Our approach to gender diversity
blog.whiteoctober.co.uk
blog.whiteoctober.co.uk
When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable.
Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession.
> We find that the median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. This result is partially due to a gender-wage gap in medicine. However, it is mostly driven by the fact that the median female physician simply doesn’t work enough hours to amortize her upfront investment in medical school.[1]
Anyway, I think ibanking is in line before tech.
[1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/Gende...
The study doesn't assume that women will scale back their hours. They use data which shows it. Suggesting that female doctors should have been medical assistants is merely the result of the fact that they would have made more money (i.e., income - cost of education) if they did.
Men are every bit as capable of looking after children as women, and it is a convenient insult to men to suggest otherwise: convenient because it just happens to uphold the gender imbalance that leaves men in much more powerful positions, relatively speaking, than women.
I don't actually subscribe to collectivist moral theories that declare it somehow wrong when members of different groups are statistically more likely to make different choices. In fact, I believe most of the collectivist theories that do ascribe morality to statistics of this nature are not even well formed.
Between my wife and I, there is no comparative advantage when it comes to child rearing. We're attorneys, we both work at big firms, we make similar incomes (hence have similar opportunity costs), neither of us is any better with the kid than the other (thanks to the magic of modern technology, like infant formula). Yet from the moment she got pregnant, the pressure was on my wife to be the primary caregiver. People talked about what a shame it was that she was a busy professional and the baby had to spend all day in daycare (nobody ever said anything similar about my job). People will say things like "she needs her mom" when the baby cries (no: she's either hungry or bored or needs to be changed). When we stroll around in winter with the baby without putting a hat on her, busybodies never tell me to put a hat on the baby, always my wife.
If you're a woman and you have a baby, the deck is totally stacked against you from the minute you get pregnant.
My wife took only 5 months mat leave. I took the other 7. People were generally envious and supportive of me, at least publicly.
My wife, on the other hand, got to hear all the negativity. People treating her as heartless for going back to work and "leaving" a 5-month-old, and being deeply suspicious of "trusting her husband with the kids", which kinda turns my stomache.
Honestly, most folks are pretty positive about it, but it only takes a few throwbacks to make you feel disgusting.
I'd answer, "No, I'm parenting."
To give a UK perspective, what our research has found is that, in general, female doctors are only disadvantaged in their career (in terms of career progression and so on) when they have periods out for maternity leave and work part-time for childcare reasons. And then, they are only disadvantaged to a similar level as male doctors who took time out or work part-time for the same or different reasons.
In medicine, in the UK at least, there is a lot greater gender parity than there is in the Tech industry (which being a programmer I also am part of).
This conference looks really interesting, aside from the gender issues, and it's happening right here in Oxford. Its a shame I don't have funding to attend conferences, academia can be very fickle like that!
Computer programmer is not one of them. In fact, we were constantly being told by the media that the future for programmers was bleak due to outsourcing.
The point I am making is that medical school and law school are viewed societally as risk-free, guaranteed paths to wealth. This is of course turning out to be a myth for law school. They are huge magnets for smart people who are following the standard path of university to job.
The "not enough women in tech" concept never took off until tech became consistently viewed as a high-status job. The vast majority of construction workers and mechanics are men, but you don't see a huge societal uproar about it. This is because these positions are low status in our society.
I can't find a male teacher in my son's elementary school, and yet a highly talented male teacher I know was turned down for a position at his school which was given to a young woman. While this issue (including the self-reinforcing feedback loop that deters men from becoming elementary teachers) has been well documented and discussed in niche circles, its not something that graces the cover of newspapers and magazines like the women in tech issue does.
Now that tech is a high status job, instead of just a high pay job, this will correct itself just like it did for law firms and medical practices.
I can tell you this: anyone who thinks that artificially shrinking the pool of experts which you can pick to speak at a conference won't affect the quality of the presentations is deluding themselves.
Whether this is true or not, the parent commenter is right - quotas seem to be the direction that Westernized societies are heading for in the 21st century. I remember last year reading that the European Commission put forth a proposal requiring that publicly traded companies must have 40% of their non-executive board posts filled by women by 2020 [1]. Whether that ends up getting approved or not, it seems like a bellwether for how these issues are going to be framed.
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/european-commissi...
Explicit quotas are a big no-no in the U.S. (where most things are concerned - you can find exceptions here and there). See, for example in university admissions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_Ca...
IMO, legal risk surrounding hiring is THE reason consulting is growing so huge, so fast (in the U.S. at least). Even if the government were to foist quotas on everyone, hiring consultants instead of employees provides a way around it.
Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect. If you're female and you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you have a big advantage in this industry.
The first-hand experiences of many women in tech, widely available on public blogs, are directly opposed to your second-hand experience of them. Should we take your word for it, or theirs?
I fail to see why programmers are of a special fascist pig breed of men that are somehow way more discriminating towards woman than for example lawyers are. Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers.
Modern life is full of hazards for women. I choose to not be one of them but they're everywhere and I'm not denying in any way the impact they can have on women. Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other areas they don't feel intimidated.
I had a female boss once and a female programmer colleague and I never ever felt a single bit disrespect towards them because of their gender. Should I start a blog about that? "Today I accepted a suggestion about how to refactor my code from my female coworker and it totally felt like the most normal thing in the world".
> Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other areas they don't feel intimidated.
We're in agreement that it's the programmers who are the problem, and not just "women choosing not to do it," then?
I guess you're trying to attack the validity/veracity/relevance of blog posts in general? That's an interesting discussion to have on its own, but I'm not entirely sure what your first and last paragraphs have to do with the question I posed before:
Women say they are discriminated against, but you haven't seen any of that in your personal experience. That's great, but it's not logically sound to generalize your experience to the entire industry when there's a mountain of evidence to the contrary. So should we believe women who have first hand experience with discrimination, or your second hand account of it?
I am not saying nothing bad in that respect ever happened to a woman in the tech industry, I am saying that the tech industry is not an example of a hostile place to women that prevents them to be successful or accepted.
Has this ever actually been shown? I hear it a lot but have never heard any evidence either way. (the latter part)
>Tickets for All Your Base are on sale now, and we look forward to seeing you in October.
John, you rascal!
Given the record of industries that have reformed to include more women, I would not bet on there being very many "naturally male" businesses. Especially not ones that have a lot of sitting and typing involved.
Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
I made no positive claims, only negative ones.
>Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
Doing my best to refrain from username-dropping here. If an iterated game rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of strategy s is inevitable. Don't hate the player.
>Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge.
I will assume you're referring to Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen here. ;)
But seriously, human beings, lacking omniscience, require strategies to work around their blind spots and keep moving forward. When/if we're lucky enough to be cognizant of our own ignorance, we can either notify the others in the room or we can not - both are real options; neither strategy is universally dominant. Obviously, I'm being nice; it is called 'bullshitting'. But if you have a nose for it, then who's to blame for letting it affect you?
When the players are also the people that spent considerable effort getting the rules of the game rewritten in a way that end up causing it to reward the strategy (replacing rules that had been put into place precisely to prevent the kind of collapse that happened after the rule change, after another instance of the same type of collapse), I'm not sure the "don't hate the player" argument applies.
That' a very benign interpretation of what happened, and one that is naive of the nature of financial regulation. Specifically, you can't just rename "insurance" to "derivatives contract that pays out like insurance but with unregulated capital requirements (and please ignore the word 'insurance' - it has consequences)" and expect to get away with it.
Regulations are written to apply to everything that behaves like the regulated product. The people writing CDS knew exactly what they were doing. They just assumed they were so smart they would not be left holding the bag. Which is what everyone participating in a fraudulent scheme thinks.
Who buys CDS? Mom and Pop? If a used car salesman sells Grandma a lemon, that's not nice. Unless Grandma is also a used car salesman.
Getting off topic...
Women perform equally to men in school/college in related subjects (better than men in the UK).
Women make up 51% of the population.
∴ Our industry is ignoring half the talent.
I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing gender equality in the field.
This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select men.
My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar outcome.
Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work. Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more complicated than it first seems.
1. Invite straight white male 2. Invite straight white female 3. Invite gay white male 4. Invite gay white female 5. Invite straight black male 6. Invite straight black female 7. Invite gay black male 7. Invite gay black female
etc. etc.
I think the best way to be diverse with genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, is to ignore genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, not to invite male, female, male, female. Simply invite the best speaker, taking into account their sex isn't diverse, even if you do take turns.
We do have incredibly talented transgendered speakers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson
and at least one very talented asian transgendered speaker:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any transgendered men.
I find it interesting that you didn't add black speakers to your list. Our industry has a very notable deficit of anyone from an African, Afro-Carribean & African-American background. Personally I have worked with many more women programmers than I have with black programmers (although I have worked with two very talented black men, both ex-programmers in a senior management role, one military trained). I wonder why?
But you are right. Equality is equality. We'll get there in the end!
Might be because trans men in tech are men and thus "the norm"? Further, maybe most of them weren't in tech or high-profile before transition? Both Tang and Wilson were high-profile before transitioning.
(no evidence or anything, just providing possible working hypothesis).
That is, a transgender man would not be a man who became a woman, but a woman who is now a man?
> a transsexual man is a person who was assigned the female sex at birth [but] identifies as a man and is transitioning or has transitioned to a male gender role and has or will have a masculine body.
They're separate components of the person's identity: a transgender man is a man and transgender. From [it is common courtesy to refer to a person as their current preferred/identified gender] it follows that a transgender man is transitioning, has transitioned or will transition to masculinity.
Audrey & Sophie are women. A transgendered man was,usually, once, physically, a woman. A transgendered woman was, usually, once, physically, a man.
I say 'usually' because as society becomes more open about this stuff it is becoming increasingly clear that gender is a sliding scale, not a binary state. A surprisingly large percentage of the population people are born somewhere on the scale between male and female physically (and/or mentally).
Hopefully we'll just get over gender. It's essentially an unhelpful social construct that is too rigid for nature.
For a transgender person, one's gender is always what it is; it's just the body that might need adjustment. Also, it's hard to say when one's "arrived" anyway; there's not really a point when you just say "tada!" and you're all done. It's a very gradual process.
Some trans* people will still rrefer to themselves as trans* even "after" transition (inasmuch as you can pinpoint an 'after') because they internalise that as part of their identity; others don't.
Tim Chevalier, of Rust - http://catamorphism.org
His "The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist" is a depressing, informative read.
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Male_Programmer_Privilege...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9MM...
If there was a selection criteria of newbie then you could select women over men more aggressively.
I know a few great female developers but then you have to hope that they have the skills for public speaking.
This needs to be done at the grass roots, not at the top level.
But saying that, any top level female developer should be automatically included. There are some no doubt but they need to turn up.