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Comment by shantanubala | Hacker News Reader

I think there are two problems: sexism and an imbalance of males and females in technology. They're not the same, though they're linked in some ways.

Sexism is hard to address effectively, and attempting to confront it can sometimes make things worse. Proceed with caution.

What is easier to address (but still difficult) is recruiting more women -- this can also make it easy to identify sexism, because if more women are present, sexism can be harder to hide.

Although I disagree that ignoring an imbalance will make it go away, there is another reason why trying to have more women on your team is important: if 50% of the people consuming software are women, it's quite possible that a team of 90% men is missing out on opportunities. Though Pinterest is a good recent example that most men simply don't appreciate to the same degree as women, there may be some hidden market opportunities that are shrouded by the current gender ratios in technology.

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How do we know recruiting more women will be more effective? Are women intimidated by the fact that IT is male-dominated or simply genuinely not interested in the field?

One could look at statistics from App Store developers (are there any?). App stores by nature do not discriminate on gender so they provide an ideal controlled environment in contrast to corporations where there are politics etc. How many women app developers are there?

My guess is it's not a cultural thing, women may be less interested in tech and that's completely fine and nothing to feel uneasy about. This view might not be de rigueur, but it seems to me that rationality is better than political correctness.

> simply genuinely not interested in the field?

In the year 2013 this question is so lazy, or ignorant, it is effectively biggotry. Or perhaps trolling. And that's a shame because you're not a bigot or a troll, you're just asking a question. Unfortunately this question has been asked for many years. (Women just don't want to have the vote. Politics is too complicated for them. etc.)

> App stores by nature do not discriminate on gender so they provide an ideal controlled environment in contrast to corporations where there are politics etc. How many women app developers are there?

The problem starts in schools where girls drop out of math and other technology classes. This is not related to ability.

I still want to see the statistics. I don't understand the vote analogy, it's nothing like that, women were free to choose jobs long before IT became the hottest sector, and certainly today's women do not need to be taken by hand and dragged to a job (if anything, that's a proof of sexism). Also i don't speak about ability, but about interest. Just because we have fetishized technology it doesn't mean everyone must go there. For comparison: http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-medicine

What would the statistics tell you?

How do you quantify interest?

Decisions are easier to quantify, but still can be difficult to measure.

What influences the decisions?

> The problem starts in schools where girls drop out of math and other technology classes. This is not related to ability.

If it is not related to ability[0], then it certainly must be related to interest?

[0] You could probably argue that IQ standard deviation is higher in men than in woman, which could result in a slight difference in ability in the most taxing fields, but that shouldn’t be a problem in school.

> In the year 2013 this question is so lazy, or ignorant, it is effectively biggotry. Or perhaps trolling.

No it's not. It's a valid question that must be asked and answered and can't be ignored just because people get tired of hearing it.

The far bigger plague is the way honest, legitimate questions get met with shaming and ridicule instead of knowledge-enhancing answers.

Also: ignorant is almost never a valid accusation to make against someone asking a question. Asking a question by definition means that one is admitting some amount of ignorance. Calling it out is exceptionally rude and counter to the spirit of honest debate.

> It's a valid question that must be asked and answered and can't be ignored just because people get tired of hearing it.

It is a valid question. It has been asked, and answered, many many times, with research, with opinion and philosophy, with politics.

Concern trolling is "just asking questions" - there comes a point where we need to say that these questions have been answered thoroughly, and that there's little left to be said about them, and that people who want the answer should really do the minimal amount of work needed to get very many answers.

This is not a question plagued by the LMGTFY problem, where people are told to use a search engine, but they only find other people asking the question and being told to use a search engine.

Maybe you could point to studies that answer my valid, but yet ignorant and bigoted question of whether it's a genuine gender difference of preferences or sexism. "Opinion and philosophy and politics" barely counts as evidence in my book.

Relevant documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2xrnyH2wQ

This is not a question plagued by the LMGTFY problem, where people are told to use a search engine, but they only find other people asking the question and being told to use a search engine.

What it is, is a question burdened with too many assumptions to be answered easily. The next time you see it, try identifying some of those assumptions and challenging them, rather than getting all pissed off. You might be pleased with the results.

For example:

"Is interest in the field important, anyway? Would lack of interest actually explain the lack of participation? It doesn't have to, it's possible to pursue a career despite not having much interest, especially initially."

"Intimidation-by-men vs. lack-of-interest is a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be one or the other, it could be both or neither."

The far bigger plague is the way honest, legitimate questions get met with shaming and ridicule instead of knowledge-enhancing answers.

Take these honest, legitimate, and perhaps well-intentioned questions. Take every man who is skeptical of this whenever a woman brings up her experiences. Take arbitrary levels of skepticism as well as standards of proof, since we're talking about varying individuals.

Multiply all that, and try to imagine answering that nearly every time the topic comes up.

It's a rhetorical DDoS, effectively. And people get sick as shit of it, given (among other things) the difficulty in determining who's even operating in good faith.

In general people get frustrated that the questioners expect the questioned to take sole or primary responsibility for educating every single skeptic. You might feel like you, personally, are being shamed, but to be honest, this rounds down to a subset of male behavior, in aggregate.

For me, the solution is to give women in particular the benefit of the doubt when it comes to things like this. It makes these discussions a hell of a lot more fruitful, and I've learned a hell of a lot since.

Rhetorical DDoS goes both ways. In fact it even goes more ways than both if you consider the amount of straw-manning that goes on amongst propagandists.

Frustration may be true but is merely an excuse for individual's behavior. It doesn't make the position valid or the rhetoric any less destructive to discussion. Your dog might chew a hole in your couch. You might say it's because he has separation anxiety. Which is true but there's still a hole in the couch.

The solution to what? The benefit of the doubt when? Which discussions? Where has there been denial of experience?

How about giving the benefit of doubt to any party who presents their view reasonably? return0 was not attempting to shut down discussion. He was not attempting to invalidate or shout down any particular lines of reasoning. He was not attacking anyone. He considered shantanubala's point but remained unconvinced and sought further argument.

It is related to interest, but not to genuine interest.

I'd argue that the biggest driver which keeps women out of tech is other, non-tech, women. I see my female employees bullied by client female employees simply because they're "geeks" (and I come down on the clients like a tonne of bricks in said circumstance, regardless of gender). I've seen girls and women who've had an astounding technical competence and interest be talked out of it by their mothers, peers, and others, as "you'll never find a nice man if you're working in a basement with a bunch of disgusting nerds".

Girls drop out of maths and tech classes not because they lose interest, but because their peers ostracise them if they do not do so. I remember the two girls who started A-level Physics at the same time as me at my school both dropped out in the first term, as they ended up shunned by their peers who were all studying drama, art, and english lit.

The issue is cultural and generational. It's not going to change, with any amount of inward hiring bias or positive discrimination within the industry, until womens' own opinion of themselves, and their place, and their abilities, tallies with the reality - which is to say, gender be damned.

There's also guys. I'm a student, so a common question at a party would be 'What do you study?'. The correct answer 'Physics' normally gets this reaction: 'Oh, I dropped that as soon as I could, cool that you can do this.' and then they turn around and talk to someone else. The only ones not doing this are other physicists, mathematicians and maybe IT people (consistently men and women, but it's worse for men). My female physicist friends report the same behavior.

Right now I just mostly lie about my subject at social gatherings, because I'm so fed up with this.

From personal experience, it appears that this reaction occurs to all physicists, regardless of gender. Maybe men care less about this than women and are hence less easily disinterested in the field?

Yeah, I hear that, and get the same - you can see the shutters come down the moment you say you did your degree in physics, or that you run an IT company. These days I tell people in random social situations I studied golf course management and run a marketing company. Goes down far better. If they're talking to me five minutes later, I reveal.

That said, I think this is far more of a factor for women as they tend to be far more sensitive to social pressure than men. Why this is is another topic entirely, but in short: culture.

Next time someone asks you what you study, wait a beat then ask them (with humor) if they sing in the shower.

It's not your fault they just asked you a boring question.

I studied physics. Best subject of all, imho! XKCD got it wrong in http://xkcd.com/435/ - Maths is just a tool invented by physicists to solve Physics problems! :-)

I'm sure those people at the parties you go to will be regretting their dislike of Physics when you have a brilliant career as whatever the hell you want to do and they are working at Starbucks.

guys may have the same problem too: http://imgdex.com/23aa

I get your point. I (half kidding) wish my mother had told me "you'll never find a nice woman if you're working in a basement with a bunch of disgusting nerds".

I am proud to be an engineer. But sometimes we fail to cultivate an image that other intelligent people would like to be part of.

That's because engineers don't construct this image, and cultural preconceptions nowadays don't come from reality but get constructed in TV studios.

"But sometimes we fail to cultivate an image that other intelligent people would like to be part of."

The trick here is to channel your interests into interesting hobbies. They should be foremost for you and your own development, but hobbies and related passion makes for much more interesting conversation.

And how do you plan on recruiting more women if the percentage of male students enrolling in STEM classes is still far above 50% (with a few exceptions, notably biology/chemistry)?

Of course, you could hire all women graduating from such classes, but if you did that while continuing to hire only the top n% of males, you’d create an environment were women are, on average, less capable than men, which doesn’t sound all that great to me, either.

Most companies have roles other than just development...

Even development teams have roles other than just developers. In large companies, there are testers, managers, business analysts, etc...

But by implementing a company-wide balance, you hardly gain anything in particular teams. Even worse, if you let the ‘actual’ development teams be all-male and the women to take care of the rest (management, secretaries, people drawing up trivial PowerPoint presentations to impress equally trivial people), you might well reinforce stereotypes.

I'm lucky that all the key jobs at GrantTree (Client Management, Sales) are naturally not predominantly male or female.

Obviously that's not the case for every company. Ultimately, if 90% of developers in the country you're in are male, it's going to be pretty damn hard to keep any kind of balance in your development team. I think you just have to accept that, and continue to hire based on excellence rather than trying to bias towards gender (which is illegal anyway).

However, there are completely legal things you can do to try and tilt the balance in other functions, so that at least the company as a whole is balanced. For example, advertising on sites that aren't themselves predominantly male, and wording your job ads so that they make it clear that women are most welcome, helps to tilt the balance of applicants, which allows you to maintain the company balance while still hiring the best applicants.

I don't think you can solve macro-societal issues like gender balance among software developers in general just by tweaking your hiring process (though I'll be happy to be proven wrong), but that's not an issue of sexism, just an issue of reality.

I haven't yet considered how you'd solve that problem at huge scales, like if you were Microsoft - probably others might have more useful opinions on this. My points above are more relevant to smaller companies. I'm sure there's a number of people at Microsoft worrying full-time about this.

If you development/technical roles are all male, then your supporting (manager/etc) roles must be mostly female if you end up with company-wide gender balance. This form of semi-gender-balance is not uncommon; many supporting roles (HR,etc) tend to skew female. As a female developer, I find the technology differential between the genders to be at least as awkward as having a strong but more uniform gender skew across the company would be.

Without any individual behaving incorrectly in any way, it feels awkward to be the only technical female in a company. Having a non-zero number of other women present is better than none, but it's completely different from having a non-zero number of equally technical women. When the information flow of technical information is always male-to-female, it just makes me feel uncomfortable, even though no one is doing anything wrong.

How would you solve this problem if you were in charge? (assuming you're not already in charge)

(genuinely curious, I have no idea how I'd try to solve it in a large company context)

I'm definitely not in charge; I've only just graduated from college, so the sum total of my work experience is two internships. The companies I worked at did both ask for advice/feedback on how they could recruit more women; they both view their lack of gender diversity as a problem. (neither had any full-time female developers; only one had female dev interns other than me)

I don't think I had anything useful to tell them at the time, and I'm still don't have especially clear ideas on how to solve the problem. Both companies are full of very nice, very smart people. They weren't doing anything wrong that I could see. It seems to me that the problem might be advertising.

They might be (unintentionally) advertising in male-dominated spaces (online or otherwise). This might be somewhat counteracted by the fact that both companies support/advertise-at specifically for-tech-women events (sponsoring a Girl Geek dinner; attending the Grace Hopper conference job fair).

Another possible factor is that both companies are known for having challenging interviews. (like a lot of well respected tech companies) It's possible that some potential female applicants talk themselves out of applying; I've seen (male) friends come pretty close to talking themselves out of applying because they felt they wouldn't get the job.

This is also something of a circular problem. The lack of female developers makes them less appealing places to work for potential new female hires; the imbalance signals that there might be problems at the company and the situation is a problem in itself. The company might also be less likely to hear about female-focused events to advertise at.

I don't claim to have a solution. I just wanted to back up that have enough women in general around does not really help with a lack of technical women.

That’s what I meant with ‘even worse…’. Assuming a child would come along on bring-your-child-to-work day, would that child get the impression that women are equally capable of doing technical work as men or would it think that women ‘belong’ in HR?

Yes, I was agreeing with you. Sorry if that was unclear.

Worth clarifying: I'm not saying you should ignore the issue of balance, I'm just saying you should ignore the issue of "sexism in technology".

Making efforts to hire a team with some male-female balance is just as worthwhile as making efforts to hire a team that's balanced long other criteria. No one wants to work for an all-male company, just as no one wants to work for an all-female company. There's not even really a need to look at the market opportunities side of things. Balance is just more comfortable for everyone.

If you're creating a company and planning you're hiring, and you're not a jerk, you probably are worried about keeping some kind of balance.

Yup, I was agreeing with you -- I probably should've made it clearer.

I just wanted to point out that people sometimes confuse "sexism" and "imbalance" -- a poor gender ratio doesn't imply sexism, and a good ratio doesn't get rid of sexism.

"[...] and a good ratio doesn't get rid of sexism"

I'm not so sure, I think diversity in general takes away a lot of lazy discriminatory behavior in the long run.

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