Why women leave tech: It's the culture | Hacker News Reader

Why women leave tech: It's the culture

fortune.com

27 pointsmythbusted20 comments

> Elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley now report that about 50% of their introductory computer science students are women

In the discussion of this story at Reddit [1], there were some interesting comments pointing out reasons that the article might be wrong in surmising that 50% women in introductory classes means they are entering the tech-as-a-profession pipeline at the same rate as men.

Computing has become sufficiently important in other engineering fields, science, finance, social science, and even some of the humanities that people interested in those areas can greatly benefit by introductory CS and programming. Introductory CS has become a course you can reasonably expect anyone to take now, and so it should have demographics that are close to that of the campus as a whole.

What you'd want to look at to see the real rate women are coming into the CS pipeline in college is the demographics of the first CS class that is generally taken only by people going into CS.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ibeqk/why_women...

> It is popular to characterize the gender gap in tech in terms of a pipeline problem: not enough girls studying math and science. However, there are several indications that this may no longer be the case, at least not to the extent that it once was. High school girls and boys participate about equally in STEM electives. Elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley now report that about 50% of their introductory computer science students are women. Yet just last year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that men are employed in STEM occupations at about twice the rate of women with the same qualifications.

Looking more into this, there are some other problems.

The link cited for "High school girls and boys participate about equally in STEM electives" says "Girls are taking many high level mathematics and science courses at similar rates as their male peers, with the exception of physics and engineering, and are performing well overall". Note that part about engineering being an exception. For engineering, their source says the ratio of boys to girls is 6 to 1.

I'd expect engineering is most relevant for most tech jobs, and in that boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in high school. That sure doesn't sound like the pipeline problem is no longer a major factor.

Their same source also has stats for college. Women earn 50.3% of the science and engineering bachelor's degrees, but like high school this varies by field. It was 18.2% in computer science and 18.4% in engineering. I don't see any sign here either that the pipeline problem is diminishing.

Interestingly, women get 43.1% of the bachelor's degrees in math and statistics. I'm surprised there is that big of a difference between math and CS.

In the workforce, the same source says that women are 13% in engineering, and 25% in computer and mathematical sciences (it is very annoying that CS and math are separate in the college stats and combined in the workplace stats).

Note the significant drop from degrees to workforce. In engineering, women are 18.4% of the degrees, but only make up 13% of the working engineers. I wonder if that gap could be due to the difficulty of having children while maintaining one's career, which is definitely harder for women than men since women are the ones that actually give birth?

I'm beginning to think that the main causes of the gender gap in tech are the pipeline problem and the atrocious maternity and paternity leave standards in the US.

Most of Europe, I believe, has much much much much better maternity and paternity leave than the US does. Does anyone have any stats on if women who go into tech in Europe are more likely to stay compared to US tech women? Note that the data we want for this is not just the percentage of women in tech there compared to the US, because the pipelines into tech might be different. I think the number we want is, for various tech areas, percentage of women getting degrees in these areas and percentage of women in the workforce in those areas.

If maternity and paternity leave make a different, my prediction is that the percentages in the workforce will be closer to the percentages getting degrees in Europe than it is in the US.

One more interesting thing. The source the article cites for the pipeline data also gives a breakdown of the workforce by various science and engineering fields. Here are the percentages:

   45.9% of chemists and material scientists
   28.9% of environmental scientist and geoscientists
   22.3% of chemical engineers
   17.8% of industrial engineers
   13.1% of civil engineers
    8.8% of electrical and electronics engineers
    5.5% of mechanical engineers

I can see traditional differences in the way boys and girls are raised explaining why women are better represented in biological sciences than in physical sciences or engineering, but I cannot think of anything that would explain why the representation of women various so much between different engineering fields. I can't think of anything that would have made me guess that women would be much better represented in chemical engineering than civil engineering, and in civil engineering than electrical engineering.

Coincidentially, I'm working on something which is very relevant to this topic: http://i.imgur.com/dGZk26W.jpg

That is not relevant - sample all the stories posted to HN over a month and we might seem something interesting, but if you put all samples into one beaker, except for one all we will see is how different that story is from the norm.

Take the ebola thread posted earlier - there is clearly no ebola words in your first sample, while there would be in one taken soly from that story.

Look women just aren't mentioned that often on your average HN story because we assume them to be humans.

> Take the ebola thread posted earlier - there is clearly no ebola words in your first sample, while there would be in one taken soly from that story.

That's...not how word clouds work.

Each bucket is taken from thousands of comments in hundreds of HN submissions, which each phase in the cloud appearing with over 100 times.

I'm kinda surprised these companies feel they can afford to treat their employees poorly despite the labour market being so competitive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406912

A valid reason to kill this one. But there seems to be the problem that controversial storys get flagged of the frontpage very fast, which then makes other people repost them. Probably because the story is relevant to them/they want to discuss it.

In addition to this, there seems to be a heavy penalty for posts that get more comments than upvotes, which sometimes kills quite inspiring discussions.

How about introducing a "controversial" tag that gets added on posts with lots of comments and flags and having a setting (similar to showdead) to make them invisible for people who don't like to discuss. This would also solve a part of the repost problem and the "censorship" accusations hn sometimes gets.

FWIW, moderators didn't touch this story. It fell in rank because users flagged it.

> It was too hard to juggle everything. Her manager had pressured her to return from leave early, and was pushing her again to take a business trip and leave her nursing infant at home.

Chose family over career. Had to make predictable work sacrifice in order to have time for family.

> I was the first and only person at my small company ever to take maternity leave. They had no parental leave policy previously even though they had been around for about a decade, and, having under 50 employees, weren’t covered by FMLA. I (cluelessly!) agreed to go back to work part-time starting when my daughter was six weeks. There was no set place for me to pump [breast milk] while I was at work, so it was perpetually inconvenient and awkward to work at the office for longer than a couple hours at a time.

Was aware that her small company didn't have structures in place, yet seems surprised they didn't have structures in place. Was accommodated about maternity leave, then quit because they didn't also have an extra room just for mothers.

> She is one of 484 [67% of the sample] women to cite motherhood as a factor in her decision to leave tech.

Two third of the women choose a larger family role over a more demanding job, yet complain about the work place consequences of doing so.

> Rather, it was the lack of flexible work arrangements, the unsupportive work environment, or a salary that was inadequate to pay for childcare.

According to the article, most women seem unwilling to accept that they have to make sacrifices associated with a family, and seem to think that its the obligation of the corporation to make their life choices work, rather than just continue to employ them if the situation is mutually workable.

> Of the 716 women surveyed, 465 are not working today.

Indeed, about two thirds of them opted not to return to a job immediately following their decision to place family over career. This strongly indicates a sampling bias towards women who would have left /any/ industry with a demanding work load in preference of family duties, and calls in to question if this is anything particular to tech.

> Some women felt that their work environments were discriminatory, but most reported something milder: the simple discomfort of not fitting in in an otherwise homogenous setting.

In fact, the article admits that it's not actually about any kind of discrimination in tech, but rather, that companies aren't going out of their way to favor women enough to get a critical mass of them employed and overcome this effect that trickles the qualified women back out of the field, keeping them from ever reaching that mass on their own.

This article seems to mostly complain about a lack of privilege, and not actually complain about anything actionable on anyone else's part.

I'm so surprised how the society keeps saying how women/people leaving the workplace to have kids is a bad thing. Personally, I would love to have the opportunity to stay at home and not need to go to work. However, being a man, the institutional, cultural and sexual factors compound and make it very unlikely that I will be so lucky.

Maybe I should move to the Netherlands - there, most women and a lot of men only work part-time jobs, as they earn enough and are able to have a better work-life balance.

> It was hard enough being the only woman on most projects.

> Try being the only woman over 40. Doesn’t matter how good

> you are, or even if your colleagues respect you.

> Eventually you get tired of being the odd duck.

What i read is: "even if everything is fine, my coworkers respect me and i get a nice paycheck, i feel the need and urge to be bitching about something".

Is it just me ?

Ok, I'll probably get downvoted to death (therefore new account), but I am really interested in your opinion on this:

Things like "Try being the only woman over 40." for me sounds like desperately looking for an excuse for not wanting to work there without really having one - similar to "I'm the only tall guy with black hair and blue eyes - I can't work there".

Next, the "Halle Berry" thing: I'm not really into the specifics about her, but I'm not aware of anything negative. I only think of her as being really successful in her job. There is nothing about being a woman in there - when a guy with a huge beard would break the server there would be jokes like "Oh look, Gandalf broke the website today" which isn't bad either.

I do not understand their problem about "being different" - I think of it as one of the biggest reasons for having people to do the job instead of 1000 equal robots (only second to "robots are not that far yet"). In addition to this: Isn't the diversity thing one of ideas a lot of "feminists" preach to convince people to look for "women who could do this job" instead of "everyone who could do this job"?

And the last thing: In the article they complain about not getting a baby leave, which is totally valid, but doesn't that contradict the the other "we want to be treated equally" stuff?

This is a Fortune article and lasted a couple minutes through HN's filters. The white CEO author appears to be oppressed along just one obvious axis, unlike some she discusses.

It's going to be flawed and lacking. If you want something more serious, use teh internets and IT Startup Revolution and look for it.

I shouldn't even get involved in discussions about sexism or racism on HN. It always turns into a 3 page meta-meta-meta debate with no resolution. The whole tech scene needs to collectively take a sensitivity training course to regain its humanity.

1) >>"Try being the only woman over 40.... similar to "I'm the only tall guy with black hair and blue eyes - I can't work there".

The fact that you see those 2 things as anything approaching remotely similar is an error in social perception that I cannot begin to explain.

2)>>Next, the "Halle Berry" thing: I'm not really into the specifics about her, but I'm not aware of anything negative.

Halle Berry is a black woman; that's why her co-workers are using it. Calling her that is pretty much equiv to saying "Oh, the black woman broke the build this morning." Yes, she's black, she's a woman and it may very well be the fact that code she pushed broke the build. But, in the context of American history... and being the only black woman in an office of white males... that kind of phrasing is a problem and it's a subtle reminder that she's not "one of them" and they probably haven't accepted her. It's not at all the same as a bunch of same gender, same race people calling out one guy with a beard. Context is important.

3)>>And the last thing: In the article they complain about not getting a baby leave, which is totally valid, but doesn't that contradict the the other "we want to be treated equally" stuff?

Humans are not computers. It's not 1 or 0. You can treat someone as an equal while also gracefully resolving particular situations. What this article is probably alluding to is the vibe of an office where you're made to feel guilty taking care of your own child. For a mom, their are real biological things like recovering from child birth and choosing to feed the child naturally. If, say, a man broke his leg skiing he'd probably get some time off and the guys would joke about it and smile. The typical vibe of a tech office won't make him feel guilty. If a woman needs some time off for a new child... it's not usually the same vibe.

______

P.S., I won't be replying anymore in this thread because I already know someone will come along with specious meta-debate and the thread will become like 3 pages long splitting hairs and debating the nature of the universe. I'm just posting here for the other HN readers who never post to let them know there are some in tech who do get it and understand what these women are expressing is a real issue and not something just made up in their heads.

EDIT:....and boom, off the front page in like 5mins. HN itself is an example of these problems. Someone should write an article about how HN can't handle any discussion about racism or sexism in tech and really shine a bright light on it. I use to collect examples; I might have to start that up again.

To 1) and 2) That was kind of the point I was trying to make here: Being a woman and being 40 or being a woman and being black is a characteristic of someone - having blue eyes is one, too. You only feel different when you look at it specifically and point out it is "important" (for example "being a woman" compared to "having blue eyes"). And then you feel alone because of it. So why make it "important" in the first place?

Because it gives them something to bitch about.

I bet that all guys in that company had nicknames. She got one for someone who was considered the most beautiful person the planet - and she's upset about it.

> If, say, a man broke his leg skiing he'd probably get some time off and the guys would joke about it and smile. The typical vibe of a tech office won't make him feel guilty.

I'm not sure choosing to have a child and accidentally breaking your leg at the same thing, since you were so critical of people making false analogies. One is certainly much more of a choice than the other.

That being said, your point isn't even true: I've been pressured to start working from home, answering calls/emails for consults, etc by more than one company while recovering from various illnesses or injuries. It's even been hinted at smaller companies that not working from home while sick is not "being a team player" and that it might negatively impact my prospects there.

HN is about tech stuff and things that interest people. These kinds of stories gets killed, because they never contribute anything new. At best you learn that otherwise reasonable, intelligent people completely lose it when stuff like this gets introduced.

> EDIT:....and boom, off the front page in like 5mins.

I flag stories like this precisely because they create the threads that you describe.

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