Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech
do-better.herokuapp.com
do-better.herokuapp.com
Presumably the target audience is not unfamiliar with the gender disparity in tech. If they are unfamiliar there exists data about the industry in general that would be better suited to making a point to them. So, this is aimed at some subset of the industry, but it seems a bit nebulous because...
Is it a call to action? "We Can Do Better"? OK, so who are the "we"? What are the actions to take towards doing better? (I mean, more specific the obvious end goal of gender equality in our industry.)
With or without specific calls to actions, why is this broken down on a per-employer basis? Should deviations from industry average be celebrated and booed? Is it an attempt to put pressure on the employers, if so to what end? Or is this just a novel way of reiterating a statistic that the target audience already knows?
The Basecamp team is 8/43 women - NONE of whom are accounted for here. That's a huge factual miss on the very first company I recognized & fact-checked. Doesn't fill me with confidence.
If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor.
Unless your product aims to solve a problem that only affects white guys in the city (which, to be fair, is certainly a non-negligible number of products), then you're going to have a hard time expanding your base beyond white guys in the city if your team consists of only white guys in the city.
I think a white man can make a product for black women, and I think a black woman can make products for white men. For me, it's more about acknowledging that the world exists outside of white men in the city and less about making sure your team is made up of every racial and socio-economic variable you aim to market to.
As Vezzy-Fnord points out, a single individual is able to empathize with other types of people, but that empathy is finite, and also, empathy does not equal understanding.
It turns out that "white guys" are not a homogenous group. In fact, chances are that white guys from (e.g.) Finland, Serbia and Nebraska will have little in common besides their skin color and sex. Their opinions and worldviews will differ greatly.
Diversity of opinion is just as important, if not more so. Sure, on the outside everyone looks like a pasty-faced white dude, but jumping to conclusions based solely on that, is... misguided, to put it euphemistically.
I'm not saying we can't benefit from having a wide variety of phenotypes as well, after all different phenotypes equal different experiences. But not every white guy is a Bay Area caricature.
Maybe "we" should feel guilty about socially engineering something that is proven to make people unhappy. Ironically, the happiness index in women is down in Western societies whereas the same measure for men, is up! And we can hardly argue that women are treated as less equal than they were in the 70s.
People have a knee jerk reaction and say "oh yeah, that's because women have to do even more work now" where that isn't actually the case. Married women with traditional gender roles are actually happier than their married and equal counterparts.
Now, I know I'm not providing any statistics or references but I would urge you to be on the lookout. They show up quite regularly and are easy to find once you are open to the concept. One good place to start is "Brainwash", a "documentary" by a comedian that actually resulted in a loss of funds to a gender studies institute.
All this being said, I do not think a single one of us would say that a woman should not be encouraged to be a programmer. But to deny the joy that a woman can get from being a "traditional" mother as well as a programmer is unfair to an entire gender and unfairly creates a generation of latchkey children. I do not know a single mother or father who says "Yeah, I wish I spent less time with my kids."
The more interesting sociological question is whether there is a nurture thing happening here, or just a natural tendency for women to not be as interested in computers and technology at a young age.
Boxing and MMX have way more men than women - why isn't there a "we can do better" campaign for these disciplines?
By the way my co-founder CEO is a woman and she's an amazing technologist and leader.
It's a real issue, but the chart doesn't work well on my browser.
What's funny is that, even using infographics and stats to show how "unfair" it is, stats don't lie: The companies that have more than 18% women are mostly chick stuff: Fashion, blogging, etc.
Hard core tech companies still employ mostly dudes, and they will continue to employ dudes. If they change that, they'll get into Gawker club.
I am seeing this stupid trend recently. GE shared an article on their LinkedIn page, to which I replied with this [0].
Some company is paying teachers to teach girls to code, but they're not paid when they teach boys.
This is absurd. This is stupid. There's a reason most jobs in tech are taken by men:
- Most tech students are male. (So women start to get filtered out way before there's even a job involved - They pursue other stuff like marketing, arts, design, etc). There are few girls in Engineering. That's why Engineering students frequent girls who are not in Engineering.
- Once they graduate, there are still more men than women applying for jobs in tech. A lot of women will do something else. There is less an urge for a woman to achieve something, and less drive, than there is for a man. If you disagree with me, you are dellusional since you are basically contradictin History and Biology and Now: How many Fortune 500 companies were started and are run by women. Thank you.
It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime.
However, let's not start writing crap. Heroku ? James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, Orion Henry. Three guys. Why isn't there a woman with you ? Is it that maybe you didn't know any woman who could fill in ?
I ask those guys: When you were in Engineering ? How many girls were there, and from those girls, how many could hack it.
I'm tired of this stupidity. I'm tired of this leveling from bottom.
Soldiering isn't for everyone. Soon I'll make a petition asking the special forces to let me in: Why is it a problem for you to let me in, even if I can't lift a dude and run with him, even if I need a pillow to sleep !? Intolerant bastards ! Make a rule to lower your standards to suit me.
And soon, people who don't bear the sight of blood will lobby to take blood out of surgery. Would you trust such a surgeon with your life ! Eww, blood !
>It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime.
Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we were young. I'm still stupid in many ways. But be careful about the stupid things that you record for posterity.
I trust female engineers who rock will not have difficulty finding a job, and if they do, I'm sure they have the drive to start their own company.
>Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we were young. I'm still stupid in many ways. But be careful about the stupid things that you record for posterity.
I'm 26, quote me on a marble rock if you wish.
PS: I don't like your idea implying that being intimate with women is stupid and reckless. It's insulting to me, and to the female gender.
Oh, and I upvoted you. Because you voiced your opinion.
My wife started the Baltimore and DC chapters of "Girl Develop It", which aims to solve your first and second bullet points.
The irony, of course, being that whether or not you believe in the gender pay gap, the gap definitely seems to be smaller in tech. Perhaps that's due to the relatively small amount women in tech currently (meaning the gap would grow as diversity increased), or perhaps that's because tech companies tend to be run more analytically (at least at early states) and less on negotiated value, but either way, it's surprising to me that more women aren't flocking to tech, as it likely holds higher relative wages for them, both because of the field, and because of the lessened gender gap.
Though what intrigues me is the fact people turn a blind eye and go "Oh, why on Earth there are so few women in Tech". Well, I'm an Engineer and every Engineering year, the ratio dudes/girls is as high as Burj Al Arab.
It's not for nothing there are clichés like "Girls don't do tech and if they do, they do Biology". Stereotypes, maybe. But "60% of the time, it works every time". You ask a girl in a Sci&Tech University what she does, most of the time it's Biology.
There aren't that many girls programmers. And then there are fewer female programmers who are good (that's natural, being good is rarer than being average. Valid for men, too) who have to compete with a more important number of men programmers.
Just probabilities, yet people want to make an exclusively political/segregation/unfair matter.