Facebook’s First Female Engineer Speaks Out on Tech’s Gender Gap
wired.com
wired.com
The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They were tinkering and playing with them despite society's mockery that they were pathetic nerds. When they found out you could make great money, well, that was just a bonus.
The Foxes joined because they were told the industry was super rad and it paid really well. The Foxes were given advantages like additional Fox-only scholarships, special Fox-quotas in good engineering colleges, and lots of blogs praising Foxes and telling them how special they are, how they bring unique Fox-only insights to the table, and that The Bears have a conscious/unconscious agenda against them.
Now ask yourself, which group would you expect to have more longevity in the industry, the Foxes or the Bears? What would a company have to do to keep more Foxes? Maybe special privileges, like conferences the companies could send the Foxes to that would tell the Foxes how great they are, promotion programs to ensure more Fox visibility, quotas for Foxes in senior management, etc. But the Foxes are still leaving in higher numbers so clearly the industry has a bias against Foxes, so funding for Fox-only programs must increase, until the number of Foxes is equal to Bears (and if eventually there are more Foxes then Bears, that's just great!) What about the Bears? Well, the Bears better sit down, shut up, and remember that they are just Bears and there is nothing unique about a Bear. Some Bears internalize this and start advocating for the Foxes themselves.
And so it goes.
Yet, as I said, I disagree with GP. The word "natural" is misleading, it sounds like he or she is suggesting a natural inborn aptitude, and we don't have evidence to support that. Unless all that "natural" meant here was "commonly occurring, happening without prompting", in which case I would agree.
It's too bad that it's not socially acceptable just to support nerds regardless of their gender. But that is just more of the same stigma which never really ended.
I disagree, and think that adults who grew up before computers were commonplace are skewing your perception. I was a teenager not too long ago, and as I remember it, personal computer ownership was about even between the sexes in middle class youth, perhaps even biased towards girls a bit because "a boy will just use it for porn." In spite of this, pretty almost every young boy I knew that had a computer, whether or not they were really a "computer person" or grew up to do anything related to technology, was interested in tinkering with their computers in some way. From playing games for long hours, tweaking their configs or even making maps or modding the game, running their own game servers from their desktop (Minecraft is especially popular for this today), to having the spiffiest desktop and theme, to building their own PCs, hanging out on forums/irc channels/etc. and the good ol' fashioned standby of amassing a huge collection of pirated music, movies, and pornography, there were a lot of opportunities for otherwise "normal" boys to get experience in playing with computers and learning something about them along the way. Being good with computers could even be somewhat cool, in a "you're a fucking wizard, dude" kind of way. And to be clear, this is the perception I got from hanging out with kids on all levels of the social spectrum, not just super computer dorks like myself.
In contrast, most of the girls I knew used them mostly for IMing friends. The most "hardcore" girls I knew were involved in communities themselves like Deviantart or the various MMOs, which gave them plenty of their own opportunities to play and learn (for instance, Photoshop is a very complicated program, and sites like Neopets and MySpace taught basic HTML to a lot more girls than boys), but in general a larger proportion of the girls seemed more interested in study, their personal lives, relationships, and "drama" (the "dickhead teenaged boys" I mentioned in another post ITT would blush at the shit that girls do to each other), than in the computer itself or the internet outside of their "small world." I'm not a girl, though, so obviously I don't have the whole story.
With the younger generations, the situation looks similar to me, but with smart phones. It's common and "cool" for a guy to have a rooted/jailbroken phone, get a buttload of apps for free, and customize the crap out of his phone. But while I obviously don't have much contact with teenaged girls nowadays outside of family, the ones I have talked with are more interested in instagramming and snapchatting with their friends than the phones themselves.
People often say that women naturally have more emotional and social intelligence on average than men, so I don't really get why those same people get offended by the idea that men could naturally have more more "systems intelligence" or general interest in tinkering than women on average.
And no, I don't agree that "all the young people today know heaps about computers". I just left a job where I was the 41-year-old sysadmin and there were a dozen or so twentysomethings. Apart from one or two self-starters, I was the go-to guy whenever there was a problem requiring a bit of computer nous. I'm talking about simple stuff that a power user would be able to do. In the same vein, just because you drive a lot doesn't mean you have an affinity for vehicles. Plenty of people that have driven for decades can barely change their own fluids, for example. Mass usage != mass affinity.
That was a bad example on my part. I wasn't trying to suggest that "most boys mod games" or anything like that, but rather that more "normal" boys than girls are interested in and capable of basic internet/computer-related things like installing a torrent client and grabbing some stuff off of The Pirate Bay, or following a "how 2 jailbreak your iPhone" tutorial.
I'll trust your experience, I'm probably overestimating the competence of the average middle-class twentysomething. To be clear, however, I had even younger kids in mind, early 20s at the latest, that you may not have ever worked with before (being ambiguous about my age is a habit I picked up as a kid pretending to be an adult on the internet, sorry about that). If you consider that PCs and the internet really took off in the middle class in the late 90s/early 2000s, then it's much more likely that someone around 20 now would have had an internet-connected personal computer all to their lonesome since elementary school, while those from in their later 20s probably would not have had one until high school or even college. Likewise, I didn't have a feature phone, let alone a smartphone, until I was in high school, so I just don't really give much of a damn about them, whereas they mean the world to kids that have had them since elementary school.
Most of my programming friends and I (many of whom are women, by the way) first learned to use the command line for PC games. Same reason I first took apart a computer and put it back together. Most kids, then and now, don't play pc games. Back then, most kids didn't play video games at all. If they did, it was a console. That hasn't changed.
You can have an internet connected computer your whole life and never open it up. I'd say the vast majority of people fall into this category. Things work, and when they break, you take them to someone that can fix them for you. The people that aren't like that are usually in my experience people that want to boost performance on their machine, whether it's a car or a computer.
Script kiddies aren't hackers. What you've just described, using a jailbroken phone, downloading tons of apps - that's using a product another person developed.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_do...
The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50% women now.
Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period:
http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct...
Lastly, for contrast, look what happened to vet school:
https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g...
(NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale.
I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among lawyers. Maybe I'm wrong about that?
In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more questions than they answer.
Maybe if you're writing an app solo in your bedroom it doesn't, but that's not how the vast majority of industrial software gets written.
But let's examine the point more closely: what is the name for the department that is explicitly in charge of managing human needs and social relationships at a large software development company? Who tends to prefer those jobs?
http://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/...
The two spikes circa 1985 and 2003 are also present in the men's data.
What we see is not women checking out of CS, but much more men getting into it, hence the percentage of degrees awarded to women goes down.
Your point about accounting is an interesting one. I suspect it's explained by this: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...
Disclaimer: the sources below are controversial. The below is not necessarily an endorsement of these conclusions, but an attempt to address them on their own terms.
Regarding your second point. At the ranges in question, the male-female disparity is not enough to explain the observed results. I'm going to rely on SAT Math data, because that's more rigorously studied than what you posted. The male-female disparity among people with perfect SAT Math scores is less than 2-1: http://www.aei.org/publication/2013-sat-test-results-show-th.... So that might explain why only 40%+ of math majors are women. It doesn't explain why less than 20% of CS majors are women, or why that ratio has fallen by half even as the field has become less mathematically rigorous.
Also, there is quite a lot of evidence that women outperform their SAT Math scores relative to men: http://esd.mit.edu/Headline/widnall_presentation.html ("He found that women outperform their predictions. That is, that women perform better as students than their math SAT scores would predict. The effective predictive gap is about 30 points.") It is interesting to note that men also outperform women at the upper range of MCAT and LSAT scores, by similar margins. Yet, differences in observed performance in medical and law school by gender are slim to non-existant, and those professions have an even number of men and women, at least at the degree and entry level.
I don't think aptitude explains the disparity if you actually delve into the data. I think it can be explained by: http://iangent.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-petrie-multiplier-wh...
medicine is over 50% women now (everyone at every level) or doctors are over 50% women now? If it's the former, I'm wondering if it has more to do with the industry becoming more equal or if the demand for nurses has gone up much faster than the demand for doctors.
This is not to say that doctors are more likely to be men than women (I happen to think it's roughly equal based on my own experiences), but that nurses are far more likely to be women because nursing is a profession that has been overwhelmingly female, and one in which men are discouraged from participating.
source: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/
Worldwide, it varies from country to country, but the are more male physicians than female physicians in every country except Algeria, Cabo Verde, Czech Republic, Estonia, Guinea and Mongolia.
source: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/?theme=main&vid=92400
Are you only referring to recent m.d. licenses? If so, what are the numbers there? I couldn't find them.
Everyone thought the Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity in working, and the Foxes had a strong natural inclination in cooking and babysitting. Then after some laws, changed policies, and social adjustments, Foxes must have changed their nature and started doing what the Bears did - often better. Within 20 years, the Foxes and the Bears reverted a few millennia worth of prejudice and assumptions, and everyone benefited immensely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912
It's not immediately apparent who the Bears and Foxes are supposed to represent in your parable.
That's quite intentional.
Which causes the whole analogy to be interpreted as being about gender, and causes a lot of controversy, because it sounds like it's saying that women can't take the role of the "bear" in the story. In fact there have been many women (like Rear Admiral Grace Hopper) who took that role without special scholarships or quotas or whatever. They were bears. So it feels unfair for the analogy to apparently imply that these women didn't have any innate talent and just came into the field to be called special.
So if I am charitable, the analogy has a significant imperfection which is encouraging a negative response that misses any more constructive point which might have been there.
It's a story. For a minute try to take it as it is; a story about bears and foxes and let's try to distinguish if the bears are treated justly.
The point is to establish common ground. If we can't agree about what is just within the boundaries of our fictitious little story we'll have little hope to agree of what is just in the real world.
The bears are the kids that grew up fascinated by computers, and just knew they were going to do something with them when they grew up. Maybe they didn't always get the best grades in school, but as early as middle or high school they could blow you away with the knowledge they gained purely out of self interest. This group is mostly (though not entirely) male. Most (not all, though things are a lot better today than the used to be) of the bear's earliest experiences with computers were solitary endeavors free of gender bias; if you're the elementary school kid picking out computer books from the library and pouring over them at home, you aren't even aware of a gender bias or skew in tech, you're in your own little world. Sure, when you grow up a bit and start meeting i.e. dickhead teenaged boys in IRC channels, the skew makes itself known, but if you made it to that point in the first place, a few jerks aren't going to be enough to scare you out of your passion. Given that there seems to be a lot more male bears than female bears, this and other anecdotal evidence suggests to me that there could be some kind of unavoidable neurological difference that makes men on average more likely to be innately interested in this sort of thing from a young age. We can make things more welcoming for the female bears and attempt to insulate them from the aforementioned dickhead teenagers (though I don't think that is great idea either), but you can't just force any girl into becoming a programmer any more than you can guarantee that every boy with a computer will use it for programming instead "wasting" it on video games and porn.
The foxes are the honor roll students that worked their asses off in school so that they could get into good colleges, get a good degree, get a good job, and continue their family's upward mobility. Whether it's business, medicine, law, or today computer programming, they didn't really care so much about what they did and didn't really worry too much about it as children (though of course they probably developed genuine interests in their field of choice during study and employment), but whatever they decided to do, they were willing to work hard to become good at it. They are at a bit of a disadvantage in tech vs. other fields that mostly lack a group of self-interested bears, but their strong work ethic helps to make up for it. This group pretty much already has gender parity (when you look at college graduates as a whole, not just in tech-related fields), so while the programming foxes may be made up of less women today, it will surely reach gender parity in time.
(Yes, this is a false dichotomy; many people can be described by both the bear and the fox. Ignore it for now, or treat it as a suggestion that the foxes may come close to but never reach true gender parity either.)
Any tech company is going to be made up of both bears and foxes. The proportions of these groups will vary, and the gender ratio within both groups will slowly shift closer to gender parity over time as barriers are torn down. However, if you accept that there may be a natural reason for the bears to be made up of more men than women, then it becomes clear that due to the bears tipping the scales, there will never be perfect gender parity in tech candidates, and that there can only be perfect gender parity in employed tech workers if the male bears are actively discriminated against by all potential employers. Sadly this philosophy does not seem to be very far off from what many employers and prominent figures here seem to actually believe and practice, but on the bright side for the male bears, it is almost impossible for them to be completely excluded; for as long as tech is a competitive field, ignoring a male worker because of his gender will just result in him being snatched up by someone else.
So while I do support initiatives to reduce gender bias and punish blatant harassment in tech, I think that some amount of gender skew is unavoidable and not worth worrying about. The people that push for a perfect 50/50 split strike me as misguided at best (if you disagree with the idea that men could be "better" or more interested on average at tinkering as a whole, while simultaneously believing that women are "better" on average with emotional and social skills, then while I see where you're coming from, I think you have some cognitive dissonance to work through), and at worst, far left radicals and those they dupe, more interested in raging a never-ending culture war than in making any real progress.
But hey, as a bear, I'm biased.
Here we go again.
Based on what? Where does this idea come from? Can you imagine if we all just accepted this as fact about men?
I know plenty of female programmers who absolutely hate this idea that women are "more organized." The result is almost always that they get pigeonholed into the "secretary" role on a team.
This idea needs to die. It does no one any good, and it's probably just false.
Which is also the same thing said when they were pigeonholing women as nurses and never doctors (not to bash nursing at all, but watch a couple episodes of Masters of Sex and you see the superiority complex). Gender roles are crap.
I'm all for equality, but every single time I read one of these articles, I seem to read everything but equality. Being a programmer is a job, a male dominated job, at least in 2014. There are a lot of fields where men work which are female dominated, like a chef, or interior design, or fashion, or a nanny, or a nurse. You don't see men throwing tantrums like this. And neither do great female programmers, they are busy making us feel stupid.
You don't see men throwing tantrums like this.
I constantly see men throwing tantrums, whenever the vaguest whiff of even moderate feminism can be smelled. Also, where did you get the idea that chefs are predominantly women? Not to mention that chefs are famously reknowned for throwing tanties. Same with fashion/interior designers, male or female.
If the genders are equal any combination of them are also equal.
It's shocking that so many people fighting the good fight for the equality of women in the workforce also attribute special qualities to women that men just don't have - the common ones being that they're more organized, and can more easily think outside the box.
This is sexist, counterproductive, and false.
Women should be represented in a profession because they're fungible with men and make up half of the general population.
Period.
Once you start saying a team needs women, because they have some special insight or ability, you have to logically accept that a team that is 100% women is not as good as that same team plus a man - which is simply not true.
Equality is neither inherently caused or obstructed by diversity.
Citing a racial example, the greater equality (read: more meritocratic) of admissions practiced by CalTech results in a disproportionately Asian composition (~40% Asian whereas Asians are just 4.4% of the population and only like 2% of the students are African American, which African Americans are make up like 17% of the US population.
A portfolio of diverse stocks, each with an equal risk/reward profile, has equal reward to an individual stock but far lower risk.
To me, the question isn't about whether men and women are equals in the workplace. The question is whether the workplace provides an equal opportunity for men, women, and people with diverse backgrounds to succeed.
From my observation, it seems this gap is prevalent mostly in engineering (not so much in HR, Marketing, Sales etc).
Computer scientists 72.2% male, HR 16.2% male. Of course there are many more employed in software than in HR.
> Sanghvi - "I don’t like being called aggressive. And that reputation has stuck with me. Any company that I go to, any VC firm that I talk to, everybody thinks of me as the aggressive person who can get shit done, at all costs."
This is a bad thing?
>Sanghvi -"Men are just more comfortable with men than they are with women."
Aren't women more comfortable with women than they are with men?
>Sanghvi - "The first thing I would say is you need to live life with no regrets. Always ask yourself—when you’re doubting something or you’re afraid of something—ask yourself the question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid and do that?” I say this because every decision in my life, everybody told me that I was a fool."
That's some of the best advice to ever come out of a Wired article.
Sure, why not. She also gave the example of having a drink with her CTO - the point was more about people who are more alike are more comfortable with each other.
> Aren't women more comfortable with women than they are with men?
Exactly. Men are generally more friendly with men and women are more friendly with men, where the ratio is, 70-30 men to women, 50-50 men to women or 30-70 men to women.
Go look at the fashion industry and you'll see that the women are more friendly with the women and the men are more friendly with the men. The fact that men or women are the majority and in power is orthogonal to the issue of same gender affinity insofar are fraternization is concerned.
Anything we can do to remove bias and create a non-hostile work environment for everyone is a win not just for our ability to function as a field, but also to serve as a benchmark of social equality for other fields.
"If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to
bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a
collaborative culture. And a result, things get done
faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy,
which makes for a better work environment. It’s just
better all around." - Sanghvi
If it's not acceptable for men to voice similar opinions, why do we not call out women when they do the same?
The change in gender ratios in our industry are very closely related to the rise of the mini-computer.
Back when only companies like IBM and their customers owned computers, there was a much more equal gender ratio. When the mini-computer came about, the bears took interest in mini-computers. There were male bears and female bears. Disruptive innovation also disrupted the gender ratio.
For example, here's a Google Image Search for Homebrew Computer Club:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Homebrew+Computer+Club&es_sm...
As you can see from the group images, the ratio of men to women in the Homebrew Computer Club was much skewed in having more men than women than was observed in the computing industry at the time (mainframes and whatnot).
Go back and watch Triumph of the Nerds, narrated by Cringely and you'll see a completely different industry today. That documentary was created right at the beginning of tech becoming mainstream and money becoming the focus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuBXbvl1Sg4#t=4m39s (watch about 5 minutes. the interview with Woz at 11m47s is worth a watch too)
Look at the people in that video. Not a fox in sight, male (brogrammers) or female. These are people who were pursing their interest in computing despite being at the bottom of the social ladder. Woz even describes the PDP-8 manual as a being like a bible. Show me anyone who would have been envious of this lifestyle back in the 80s and 90s and I'll show you someone that is a nerd through and through and probably oblivious to gender or possibly even the opposite sex.
I don't know about others here, but when I got involved with programming (~12 y.o.) in 94 or so, I was as alone as you could get. There were no other boys or girls. I had no role models. Neither of my parents were in tech. Prior to learning to program, I spend hours in my basement taking junk electronics apart that I found in the high school dumpster. None of my friends did this. When I decided I wanted to learn to program, I had to find out on my own about HS courses and courses at the local computer shop. I took a short visual basic course at the local computer shop (IIRC only 3 other people took the class with me) before I took a summer programming course at the local high school, where I was 12 years old and IIRC everyone else in the class was a sophomore or older and I don't even know what the gender ratio was in the class. It was irrelevant to me at the time. Unfortunately my relationship with programming took a 10+ hiatus when my family moved and I was no longer at a school that had support for programming when I first arrived and when AP computer science was added, the teacher was so bad that it killed my decision to go to school for CS (I went into physics instead).
Anyone who is a bear cub today, boy or girl, white or black, enjoys several orders of magnitude more privilege in becoming involved with computers and programming that I could ever have dreamed of growing up interested in computers in the mid-90s. If I could be the same precocious 12 y.o. as I was in the mid-90s but instead in 2014, I would jump at the opportunity. There are no no real barriers to getting involved in programming today relative to two decades ago. If someone is truly a bear, then their gender or race are a insignificant relative to the privilege of being able to involve yourself in programming in 2014, with the many resources out there to help you learn that didn't exist when I was a kid.
Foxes, male or female, only care about being included in tech now because there is a lot of money and job growth in this industry. No one was making a big deal about being included when being a nerd was socially undesirable.
Furthermore, it's worth nothing that some of the female bears now resent the female foxes because they have made their life worse [0].
Unfortunately, real merit seems to go beyond one's official role. You are better if you can move stuff forward and facilitate projects succeeding overall. If you can make things happen.
Schools never taught us to think about life that way.