I'm getting sick of the gender argument to be honest. Sure, women in tech are a minority. Sure we'd all like to see more of a gender balance. However I have yet to see someone actively retarding that balance.
* Male nurses will not be told "good for you" by someone finding out their profession.
* Male nurses are not assumed to be secretaries in meetings.
* Male nurses won't be judged by their body over their skill -- and as a result, they won't face cognitive impairments because of internalized objectification[1][2][3][4][5].
* Male nurses will not be perceived as "bitches" if they are competent at their job -- and they will not be perceived as incompetent if they attempt to be likable[6].
* Male nurses are not paid less, on average, than female nurses[7].
By ignoring these very tangible and well-demonstrated barriers to entry for women in a wide variety of careers (any of the above arguments apply to women attempting to be lawyers, doctors, or executives in addition to being "in tech" as you put it), you are minimizing women's lived experiences of these effects, and you are retarding the balance.
[1] http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/30/1/59.short
[2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-006-9140-x...
[3] That swimsuit becomes you: sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of personality and social psychology [0022-3514] Fredrickson yr:1998 vol:75 iss:1 pg:269
[4] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FB%3ASERS.00000323...
[5] http://www.sanchezlab.com/pdfs/FredricksonRoberts.pdf
[6] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004....
[7] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2009....
2. Your source for #7 is ridiculous. There is absolutely zero proof that female programmers are paid less than males. My career is dedicated to helping programmers find work (both male and female) and my own direct experience with the thousands of people and companies I've worked with points to the fact that female programmers are paid more than average simply because companies are willing to shell out a bit more for a female dev in order to avoid the label of having a male dominated workplace.
There are, for better or for worse, traditionally male roles, and traditionally female roles. The argument (as you suggest) seems to go in one direction only - why aren't there more female (developers|CEOs|politicians)?
The problems are more complex:
1) One problem is related to the fact that society values male roles more than female. A traditional skilled "female" role earns considerably less than a similarly qualified "male" role. While this isn't immediately relevant to the current conversation, it crops up along with the "glass ceiling" argument about CEOs and other high-status traditionally male roles.
2) Another, and the one typified in the OP, is the mockery or prejudice that applies from men to those who take jobs in roles more typical of the opposite gender. You know the jokes about male hairdressers, and male nurses also have to overcome such jokes. The jokes that females in typically male roles have to overcome are similarly well known, and even less palatable.
Personally, I don't care about gender balance, numerically at least: I don't think the world needs more male nurses or hairdressers, or female developers or construction workers (more power to them if they want to do it though). I do think the world needs to accept (without orthogonal prejudice) when they make the choice and try as hard as I did when I started out in this career.
There is pay inequality caused by "unknown factors" (potentially including sexism) of around 5%. The rest of the pay differential is caused by known factors (e.g. taking time out of work for children, career choices, etc).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga...
The world already has that.
Only when we put blinders on and look at the top end of the spectrum. Male roles like CEOs and politicians are attractive, so we only look at them, and decide men must be getting advantages women aren't. Look down, there's other male roles too. Like prisoners, the homeless, the people committing suicide, the people taking dangerous jobs and dying. 97% of work related deaths are men, and obviously nobody is pushing to fix that imbalance.
There's the stereotype threat and the common notion that women are bad a math. There's been a number of sexist comments and incidents within the field (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents). There's even a study the correlates geek culture with keeping women out.
There's this thing called the patriarchy, you mighta heard of it. It's not something as clear as the things above, esp. if you have become comfortable within the system. However, it is there. There's subtle unconscious biases from both men and women inside the field (as observed in this study http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract).
Is that enough to convince you? Or do you need more, because there really is an abundance of data to support this.
Can you explain this further?
Nursing is dominated by females. Male nurses are considered a novelty and men in the industry are almost always described as male nurses. Nursing is an insanely demanding career and requires tons of skill and training. Why aren't men posting in outrage about the gender disparity in nursing?
Why can't it simply be accepted that programming is simply a career that tends to appeal to men more than women in the same way that nursing appeals to women more than men?
There are arguments that women get paid less in tech. My direct experience with women in tech (and I have plenty) is that if anything, they tend to be better paid due to the fact that female devs are in high demand and I've yet to see proof, even anecdotal, proving otherwise. I've also yet to come across a single, official complaint of sexism in the workplace within the tech industry.
You know, I'm tried of this straw man (excuse me, straw person) being brought up every time someone talks about women in computing.
Being a female developer in gives me a disadvantage. If I am mistaken for anything, it is a graphic designer, a secretary, an assistant or an intern.
Positions that are typically male are generally considered higher positions. When a man takes on a typically female position, they feel the need to prove the position to be 'manly'. When a female takes on a typically male position, they feel the need to prove themselves to be 'manly'.
Being a female developer gives you an advantage by having employers instantly agree to interview you in the hopes that your talent is enough to warrant a place on their team and simultaneously help dilute the male dominance in their company.
I don't know of any developer having a hard time finding interviews right now, btw. The industry is in desparate need of more developers.
Wrong.
> in the hopes that your talent is enough to warrant a place
Offensive.
The gate swings both ways here; getting an interview as a woman isn't any easier than getting one as a man at any place worth working in this industry, especially right now when the demand for quality is high. If they're lowering standards for their female candidates, that hurts the business and the people alike.
Etsy is doing it because they know they can ramp those engineers up with their existing staff without putting their business at risk, so more power to them if they're able to solve both problems at once and have it work to their (and everyone's) advantage long-term. If a company does it for the sole purpose of trying to balance things out without consideration of how it could affect both production and morale, they'll sabotage themselves and further underscore the argument that women aren't as competent to begin with.
Your second statement does not follow from the first. If we get 10 resumes of people who seem competent, any of them is likely to be fine. The ones who get interviewed are the ones who get hired. The fact that company policy is "all female applicants are to be interviewed" means we hire more women. Our standards aren't lowered as a result, we still don't hire incompetent women. The effect on the company isn't to lower standards, it is just to hire more women. The effect on women who apply is that they are far more likely to get a job than a man who applies.
Even if the intent means well, these types of threads are cluttered with resentment of these practices. If I knew that I was being interviewed because it was company policy to do so even if my skillset would have landed me there anyway, I'd feel weird about it.
Which is precisely what we do, and precisely what I said we do.
>Even if the intent means well, these types of threads are cluttered with resentment of these practices
Why shouldn't they be?
>I'd feel weird about it.
I don't blame you, I would too. The companies making these decisions aren't concerned about how you feel about it though, they are concerned about appearing to be "the good guys" in the eyes of the people who are making an issue out of gender balance.
I find it incredible that you consider my other statement offensive. I posed that statement as a counter-argument to your original point and you're taking my counter-argument and twisting it into a completely subjective retort.
There's a simple reason why this post got flagged off the front page almost as quickly as it appeared and that's because the entire debate is completely circular and pointless. I've yet to see a submission to this site that presents an attempted solution to this issue and the reason for that is because you can't solve a problem that doesn't exist.
I'm also not the same commenter as the parent you were originally speaking with, which could also be some of the confusion.
Or lower ones. Men make up 76% of the homeless, and 60% to 70% of the unemployed in America. They also make up 92% of worker deaths.
It's not a conspiracy. Men take more risks, and are more frequently rewarded or punished for them. Even within a profession such as programming this is true. Our society values people who take risks, because those people stand out.
The amount of active segregation is indeed frustrating.
> Why can't it simply be accepted that programming is simply a career that tends to appeal to men more than women in the same way that nursing appeals to women more than men?
Because programming was a field dominated by women until established as an academic field. Afterward, even then it saw a unprecedented rise in women in the 80s only to be followed by a sharp decline while every other math/science field had continued to rise: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/spring07a.pdf You may fault the following as this is purely rhetorical albeit reasonable, but I find it difficult to believe that thousands of women who would have potentially studied the field suddenly decided upon a generational line that CS is an uninteresting pursuit. I align myself with Sapna Cheryan's conclusions of the stereotype threat in computer science as an explanation.
> I've also yet to come across a single, official complaint of sexism in the workplace within the tech industry.
I've come across many. The vast majority of aggressions I've witnessed go completely unnoticed and unreported among those that could do something about them.