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Comment by brutal_chaos_ | Hacker News Reader

If DEI was only marketing, why has the number and proportion of women in tech been increasing over that time? I'm not trying to challenge you, I'm just curious if you have any insight.

ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?

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It can be marketing and somewhat effective. I'm not trying to say that it didn't accomplish anything (though others are), I'm suggesting that it wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to accomplish something real for equity. And since the motivation was external pressure, a change in external pressure immediately triggers a pivot.

Oh ok, that makes sense. I can agree with that. Given that, I worry the number of women will stagnate or decrease without it, which, imho, would be a detriment to the industry.

There’s no reason to believe it’s primarily due to the DEI programs until it gets worse again with them gone. That’s a basic ABA flow for testing causation.

Things improve on their own over time too.

This is true. I know the change wasn't just DEI, but I thought it might have been the biggest push. And yeah, after it's gone we will see how much it helped (or not), or other influences will muddy the data and we'll never really know (unless it's a really big trend). shrug

Honestly I think a lot more of it has to do with the perceived status of engineers in society - particularly teenage girls are hyper aware of social status.

15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.

I wanted a wider view of the trend, and it looks to me like after the covid dip the US is still not back at the 2000s level of participation.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300026

In tech it might be a different story, but all I've seen where the stats decrease until 2020, and haven't seen much data covering the recent years. Was there any significant increase above what the other fields have seen ?

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