Why aren’t there more women in tech? I’ll tell you why I’m not (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Why aren’t there more women in tech? I’ll tell you why I’m not (2012)

sarahmoran.com.au

7 pointsnreece15 comments

This is interesting, but I honestly don't see why this has to be gender-specific. I had very similar experiences as a male, from primary school all the way to university. I don't think it's fair (or honest) to expect other people to take care of "the transfer of knowledge" as if the duty were one-sided. I personally learnt pretty quickly that if I wanted something (learning included), then the responsibility and the motivation were mine and mine only. A teacher, or school, is a mean to an end, but by no mean an end in itself.

There is one point in this article however that somewhat confirms an idea I've had for a while. I too have been wondering for a long time what drives women away from tech (or not drive them in). After many a conversation, the only half-decent conclusion I came to was that many women see a lack of creativity in the tech sector. It's true that a lot of sciences are pretty dry on the surface, but at the same time, so is learning classical music (for example), and that doesn't seem to deter women nearly as much (I don't have any numbers for this mind you).

I'm not completely sure what I'm trying to get at here. I guess I'm just wondering how the dryness is somehow more appealing to men and less so to women, or maybe how genders perceive/experience creativity.

For this author, it wasn't the creativity, but how social the field that motivated this author.

From the article:

SOCIAL VALUE

"This added a social element to maths that I really enjoyed. Most of these kids then moved to other schools, and particularly to the local school that opened a class for bright kids. But I sure as shit wasn’t leaving my friends!"

"But to be good at maths was to be in solitude – or elitist and removed from friends."

"In high school I sat an IQ test and got accelerated in mathematics and in science. It was social suicide, but luckily I fell in with some amazing women in the year above me and always sat at the back of the class which eventually leant me to (almost) social acceptance across both grades."

"It was my secret shame – hanging out with the most beautifully intelligent (yet socially inept) kids of the school did not bode well on my social resume."

"So: after so much discouragement, social outcasting and lack of appeal to my introverted self, my pre-tertiary education beat the passion out my left brain entirely."

"Socially, the path to becoming a female tech pioneer from here on out could be a struggle for me personally."

"it was painful to be good at something, love it, but to then be punished for it in the schoolyard. I’m a social butterfly, dammit!"

CREATIVITY

The only time she says non-math was creative was, "My English classes were creative: my maths classes were often silent." But if you read on, it was still because creativity was social. "People talking at me, rather than nutting things out with the person next to me, drove me crazy in my maths classes."

Nevertheless, the author found self-creativity in computing:

"I had a male teacher give me a near-fail (pass minus I think it was called) when I built my first HTML site. He said I didn’t take the project seriously, and I said I wanted to be creative about it because it wasn’t challenging and technically I did nothing wrong – the code was perfect. If you didn’t want it fluro pink and with unicorns, then you should have said so. These days I would say “Write a better brief, dude.”"

FURTHER CONSIDERATION

It's reaching to extrapolate one person's life to the whole population. Nevertheless, while there are numerous theories of why gender differences persist in STEM, education, etc., I personally am convinced significant statistical improvement in the gender balance in STEM could be made by emphasizing the social value of STEM fields.

If you are interested, others have claimed the social quality to be the dominating factor in the female participation across all undergraduate degrees. For instance:

“Research has shown that women tend to gravitate towards fields of studies and career paths where they can have a positive social impact and work with others, often collaboratively,” says Linda Basch, president of the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW). “This is why you see so many women in the fields of health care and education. When women do gravitate toward the sciences, it is usually the life sciences.”

Source (with interesting statistics of top 10 degrees by gender as well): http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/top-10-college-majors-women...

Much of what she lines out isn't necessarily related to gender. Any kind of creative type will find dry CS classes boring. As someone else points out, the fact that the teacher that almost failed her was a male is completely tangential to the story.

A better title for this article would be "Why aren't there more people with similar interests and motivations as me in tech?".

I'm a bit tired of this discussion. I personally don't see women being excluded from tech other than their interests lie elsewhere and have not chosen to pursue this career. As far as I see, the door is open and techie personas tend to be some of the most open minded and less judgemental departments.

I want good designers/programmers, male or female, not someone that is there to prove a point. And if so important why is this discussion so dominated across tech jobs. I rarely see articles deriding the lack of men in nursing and never for HR departments. The latter I find amusing as HR are often the department driving this campaign when their department has to be the most gender skewed in every company I have worked for.

Excerpt:

I had a male teacher give me a near-fail (pass minus I think it was called) when I built my first HTML site. He said I didn’t take the project seriously, and I said I wanted to be creative about it because it wasn’t challenging and technically I did nothing wrong – the code was perfect. If you didn’t want it fluro pink and with unicorns, then you should have said so. These days I would say “Write a better brief, dude.”

I hope it generates discussion.

Teachers (male and female) typically reward boys for technical competence, and girls for "effort" (polish, pink unicorns, etc).

My sister and I (mathematically and technically inclined) would always get this. I would always think that this was to help those that were not academic still get points for effort.

I'm not seeing how the fact the teacher is male and the student is female had anything to do with what looks like uninspired teaching methods.

Much of her experience would be equally applicable to any gifted student male or female.

Mass schooling is very seldom individually tailored and this is it's major failing point, it always seems to gravitate towards a production line education model. So that late developers are left behind and early developers are left bored and inevitably under achieve.

As a male human, I got much the same response from some teachers. It's unfortunate it happens to anyone. Fortunately, grades don't really matter, and my parents didn't mind the occasional B.

tl;dr: The culture of tech was boring compared to other areas.

This aspect of the problem is underrated compared to others. Thankfully, there are a lot of strong admissions about it in this article, which is unfortunately not seen too often.

"But to be good at maths was to be in solitude – or elitist and removed from friends."

"It was my secret shame – hanging out with the most beautifully intelligent (yet socially inept) kids of the school did not bode well on my social resume."

"In high school I sat an IQ test and got accelerated in mathematics and in science. It was social suicide."

I have stressed this on HN before in articles about "why aren't there more women in tech" -- one of the major un-addressed problems is that younger women don't think of tech as a cool thing to go into. Younger men don't mind being social outcasts as much, and tend to deal with the solitude that results from such activities, because they are often socially isolated anyway. If we want to get more women in tech, we have to make it socially cool, not just socially acceptable.

I think this also explains why a lot of men have knee-jerk negative reactions to "we should do more to get women in tech" articles. They believe that suffering through all that social ostracism at school was the price they paid for getting into tech.

Except that has nothing to do with gender. It's just as "boring"/"uncool" for boys too. Boys are also discouraged from going into tech. Being good at math/science/technology skill are stereotyped as "nerd" and considered low-social status by our culture. I think this is even moreso for boys than girls but maybe it's both.

My hypothesis (although it is not proven by any means, it is somewhat bolstered by the social experiences of many men and women I have talked to about this) is that men prefer to take the social hit of being ostracized, since they work alone on their pursuits anyway, more often than women. (e.g. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/why-wome...)

Totally agree though, that both men and women do face this social ostracism, and that eliminating it would be hugely beneficial. I think we differ in the belief that it is the primary reason for the low number of women in the tech sector.

That's nonsense. The same way it could be "Why aren’t there more men in tech?" or "Why aren’t there more people in tech?" whatsoever.

The whole article consists of telling how good and capable she was (and by arguments she uses you can suspect that she really is not) and concludes it by "I wasn't appreciated by society, so that's it".

Stereotypically, being a guy-programmer isn't "cool" as well. Never really was. These "nerds" were't appreciated as well. Did they care? No. Because they simply liked and valued what they were doing much more than somebody's opinion on that. And that is what really makes them "good". They do not need appreciation to do what they do.

I know quite a few women in tech that can be called "good" indeed and I never heard a single one of them blaming others for attitude or talking about all these "social justice" nonsense at all. They write blogposts about DSP and compiler optimization instead. And for some reason it is always somebody who has nothing to really be proud of (in sense of technical achievements) who writes posts like that one. It is so obvious that I still can't understand why it finds enough social response to be on top of HN. Again and again.

I wonder what's up with that, why is it a shame to hang out with intelligent yet socially inept people? Note that she used the word "shame", rather than "guilt". Where "guilt" is an emotion one experiences after one does something "wrong", "shame" means she felt her self was deficient, because she hung out with people who weren't good at being social.

"If we want to get more women in tech, we have to make it socially cool, not just socially acceptable"

So, what you're saying is, in the name of equality, we should make it easier for women to join tech, so that men and women are more equally represented in tech. Since an environment with socially inept people is less cool, and therefore less welcoming to women, we should change the environment such that socially inept people are discouraged from joining tech, so that tech becomes cool, and so that more women gets to join.

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