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Been lurking for a while, figured this'd be a good place to make my first post.

I'm a trans woman (MtF). This isn't the first time (and it won't be the last) I've observed something about gender stereotypes just from having lived on both sides.

One stereotype that's widely known in the trans community is that a disproportionately large percentage of trans women work in tech (or are tech hobbyists). The "MtF CS nerd" is probably the biggest trans stereotype I can think of.

This stereotype doesn't extend to trans men (FtMs). In fact, it's assumed that the ratio of MtFs to FtMs in tech is about the same as the ratio of cis men to cis women in tech.

In the main online trans community I run in, where this stereotype is endlessly touted as being true (often tongue-in-cheek), most of us start our transitions somewhere between 18-45 and by and large is biased towards people who started in our twenties (I started at 28, myself, and I'm 30 now). People who started before or after that are really rare in that particular community (there are other communities that swing younger or older, by the way -- I'm just talking about the group I run with).

The only real conclusion is that whatever biased us towards or against careers in tech based on our perceived genders must have occurred in childhood, definitely before college and probably before high school as well. It probably happened in toddlerhood, really. There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed into the spam filter.

This is why I think putting pressure on companies to recruit more and more adult women is fundamentally flawed. There just aren't enough adult cis women who are interested, no matter how much any company tries to recruit. I'm also particularly appalled by attempts to demonize Linus Torvalds for not having enough women as core kernel developers: it's not his fault that people perceived as female (i.e. cis girls and pre-transition FtMs) are told as early as preschool that they shouldn't be interested in technology. Fix that part of society instead of demonizing project leaders.

  > There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new
  > and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed

This one? http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

(Upvotes to the parent, if so.)

Indeed it is.

On the gendered toys thing, Rhesus monkeys show gender preferences for different types of toys. I'd be surprised but interested to see a follow-up paper about cross-species gender expectations forcing toy choices.

paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

bbc news article w/ video: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29418230

This study was done on adult monkeys. And AFAIK, in humans the differences in neural connectivity are negligible until testosterone kicks in. On the other hand, in adults, gender differences are drastic.

> This study was done on adult monkeys.

I think we read Table 1 differently: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/table/T1...

> And AFAIK, in humans the differences in neural connectivity are negligible until testosterone kicks in.

Possibly, I'm not a biologist, but the 4th paragraph of the intro is interesting in that regard:

"Prenatal hormone exposure is known to influence children’s toy preferences as girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an inherited enzymatic defect....show more boy-typical toy preferences than do their unaffected sisters or control girls....This preference is evident in CAH girls who look like and are reared as girls ... and despite the fact that most of these girls have typical female gender identity... When parental socialization was explicitly studied, one study found that CAH girls are more strongly encouraged to play with female-typical toys than are unaffected female siblings, yet they still show a masculine toy preference.... Thus toy preferences appear sensitive to prenatal androgen exposure..."

You are right. My bad. I've only briefly looked to confirm that the study was not specifically targeting juvenile monkeys. But in fact 52% (8+10)/(11+23) of monkeys were juvenile. Still, half are post puberty and taking into account "females reach puberty around age three while males are sexually mature by age four" (Rawlins & Kessler 1986, that probably diminishes this 52%. And as per the study itself "Overall sample size precluded analysis of individual age groups." So, I still wouldn't be too happy to transfer that results into human children domain.

That's fascinating; I would have expected the reverse: that people who are biologically male but identify as female would have had low developmental androgen exposure, thus a more "female-structured" mind that leads them in this direction, and thus have average aptitude for mathematics closer to that of neurotypical women.

What you're saying instead suggests that it's actually the continued androgenizing effect of male gonads on the body during puberty that determines whether the brain dimorphisms responsible for different mathematical aptitudes develop. Neat!

I didn't see aptitude mentioned in her comment at all?

Sorry, I was assuming everyone here had read http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required....

What the link says (and proves): after screening off sex-linked differences in aptitude for mathematics (by giving high school kids "mathematical IQ" tests, etc.), there's no difference left over in how often women vs. men go into math/CS. Both men and women go as often as they have potential in the field.

The only thing left to explain is where the difference in aptitude comes from. Right now, it is assumed to be a result of developmental androgen cues that cause spacial-navigation-related parts of the brain to grow bigger in men vs. women.

Transpeople, as a group that much more often gets a non-sex-linked androgen dose in the womb, let you take that apart further into the individual possible factors of "androgen exposure in the womb" vs "androgen exposure at puberty".

Thanks for posting, views like this are why I come to HN. Please post more/lurk less.

> In the main online trans community I run in, where this stereotype is endlessly touted as being true (often tongue-in-cheek), most of us start our transitions somewhere between 18-45 and by and large is biased towards people who started in our twenties (I started at 28, myself, and I'm 30 now). People who started before or after that are really rare in that particular community (there are other communities that swing younger or older, by the way -- I'm just talking about the group I run with).

Well, I suspect that there are multiple issues at play that make techies more likely to have the MtF transition:

1) There are simply a lot more males in tech. So the MtF transition is likely to be way more common than the reverse.

2) Techies have money. Gender transition takes quite a bit of time and resource that someone poor is not going to have.

3) Bias to late twenties/early thirties probably makes sense as that's the first point where you have the resources and support to pull off the transition but is still early enough that your social system hasn't hardened into place (Trans-changes when you already have children are very disruptive).

Hopefully mandatory computer science education doesn't fall into the same trap as mathematics, where the "introductory" version taught in grade school becomes so simplified and rote that it loses all of the qualities that make it creative and interesting. There is definitely a systemic problem of kids thinking they are "no good at math", despite an early introduction, and I'm not sure why CS would be so different. Of course, that's still a lot better than not having mandatory math classes at all.

Indeed; what I'd really hope for, in the end, would be just beginning to teach discrete math (logic, set theory, graph theory, etc.) to kids starting when they're 11 or so. It's a lot easier, and a lot more fun, and tends to be a lot more appreciated by the kids than the random bits of pre-calculus (literally "things that are useless unless you later take calculus") we teach them in "Math" class!

But, of course, everyone always derides the idea because "we tried this" with New Math in the 70s. No, we didn't. We tried to teach some parts of discrete math (which are formal abstractions) to 5- or 6-year-olds, who weren't yet at the formal operational stage of cognitive development. You can't teach a 6-year-old about set theory any more than you can teach a 6-week-old about object permanence. You have to start when they're older. But "older" doesn't mean "an optional thing to be taught at university!" It's a formative skill, and if you don't pick it up right when you're first able to pick it up, trying to force it into your mind later is somewhat like trying to learn a new spoken language in adulthood when you've been monolingual for your entire life until then.

> In my opinion, this is the heart of the diversity problem. We spend a lot of time trying to improve the representation of adult women in tech. Wouldn't that be a whole lot easier if girls felt more comfortable growing up to become women in tech?

I think you may be making a mistake in assuming that people are interested in nothing more or less than addressing the problem. From where I'm sitting, people are interesting in addressing the problem and having a scapegoat.

It's always easier to blame a small group of people than it is to accept that you are part of the problem.

In practice, they're throwing seven- and eight-year-olds at Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu and the kids are LOVING IT. My daughter and her friends, who are pink-dress-wearing MLP-loving girly girls are really getting into it. I cannot tell you how highly I approve of this.

honest question: why is the lack of diversity in tech a problem from your point of view ? I don't know any other field where people perceive these kind of problems. (I never heard anyone wanting more women in construction or plumbing nor more men in nursing for exemple)

Because $$$. A financial handicap is the worst kind of social handicap.

oh, it makes sense now. In my area (EU) programming and IT in general is considered difficult, unhealthy, extremely boring and not necessarily well paid job (very little above the national average salary). On several occasions I met parents explicitly discouraging their kids from a career in programming.

If money were the only or even primary issue, the underrepresentation of women in the trades would get a lot more coverage. The trades are a key source of well-paying jobs, and women are dramatically underrepresented there.

Perhaps the difference is that tech is perceived by the general public as well paying, but the trades are perceived by the general public as crappy jobs for people who don't get accepted by college.

Mike Rowe (who has agendas of his own I am sure), has commented on this discrimination/vilification of the trades many times in the past. Parents and teachers will frequently discourage teens from pursuing careers in the trades because they believe the only way to be successful is to go to college.

If the trades are incorrectly perceived as low-paying, that could help explain why calls for more women in the trades seem to be underrepresented.

That's certainly true. Part of the issue is that the media is largely from the middle/upper middle class, and so doesn't really know that trades are good work if you can get it.

Still, it's pretty frustrating to hear people talk about the gender disparity in the trades as if they're talking about ditch digging--i.e. as a benefit rather than hindrance to women. Teaching and nursing both require education, so the options available to women without education are measurably worse.

Twenty years ago, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was appointed to the Supreme Court, people were talking about the lack of diversity in the legal field, and it was an extremely important discussion because why on earth should the laws that govern everyone be made solely by men? The lack of diversity in tech is a problem today for precisely the same reason. The industry is going to shape what the world looks like 50 years from now. Who does that shaping is important.

I understand that laws should be made in a more democratic and representative way but traditionally the capitalist enterprises are fascist in nature. They are governed by a top-down authoritative hierarchy that is not democratic nor representative. The employees don't elect their bosses and the business owners don't hire their employees based on representativity or diversity but based on skills. So if an enterprise functions in an area where 60% of the people have no college diplomas, I find it strange to put pressure on that enterprise to have 60% of its employees without diplomas and I find at least as strange to put pressure on 60% of people in that area to get diplomas in order to be better represented in a particular enterprise or sector.

> traditionally the capitalist enterprises are fascist in nature. They are governed by a top-down authoritative hierarchy that is not democratic nor representative.

I don't particularly see a point to making sure that we continue with fascist practices in specific sectors of our lives. If democracy, and consequently diversity, is a good thing for our legal system, then why is it a bad thing for our corporate structure?

Your intentions are noble but the implementation is tricky. The last time (I know) someone changed in mass the way people get hired was during communism when the enterprises hired people primarily based on social class, party affiliation and family ties rather than merit and skill and you know how it ended.

Supreme laffo if you don't think people hire in this country based on social class and family ties (c.f. all those studies where identical resumes get called back at different rates depending on the presumed race/gender of the applicant, also "looks like Zuckerberg")

Positive spins:

http://holacracy.org/

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...

http://www.elezea.com/2012/06/user-centered-organizations/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8955706

Negative spin:

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/tyranny-flatness/

> Who does that shaping is important.

Nobody is stopping women from shaping the world. Women need to just fucking change the world and stop asking men for permission.

Bill Burr said it best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pn1RVZu-24

Twenty years ago women were almost half of law students and rising. Lawyers knew that time alone would dissolve lack of diversity. And the diversity had arrived in the face of extreme open bias against women by incumbent lawyers from an age where that bias was expected; older lawyers didn't even have to quit open discrimination to bring women into the field. It was a comfortable thing to worry about since it solved itself.

Women form a much smaller proportion of computer science students and it's shrinking every generation. And we're a generation further on from any kind of real organized social pressure against professional women in general while the field gets less and less diverse.

So it's a lot more uncomfortable for programmers than it ever was for lawyers.

I used to think it wasn't a problem at all. There were several reasons for that but two stand out.

1. I'm a white male. I kinda don't have to worry about it.

2. I came from somewhere where this was less of a problem. Ironically, "lack of diversity" wasn't as much of an issue in the bigger corporations I worked for in Houston. The "boys club" thing is just worse in Silicon Valley than in Texas, from what I remember. I know it's probably tough for some Californians to hear this, but I'm just going to lay it out there from a Texan: between the frat-like feeling of some startups and the amount of cat calling I see on the streets of SF (that I never saw in Texas), y'all have a sexism problem.

Ultimately, though, the women in tech in SF with whom I work say it is a problem and they tell me (and other men) that they work in tech because they love it, but that it certainly isn't easy. I'm choosing to take them at their word.

You hear about it more in this field because - in part - there's a belief that diversity of origin and diversity of life experience leads to more creative solutions, products, and ways of working. I'm not quite sold on this idea, yet, but I'm open to the concept.

I still get angry at the suggestions that people sometimes make that amount to affirmative action or quotas for hiring, but that's why I think the ultimate solution is to stop pigeon-holing children from birth. We wouldn't have to jump through all these hoops in the first place.

> coding will be mandatory

...people want this? what's good about it?