How Stereotype Threat keeps women from working in SW — and how we can fight it

First, I've yet to see any women engineers who have demonstrated they are good at their jobs make this argument. It's mostly bloggers and journalists writing these things. Women engineers who are good don't describe having problems any different from the rest of us.

As far as the actual incidents of harassment from asshole managers and socially inept coworkers, I've got the same stories too. Management is clueless in general and the profession, although respected by the public, is not generally respected by managers, executives or journalists.

Most developers employed these days are not competent, regardless of gender, man and woman alike. The few that are competent cluster in competent firms where harassment and disrespect of employees, man and woman alike, is not tolerated.

I'm a bit hyper-aware of this right now. I resigned my job last month after 6 months of abuse and harassment of engineers by non-engineering sales staff, which they viewed as hilarious pranks on worthless geeks who think they are so smart. Complaints to management were handled with suggestions to "man up", "learn to deal" and "stop being a pussy". I received over 100% salary increase in return for my willingness to quit and leave for a more sane firm.

If you are good and you are being harassed, there is high demand for people who are good. The companies that permit harassment deserve to fail. Leave and don't look back. I offer this advise because I would hate for someone to think they can't find a place where there work is appreciated and they are valued because of their gender or race. There are places out there that are sane and professional, and they are generally more profitable so you make more as well. The only thing is that you need to be competent, that is the most important thing in this field because that's your ticket to success.

Statistically, men have a wider variance in IQ score than women do. This means that there are likely to be more highly intelligent men than highly intelligent women in a room, and that the most intelligent man in the room is probably more intelligent than the most intelligent woman.

With that said, if you were to select the top 10 intelligent people in a room of 1000, a statistically significant amount of the time a majority will be men.

If you are hiring for a job that requires the top 1% of intelligence, it is no surprise that you are going to have more men than women.

Disclaimer: I hope some day that my daughter chooses a position in STEM, I realize that there are limitations and gaps in the IQ test, and that I might sound like a complete troll but I'm asking this question legitimately.

Second: all these things the author experienced can be said about any minority group, and women is just one of them in STEM. Therefore, can we really say that there is a particular bias against women, when the bias actually exists among many minorities? Therefore, can't we assume that really it's the monopoly of the majority that we should combat, and not specifically the gender gap?

Third, holy shit. If your self confidence is so low that any critique by a peer could shatter your world and cause you to abandon your career, you need therapy, or at least some kind of daily affirmation exercise. And being too afraid to ask to join a group is no excuse, for any person. You have to be able to work with other people.

Often times they will not be the same gender or ethnicity as you. Simply saying it's difficult or scary is not some big revelation: many people find it intimidating to work with groups of people they know nothing about. Luckily, that's what college is good for: overcoming those fears and becoming comfortable with what will eventually be a requirement of your job.

I agree with all her Eliminating the Threat points (even though that's kind of a harsh way of saying "Overcoming Obstacles")

It'd be interesting to see the differences in upbringing that allowed for the Soviet Union back in the 60s to have a stat where "one-third of the engineers and 75 percent of the physicians are women." [1]

Having been in the role of a guy in a computer science class at a large public university with roughly similar ratios, I wouldn't say that the motivation that people don't work with women is mostly due to the stereotype. It's likely due to the social ineptitude of engineering students. I definitely could relate to Max Levchin talk about how PayPal had difficulty in hiring women because they were nerds that didn't know how to relate to women. [2] Granted, as the author points out, the stereotype threat exists due to the outcome being perceived as social bias.

Perhaps a solution as well is to help nerdy guys interact with girls in high school while the gender balance is fairly balanced. Perhaps projects with "random" (assigned) partners. Looking back at some of the things I did, I can't believe I was that socially awkward.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=dwTvE44DOgQC&lpg=PA145&... pg 188

[2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels...

In the U.S. at least, tech dialogue is about 'men' and 'women', despite the fact that a significant number of certain men are rarely represented in the tech industry. Asian/Asian America men might overrepresent their demographic in the tech industry relative to their % in the country, but they are rarely on leadership boards (especially compared to women). But more importantly, having worked in Silicon Valley and New York, I rarely saw African-American and Hispanic devs/engineers.

I just take exception to the idea that as a tech collective, we are supposed to 'fight' for one segment yet ignore other under-represented demographics.

For those of you who are actually able to empathize a bit here, I found the APA paper "Stereotype Threat at Work" http://www.apa.org/education/ce/stereotype-threat.pdf to be especially useful in communicating with managers, mentors and peers about what I was experiencing in the workplace. I don't think there are easy solutions to this issue, but bringing a little awareness and kindness to situations where a member of your team might have their stereotype threat activated can really go a long way.

As hackers we typically care about efficiency, and stereotype threat is making some of our peers less efficient. If you think it's just a matter of "getting over it," your empathy skills could use a little work. A lot of this stuff is unconscious and impossible to unwire after a lifetime of being fed cultural stereotypes.

"Is it even something we ought to be concerned about?(I won’t dignify that last one with an answer.)"

I'm guessing that the reason the author won't dignify the last one with an answer is that she feels the question is rooted in deep sexism, or dismissal of a serious problem. And I'd agree, discrimination and/or stereotyping that leads to women giving up on CS is a serious problem.

However, a slightly less extreme version of this question is important: "is it possible women are finding better professions than software development". As an exercise, consider the case of a young woman who has entered your office to talk about whether she should pursue a career as a programmer or apply to medical school with the ultimate goal of becoming a cardiologist. Make sure you address longevity of careers, pay, stability, social standing, attrition rates from graduate programs, and so forth.

I do think it's very important to ask why women aren't going into CS. To the extent that stereotyping is responsible, yes, we should fight it. It clearly is a factor.

But young women are starting to outperform young men academically. A recent RAND study concluded that young Americans are rationally avoiding PhDs in STEM fields because they are not competitive with the professions (where women are closing the gap rapidly, and in some cases creating a gap that favors women). In this case, avoidance of these fields may simply be one more way that women are making better decisions than men. Programming careers can be very rewarding, but they're hardly the only game in town, so it makes no sense to analyze it in isolation.

If women aren't going into CS, what are they doing instead? Should we be telling young women who choose nursing, law, accounting, and medicine that they would be better off studying CS and becoming programmers? If anything, we might want to encourage young men to look at what young women are doing and learn something from them!

Is there any evidence that this is what actually happens? Are all women carrying around these stereotypes with them? It just seems like a "just so" explanation.

Most of the examples in this article aren't of stereotype threat, they're examples of the authors' insecurity and social anxiety about being in tech. I can understand how a women would feel uncomfortable working in large groups of, what are generally socially inept, geeks but that seems like a different problem. This was the money-quote for me:

I remember one instance in particular when I was feeling particularly isolated at our company. “I feel like an outsider! Like the guys don’t want me here because I’m a woman!” I whined to one of my male colleagues. He looked at me and replied, “Well that’s dumb. Of course they want you here. You’re great to work with.”

So essentially this woman has a self-confidence issue. I see little evidence from this article (and the NPR one) that these problems, to the extent that they exist, are just run-of-the-mill social anxiety and nothing more.

Maybe people shouldn't be persuaded to pick careers based on what "society wants" or what demographic ratios "should" be.

Maybe we need more women, no, more people to pick the most advantageous careers for them personally.