More women needed in technology
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
By "more women needed in technology", what it appears to actually be advocating is "more women needed in designing products for women, because men are condescending in their design of female-oriented products".
... and ok. Then the author follows it up by saying "it's basic economics! More women will buy your products!", but doesn't follow that up with "and so market forces will make it happen!". But whatever. If you want to try and change how an industry talks to your group, have at it.
But then also the author has taken the time to produce a cartoon book telling young women to go in to computers and technology, because (from the image provided) apparently all young women ever hear is badly-spelled messages telling them that they should focus on home economics (untrue) and that programming generally involves working in dark cubicles (sometimes true) and being a nerd (all too true). Why doesn't the author already know that ...?
Because the author, and head of this campaign ... isn't actually a woman in technology. She's a woman in advertising, who has decided that more women need to be in technology. Not her, just other women. So how does she know that women can thrive in technology? How is she able to legitimately address their concerns? It all feels a bit condescending towards ... people in technology. "Here I am, a person outside of your field, telling you that you talk to women all wrong, and I'm going to fix it with a swish advertising and graphics campaign".
If you want the message to be taken seriously, get Marissa Meyer to say it. Bring me the opinion of Danese Cooper. Shouldn't tech role models come from, ya know, tech?
Conclusion: the message I probably agree with. Diversity of every sort in technical teams is a great thing in my previous experience. But what the hell is this article about, and who is this advertising exec to tell deliver it?
They always address the two main questions/premisses "more women needed in tech" & "why are fewer women in tech" flippantly with weak, unthoughtful arguments & cliche explanations. Both are genuine questions that need to be addressed. Even if you are willing to accept that women need to be equally represented in tech as self evident or fundamental, you should still find out the real reasons why things are this way if you want to fix it.
Any answers that you come up with to the "why" question need to answers it in a way that doesn't equally apply to law, medicine, academics & government. Professions that women entered a generation ago.
In any case, I'm only half convinced about the economic rationale given by this article: We need women to design stuff for women. It is a definitely a real problem people designing tech products are disconnected from many of the people using tech products. But women are the one "group" that technology designing men do interact with. I think if you want to add useful perspectives something to encourage might be technology as a second career. People who spent 10 years as farmers, nurses, builders or rodeo clowns.
I'm not sure how to quantify the efforts put in by different fields.
We need more women in trash collection. It is a national problem. The disparity between genders in the field is huge, has been going on for years, and relies on outdated, presumptuous, and sexist stereotypes that women do not like to be smelly and dirty. And the discrimination goes all the way up to the top: every CEO of a trash collection company you meet is male. We need to reach every girl and indoctrinate them to like trash as early as we can so that more of them will go on to collect it.
What I mean is: Sure, we really like computer science and allied fields. But there are other ways to live, and it seems really arrogant (and speaking of stereotypes, American ;) to unilaterally decide that our way is the best way and roll in and try and "fix" the problem. Anecdote, but the people who do well in CS are intrinsically into it.
An interesting converse of this is that if you aren't building a female oriented consumer product, women probably aren't that helpful. If your product has primarily male consumers (e.g., that huge samsung phone, a database), you probably want to make sure your designers are all/mostly men.
I wish people would fully think through the logical implications of their arguments, since I somehow doubt the author of this piece would agree with that.
The fact seems to be, pink gadgets sell. So I am not sure that the companies are "getting it wrong". Not saying that there couldn't be a better way.
Also wondering about the oft cited former communist East European states with their high percentage of female engineers. I have heard that not many of them actually work as engineers. Don't have numbers, though.
I wish more women would go into engineering, but to be honest, my attitude has become a bit cynical: I think women have more attractive choices (not in the least becoming stay at home mums, or working for unattractive salaries in fun jobs because husbands bring in the big money - fun jobs including kindergardener, nurse, fashion shop owners,...). Engineering, or let's talk about programming, is not actually that much fun in the real world. You sit in front of a screen all day long and wreck your brain. Talking with people is better for the soul, and women are smart enough to realize that.
Yes, bring on the downvotes. I am not saying this is a law of nature, just that it is the current state of things for a variety of reasons.
As for nursing, no it is not "fun" in the strict sense, but I think it comes with a lot of expectations of emotional reward, helping other people and so on. I was using "fun" loosely.
Btw, as a father with a kindergarden going kid, I hope the kindergardeners have some enthusiasm for the job... If you need help entering programming, get in touch. I live in Germany, though.
Edit: actually, programming gets boring after a while, too, and people ponder steps to make it interesting again. Maybe the same could be done for kindergardening? Can't you think of ways of making it more fun again? A change from the routine perhaps? I worry a lot about my kid just doing standard stuff at kindergarden. On the other hand maybe it is unrealistic to expect more, and kids first have to go through the basic motions. (There are no lego mindstorm sets at my kid's kindergarden - but then kindergarden kids can't be expected to program, I suppose. But perhaps they could build robots, and the kindergardener could do the programming).
After a day or two off more real enthusiasm returns but the job is not intellectually stimulating except for trying to help spme special kids and while reading psychology is fun applying the concepts involved is remarkably similar to common sense. Or what seems commonsensical to me; I've been reading psychology textbooks well before I came to China and started teaching.
I like kids, I enjoy playing with them and it's satisfying helpinh them learn English and learn to read, helping socialise them. But the longer I do it theore I think John Taylor Gatto is right. For sure age matched education is wrong. When I have kids I'm going to try home/unschooling them if s Summethill type school is unavailable. I believe Steiner is similar hippy shit.
As far as your own kids go the Kindergarten Ausbildung is thorough anf professional, as I'm sure you're well aware. For what it costs and the pull and effort it takes to get a place it should be. But what I'd concentrate on is are your kids having fun and developing social skills in kindergarten. Intellectal development is something you are much better suited to deal with.
And I am learning to programme. It's going very slowly.
My best hope atm is to find some techniques to enable my kid to master school with minimum effort, trying to maximize non-school-dominated time. I don't think Homeschooling is possible in my country (Germany).
I imagine to turn it into a kind of game. For example there are memory competitions, and people don't seem to mind memorizing useless things to win those competitions. So perhaps if it can become a game to master the school nonsense in as little time as possible, there doesn't have to be so much suffering from the wastefulness of it all. Some useful skills could still be harvested from going through school that way (memory techniques, presentation skills and what not).
I can relate to a general lack of enthusiasm :-(
As for intellectually stimulating, I don't know. I must admit I am sometimes scared about playing with my kid (2 years old), because I fear not having any good ideas. Luckily he usually comes up with stuff himself, and somehow after a while things tend to happen, random ideas take on a life on their own. Maybe a bit like improvising music - after a while suddenly things start to "jell".
I suppose as a kindergardener you have a repertoire of so many standard games that you hardly have to improvise. But maybe that is a potential to escape the drudgery? In theory, couldn't you play out arbitrary scenarios, whatever you fancy? Like writing a new book? You could invent new games every day... Or at least role playing games.
Not that I know much about kindergardening... And I don't even play enough with my kid, hope to improve on that... Atm I sometimes read HN when I could be playing with him, which is ridiculous.
Possibly, but what makes engineering different from say law? My engineering class was 28% female, and the engineering team I worked on after graduating was 5% female. My law school class was 45% female, and my law firm starting class is about 45% female as well.
I can't think of a principled way to distinguish law from engineering in terms of gender attractiveness, other than the culture of the respective fields. I don't think it's aptitude. The male-female gap on the SAT Math is about the same as the male-female gap on the LSAT. I don't think it's attractiveness. Law isn't any more fun than engineering. In your words: "you sit in front of a screen al day and wreck your brain." It's analytical, detail work, not unlike debugging code. Yet, women seem to self select into at a relatively similar rate to men.
I'll also note: women make up the majority of accountants and auditors and 45% of accountants at accounting firms. Talk about boring detail oriented jobs!
Higher social status. For any given amount of money the job with more autonomy wins. Also, just by virtue of being a more verbally focused field lawyers will tend to have higher social skills than the average engineer. Said differently engineering has a higher proportion of the socially maladroit than law. Women have much less tolerance for that kind of stuff.
All of the fields you mention, law, engineering, accounting demand intelligent, conscientious, hard working people but engineering is unusually willing to tolerate weirdness if the person can get the job done compated to the others and is less autonomous.
That doesn't explain everything but it goes a long way.
And neither provides a principled reason to maintain the status quo. Why should the socially maladjusted men already in engineering (as you call them) get to define the culture of the field?
What if tech companies tried to actively change the culture of the field. What if, say for 15 years, tech companies put a thumb on the scale by actively trying to recruit say 25% women. You'd definitely have to take slightly less qualified candidates in order to meet the quota, but it would be transient. After 15 years, there would be a critical mass of women in the field, and the perception of the field as being for socially maladjusted men would be greatly diminished. Tech companies would have enough women applicants to maintain their new ratios without putting a thumb on the scale. You can say it's "unfair" to the men who would have gotten those jobs in the interim, but is it any more "fair" for a group to keep another group out of a lucrative profession by defining a particular culture?
As for accounting being "less demanding on the brain" I think now you're just grasping at straws.
With respect to law vs engineering, my point was about the public perception of the jobs, not the actual reality of it. The public perception of lawyers is people wearing stylish and expensive clothes eloquently fighting for what is right. (I am talking of TV and movies).
Your thought experiment in which companies discriminate against men in hiring might work. It would need to be forced upob all participants in a field/economic sector because if it was voluntary those who were not discriminating would be hiring from a superior talent pool. They'd win, on average. I thonk it would be unfair to women who could have made it on their own merits too, but hey.
I don't see why the same couldn't work for engineering. Would engineering companies have to dip into a slightly less talented pool to begin with? Probably. But here is an interesting statistic. At my alma mater, the entering men have about a 30-point higher average SAT math score than the entering women. Of course, the school has gotten more competitive over time, so the women entering today have about the same SAT math score as the men who entered as freshman in my class (about a decade ago). Think about that--the cohort of "affirmative action" women today have about the same level of mathematical aptitude (measured purely by test scores) as the cohort of experienced male engineers who are 5-6 years out from graduation. That's the magnitude of the thumb on the scale, and I'd argue it's very small.
I think the bottom line is this--there is no reason there should be fewer women in engineering than can be explained by any difference in aptitude of women for engineering. In terms of aptitude for engineering, the starkest difference we see is in standardized test scores, particularly the Math SAT. In the range that characterizes engineers from good schools (~700) the pool is ~40% women. That's the upper bound. I honestly think you could get an equilibrium in the engineering field with ~40% women, an equilibrium that would be stable, once established, with no affirmative action.
Normally this would be where I linked to the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth paper showing girls who entered math competitions withr similarly skilled boys to leak out of the tech/science/engineering path much more but I'm on my phone.
Bowing out.
Yes. This is very true, after I finished my degree I couldn't stand the thought of staring at code & hunting for bugs for the rest of my life.
I took a while to assess the tech industry, consider all of the jobs available before taking the plunge into security & support.
I miss creating things & I'm probably on half the salary I could be, but on a day to day basis I love it. I learn from a great team, get to solve problems & get awesome feedback from helping people & fixing issues.
I think most women are still waiting for the reasons why they should join the tech industry. What's in it for me, why will my life be better because of it? No one is providing answers, so only those that go looking will find them.
All these articles that say 'more women should be in tech because that's better' - well, why is that? They normally cite 'balanced departments are more profitable' but still, for the individual - why? It never goes any further.
I think there needs to be compelling reasons. What do we bring, where can we excel? We aren't going to work in an industry because people say we should. We're going to look for happiness in a profession first and foremost.
I believe that the tech industry is dominated by men, that's a given, but I don't necessarily believe that we need more women, or even more men. At the moment, the tech industry has a surplus of jobs and not enough bodies to fill the desks, so what we need is more people, irrespective of age, gender, race, etc.
In my opinion, it is extremely sexist to even suggest that we need more women in tech, it implies that the (large amount of) men who are currently in the industry are not doing their jobs correctly and should be replaced by women, that women would do a better job; granted, some women would do a better job, but so would some men.
You can not force equality (a thing which you already have) upon the masses, but look at it like this, there aren't less women in tech because men don't want them there, there are just less women who are inclined to go in to technology, this isn't a case of "Male oppression is forcing us not to follow our dream", it's merely a case of less women having this dream.
Let's be honest, from our earliest childhood years, we are given this impression that certain activities are for certain genders, and yes, to some degree this is wrong, I happen to like the colour pink and my sister absolutely loved playing in dirt, to my mothers disdain, but these young character building years are what defines us, the fact is that there are two genders, not one, and they are not always equal, we need to celebrate these differences instead of trying to subdue them in to none-existence.
Personally, the finest developer I have ever met was a woman, so I have nothing against women in tech, but let's look at the fact, from a young age, boys are taught that playing computer games is a boys thing, playing these games often fosters a natural ability to understand computers.
If you play model of honour enough times, you begin to recognize the path finding model which the computer takes, and at a very primal level you begin to understand the most simple AI elements, this experience builds your understanding of how computers works. I'm not saying this is the only way to get in to computers, I'm just giving the example which was relevant to myself.
tl;dr: Stop blaming men for the lack of women in tech, take a look at your own base camp, men have given you equality for years now, just accept that most women don't want to go in to tech; not because they are women, but because, let's face it, we're a big bunch of nerds and foreveraloners and most sane people would do anything they could to stay out of this space.
We need more women in tech because a better male/female balance helps the industry grow.
More women will bring a new/different perspective in all areas of tech.
All areas? What is the female perspective on query planning, routing and queueing?
It's one thing to say that women don't select into a profession because they don't have the aptitude to do it. I think the number of women who score 700+ on the Math SAT proves that at least a lot more women have the aptitude for tech than to into it. If its not aptitude, then it must be culture, and why should the male foreveraloners get to dictate the culture of the field? Because they were there first?
We need more qualified people, but mostly fewer unqualified people. Most of the men we already have are worse than useless, and I don't want to attract anyone who isn't markedly better.
How about a campaign to drastically improve science, math and computer science teaching at school from a young age, and work hard to ensure both genders get enough exposure so that the kids with the most aptitude and passion, whatever their gender, get a real chance to choose tech as a career path, instead of this marketing and PR bullshit?
I always see tremendous skepticism whenever an article comes out saying that we need to reduce the gender gap in tech. The attitude seems to be that if a gap exists then it is natural and there is no point in taking affirmative steps to reduce it. What I find interesting is that these same people probably wouldn't apply this reasoning to many other situations. They're often totally willing to believe that we have too many people in liberal arts programs and not enough in engineering programs, or not enough people going to college or too many people going to college. They're often willing to believe that we have a "digital divide" that needs to be corrected, or that there aren't enough people with science backgrounds in Congress, or any of a number of other ideas predicated on the presumption that positive action is required to address some imbalance in society.
At the dawn of programming, it was stereotyped as a profession for women (yes, really). Later on, men became more prevalent. But it's not like women were ever barred from the field, or from getting an education in general. In fact, nowadays most people who graduate from university are women.
Given all that, I get the impression that the constant hand-wringing about the dearth of women in tech is more about companies hoping to expand the labor pool for what is still a highly-sought and well-paid profession, rather than about empowering women to do what they want. The former is still a legitimate concern, but not something a father needs to lose any sleep over.
I'll use the legal field as an example because I think there is a lot the technology field can learn from it. Women had been allowed into law school and admitted into state bars since the turn of the century. However, as of 1960, 96% of law students were men. In the 1970s, law schools and law firms took affirmative steps to encourage women to join the profession. By the late 1990s, enrollment was almost even.
Today, 45% of law students are female as are about 45% of incoming associates at large law firms. 20% of firm partners are women, and about a third of newly-promoted partners are women. Neither law schools nor law firms take directed affirmative steps anymore to recruit women (beyond the usual affinity groups and the like). The gender equalization efforts were self-propagating. Once the field had a critical mass of women, women self-selected into the field at similar rates to men.
I think it's weak to assume that women just don't want to do engineering work. Would the number of women who wanted to go into engineering be as low today if there were a reasonable number of women already in the field? I don't think so.
Why is that insufficient in technology? What makes tech different from the other fields you mentioned?
(That lack of "affirmative steps" is not a good explanation, since the "affirmative steps" persist in tech even today.)
I'd be very surprised if small (e.g. 5-10 person) law firms ever put any more effort into recruiting women than small tech firms.
"Whenever the subject of women in science comes up, there are people fiercely committed to the idea that sexism does not exist. They will point to everything and anything else to explain differences while becoming angry and condescending if you even suggest that discrimination could be a factor. But these people are wrong."
boom headshot.
For what it's worth (although this is tangential), I think the study is interesting but I can still think of a lot of questions to ask. And it wasn't about IT, the experiment was done with lab jobs.
So the author wants more women in marketing. (tech-marketing) Ok. But if my now 5 year old daughter will be interested in programming, math, algorithms, I will not force her to learn marketing just because Belinda Parmar says so. Yes I will be happy to talk about marketing with my daughter when she grows up, I am interested in marketing, but I equally happily will talk about the beauty of Hindley–Milner type inference with her.:)
What if my target market is teenagers...