> and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc

Women tend to seek out such roles all on their own, there is no encouragement needed. Just adding "design" to a job title massively increases how many women applies, even if the job itself is unchanged.

Just rebrand software engineers to software designers and suddenly you get many women, even though they do the same thing.

Product is a lot more prestigious at most companies. Design is too, at quite a few, in that it’s often a better stepping stone to product, though that depends on the org.

In general, programming jobs are low-status. High pay, but low status.

Management often leads to better compensation.

YMMV, but my experience is very different from what you mention above. Every company I've been at has paid very close attention to ensure that women are treated fairly with the understanding that these biases exist.

But there's some truth to what you're saying. I do think women tend to be the "babysitters" on the team. I've noticed this often on teams I've been on. They're usually the ones that are the "cultural heart" of the team and organize all the events. Sometimes I've been their manager so I've asked and I'd say it's about 66/33 they legitimately enjoy doing it vs they felt pidgeon-holed into it because they volunteered once.

As for the transitions into other roles, I think it's impossible to tell if it's bias and or a natural inclination. There's no way to look at the data empirically and determine this. In my experience though, I think women are often encouraged to take these roles not because there's a bias towards "women are good at soft skills" but that these are generally the roles that provide better career advancement and visibility. It has always seemed to be a somewhat mis-guided outcome of allyship.

Engineers viewing design as a 'less prestigious' role is laughable. The compensation for these tracks is pretty much equal. I would love to hear you spell out why exactly you perceive design as less prestigious.

As a student I have personally experienced "sorry, you cannot join the event, you're a boy we're looking for a girl" and instead of me they picked a girl whose only job was to stand, smile, and tick the box "yes I'm a girl, this makes the team diverse". Having such an experience makes my brain heavily biased against all actions supporting gender equality.

Which are many. And they're almost always about improving the position of women. "Gender equality" is rarely ever about improving the position of men. The social consensus is that it's impossible for a situation to exist where a man is discriminated against, and even discussing this idea is a very much taboo topic. Which is not true, because such situations exist, and the number of people who have this opinion but are afraid of voicing it is growing.

I'm deeply convinced that a societal shift is on the horizon, and what we see as "modern feminism" will be, in the future, considered one of those things that aged like milk. The only question is whether this change will result in a society where people feel equal, or the pendulum will simply swing back and it's going to be taboo to discuss the hardships of women.

This change isn't very visible in western societies yet, but we're starting to see it in South Korea. This movement is going to grow and spread.

There is a great book (written by a female engineer, Tanya Riley) called "The Staff Engineer's Path". I've learned a lot from the book, but one part of Tanya's experience that I could not relate to was having mentors who would encourage me and provide "you can do this" kind of pep talks. For a male engineer the usual experience is the opposite: we are expected to be competitive, and if we display any doubts then the only advice we'll get is "are you sure you want this promotion enough?" and "are you cut out for this?"

It appears to be much easier to advance in one's career as a self-doubting woman than a self-doubting man. This is probably because women are expected to have a high degree of self doubt and there is no assumption that they are defective if they admit to it.

And management is absolutely more prestigious and better compensated than IC work, despite what some may claim.

> women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles

Do you have actual data to support this claim?

> into coordinating work, managing people

So promoted into management. Are you saying managers are systemically making less than the engineers they manage? Which would be interesting, as management is generally seen as a more prestigious role than individual contributor.

what is the mechanism for that "funneling" though? intentional programs to make diverse candidates feel more welcome? more money? if big tech is actively working to attract diverse candidates and other companies aren't keeping up, it doesn't sound like it's through no fault of their own that they can't retain those people.

This may be true. As I noted, I've only worked at very "desirable" companies so my views are potentially skewed. That being said, I can't imagine that DEI has gotten significantly worse across the industry while vastly improving at the top end but I have no data to back that up.

DATA! Thank you!

Loosen them how? By importing poor, uneducated people and putting them to work as software engineers?

Japan is already stupidly easy to immigrate to if you're an experienced software engineer, probably easier than any country in the world. The main obstacle is the language barrier, but there are a fair number of companies recruiting foreign engineers and offering workplaces that use English, because there's a huge shortage of software engineers here, which largely stems from how software has traditionally been treated very poorly compared to other more traditional engineering disciplines here.

The best SRE team I was ever on beat the industry averages for gender equity. We had 50% women, including a Black woman, and a trans woman.

Our hiring practices actively surfaced people who had difficulty being considered and retained on other teams and at other companies.

This concept of being inclusive is a lot different than having biases. We didn’t reject men or anything like that, we just made ourselves more visible to underrepresented candidates and hired on very specific personality traits on top of the technical requirements. We also made it clear to candidates that our team was accepting and empowering to people in minority groups as they relate to our industry.

For example, we would use specific interview questions to screen out people who were selfish, egotistical, and closed-minded. There would be a zero or low chance of hiring someone who would make our minority team members uncomfortable and lead them to quit because those people would have been screened out.

Another example was being open to diverse backgrounds, like transitioning from a different team within the company or having a resume that lacked formal schooling.

I remember a conversation that stuck with me where the Black woman on our team told me about how she tended to job hop because she could only stay at a company so long before she started to have difficulty tolerating how she was treated by everyone else in the company. As someone who isn’t a minority in my industry it was a very eye-opening thing to hear. I had never once quit because of the way people treated me on a personal level! I had always quit for job reasons like pay, quality of my projects, effectiveness of my managers.

So, you’re right about random chance and statistics, but in my opinion a good team won’t allow random chance to dictate their candidate pool. In my opinion a good team that approaches 10 people will notice the fact that there are zero women and question whether they have made their team a good place for women to work for in the first place.

Let’s not forget that diversity is a proven dollars and cents benefit to corporations. Conservative media right now is using “DEI” as a substitute for racial slurs, but their intended audience for those insults isn’t corporate board rooms. No, Disney isn’t a liberal corporation, they just have a policy of inclusivity to the point of being perceived as overdoing it because they know that including everyone means a larger employee candidate pool and a larger customer pool.

When you say “You don’t need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved,” the problem with that argument is that the problem is so obviously not solved. You can’t look at various outcome statistics for the racial demographics of the US or the gender pay gap statistics and tell me with a straight face that the problem is solved.

The people who have the power to make those outcomes more equitable are institutions like schools and employers. That’s why I prefer my employer to be active rather than passive.

(I have a hard time believing on-call is a reason why women don’t join SRE teams, especially considering that nursing has the opposite gender bias and also has far worse scheduling woes than any SRE on-call schedule I’ve ever witnessed or heard of)

There is a proverb: once bitten, twice shy.

If we want our teams to be broadly representative of our communities and recruiting the best people for the roles, it’s clear that we cannot put the weight of solving the problems that lie behind such experiences and choices on the underrepresented individuals themselves.

I’ve been reading the comments and it seems clear to me that many of the commenters are either unaware or dismissive of the reasons that a woman might say that she would not join a team that was otherwise only men.

Without acknowledging the data, and failing to provide any useful hypothesis for why it is the way it is (apart from “it’s not called design” or some kind of gender-based competency model or perhaps a hand-wavey “but we shouldn’t discriminate; it’s their preference”), resistance to whatever we as professionals and leaders choose to do about it will be the norm.

And it’s hard to force people to deploy critical thinking when they believe they benefit from not doing so.

My own theory is that many men benefit from single gender bro spaces (where other forms of diversity are also highly constrained) and this rather than genuine lack of empathy or creative thinking lies at the bottom of gatekeeping and making teams and working environments toxic enough to drive women who dare to enter away.

The guys who early on in my career were dismissive of women in tech roles who have changed their tunes significantly tend to have had a daughter with an aptitude for STEM. Perhaps they’ve got skin in the game and somebody who shares what it’s like coming into difficult study and work environments?

The statistics say that 23% of software engineers in the US are women.

That’s what I’m referring to. If there are no women on a team of 10 I start questioning whether the team is hiring for their biases or if they’re doing a good job of setting them aside.

I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with your last paragraph. Do you believe that women being hired on a software team causes delays and negative effects? Because I do not and that has never happened in my experience. I would hope you wouldn’t similarly falsely claim that male teachers and nurses are less qualified than their female peers.

When I say that statistically there should be one or two women on the team, that is already taking account the fact that women are the minority in tech.

Women are about 23% of software engineers. So if you have a team of 10 with zero women, that is somewhat suspicious to me as an applicant.

Is my prospective future team hiring the best talent or are they letting their biases creep in to their hiring process?

Source: https://www.celential.ai/blog/percentage-of-female-software-...