally linked against the debug version? Someday I'll get around to writing my "How to Hack Dating: an iterative approach to acquiring relationships" book. Lean Startup principles apply surprisingly well.
As lots of us on HN trend towards the geekier side of life, social cues sometimes don't come as naturally to us as they do to many others - it takes time and effort to not be socially awkward, but it's 100% worth it.
The next time something like that happens, try reviewing exactly what happened, how things might have been misinterpreted, and how you can learn & grow from it.
Also keep in mind that there are lots of people who _are_ jerks, but gender has nothing to do with it.
Most importantly, don't let it bias you, and keep your chin up!
The point I was trying to make was that a bunch of negative experiences with women when you are young leaves very deep scars and these scars manifest themselves as unconscious biases so much that whenever you see a beautiful woman (who will most probably reject you if you tried!) you are automatically biased against her.My brain does this to me so often even though I think I am logical than most other people.
Now I will make another point that is also controversial.(someone needs to say these things!)
See when you grow your skills interacting with women a point comes when the things you cant change matter much more than the things you can, so much that the situation seems pretty helpless.
So at that point even if I bought really expensive clothes and bought myself a mercedes or say became a really smooth talker, how women respond to me would only marginally improve as compared to the non-possible changes such as changing my race to become white...changing my height to become six feet tall etc.
So no matter what I do a six feet tall white guy or a good looking muscular black guy will always have significantly higher odds of attracting a given woman over me.
The more you approach the limit the more you begin to see this brutal truth of the dating world.The things that matter most are things you are born with and this sometimes causes you develop significantly negative feelings towards women as a whole.
Wrong. You're suffering from confirmation bias.
Guys obsess about money and looks to prove their worth to females, but most of that shit doesn't matter, actually. (It's held against you if you're severely deficient, of course.)
What does? A strong sense of self-identity, confidence, the ability to be both a risk-taker and a stable provider, and, more generally, being an interesting person. These are much harder to work on, so you don't hear as much talk about them. You need to be able to enjoy your life without a girlfriend. You need to have something you love to talk about, and, preferably something you can be good at.
Suck up your pride, ask for help, and start working toward taking responsibility for more of your life.
We are all human beings with weakly rational brains.Only thing wrong here is that it is not socially acceptable to be biased against women!
I get about 5 mails per week pimping some junior job to me that would probably pay 40% less than my current job. I don't reply to these emails because these people haven't done their homework.
The poster above you is saying that maybe that's how attractive women fail...
I either gravitate toward women who tend to respond to my advances negatively or have some behavior that puts women off. Therefore, I'm sexist and consider most if not all women inferior to men in ways including ability in math, engineering. Because I can't get them to sleep with me.
...What??
Although I absolutely agree that it is totally irrational to think of women as inferior in anything , my primate human brain cannot be convinced by reason alone to discard all its biases.Therefore I stand as an example of a young male nerd who as a result of his interactions with the opposite sex is developing negative biases towards them.
Read that post again very carefully. Either you look for the wrong women, or you do something women dislike. Both are relatively easy to fix.
Go talk it out, either with a friend or a therapist. The longer you wait, the harder it will be.
I think like all other people you are missing my point.Please read my other responses on this thread.
But Yes I am certainly a failure so far by all conventional standards......but that does'nt mean I have the magical ability to get rid of all my biases....dealing with them is going to take time and in case of this particular bias ,perhaps a lot of positive experiences of interacting with women.
The specious arguments you put forth in the thread are not worth addressing.
"Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance" http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
Now for the anecdotes: in my experience there has been plenty of outright racial and gender discrimination in computing, science, math, and even medicine. I've seen it. I suspect most if not all of you have seen it. It persists into the 21st century.
That needs to continue to change.
It agrees completely with the data I cited. It shows a variance ratio of 1.1-1.2 across many countries (though not all).
Interestingly, it also shows very little correlation between gender equity and gender disparities in math performance. The strongest correlation it shows is that gender equity is positively correlated with math performance disparities! Gender equity seems to increase [1] math performance of both boys and girls, but it increases boy's scores more.
[1] Of course, the article only shows correlation, not causation, but I didn't feel like rephrasing what I wrote.
This was the most glaring example of statistical dishonesty in this paper: their data shows with perfect clarity that there's a > 1.0 male/female variance ratio for almost every country in the set, and I encourage anyone interested in this to look at their graphs and draw your own conclusions (http://imgur.com/39pja). To me, it looks like a typical noisy measurement (the authors note that the variation within a single country was about 20% from test to test, so we should expect a decently wide distribution (well, the authors don't actually admit that - as a first mathematical blunder in a series of many, they claim that 20% variation is very small and means we should expect a tight distribution)) with a mean somewhere between 1.12 and 1.15, a variance of maybe .1 (just about right for a measurement with around 20% variation, no?), and a decent bit of skew. Pretty good jumping off point for some analysis and explanation, I would think...
But not in this article. The authors merely point to those graphs and claim that they obviously disprove the greater male variance hypothesis. In other words - they point to a distribution of admittedly noisy measurements that is clearly centered around ~1.13 or so, with almost zero density below 1.0, and claim that it proves that the mean of the distribution is 1.0, (with an implicit "STFU Larry Summers"). When I first read this, I thought they were trolling me, the result is so clearly wrong.
[As an aside, it's worth noting that a variance ratio in the 1.1 to 1.2 range is enough to explain away most, if not all, of the gender imbalance in mathematics, if we make the assumption that the variance ratio is the same throughout all of mathematics education (which is not likely true - IIRC these measurements were all at the 8th grade level)]
Their argument? Because the measured variance ratios are not identical, we should ignore the mean of the distribution. Seriously, that's it. I'm not talking about a statistical calculation showing that the null hypothesis (that the variance ratio is 1.0) should not be rejected, mind you (because such a calculation would not allow us to accept the null hypothesis - a quick look at the graph is enough to be sure of that), or in fact any statistical argument at all. They quite literally claim that any variation in the measured variance means that the entire distribution is meaningless.
They also try to confuse the issue a little bit by pointing out that there's a bit of correlation between the variance ratio and the variance; while interesting and certainly worthy of further explanation (not done in this paper), this is completely and utterly irrelevant to the variance hypothesis, yet they imply that it somehow disproves it as well.
Quite frankly, the referees should have caught this, I can't remember the last time I've seen such bad statistical reasoning in a legitimate math journal. There are glaring issues all over the rest of the paper, too, where they've filtered and re-filtered data many times until they obtain the correlations that they want, where they chop data into bins in suspect ways, etc., but to actually enumerate all these errors in detail would make this a much longer rant.
It's a shame, too, because it appears that some of the article is solid, and it presents some interesting data that definitely warrants more investigation; unfortunately, they went absolutely bananas in several places, drawing completely unfounded conclusions from the data they generated, so I would be hesitant to cite this paper as proof of anything.
While I do think the variance ratio in math is significantly different from unity (without speculating as to the cause), it's worth pointing out that while this does explain a lot of the gender imbalance in math, it doesn't come close in computing. Off the top of my head, in math it's something like 35% women, a 1:2 ratio, whereas in tech it's closer to 10%, or 1:9.
To explain a gap that wide based on variance, we'd have to assume that men are way more than 10% more variable in computer ability than women, probably more on the order of 100%, and that seems very unlikely to me (there's not really any data to look at there because CS performance is not as commonly measured as math is).
I think you've got an American bias there. :-)
I'm joking.
That is a misleading characterization of the paper, which aims at establishing an analytical framework rather than offering itself as a 'report,' within an existing analytical framework. For example, rather than suggesting that women are 'fearful' of text interfaces, the author observes that their continuing popularity in the FLOSS community exacerbates past educational disparities: 'Instead of deducting from biological sex difference, the phenomenon suggests a lingering deficiency of women’s IT education and women-unfriendly products and tools.' The writer goes on to posit that many staples of geek culture (eg long coding pushes) act as exclusionary factors for women who may have to juggle coding with other tasks such as child-rearing, and that women's contributions in areas such as documentation or design are seriously undervalued.
Your summary of the paper is so far off base that I find myself wondering if you inadvertently linked to the wrong document.
You are correct, however, that my use of the term "fearful" was wrong. Thanks for the correction. In actuality, the article doesn't explain why women don't teach themselves how to use gcc.
And yes, you are also correct when you point out that one specific reason women are less dedicated and less willing to put the time in is that they have other interests (such as child rearing and housework).
Apart from the minor issue of whether "fearful" was correct, what do you object to about my characterization?
Especially the first one: women are better at math in some cultural settings and worse in others, suggesting that the gender gap is culturally determined. In order to prove that these things were biologically determined you would either need to show that they were present at birth, across a large number of different cultural contexts, or had direct, traceable biological causation. In the absences of any of those three, I and most social scientists will assume that gender differences are the product of culture.
Do you think having more women in our profession would actually be a bad thing?
No. That tells you there's a difference, but absolutely nothing about the causes. You may not know of an artificial causal effect that inhibits greater participation in software by women, but not knowing about it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist (unless you have falsified all available hypotheses, naturally).
Fowler's point is that lopsided ratios existed many times in the past, and people argued that they were natural, but they turned out not to be, as was proven when the barriers were torn down and the ratios equalized. So in that sense, he's arguing that ratio observations do not count as "evidence" in this context.
However, what he's overlooking is the fact that in most cases, those imbalanced ratios in the past were buttressed by direct barriers to entry - women and minorities were usually actively excluded, and then when the active discrimination stopped, things started to equalize, often very rapidly (the "Jackie Robinson" effect).
We have seen this happen in most fields (tech has just about the worst gender imbalance in any field apart from nursing). And now we're at a point where explicit barriers to entry are all but absent. So as time goes on, the observation that the ratios are not approaching 1:1 in tech suggests more and more strongly that there's something else going on, and that the methods used to create parity in other fields (fighting -isms, mainly) are not addressing the root cause of inequality in tech.
That's not to say that this is evidence that there's not some other sort of more subtle discrimination going on; that's certainly possible, and I'm open to evidence that something in tech is somehow worse than in other fields (I've never seen any numbers to suggest this, and when looking at data like salary gaps, tech appears to be more equal than most fields). But it does mean that we should be wary about drawing the same causal conclusions that we drew 60 years ago when the situation was very different...
But what kind of diversity will have the greatest effect? I posit that there are far greater kinds of diversity that will have a bigger impact than gender: language, culture, education.
I would also be interested in studies in why girls aren't as interested in science and computing as boys. When I started no one around me knew what a computer was. I'm kind of puzzled why I was interested at the age of 11. I was also discouraged from doing it at school, but it didn't stop me.
I take issue with te while geek thing. It may be true of some devs, but most I know don't fit into that stereotype, they have a wide range of other interests. I wish people would drop it.
Although female programmers are rare now, that wasn't the case in the 70's. That shift is another argument against the natural balance hypothesis.
I am too young to know, but is this the experience of others as well?
Again, this is based purely on anecdotal experience, but I wonder if women programmers tend to concentrate into particular industries (for whatever reason). My wife was a programmer at a contractor for a large government agency, and it struck me that there was a higher concentration of women there than in other industries or in the start-up scene.
If this is generally the case, I am not sure to what extent this would support any given hypothesis.
It genuinely weirds me out how many white males in tech see no conflict or even feel a shiver of historical echoes when they argue the premise that they (white men) are intrinsically genetically gifted in ways which other groups are not, and that is why they are superior (at technology). Every other time it has ever been argued, it has been false.
Unless the argument was that white men are better at the combination of having penises, privilege, and low amounts of melanin --- we have that hat trick down.
My personal opinion is that the most important reason there are few women programmers, next to which any other factor fades into insignificance, is that women are simply less interested in doing it. Now that I think about it, the fact that there used to be many more women programmers when women's career options were more limited is pretty strong evidence that this is true: Now that women have more options, there are fewer women programmers.
It was assumed that programming would be basically the same thing. Male mathematicians would write up algorithms and women would type them up. If you read math papers that relied on computer calculation from the 50's and 60's you'll often see women's names in the acknowledgments for having programmed the algorithms.
As it became clear that it was a more involved job, men began moving into the field. Someone else in these comments listed the books that describe the process.
We could potentially take the Avatar/Dances With Wolves approach. A really awesome superstar male programmer could start dressing in drag and lead female programmers to victory. Or at least 50% representation.
I'm sure there are fellow female (and other minority) programmers reading the comments on this article feeling completely unwelcome in the programming community.
We all would. We're just not seeing you gals come in. We've got quite a few female project managers and business devs at my company, but no programmers.
It is possible (I don't actually know in your case) that there are other factors that make women not want to apply to your company. For example, right now (and in the US) women are more likely than men (for this argument it doesn't matter whether it is cultural or innate) to seek companies that reward people (or at least don't punish people) for wanting a balanced between work and home. A company's career website (or benefits website) can turn off potential applicants if it looks like that balance is not respected. That is particularly true in software because there are software companies that do both.
Then there is the tone of "No, there could not possibly be a problem with US" that permeates so many comments on this thread. There are very few voices that are even willing to entertain the idea that there is an aspect of this culture that is unwelcoming or hostile to women.
And finally, there are all the comments that seem to be saying that who cares why there is a strong gender imbalance in this field, they don't see a problem with the status quo, and that including more women in the field is completely unnecessary and not worth considering, much less actually doing anything about.
So yeah. Not feeling like I could ask any of these people and a question about something I'm studying or make a comment about something technical without getting either a lot of "pat pat little girl" or otherwise insulting and unhelpful reactions.
Women: "We feel unwelcome. It's kind of lonely." Dudes: crickets Women: "Well, fine, we can make more money elsewhere working fewer hours." leave Nerdy Girls: "Video games are for boys, except the stupid ones. All those programmers are men, and all the technical women I've seen got pushed into program management. Guess I should go be a computational biologist instead. I'm not regarded as a strange alien in those classes." Dudes: "Hey, there's a lot fewer women here. Maybe there's a problem like those women said." Other Dudes: "Nah; let's just keep doing what we're doing. They probably just want to pop out kids or something. Besides, it's not like they wanted to sleep with me anyway." The Woman Who Didn't Leave: "It's totally cool guys; I'm not a bitch like those other women! I think it's awesome being the only girl!"
This thread is part of a much bigger context. As long as the response to someone just pointing out the consequences of the sexism women have reported happening repeatedly for decades is a bunch of dudes bickering among each other about whether the problem exists or whether it is more important than nerds having trouble propositioning women for sex in bars, I'm not sure what message women are supposed to receive.
As such I say there should be as many good women programmers to good male programmers as there are good women writers.
It turns out that there is a 12:1 ratio of males to females with the Asperger's diagnosis.
I wonder if the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in males contributes to behaviors that might give one an advantage in the software development field? It only takes a quick reading of the characteristics of the disorder to see that many of them are common among software developers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome
Of course, there are exceptions and I don't mean to imply that one cannot create good software without these characteristics. I only suggest that perhaps these characteristics provide some advantage in a field that is young and constantly changing.
In nursing: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/06/health/main521057....
http://www.lpn-to-rn.net/articles/men-nursing.php
In social work: http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/092310p32.shtml
http://www.prlog.org/11694478-men-in-social-work.html
In teaching/day care: http://www.menteach.org/
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_...
Imagine if you threw a party and invited half men, and half women, but only the men showed up. Wouldn't you be displeased with those results and conclude that you need to do something different to make your party more appealing to women? I know I would.
Does this mean the problem will take care of itself? That is, if it is true that a diverse group is usually more effective, the products and startups that succeed should have teams which tend to be more diverse than the ones that fail. And as that happens, founders interested in succeeding would pay more attention to the diversity of their firms.
Here's a simple example. Assume hypothetically that due to historical differences the vast majority of investment decisions are made by a non-diverse demographic who prefer to invest in people like themselves. So even though the diverse groups outperform, it may not be enough to overcome the "unfair advantage" of easier access to capital.
There are (real and perceived) barriers to entry, entrenched good-old-boys networks, gatekeepers, stereotypes, etc. Even if it's more like a minor obstacle than a brick wall, those tiny disparities add up can make a huge difference.