Gender gap in tech jobs narrows across advanced economies
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How do your personal classes represent the labor supply? The fact is that most college students now are female.
See this statistic from 2017: https://inside.collegefactual.com/stories/the-most-popular-m...
I lived in a shared apartment with 2 women and almost all their fellow students were women. Not computer science or anything technical of course.
To me the gap is closing because tech firms have more non-technical positions.
Why is acceptable to deny young men equity in education?
What do you think? Shouldn't university DEI programs be trying to recruit more young men to reduce the gender gap in higher education?
IME, that particular assertion has been discussed at length for years. Is it intellectually curious or interesting to start over again? Why would you want to have the discussion again? But I asked for it, so I'll go along with it a little.
...
Imagine a wealthy hedge fund manager's white male kid, a graduate of Exeter and a reasonably qualfied candidate, is denied admission to Harvard. How does and doesn't that implicate equity? Imagine a bicycle delivery person's Latina female kid, a graduate of an underfunded public school and similarly qualified to the other kid, is denied admission to Harvard, or is admitted but can't afford it. How do those situations differ?
White billionaires and Latinx poor - an extreme example used for simplicity (skipping the real-life complexity of, for example, Latinx billionaires) - are both 'groups', and each individual in both groups should have equal rights and something like equal opportunity. But to infer that the two situations are therefore the same with regard to equity is, IMHO, obviously false - to the point of being dishonest and just disruptive, demanding we spend our time explaining it. So I'm going to skip the explanation and assume we all understand those parts. ...
...
A few thoughts on the issues:
Discrimination x Power = Harm
(1) 10D x 0P = 0H
(2) 10D x 1P = 10H
(3) 1D x 10P = 10H
Young male education: IMHO it is a real problem that isn't getting enough attention. I doubt it's tied to race (is there evidence that it varies by race?) and while I suspect it's tied to family wealth, I'm not sure - that is, I could imagine that wealthy males and low-wealth males both perform at 80% of female economic peers, but that still lands wealthy males in college because of economic inequity. Still, I don't know those gender differences are an issue of equity - not every problem is an issue of equity.
> I think people who are genuinely working toward equity would advocate it for all people. Groups who only advocate for equity when it favors certain groups aren't really working toward equity at all.
I agree to a point. First, people have limited resources; they can't solve every problem for everyone; you can't tell a brain surgeon that they are discriminating against cardiac patients. Second, sans harm (see above), there is no issue of equity; nobody needs to advocate for white billionaires (though it seems that more HN commenters advocate for Elon Musk than for poor people in disadvantaged groups).
Most importantly, IME people who raise the parent comment's well-worn question advocate against equity measures for black people, women, and other disadvantaged groups. I don't recall any of them (I don't know you) supporting equity measures for those groups and arguing to add, for example, measures for poor white males.
For the sake of argument, I'll grant that rather controversial view. We're talking about discrimination by university administrators and admissions. They hold immense power in world where the college you attend determines the opportunities available to you. They fall in category "(3) Even minimal discrimination by the powerful can cause significant harm".
The rest of your comment is irrelevant and only obscures the issue. The question about a rich white male graduate of Exeter vs a poor Latina graduate of public school, muddles sex, race, and class into one bad example.
When all else is equal, should universities admit a male student before a female student in order to reduce the gender gap?
Regarding your one actual point: Clearly, certain racial and gender groups have more power than others, and they use it to actively discriminate to some degree - some do it very openly these days.
The idea you espouse, in practice, justifies injustice. It's asking children to pay for the sins of their parents. And everyone (even the people who supposedly benefit from this idea) will suffer as a consequence in the long run. You unwittingly sow the seeds of _more_ racial/gender animus, not less.
What shall we do about it? Insisting it's not there doesn't solve the problem. If you have better idea of how to resolve that injustice, let's hear it.
Differences will always exist between groups and there are a plethora of economic reasons why beyond 'systemic racism/sexism'. Russian-American's aren't paid the same as French-Americans. Nigerian-Americans earn more than the average white American. Bostonians have a different average income than Texans. 30 year olds have a different income than 31 year olds. Blue eyed people earn differently than green eyed people. Taller, prettier people earn more than shorter, less pretty people. How do you propose we determine exactly how much of these differences are due to 'discrimination' vs. the hundreds of other reasons these differences might exist?
The world is unfair in a variety of ways. But one thing that's painfully obvious from a cursory investigation of public policy, is that way too often, well intentioned policy measures end up doing EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what they were intended to do.
For example affirmative action has been a demonstrable failure. If you're admitted to a school like Harvard with lower SAT scores simply because of the color of your skin, you do worse than going to a school where you would be in the top 10% of SAT scorers. On top of that, you give people a reason to believe you're less qualified knowing your race got preferential treatment. Congratulations, everyone is now worse off because superficially the policy sounded like a nice idea. Racism has gone up and you unwittingly f-ed over the person who you tried to help by putting them in a situation they couldn't compete in.
"If you have better idea of how to resolve that injustice, let's hear it." Focus on restoring two-parent households cross-racially. The rise of single motherhood in America has a colossally negative impact on children, specifically for the lower-class. The effects permeate generationally. You could do this in a way that unites people instead of dividing it by race. Push for public policy that incentivizes two-parent households. Attacking race/gender-blind meritocracy is not the way.
In fact making that a premise leads to quite a few assumptions that are clearly wrong that falsification is trivial, even if you could nail any sensible quantification of power.
alongside the role not being ruled out entirely by the candidate
this is something I hear from other women for other career choices too, from nursing to dancing to undiagnosed mental disorders (BPD, autism), the flexible scheduling draws them over 9-5 in person office work
for tech there are more pipelines than university and an entire decade has been spent addressing that already
whats happening is likely not just what you’re sensitive to
How do you figure? According to the law, race is never a BFOQ. Even if that weren't the case, this wouldn't be a BFOQ situation anyway.
And, BFOQ isn't relevant here because there is qualification that is relevant - it's just that if men are getting under paid/left behind, then merely offering a low salary would be enough to attract them.
That may be true in general, but in STEM, twice as many men graduate as women at all levels of degrees. [1]
I started at top ten CS program almost 25 years ago, and there were only a handful of women there at all. Today's grads weren't born much later, so when tech jobs began to pay better and became high-status, it's not a big surprise that everyone else flocked to them. I'm not discounting the advantages women get in the hiring process, which plays its own part, but I think it's a lesser factor in all of this.
https://www.hmc.edu/about/2018/05/15/harvey-mudd-graduates-h...
The gender ratio was actually more even in the early days of computing. One hypothesis is that it became skewed largely because in the 1980s the consumer electronics industry marketed video games and home computers almost exclusively to boys. I don't know whether that entirely accounts for the change but it could have been a factor.
https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
It rose by an absolute 4 percent during the incredible rise of the fake email job. To me, it means that we're completely tapped on the amount of women that are willing to join tech.
If you look at college admissions, you'd think, "Hey, we're actually seeing an increased interest in women joining CS. Look at the percent of women graduating from top CS colleges over the last 15 years." What you're not seeing is the admissions statistics broken down by gender. Almost all admissions statistics that are publicly available are aggregated. I've seen how the meat is made on the admissions side and have had access to the statistics broken down by gender. There is a drastic difference in the admissions process based on gender. Often the only admitted male candidates have a GPA of 3.9+/4.0 to these top programs whereas the average on the female candidates have much lower at 3.4/4.0. That's the difference between perfect academic performance and above average. It takes a lot of effort to achieve a perfect score in some of these intense majors. It doesn't even account for the grading bias that these men will be experiencing in addition.
What's interesting to me is that you see very few women as ICs in later stages of their career. Most transition to management or out of the workforce. Straight women in tech typically marry someone else who makes same or much more. It's often plausible for the woman to become a SAHP and opt out of working as long as they're fine with either husband grinding insane hours to make 7 figures or moving to Dublin/Boulder Creek.
In addition, I think the outsourcing of tech jobs will be another way that companies will "improve" the statistics here in the USA. Engineering is overwhelmingly male. Companies love to outsource expensive software engineers to other countries (where they are also still overwhelmingly male but won't be accounted for in company stats!). I think this is the next move for DEI/anti-labor consultants. Expect your job to be outsourced not because it's saving the company money but because it improves the company's demographic numbers.
I remember a company I worked at bragged about their wildly high POC/black workforce. Everyone they were hiring in those roles wasn't making much money. They were just customer service roles that didn't pay a ton but this was peak fake email job time. The HR side of the company would then trash the engineering org because it was 75%+ asian (one would think it was 95%+ depending on org you joined) and most of the remaining <25% was a mix of white/middle eastern with a few token Nigerians spread in. (Not a single black american in over 1000+ employees in USA employer) Almost always the female IC engineers were under 35 - and none had kids yet. As soon as kids happened - transition to management or quitting. I never thought I'd see it so blatantly.
I don't know why we have to fixate on such a stupid non-problem. Women and a lot of minorities just have no interest in tech because it has the lowest social status of all white collar professions and it's an incredibly taxing job on top of that. The competitive jobs require an insane amount of effort to get into that requires nothing short of methamphetamine or autism. The only reason most women I know get into these jobs is because the hiring bar is lower for them. A lot of women get completely shellshocked whenever they encounter an interview that is at the level of a typical male candidate.
When adjusted for factors such as lifestyle choices, women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's[0] - a negligible difference. Intervening to enforce exact equality between men and women without taking into account lifestyle choices is in fact giving preference to women.
Women are already outperforming men in education[1]. Is it really valid to claim women are not on a level playing field anymore? We're not in the 20th century. In the UK, women outnumber men in universities[2]. White, working class British boys are one of the poorest performing demographics in education but I have rarely seen it discussed. As a British lad who left school less than a decade ago, I don't think the education system is suited to engage boys whatsoever.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap
[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/13/girls-outperform...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/h...
Addendum: I'm located in London and work in the tech scene. I have worked with people from all over the world and many different cultures. At no point have I observed a distinct advantage from this diversity.
I can't speak for the broader, more recent term of DEI, therefore I am not speaking to how diversity is achieved.
However, I can speak to diversity being a huge win. I've seen features go through the lifecycle process that if there weren't other perspectives in the room (namely, people of color, non male genders and folks with disabilities), we would have ended up releasing things that would have either not been good for our entire addressable market, or accidentally offensive.
Saved us embarrassment more than once. Having a pool of people from different backgrounds, ability, ethnicity and genders can be real value add, in above their competency as engineers (of which, they most certainly were some of the best I ever worked with in many cases)
For the sake of example, let's substitute diversity for wealth.
Wealth distributed equally and justly is good. People who feel they must control the distribution of wealth because of the injustice of the world are evil. And their practices are evil. And the actual implementation of those practices only leads to more injustice and evil.
This quite frankly does not address anything I wrote at all.
Diversity is good. People who enforce it for the sake of diversity and build their careers around it are bad and essentially parasitic.
Not to mention, as with many things, it all comes down to the details, I would t paint it with such a broad brush
It depends on what you define as solid. There are some compelling case studies on diversity effects, at least when going from almost zero diversity to a little diversity. I don't think there's any solid research on what levels of diversity are beneficial or detrimental.
In additon to your points, one thing about DEI initiatives that I don't like is how they ignore other types of diversity, including people with disabilities. It seems to be all about gender and ethnicity.
There are all kinds of diversity, and it's really valuable to have someone in the room who realizes that your product will be offensive in India or unusable in Brazil, or dangerous to young children. It's way more than skin deep.
This varies. I've led DEI initiatives and one of the points I make is "there's diversity in diversity". Meaning it isn't just gender and ethnicity. I do believe that actually caring about people is the most important thing, and I've found that people who do care about others generally share the trait that they want diversity in their environment -- at least certain types of diversity that aren't inherently detrimental to the work they do (e.g., you probably don't want small/light offensive linemen). The reason for this is because I think most rational people who care realize they have major gaps in their understanding and want to bring in more people, in whatever capacity makes sense.
While I don't have anything near conclusive data, the people most against DEI tend to be the most insular in general. That said, often those the most extreme for "DEI initiatives" aren't really pro-DEI -- rather they are just pro their specific group, which just reduces to being the same as those that are against DEI.
My own organization contracted with Auticon for an extremely small number of roles and made a huge publicity push about it. When asked what programs or assistance they have for neurodivergent employees, they had none. Any sort of career pathing or placement assistance for candidates with this issue - no.
The people leading the efforts or training might care, but the people in power don't.
The reason for this is because there are certain classes of diversity that are legally protected (at least in the US). And there is historical context that generally increases sensitivity around those issues. At least for us, that resulted in us having to make sure we had tracking data for, race, sex, age, and disability. But other types of diversity we still cared about, but didn't spend the same amount of time on.
It's not a perfect system, but the intent was there.
When DEI studies were first being touted I used to ask to read them. I thought that perhaps I would eventually find one that actually had any rigor behind it. After reading dozens, I stopped asking. It seems that rigor is not required. Just a headline that resonates with key constituencies.
I have seen posts on social media by journalists looking to write about DEI. Instead of asking open-ended questions they were just soliciting success stories. That doesn't lead to the truth. It leads to the preferred narrative.
How did you organization create its case studies? Would it have actually written up a case study showing that the net effect was negative?
If we approach this from a different direction, can we disprove that having people from different backgrounds and perspectives who can point out things the others missed are not beneficial or provide a negative? Perhaps focusing on the claimed mechanism of benefit can shed some light on the effects.
So in general you want diversity when you want weak subordinates that are easy to control, that is the main advantage companies are really after. The other thing is if you want a group of people that holds each other accountable, since diverse groups are less trusting they are less likely to conspire, so useful on boards etc.
Also it is very easy to show how a team is hurt when normal hiring standards (GPA, other numerical prerequisites) are ignored in order to hire someone based on sex or race. I first experienced this when I sat in a classroom and worked on group projects with people who were clearly admitted via AA preference. AA was not functioning as a tiebreaker in close cases. It was used as an enormous boost, and everyone could tell.
We live in a sexist and racist society (and always have). One either takes no action which is passive acceptance of the status quo or we attempt to take action which will inevitably have some racist and sexist consequences (intentional or not). There is no neutral option.
Railing against DEI almost always comes across as a convenient scapegoat to justify the status quo which overwhelmingly favors men in the tech industry. I will admit I don't have the statistics, but I would expect that one would find proportionally fewer and fewer women at every rung in the organizational ladder in tech firms, which to me speaks to the challenges that women face even in this supposedly level tech space. It is one thing to get an entry level job, possibly even through a DEI initiative, but another to actually be treated as an equal after hiring. My experience at a big company made clear to me that even men who like to think of themselves as egalitarian or even feminist, often have very obvious unconscious bias. I can particularly recall a manager talking up the potential of a young man relative to his female peer even though she was more productive than him on basically every imaginable metric.
People that do DEI as their main job certainly try to ensure that discrimination will stay. They have a vested interest in it for themselves. What can I say, they are just human. Probably sexist and racist, just like you said.
I worked for a company that had 0 female programmers. "How curious", I thought as a fresh grad, "that while there were some women in my CS classes, there were none at the company". "Well, there are only 30-40 of us, so it must simply be a quirk of statistics."
Yeah no, the owner didn't think women could handle production systems so he only hired men. He told us this directly at lunch one day. He looks exactly how you're probably imagining he looks based on that statement. His wife made him give me a bigger bonus one year because at a company dinner, I made the mistake of sitting next to her because I didn't recognize who she was, and mentioned (over the course of dinner) that my wife and I wanted 3 kids and she was going to be a stay-at-home mother. I worked there for far too long because I was a new grad who hadn't ever left a job before.
It being so obvious at my first job was honestly a good wake-up call, because now that my generic white male illusion that it's all in the past was soundly shattered, I see it's more insidious forms. Like at my next job, how the one woman on our team was suspiciously the only one who took longer than 2 years to get promoted from [mid-level eng] to [career level / sr eng]. I don't think that one was nearly as explicit, but I no longer sit here and go "hmm how curious that the only woman is the only one who didn't fit the pattern". It's because of unconscious biases in the promotion review panels.
Ignoring what lifestyle choices means and taking this claim at face value:
Can I have 5% of your lifetime earnings? Can I increase your taxes by 5% for no benefits?
It's not a negligible difference even with your handwaving. It's someone else's money and not your problem is the tl;dr here.
So what are the root causes and fixes?
Even at that rate it is not negligible. Does that clear it up for you or are you still beating your wife?
Please abide by the HN rules or leave.
There are two separate rates and have been for a long time. Those rates are non-adjusted (in the 80)s and adjusted (95%+). Of one actually reads the BLS reports, you will find both. They are indicative of separate issues. The adjusted number measures fairness of pay. The unadjusted number measures essentially vocational distribution/choice.
Many politicians misrepresent the unadjusted number and its meaning, including presidents in SOTU addresses, to evoke the kind of emotional response that you are displaying right now. All while their proposals will do little to nothing to close the unadjusted number (their proposals focus on pay fairness which is a much smaller number).
Yes, 5% is significant. If you have suggestions for how to address either of the numbers, that would be great since that's what I asked for in the first place. Perhaps some of those things can even help me - people with my disability face a 30% (unadjusted) detriment to earnings.
You know that's not how taxes work, right? If someone's taxes are increased by 5% that means there's more money available to do things (or pay off debt). Many or even most of those things might have no direct benefit to the person paying the taxes but "we live in a society" (haha) and hence, we all pay into a pool that helps everyone in our community, state, country, etc.
Sometimes the benefits are obvious such as infrastructure but for most government spending it's indirect such as restoring wetlands or hiring more code inspectors so fewer buildings burn down or collapse.
The point of DEI is to first try to teach and then to punish managers that are stupid and say that they have a meritocracy when they absolutely don't.
> women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's[0] - a negligible difference.
So I am guessing you would be okay if I only paid the men in my org 95-99% of what I pay women? Enforcing that they are paid the same is just giving preference to men. Didn't think so.
I have a special place in my heart for the men that whine about the one woman in their org that didn't work out, ignoring the countless men that don't work out. The idiot men that get through the interview screening are somehow okay, but heaven forbid we hire a single woman that couldn't cut it. When I ask for more details these guys eventually admit that they just hate the idea that finding a job could be slightly harder or it is plain old misogyny with the belief that all men are better than all women. This doubly applies to men who seem to not be doing amazing at their job. Not only are the other men better than them, but they get really mad when a woman does better too.
I just want to do a good job, but I have had to deal with this stuff my entire career.
I don't know why we have to pretend men and women are exactly the same. They're not. They each have different characteristics, different preferences, and different capabilities.
E.g. 50% of NVIDIA's staff is AA. Third most valuable company in the world. That's about 10x the national average. Similarly with CISCO. You can keep digging these up.
What should we do? Systematically disadvantage and discriminate against Asians (part of the honorable and noble BIPOC coalition) to make sure to return to the national averages?
Of course this also touches upon the insanity of wanting company x to match a certain demographic split. Should they mirror the world's demographics? The US's demographics? California's demographics? South Bay's demographics? Santa Clara's demographics? Each one of those is different, and nobody seems to be able to agree on which we should use as the authoritative reference. If people are going to be shaming firms for not meeting a certain bar, can we at least agree what that bar should be?
And the wage gap is most likely not going away, men are women are not identical, they do not have the same impulses, incentives, timelines, or desires. They're not perfectly homogeneous interchangeable robots that behave the same way. It's entirely not surprising that we're seeing a gap. See the Uber study which was trying to find sexism to explain their drivers' 7% wage gap, only to find out that it ultimately boiled down to risk taking, hours worked, and more aggressive driving: https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf - this is going to be true across all jobs.
Side note: the real "wage gap" is everybody vs mothers, not men vs women. If you want to advocate for making child rearing easier on mothers in the workplace, I'm fully in support.
Links:
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/about/csr/esg-hub/people/wor...
I've been on teams where I'm the only white person. I've also been on teams where women outnumber the men (yes, even in tech).
This isn't surprising at all. There are tons of asians in tech. And it's not uncommon for a couple devs to be on a team with lots of product or design people. I'm on one such team right now. The vast majority of this team is non-white women.
TBF that's exactly what Harvard did.
Assuming that is true (I'm not buying Wikipedia as a source), the career and job norms were created by men for men. If it was women who had created them for centuries and men were just joining in, the norms would be structured so that raising children was assumed - like taking weekends off - and not a career killer, and maybe everyone would get a day off every ~28 days (I don't mean that snidely at all; it would be realistic and reasonable).
> White, working class British boys are one of the poorest performing demographics in education but I have rarely seen it discussed. As a British lad who left school less than a decade ago, I don't think the education system is suited to engage boys whatsoever.
This kind of undermines your comment, IMHO; it's a cliche of white racial solidarity and a race competition. If race doesn't matter to you, then it's not an issue of race.
Among successful people in Britain, clearly white males have great advantages. The educational system engages them fine. Maybe it's poor kids of all sorts who don't have access and engagement?
The sources are on the Wikipedia page itself.
> This kind of undermines your comment, IMHO; it's a cliche of white racial solidarity and a race competition
Why is it a race competition to point out when white people are at a disadvantage, but justice to point out when black people are at a disadvantage? It seems you have biases of your own.
>Among successful people in Britain, clearly white males have great advantages
That isn't so obvious to me. A vast portion of successful people in London, especially in the finance sector, are not white British. In fact, as a London-based tech worker, I have become completely accustomed to not seeing white British people in high places.
That's all part of the same old routine, almost out of a script. It's not hard to understand the difference if you want to. It's your business, but if I find myself following someone else's script - I'm human too; I can get caught up in things too - I look carefully at my reading and my reasoning.
Social in-group is a powerful thing to fight against. If you can cut off the header of a resume and make hiring decisions based on that, that's awesome, but otherwise it's reasonable to be aware of and resist implicit bias in hiring.
When people get discouraged and shut out from jobs, sports, music scenes, it's a loss, especially if that means we perpetuate patterns that lose us hundreds, thousands, millions of talented individuals in the future.
I and many people would agree, and that is why we need DEI: Gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, etc. etc. have long been determinative in hiring, education, etc. The system we inherited is a DEI program for (mostly) heteronormative white guys - it advantages them over others. The data - the outcomes, if you look around - are overwhelming.
They are determinative intentionally (especially now, when open prejudice is brazenly thrown around, hate crimes are multiplying, etc.), unintentionally (we're biased to hire people like us - we're just more comfortable, more trusting), and systematically (we hire from our social networks, which are segregated racially, etc., in large part because we inherited them from prior generations).
For the last eight years I've heard much open prejudice - you can see it everywhere on social media, as an obvious example, and from some prominent political leaders. I remember when a college funding program was voted down in Congress, a white guy I was speaking to laughed and said 'no way was I paying for Blacks to go to college'. The same person told me there is no bias in hiring, education, etc.