Valley gender gap a death spiral | Hacker News Reader

Valley gender gap a death spiral

sfgate.com

17 pointsilamont24 comments

Interesting article, but submitting it with this as the title is misleading. The "death spiral" quote is from the text of the article, and is not used to describe the gender gap as a whole, but rather what happens when an individual startup fails to bring on any women in the first 15 to 20 employees (i.e. bringing one woman into an environment with 20 men is nigh impossible, and just gets harder as you hire more and more men because you can't hire any women).

These articles rub me the wrong way.

Unless their parents are engineers, girls also aren't likely to encounter coders in their own lives the same way they would, for example, a doctor or a teacher. "We don't really have that same kind of interaction with software engineers as we go about our daily lives," Goldfein said.

Neither of my parents were engineers (uneducated truck/bus drivers actually) and I never interacted with engineers growing up. So... simply "being male" was my influence to be an engineer? I call bullshit.

No, not you being male. Other engineers being male ("role models in popular culture" not just day-to-day life).

I'm not sure what "role models in popular culture" I had in the 80's that steered me to be an engineer. It sure wasn't anybody on MTV. And assuming none of my school teachers were engineers, I didn't encounter my first (known to me) engineer until I got to college. But I started out just wanting to be a computer repairman because that looked like the future and the money would probably be good. It was after college that I realized my true passion was software and not hardware.

So this story implies you found out about computers somehow? That source might be more male-centric.

Some people are generally more predisposed to some fields than others anyway, so it's hard to extrapolate your anecdotal experience into a full counterargument against her story.

Some people are generally more predisposed to some fields than others anyway

Agreed... perhaps this is another possible influence on the gender gap. But isn't a lot of this anecdotal?

Edit: I found out about computers in school. I don't recall what grade.. somewhere in the 5th to 7th grade probably. I don't recall my middle school being male-centric but I suppose it could have been and I never noticed. I wanted to be a computer repairman after my sister told me about the nice guy that came to fix the copier in her office. He dressed nice. Kind of funny now that I'm where I am now. I don't like to dress up. :)

The 80s.. hmm how about Jeff Bridges character in the movie Tron? Or the star character in the movie Wargames? If you've seen either of those, the main character being male could have been an influence (the movies certainly were for me). It wasn't until '95 that Angelina Jolie was in Hackers. Besides such movies, the other role models in popular culture would be the archetypical Einstein (Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future), etc. In the west, engineers aren't held in as high esteem as eg China (where the president is an engineer), at least not until recently (with Zuckerberg as the modern archetype).

There are historical female role models: Madame Curie, Grace Hopper, and Ada Lovelace probably the top three (and for a modern one, how about the founder of Adafruit? and so on and so forth). Showing their wiki pages to any young females, if the topic comes up, is a helpful contribution IMO.

Movies perhaps. I don't recall when I saw Wargames... but at least a few years after it came out. I didn't get to the theater much so it would have been on VHS. I didn't see Tron until I was an adult. (gasp)

Well, to even know what an engineer is/does, you must've had some contact with it at some point. Might've been through the media, or school, or some random friend you met once, but I think you're dismissing her argument prematurely.

well, knowing what one is/does is a lot different than interacting with them in our daily lives or having them as role models.

These articles typically throw the ratio of female to male employees out there as a statistic. How do we know that gender discrimination is the biggest factor in the gender gap? It's not hard to imagine that men and women on average would have different career preferences even without discrimination.

This is what crosses my mind quite often when gender is brought up here. The sentiment is that gender imbalance is a problem that needs to be fixed. And as you say, any other reason goes out of the window.

I'm also of the opinion that there's a hint of arrogance in saying that men are the reason there are fewer women in the field. I generally take a feminist stance with these things, and am of the opinion that women's jobs being at the mercy of chauvinistic 'brogrammers' or some such bullshit is exactly that: bullshit.

Given the desire and the determination, any woman interested in the field can pursue a career in it, and the field does not prevent that.

> "For Yeung, having parents who were both engineers spared her the sense that computers weren't for girls."

This conveys the real truth, hiding in the mound of rubbish that is the majority of that article.

It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't. Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives to pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.

> It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't. Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives to pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.

I agree... there was another good comment along these lines in another thread on this topic earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061749

If the engineering gender gap is an issue we are going to address as a society, then we need to address it at its roots: childhood social pressures.

For one thing, if gender discrimination were the major cause of the lack of female software engineers in our society, then one would expect other societies to do better. But that isn't the case. Even in famously egalitarian Sweden, only 30% of computing graduates are female, according to the ACM; Norway, Germany, and the UK actually do worse than the US on that statistic.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development...

I don't see much evidence of what the title says in the article. It just is based on anecdotal evidence. This is on par with a blog post by some random person. I'm surprised SFGate would publish this.

The Director of Engineering at Facebook is not just some random person.

yes, it is a random person. an engineer in facebook is also a random person. what you are confusing a random person with is person on higher rung of career ladder

to the people who downvoted: downvoting is not the way to say you disagree.

i stopped reading articles with "brogrammer" in them. it's overused to the point of absurdity right now.

That's just the way the press works. e.g. 'Pivot' has been a perfectly normal business term for a long time, then 1 tech company used it, suddenly dozens of companies were 'pivoting' and eventually people start avoiding articles using the term. It'll fade away soon (hopefully).

While I agree with the point of the article I could help but think this writer didn't do too much research. Hewlett-Packard's CEO is Meg Whitman. I get the article was referring to the original entrepreneurs but another could could have been chosen.

To be fair, Meg Whitman is not a technology person, she is a classic business executive.

The article makes some fair points that are right on target. There is a significant disparity between the number of "hacker" types with regards to gender.

Frankly, I think the article is saying we need more of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

Steeped in video game culture and barraged by positive male tech industry role models, boys tend to dominate conversations around computing early on, leaving girls feeling shut out, said Yeung .

this contradicts the evidence that social network use is mostly from girls

to be fair... using a social network site is not exactly conversations around computing.

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