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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

> About 83 percent of its software engineers are men, according to a recent New York Times report.

On a side note, I'm tired of high percentage arguments, I've seen it in countless articles. There's NOTHING inherently wrong in the ratio itself.

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This. We need equal opportunity and chances for everyone. It doesn't matter that a group doesn't have enough women yet, as long as all women and males today have equal chances of getting a nice career.

and the equal chance (opportunity) of progression

As long as they put in equal effort into their career and don't go taking a few years out to look after their offspring or whatever else takes their fancy. (Men are capable of doing that as well as women these days aren't they?)

This opinion has been shown time and time again to be wrong by countless studies and real life examples. Having an imbalance of gender, age, race etc causes problems as it skews the corporate culture.

So long as everyone is professional I personally don't see it being a catastrophic problem. But it is a major problem that the IT industry needs to continue to work on. More females in SME is something we should all strive for.

How exactly would you achieve that balance? Rejecting good male candidates in favor or worse female ones? Creating make-believe positions for women?

If the percentage of females working in IT reflects the percentage of females with IT studies or interested in IT, I don't see a problem. Or at least I don't see a problem in the workspace. Maybe it's a problem of education, but I'm not sure even if this is the case or just a simple matter of different preferences between men and woman.

It definitely starts with education and universities all around the world do work hard to encourage women into SME. So I can't imagine there is much low hanging fruit from that aspect.

With regards to a quota system I do believe at the senior levels in particular directorships and board appointees they are essential. Other companies have been done for this a long time and it works well. The hard part is at the engineering level. I don't believe rejecting good candidates based on gender helps anybody. It just makes things worse.

There are problems in the workplace though. But it has to do with the culture of IT rather than something specific. We tend to argue the idea rather that the person more often than not far too strongly. This is something that needs far more subtlety.

> With regards to a quota system I do believe at the senior levels in particular directorships and board appointees they are essential.

Why only there? The fact that there are more people in board appointees is a result of men being more prominent at both ends of distribution of psychological properties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology :

- more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution

- males are generally more likely to display aggression than females and when any endeavour is successful, aggression is likely to enhance success, and when it is unsuccessful, it is likely to aggravate failure

- men may have evolved to be more risk taking and socially dominant and sometimes taking risks pays off, sometimes not

- etc - the general idea is that there are more men at both ends of the distribution in various things.

This results men in being entrepreneurs, executives and board members more often than women, but it also results in men being homeless, sick and dying prematurely more often than women.

It also has the result that men pay more taxes, and contribute more pension payments, but use less public services and are paid much less in pensions.

Therefore, if we set quotas for senior levels in particular directorships and board appointees, shouldn't we also set quotas for the homeless, jobless and poor?

I.e. if we apply quotas in some areas to disadvantage men, shouldn't we apply quotas in other areas to disadvantage women? For instance, reduce pensions to women after the age where men on average don't get any (i.e. are dead), and make a suitable percentage of old women homeless?

(You must realise I'm intentionally quite provocative and not entirely serious, but I think these are valid points to discuss before setting gender quotas.)

Equal chances != perfect employee ratio. You can clearly see this in other fields, as shown by @imaginenore. I'm all for equal opportunity, but imho framing the real problem as "the gender percentage" brings wrong solutions.

Again. This has been shown to be wrong. Fixing the percentage tends to fix the issue. Look at racial profiling of poor blacks by police. Adding more officers from similar backgrounds has been shown to reduce problematic incidents.

Likewise adding females to boards through quota systems has been shown to improve governance and quality of decision making.

There is. Women want to be software engineers, and get scared when stuff like this happens.

It's a problem, and we work in this industry, and can fix it. That's why I care about this and not so much about "women in roofing." I can't do anything to fix women becoming roofers at a higher rate. Technology I can fix.

Exactly. Look, boilermakers are 99.8% male. You never ever hear feminists complaining about that.

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chal...

http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/07/myths-women-non-traditio...

Saying 'strength in a social construct' as that article does shows a massive ignorance of strength and is an insult to female strength athletes who work much harder than men for gains.

Anyone claiming that strength is a social construct is either disingenuous or using a different definition of the word.

In terms of physical strength, there are obvious and clear differences between men and women: http://www.powerliftingwatch.com/records

I sometimes think men and women need to be careful for what they wish for. Right now Programming is portrayed glamorous. People saw the Social network and said wow that's cool. They hear about how fun and stimulating it is to get the opportunity to work at Google. They hear about college dropouts making billions.

That all might be somewhat true now, but will change. I don't see unions making any headway into the industry, and when the bubble bursts--why do I have a feeling the industry will go back to people staring into monitors, complaining about pay--long hours, vitamin D deficiency, and Coding will go back to Programming?

(I hope this doesn't happen. I have met too many homeless former programmers that were hot in the 80's-90's)

You've missed the point. Women WANT to do SME. They are spending years at university, going through the lower stages of employment, making it to a certain point and then leaving the industry.

And bringing up the straw man of "feminists" hardly adds to the conversation.

Ok, so they are leaving. It's their decision.

Many people get into programming for the money only to discover it's actually harder than it seems. Most people don't realize you have to keep learning just to stay relevant in IT. How many professions require that?

I'm yet to see any evidence that women leave IT because they are harassed on a mass scale.

I recommend reading this (or at least pages 4-6 if you're in a rush) and the footnoted sources:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1soIYek-YEIvqtu9brv3ecdPb...

Your own link says "The main reason women give is dissatisfaction with their pay and promotional opportunities".

So it's not harassment.

So basically they leave for the same reasons men leave.

I've never been promoted, ever. I got a salary raise once, I think. I increased my pay by switching jobs, just like 95% of the IT people out there.

They don't need to be harassed for them to feel like the environment is hostile, or, at the very least, unwelcoming.

Yes you do.

This point has come up on HN so many times that anyone continuing to repeat it is at best willfully ignorant, but probably deceitful.

A simple websearch [boilermaker women] shows you're wrong with plenty of sites calling for more female boilermalers.

Maybe they do now after it was pointed out. Take the bottom 20 positions from that list and see how many of them feminists talk about. It's pretty much non existent.

You hear a lot less about calls for more males into nursing or primary teaching (lower paid generally than male dominated professions, like engineering).

False.

You hear a lot less anout it because you don't read any nursing or teaching magazines or blogs or message boards.

This is now a great dogwhistle -- anyone saying things similar is clearly dishonest.

I hear a lot less of it, not only on HN but on general newspapers and sources that are not focused on tech. Does that make the point more valid to you?

I am not a boilermaker. I work in technology, and I can actually do things to fix this. So can you.

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