Women are leaving the tech industry in droves
latimes.com
latimes.com
This makes me think that we won't fix the gender issue in tech until we fix a whole cluster of bad behaviors that actually affect everyone, and of which hostility to women is only one facet. The "work hard play hard" culture of spending every waking moment (and too many of those) either working or "socializing" with the same people in the same few stereotypical ways - drinking, video games, cycling - is near the top of the list. So are the OS/language/editor religious wars, and the glorification of trollish behavior on mailing lists or Twitter or Reddit or . . . well, here. Women aren't the only ones driven out of the industry by all that BS, but they are an important part of that exodus.
The first step toward solving a more general problem is admitting that it is a more general problem. Don't just try to fix the superficial appearance of the bug; try to fix the design flaw that led to the bug.
> A Harvard Business Review study from 2008 found that as many as 50%
How many is "as many as 50%"? That's an odd way to word it, maybe respondents were able to select multiple unranked reasons for leaving, maybe they lost half their survey results, maybe it wasn't multiple choice and it's difficult to determine what exactly falls into this category. What is the number for men? How does this number compare to 20 or 30 years ago? This article neither linked to the study nor provided appropriate details.
> including as journalistic and not scientific essays tend toward, real interviews from credible first-hand sources
The plural of anecdote is not data. If I find "credible first-hand sources" of women who don't feel they've been treated differently that doesn't mean we don't have a problem.
I live in my own little bubble, but personally I see nothing but love for technically capable women. Sure, everyone loves to play immature every now and again and make crude jokes. This includes women, but generally I feel like everyone I work with and around would be delighted to have more diverse insight in their technical projects.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html
I feel that we would be a better company if we're able to hire more women, but on the engineering side it's challenging. The number of women in engineering programs is just not large enough. Do a search on AngelList and 9/10 people with a given skillet are men. The industry demographic makeup can't increase the proportion of women without increasing the proportion of incoming talent.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...
(I don't know toolz and a couple sentences written one Sunday on Hacker News don't represent him as a person. The following is only about the words, which are a good example to work from.)
It's hard to escape our own perspectives; it's a skill that takes learning and work. For example, these words are meant well and on one level seem fine, but unfortunately in my experience they are just another roadblock:
* "love for ... women": 'Love' probably isn't the best word to use in this context! Combined with the rest, it conveys that the women still are primarily objects of sex or romance, not engineers to be taken seriously, not people you respect and don't want to mess around with.
* "I see nothing but love for technically capable women." This objectifies the women. (If you don't know the concept, it's one of the most powerful, important, revelatory ideas I've learned regarding understanding others.) First, someone else is taking a bunch of individuals, putting them in a box, and slapping a label on; whether it's a positive or negative label makes little difference. Imagine if someone said 'we love black people here', that would suck if you were black. Some people are assholes, some are funny, some flakey, some arrogant, some kind, some don't want your "love" ... form opinions on and relationships with one person at a time, just like guys.
* "Sure, everyone loves to play immature every now and again and make crude jokes. This includes women ..." People make this mistake all the time. Yes, the minority laughs and say it's all right, but they have no choice. Nobody wants to be the one person complaining when everyone else is having fun (and usually it's fruitless anyway), nobody wants to be labeled a whiner or trouble-maker, and if you are in the minority your social status is tenuous anyway -- you have to constantly prove yourself to be 'one of the guys'. Object and will you find yourself on the inside on the next project? Promoted? Find someone who has been in that position, who would confide in you, and ask how they liked it; in my experience, they have not liked it at all.
Also, people get their morals from their peers (we're sheep, we follow the herd; again, nobody wants to be the lone objecter). Every time you make that sexist joke and everyone laughs, it communicates a standard: It's ok to discriminate against women. I love crude jokes, but maybe play them on the majority or play non-gender-oriented crude jokes on the women (maybe a fart joke?).
The article describes how gender disrimination works in practice, though many other articles have covered the same ground. The effectiveness of this solution is interesting (but it's more an off-hand story from a third party than data):
> Google's own data showed women were promoted less often than men because workers need to nominate themselves. Women who did so got pushback. Based on her studies, Williams found that women are rewarded for modesty and penalized for what men might see as "aggressive" behavior. Google began including female leaders at workshops to coach everyone — men and women — on how to promote themselves effectively. The gender difference among nominees disappeared, Williams said. [Joan C. Williams, law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law and coauthor of "What Works for Women: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know."]
However, this article offered no data to support the sensational headline. All they offer is,
> A Harvard Business Review study from 2008 found that as many as 50% of women working in science, engineering and technology will, over time, leave because of hostile work environments.
That leaves many questions: How many men leave? And how many of them over hostile work environments? How many is "as many as 50%"? (I don't doubt it's a problem, but we need some good information to work from.)
I find that weird. I would've thought that the rise of "social" and other things associated with women pursuant to our prevailing gender norms would've been the impetus for getting more women into the field.