Even with those low numbers these days, a lot of women who are interested in programming and computer science are chased away early on, or they quickly move into more welcoming fields. So it's true that among senior staff, women are even less well represented.

This isn't just a bad thing for the women who are harassed, mistreated, or just made to feel unwelcome. It's a bad thing for the industry. If women are unwelcome, we're throwing away half of the talented engineers before they even get started.

For all those reasons, Rob is right that role models are important. But even more important: we need to stop chasing women from the field. You have to stop the bleeding before you can start improving. The recent stories out of Uber make it clear that the technology industry is at risk of moving backwards if we aren't already.

I've heard this thought expressed a lot, but I have to ask a genuine question: Does anyone here really have any role models that were influential to their interest in the field?

I'm a man, so maybe it is different for women. But I never really had any role models in programming that I looked up to/wanted to emulate. Personally, I was always interested in computers, software, technology for its own sake, and never really paid too much attention to the people behind the scenes. I don't recall any particular person who I saw in programming and thought "I want to be like them", or thought of as a role model.

I suppose this could have happened on a subconscious level, when I was unaware of it. But at least on a conscious level I can't point out any particular individual who I viewed as a role model and inspired me to continue in the field.

Is there anyone else who never had a role-model type relationship with someone? And for those who have experienced it, would you mind sharing a story about a significant role model in programming from your life?

I suspect that having not just role models like yourself, but them also being commonplace can more easily dispel beliefs that your room for growth is limited by gender, ethnicity, etc. Obviously, if your field is already dominated by people like you, this is not a problem that you have to deal with in the first place.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing...

Anecdotally, it had impact on me when I was young. Female detectives in detective stories made the idea of me becoming a cop seem socially acceptable and not a feminist statement. Did not became a cop, but I remember thinking "cool that means me doing that would not be weird" at the time.

With that being said, my mother and father were both engineers. I hedged my bets by studying EE before going pure software. Role models contributed to me signing up for engineering, even if they had different specialities.

As it happens, I 'rediscovered' him on twitter via another hackernews post [1] a while ago, so dropped him a message to say thanks for being an unwitting inspiration :)

[0] This is a relatively simple example, it's hard to find better ones now the site is down - http://web.archive.org/web/20111111050908/https://www.freera...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691798

I've never had a role model in computing.

This is precisely the reason you would find so many female programmers in south asian and other poor countries.

Its funny to see all the armchair philosophers like Pike come up with some 'Well actually, it's because X' explanations without presenting a single bit of evidence to back it up.

Where exactly? Because frankly, that seems to be highly unlikely.

Poor is obviously relative in this context. Poor relative to western women.

That's probably the wrong question to be asking.

There is a limited supply of people who are interested in technology for its own sake, and prefer computers over people.

In order for software to keep eating everything, the industry needs to attract more and more people who don't care quite that much or even people who DGAF and just want a paycheck.

That means having things that normal people care about (role models, respectability, etc), and not having things they can't stand ("RTFM" culture, socially-incompetent single coworkers, the "nerd" label, etc). Even if those things aren't all that important to us, and only serve to increase the amount of economic competition we face.

What does that even mean, to "prefer computers over people"? I think there are very few people (in tech or any other field) who would prefer to be a hermit and spend all of their time on their interest of choice. You can be interested in technology for its own sake without seeking social isolation. The idea that programmers should be modern day monks that have no families and spend their days programming and in quiet contemplation is completely ridiculous. Sure, there are some lone wolves out there who are successful on their own, but most programmers will have to work/communicate with other programmers, managers, stakeholders, customers, lawyers, and/or domain experts at some point in their lives, and having the social skills to navigate such situations can enable you to create interesting technology.

> That means having things that normal people care about (role models, respectability, etc), and not having things they can't stand ("RTFM" culture, socially-incompetent single coworkers, the "nerd" label, etc). Even if those things aren't all that important to us, and only serve to increase the amount of economic competition we face.

Who is this "us" and "we" you speak of? I have to work with my coworkers, so all other things equal I prefer it when they are socially competent.

I think you are reinforcing a very harmful stereotype, where you have to be a computer-obsessed social pariah to have a successful career in tech. Perhaps you should reflect on those beliefs, and whether they are based on objective facts or perhaps something you tell yourself to avoid feeling inadequate about your interpersonal skills.

I'm not saying they should.

But, I'm sure you've heard the terms "geek syndrome" or "pizza-box coder"? Or the whole nerds vs jocks thing, including the "Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for one." that is usually mis-attributed to a commencement speech that Bill Gates apparently (per Snopes) didn't actually give?

Or the "Unix greybeard" persona, and the big push a few years back to recognize that computer people really don't all look like that?

These things did not come out of nowhere.

Who is this "us" and "we" you speak of? I have to work with my coworkers, so all other things equal I prefer it when they are socially competent.

Yep, same here.

I think you are reinforcing a very harmful stereotype, where you have to be a computer-obsessed social pariah to have a successful career in tech.

No. That used to be a common side-effect or correlate of interest in tech.

I am saying that the people we're trying to attract into the field now (and for the most recent decade or two), are not like the people who voluntarily chose to enter the field in the more distant past.

I am saying that these people are not likely to care about the same incentives.

I am saying that the quantitative change in the field has necessitated a qualitative change in new entrants, which makes "back in my day" a very poor argument for what's appropriate or effective.

Perhaps you should reflect on those beliefs, and whether they are based on objective facts or perhaps something you tell yourself to avoid feeling inadequate about your interpersonal skills.

You mean the beliefs you wrongly claimed I hold, based on your presumption that my claims of what is (or in this case, was) were really just disguised claims of what should be?

And my interpersonal skills are just fine now, thank you. Because I made a point of learning them in my early 20s, after seeing how useful they were to my new coworkers.

When I was younger (before I was into computers) my role models were Albert Einstein, Harry Houdini, and the Wright brothers. This list was very easy to remember, because I did reports on all of them as assignments in elementary school. That basically forced me to pick role models. They're all STEM related except maybe Houdini, but he invented a lot of mechanisms for his tricks.

So to take your list of people for example, someone like John Carmack. What I was looking for was what specific exploits were you talking about and why they were so inspirational to you. Maybe it was his work creating the Doom and Quake games, or his bootstrap work building id software from scratch, or his contributions to free software by releasing his engines under gpl, or his quakeworld talks, or his work with rocketry, or his new work with VR, or his general overall attitude about life, programming and everything.

I mean there had to be something special about him for you to want to be like him, and that seems like something that would be worth telling a little story about.

We might have a disagreement about the meaning of "role model," which is fine. I don't really think that's the point at all...

Edit: Thomas's "cognitively available success cases" seems like a good one to me

Yes.

Rob's entire piece is about how a group of women in a highly technical field were influenced by role models. And we're still denying these women's responses?

I have just seen this concept of a role model bandied about before, and that is something that I have never experienced in my own life in computing. In the article, Rob mentions how in the field of astronomy, the women he has talked to consider role models to be important. But he never mentions any people he would consider role models to himself in computing.

So I was just curious if anyone else here had any role models in computing (man or woman), and if so would they mind sharing a little anecdote about that experience. I've often heard talk of the importance of role models, and I felt like I was kind of "missing out" for not having one. So I thought, how about I start a little side discussion on the role that role models in computing had had on others lives and careers on here.

I am NOT trying to imply any of these things: "Women shouldn't need role models because I didn't have one" "Role models are unimportant" "Women should accept men as role models" "Women are liars"

or any other such derogatory statements.

More current role models would include Jess Frazelle, Julia Evans, Sara Chipps, who are all incredibly brilliant, influential, successful people who have achieved really amazing things and I hope will continue in the field and be role models of a future generation.

To me, role model is not just some particular person to follow. If you see that some group of people are common to show some particular behavior and is successful as a result, it gives you a clear signal that 1) you can do the same since you belong to that group 2) this pattern is a proven path to success. Done! No particular person, but a very strong and potentially life changing role model, that many people don't even realize influenced their life path and desisions.

0% of, say, women in some field is a negative role model, because if you are a woman and never seen successful women in this profession, why on earth should you start thinking that it is a great or feasible path? People stick to what is normal around, all their context is a role model of what is likely possible and what is not.

Why the rush to assume malice?

Most discrimination is not malicious. It's a whole bunch of small acts of apathy.

I have to wonder if the chasing away is not to their benefit. Perhaps the ugly is not just a ... social artifact but more of a reflection of the nature of the course of study.

Two things spring to mind:

- the curious economics of program-correctness. ( people quickly abandon all hope and despair - the "fixes" are all very tedious )

This one's weird - I hope I do not try your patience with it...

- the observation that is made by Adam Curtis in "All Cared For" that what we now call the "environmental movement" could be an artifact of computing. The mindset that there is a knowable and optimum equilibrium for complex systems is something I find increasingly puzzling. It just seems to be a bootstrap; I can't really come up with an ...epistemology of it that isn't circular. People 100 years ago just didn't care; they do now; there was propaganda; it's a thing now that used to not be.

Now suppose that there are other, irrational "optima" that people in our field become obsessed with.

Finally, I believe that prior to the 1990s, people used things like punch cards and other madness to filter participants. After 1990, the unemployment rate of GenX led to the abuse of computing to find those kids something to do. That, I think, led to the "alpha geek" phenomenon as it is now - we had "alpha geeks" before but they seemed nicer, somehow. Or something.

I'm increasingly attributing thready employment to Fed policy, as per Dean Baker, and Scott Sumner. That's not a main stream view...

I would submit that the tech industry is definitely moving backwards. Whether this is all part of it is a hard question.

There's a split in environmentalism between the "deep green" who want nature to be left alone and tend to have a spiritualist approach, versus the "bright green" technocratic management of ecosystems. But the deep greens definitely came first, starting with opposition to nuclear testing, the dumping of nuclear waste at sea, whaling, pollution of rivers and acid rain, and the effects of pesticides (Silent Spring was published in 1962)

I am not doing Curtis' thesis justice; you'd have to see the ( freely available, SFAIK ) film. He doesn't just paint environmentalism with this brush. I found the idea bracing; I saw myself in it.

For the curious: "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace"

Economics is one of the last sciences that sadly cling to that notion.

BTW, are geek and nerd synonyms now?

Men also have a similar shape curve, just with everything bigger.

It's most useful is to look at the fraction that are women. That rose steadily until about 1985, reaching about 38%, then over the next four years fell to just under 30%. It then was pretty flat until about 2002, then over the next four years fell to about 20% and then flattened again.

That suggests that something happened in a couple specific relatively short timeframes that changed the chances that a women would go into CS or stay in CS.

There are some nice charts here: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/it-careers/wome...

They drop out partly because, inconvenient though it is to admit this, they tend to get discouraged more easily. There are stats showing that women stop searching for software jobs after X rejections, men after Y (on average), and that Y > X. Google found that women were getting promoted less than men simply because they weren't putting themselves forward for promotion as often. That pattern crops up again and again - women hold back when they could push forward.

The subject of insecurity does come up:

> Throughout college, men and women succeeded equally in the classroom. However, we observed that women started to doubt their problem-solving abilities more than men. [...skipping long illustrating quote]. Women were also much more likely to look to others—teaching assistants, professors, and advisors—to affirm, and reaffirm, their confidence. Men did talk about doubting themselves, but they did not necessarily seek reassurance from others. We found that this search for positive cues carried over into expectations for feedback from supervisors in internships and jobs."

However, it is not at all the only phenomenon at play. More discouraging is the gendered treatment they receive from professors and, more importantly, colleagues.

> For many women engineering students, however, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways, mostly by their peers. While some initially described working in teams positively, many more reported negative experiences. When working with male classmates, for example, they often spoke of being relegated to doing routine managerial and secretarial jobs, and of being excluded from the “real” engineering work. Kimberly wrote, “Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came back in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.”

> There were also descriptions of being treated differently by professors. Rachel described when her team (the only all-girl team) won second place in a design competition: “Our professor wanted to get a picture of our prototype and us. We picked up our prototype and were all smiling and looking all professional; then he said: ‘You guys look like professional catalog models; this picture could go in a catalog and you could sell big time.’”

> Men, on the other hand, described mandatory group design projects as exciting turning points, where theory and practice come together. “I made a pretty big stroke of progress last week,” one student wrote in his semi-monthly diary, “I ended up proving the professor wrong on something she had done last year, which actually helped us find better results (well, also more correct results)… It’s really a blast working on something like that.”

Anyway, there are more quotes available, if you want to look at it yourself.

Note also that there is one other factor they address that isn't related to sexism in the field (but perhaps to broader sexist acculturation in society) - women are more likely to want to work somewhere that is "contributing to society". Part of what's going on here is that it's not considered quite as socially acceptable for women to be ambitious for ambition's sake, at least not in the way that it is for men. But I don't think that's something that the engineering culture enforces, I think that's something that's internalized.

So some women felt like they got assigned sucky roles in group projects. But so what? Men get assigned sucky roles in group projects too. Every group project has that problem: some roles will be perceived as more desirable than others. There was an assumption there that the girls "sentenced" (gosh, what emotive language) to some other role simply because they were girls, and not because they were simply less pushy personalities in general. But no evidence is provided either way - they never asked the men why they did that, or if they even perceived the women as upset. Maybe an assertive woman would have steamrollered shy men in the group, I've seen that happen. Sexism is asserted as the cause and, as is always the case, that lazy assumption passes unchallenged.

In another case, the women were complimented on their appearance by a man, something that happens in every work environment and every job around the world. This is related to gender ratios in programming specifically, how?

The last quote - I'm not even sure how that's related to sexism. It appears to show a man enjoying the studies.

I guess if women perceive things like the internet as not "contributing to society" that would be one of the non-sexism related problems women cause themselves. OK, sure, if they believe that, that'd explain some of the gender disparity, but again - so what? Lots of men believe the opposite. If true, it's a self-imposed handicap that women can discard anytime they like. Besides, I'd much rather work with people who believe their work has a higher purpose than people who are simply ambitious!

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

A good NPR story on this topic : http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episo...

TL;DR: It was the rise of the personal computer. Boys got more access to personal computers thereby allowing them to get farther in the field.

>"Because if you're in a culture that is so infused with this belief that men are just better at this and they fit in better, a lot can shake your confidence." (Margolis, ibid) //

Hang on though, the main premise of the piece was that women were most dominant in the field and excelled [beyond the men?].

From personal experience I don't buy the narrative of computers being chosen to be "boys toys" as a move to exclude women, instead it strikes me boys chose computers, instead say of other things - like a social life. But that's maybe because the [apparent] anecdata they have contradicts my own experience, that my mother bought our computer, that it was in a common room and that my sister completely ignored it. At primary school (UK, 1980s) all the kids were given equal time on the BBC microcomputer during lessons, but it was primarily the boys who chose to stay in at break times and after school to use it. At high-school I was inspired by our IT teacher [female] as were others but AFAIR 90% of those staying to use the computers outside directed lessons were still boys.

That link actual goes as far as promoting the idea that boys were given computers and girls were physically restrained from accessing them [based on an anecdote]; to me that sounds like a misconstrual of the situation where boys asked for computers as gifts and so had them in their bedrooms - I can only assume that happened for some girls too.

If I'm wrong then nonetheless I don't think you can argue any similar narrative now, for the Western working and middle classes at least - if you have access to a smart-phone or a school/library computer you have all you need to excel at computer science; that surely eliminates any element of exclusion by sex from the field.

[+] In this connected digital world where no-one knows online if you're even human [woof!] the premise of male suppression in the proposed narrative would be defeated and a massive up-tick would be expected, but instead the graph shows a fall [in percentages] as the web has grown.

In short I don't buy that the ratio of the sexes in computing and tech is skewed by a global male conspiracy to suppress women as a realistic explanation.

[Aside, do you know of the study that they refer to in your citation, the results and anecdotes are mentioned but without citation?]

tl;dr see [+]

Obviously, there could be a number of different reasons why a field could be unfairly skewed against women, many of which require very little intentionality.

The profession does not conduct exit interviews, but fortunately every few weeks someone will write a blog post on why they (a women) left computer science. These articles may be posted to HN, where they often get a skeptical to hostile reception.

Harrasment is the big one in the news (Uber passim), but there are all sorts of lessor problems which result in women's contributions being ignored or misattributed to men who are louder.

(Astronomy is not immune to this problem, even if it might be better: http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-roiled-again-by-sexual-... )

For sure men are unhappy with their companies. Otherwise nobody would ever switch jobs.

Also it should be considered that women have more career options than men. Since they spread out over more professions (including fulltime mum), it is to be expected that they are not 50% of people in all professions.

All you have to do is look at incoming CS major undergrads vs finished degree CS undergrads, or you can look at any statistic at all along a women's career.

Women are leaving in droves. We do not have a pipeline problem. We do not need to get more women in kindergarden interested in math.

We have a toxic pipeline problem, when women are driven out of the industry.

Why? What's the (supposed) benefit?

I'd rather see general improvement on math lessons in school. Most of these lessons are boring, given by boring teacher. I'd be happy if people went out of school simply not hating math (they don't have to like) it. I find this to be much worthwile instead of pushing girls into math even though they might not be inherently interested in it.

The problems in STEM (and science in general) won't be solved by quantity but by quality. (They definitely won't be solved by gender.)

TLDR: Stop focusing on Kindergarden. Focus on the women who have already spent years of their life in tech, and are being driven out. Help these women, by fixing tech culture, so they are not driven out.

"the problems in STEM (and science in general) won't be solved by quantity but by quality. "

I agree. Quality. We need to stop driving the quality, talented women out of the industry.

When men and boys try to describe experiences—such as watching every girl in their high school computer science class receive amazing internships before any of the boys, regardless of their skill level—they're shamed and ridiculed. They certainly aren't given platforms by influential journalists and CEOs.

We can't give much weight to "experiences" while there are such uneven power dynamics in place regarding sharing them.

I virtually never downvote on this site, but I did in your case because you're simply trying to make an entire area of discussion taboo, by writing off any views you disagree with as "embarrassing" and a "trainwreck". This is the school of thought that gave the world Trump; telling people their own experiences are wrong and that if they disagree they're just horrible people.

My experience of tech hiring, as someone who has been a tech interviewer hundreds of times, is that discrimination in favour of women is rampant. Invariably recruiters and HR would claim it wasn't illegal as the final decision was unbiased, and there was certainly a lot of truth to that, but they did everything they could to give women a push along the way. Scheduling the most experienced interviewers to women (so reducing the chance of hiring mistakes), systematically allowing women onto the next interview stage even if they failed the previous stages, setting up massive scholarship programmes closed to boys etc. And of course the difficulty in firing women.

I don't need to listen to women to know about these things - I've seen it with my own eyes. It's driven by attitudes like Rob Pike's and eventually it hurts both men and women.

And yet: I don't have the sense that I'm going to get anywhere by acknowledging the problematics of the thing. There's just too much committed misogyny embedded in this community as a whole. It feels like a safe bet that "I don't need to listen to women" may as well be the entirety of this particular comment, and many of the others in this thread.

I've been feeling conflicted about participating in comment threads on HN. This one is enough to convince me that I should stop investing the energy.

In your case, you chopped off half my sentence which modified the meaning to make me fit your preconceived expectations, and then wrote off the rest of my comment. I might suggest that if that's your approach to debate, committing the energy is indeed worthless. You'll never understand the people who disagree with you like that, so why bother trying? Go back to believing anyone who isn't a feminist is a misogynist, it's wrong but at least it's easily packaged.

Second, you're still just avoiding the question. The idea that there is an intrinsic gender difference driving gender disparity in tech has a huge hurdle to clear, which is that the same disparity does not exist in other STEM fields. Even the STEM fields that have gender parity problems don't have it as bad as CS does.

In order to compose a persuasive argument that gender disparity is due simply to benign preference that is intrinsic to the field of technology, you have to identify attributes of technology that serve as evidence for those preferences. None have been provided anywhere on this thread, just the vague idea that women don't like computers but do like actuarial science, molecular biology, and abstract algebra.

It explains your position. Being meta isn't name-calling. Or if it is it's on the same level of Nietzsche saying philosophers derive philosophy from who they are.

2) You've listed three such subjects yourself: CS, engineering, physics. Not such a high hurdle when there are multiple elements in the set. Which you left out. Strawman. Or is it OK to be dishonest in your arguments, and then claim I have a lack of rigour?

> you have to identify attributes of technology that serve as evidence for those preferences

No I don't.

I can say males & females have preferences for different activities, therefore it's plausible that they have a preference for one job over another.

I could point to Sweden and say a country with the least inequality has the largest differences in occupation.

There's no way to be more definitive without additional information. Thus, my position is, it's unclear what's creating the differences in a number of fields. It could be biological, or it could be systematic discrimination (which is falsified somewhat by Sweden). So, I lean towards biological differences.

I understand your position as:

There are no preference differences in most 'high-status' jobs, therefore there are no preference differences universally.

That doesn't jive with Sweden. And isn't self-evident.

You demand proof that a number of fields are different in a way which is unattractive to women. How about you supply proof that they're the same?!

"Computers are different from all the rest of science. That's why there's so few women in the field."

How are computers different from the rest of science?

"They just are!"

That's not an argument.

"You're a dishonest jerk!"

I think I understand where you're coming from now.

I'm genuinely interested in integrating ideas. It may get rough. But that's the war of ideas.

I've laid out my logic. If you don't understand any of it, I can expand. If you're unwilling to understand it, that's on you.

You've addressed none of my points. And made no attempt to rephrase my actual position.

If you don't like me saying you are dishonest in your arguments don't be dishonest in your arguments—or explain how you weren't being dishonest.

> I think I understand where you're coming from now.

Do you? I want to critique your arguments, your epistemology, and the way you argue.

You've tried to make it look like I'm making untenable claims, can't justify what I've said, and then an insult for a cherry on top.

Critique what I've said, not some strawman dialogue.

All that one really needs to do to understand why the field is unwelcoming to women is to start listening to women.

I imagine that is part of it.

Trivialization of women's issues is a different monster.

Which makes sense to me.

As status has risen, it's become more status-ey. Surprise!

What is the value of having an equal number of men and women? What is a "diverse opinion"? If you hire a woman over a man because of the "diverse opinion" you expect her to bring, and her opinions end up being the same as the men on her team, will you be disappointed at the lack of ideological diversity you expected her to provide? Will she feel marginalized for her opinions not being "diverse" enough?

These feel like reasonable questions - you are implying having gender diversity will bring ideological diversity, that is, men have different ideas than women, and that this difference is valuable. However, won't that assumption also lead to women feeling that their value is diminished if their opinions aren't different enough from men, if that is the basis upon which you hire them?

Right, this is what I like to call the Google Fallacy. If you have a team that represents all genders, races, etc etc but they are all recent graduates of the same handful of CS programmes, then where does the diversity of opinions actually come from? This is why Google keeps making products and abandoning them when they fail to gain traction, or produce public disgust like Glass. To be actually diverse companies must move beyond the tickybox culture of just looking at gender and colour and look at actual lived experiences.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/25/why-google-doesnt-care-abo...

They don't need to be chosen "just because" :/ they should be chosen based on merit, otherwise, how good of a role model would that person become?

I.e. women can start computing companies, and hire women. Women do not need permission from men to do this, nor do they need favor from men.

The women in tech pipeline is a leaky, toxic pipeline that results in talented women being driven out of the industry.

Of course many women are not that interested in programming. This is obviously true. Because the women who DO get into programming are quickly driven out by the toxic culture. If I were a woman I wouldn't want to be in the tech industry either.

It is a waste of time to focus on widening the top of the funnel, which leads to the toxic pipeline, and will result in most of them leaving anyway. We should focus more on making the industry less sucky for the women who are already here.

Once the toxic pipeline is fixed, THEN women will start being more interested in programming and tech.

We need some sort of exit poll data for people leaving the tech industry if that exists. We've seen the data for women giving up after receiving fewer rejections than men, but to my knowledge any accusations of toxicity are purely anecdotal.

This isn't something that is controversial. There is lots of research into this.

https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/the-real-reason-wome...

http://news.mit.edu/2016/why-do-women-leave-engineering-0615

Are just two, actually published research attempts that I found with a 2 minute google search.

I'd be very interested to see some evidence of this. How many women leave, at what stage in their career path do they leave, where do they go after they've left, and how do you know that their unfair treatment is responsible?

This isn't something that is controversial. There is lots of research into this.

https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/the-real-reason-wome...

http://news.mit.edu/2016/why-do-women-leave-engineering-0615

http://alltogether.swe.org/2016/04/real-reason-women-leave-s...

Are just a couple, actually published research attempts that I found with a 2 minute google search.

Steeped in a culture of sexism accusations, it's not surprising that you'd hear reports of sexism from women leaving the industry.

A man doing the exact same thing (and many men do leave tech) would say their boss was an asshole, or they hated the hours, or whatever. Women are prodded and trained to interpret exactly the same circumstances as sexism.

Of course this doesn't mean there isn't sexism. But it does mean that you can't just "figure out the reason that they left by asking them".

He has an unfalsifiable belief.

He asks for evidence, someone gives him clear evidence, well the evidence must be fake.

Assignments just don't drop in your lap, you have to go get them. Praise doesn't just materialize, you have to make sure that the right people know what you did--sometimes with a baseball bat. Everybody fights to get "fast-tracked", although I don't really know what that means anymore outside of large companies.

I knew lots of people at IBM, both male and female, who felt shortchanged and I asked them: "So, what did you do to go get on a better project next time?" Generally the answer was nothing. Several of the co-ops complained that they were just doing menial tasks: "Did you ask to do something more important? Did you demonstrate that you could do something more important? Did you complete the menial task well or not?" Generally the answer to all of these were not.

If you don't complete the menial task well, you're not getting something more important--and sometimes a menial task is important. I have often had the conversation with an intern/co-op "Look, the task sucks. But someone has to do it. It's either you or me, and you're lower on the totem pole right now." If you don't do a good job, you're not getting anything better.

And if I'm doing something interesting and important, I'll be DAMNED if I'm letting somebody take it from me.

You have to offend some people if you want to get ahead. And you may have to leave if things don't fall your way. That's corporate life.

And same sex harassment is probably worse. Ever seen someone whip out his junk at a workplace? Happened 3 times in my life.

One of the primary differences is that a man rarely feels physically threatened in a situation. If I'm working at 8PM with a colleague and nobody is in the office, I'm probably not worried about my female colleague physically assaulting me. The reverse, however, is not true.

In my career, I have worked for the same woman boss through several companies. I can't imagine having a stronger, better person to work for.

Yet of course I see what everyone else here reports : that there are very few female engineers/developers.

And even leaving aside companies - it doesn't cost anything to contribute to FOSS projects.

The whole ecosystem is hugely weighted toward men making decisions.

But, since you asked: I will now say that there are biases in our industry that perhaps those of us not subject to them do not see. Those biases adversely impact the ability of women (and some people of color) to rise to positions of influence in the tech industry. I don't believe this is a controversial assertion (despite all of my comments to this effect being voted down). I consider the matter well-known to anyone who's willing to listen to the people it affects.

I can follow a chain of logic that goes something like:

- there's a lack of gender diversity in tech, in that there are disproportionately fewer women.

- this is a problem we should solve

- given that there's more men in tech, they're somehow to blame

Is this an accurate representation of how you get to "I don't see how it is the fault of men"?

I don't see (most) people blaming men as intentionally causing this problem. I see plenty of people, men and women, at trying to figure out how to understand the disproportionate lack of women and do something about it. Similarly, I don't see it as the responsibility of women to do this on their own.

If I've completely misinterpreted your comment, it wouldn't be the first time. I don't mean to put words in your mouth. Please do elaborate and correct me if and where I've misunderstood.

I view this as an unfortunate sexist and patronizing attitude, and is ultimately a destructive one.

Women do not need the aid, approval, or encouragement from men to succeed in tech. This applies to everyone else, too. There's never been a time of more opportunity for everyone in the US.

If people need excuses for failure, there's an endless list of them. There is no fixing that (like how my coming up with a few thousand to start a business was dismissed.) Successful people don't look for excuses and don't make excuses. They go out and get things done.

This thread is about men being the gatekeepers of financing. The parent article says:

> Men have the power to help fix those things, but they also should have the courage to cede the stage to women more often, to fight the stupid bias that keeps women from excelling in the field. It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team, just because, or promoting women more freely.

Perhaps we're talking past each other.

Furthermore, VC funds are hardly the only source of funding. Friends and family are traditional sources of startup capital, and loaning money to businesses is a traditional business for banks.

Have you ever founded a tech startup funded exclusively by friends and family? Have you ever tried to get a loan from a bank for a tech startup?

Yes. Started my tech company with a 4 figure loan from a family member. Am now independently wealthy. I was told I would fail every step of the way from just about everyone.

> bank

No. Never needed to. Never needed any other outside capital.

My aunt got a loan from a bank to start her own successful business. (She was told that women couldn't get loans to start businesses. She was quite a firecracker.)

Congratulations for being born into a family that could support you economically.

> No. Never needed to. Never needed any other outside capital.

That was lucky. Banks don't loan to tech startups. Unless you have assets to put up as collateral (say, your house that you have significant equity in), you will not be able to obtain a loan from a bank to start a tech company. The SBA does enable a limited number of loans for businesses, but they are almost exclusively of the brick and mortar kinda. I have never met a software company founder who could get a loan from a bank to start their company.

If you don't already have money, your ability to get money from a bank will be extremely limited.

The barriers you are talking about are in your mind. People who want to get things done are not dissuaded by such things. People with your attitude always assume other peoples' success was a cakewalk, full of people showering them with praise and money at every turn. It's just not so. To start a business, you have to get out and hustle. If you're so easily discouraged because you can't raise $5000 or some professor dumped on you, you aren't cut out for business and have nobody to blame but yourself.

(Wasn't it Steve Jobs who sold his car to fund his startup? his company was successful before any investors would give him a nickel. I can't imagine Jobs quitting for any of the reasons you give.)

Just remember the story of Douglas Bader, who had both legs amputated, and was told he was going to die of his wounds, then told he'd never walk again, etc. He went on to become a fighter pilot for the RAF, even though the RAF discriminated against legless men, shot down many Luftwaffe fighters, was shot down himself, escaped from German POW camps 3 times, married the woman of his dreams, etc.

There's never been a time of greater opportunity in tech in the US.

So, you believe that assertion applies to women in tech, since that is who we're talking about?

Do women need permission, encouragement, and money from men in order to succeed? Nope. Suggesting otherwise is patronizing and taints the success of those who do succeed.

Women have started companies in the US for 200+ years. The idea that somehow they can't start tech companies, and run them as they see fit, is ludicrous.

Choosing to put money into a house instead of a startup is a choice people make, and not the fault of somebody else.

The fact that you were able to start your own company and succeed is a mixture of your upbringing, your standing in society as much as your intelligence and access to capital.

It's a common fallacy to think that just working harder or having the grit to strike out is the only factor. I would suggest that line of thinking would lead to some form of survivorship bias.

Merit is equal parts nature and nurture. "Pushing women into positions of influence" can also be interpreted as identifying high-performers capable of filling senior roles and then helping them get there.

This does mean giving them an unfair advantage, but only in the sense that life is unfair in general. Ultimately they are the most capable individuals for the roles they assume, and lifting them to that level pays dividends for our entire industry.

If you believe in both bolstering the meritocracy and furthering gender equality (as I do), this should be your reaction. Positioning a meritocratic ideal as in opposition to equal representation is just veiled misogyny.

Nobody is arguing that this is "reverse sexism", merely sexism. If you don't think disadvantaging men in particular is sexism, then I don't think it's possible for us to have meaningful discourse on this if we can't even agree on what words mean.

>"Pushing women into positions of influence" can also be interpreted as identifying high-performers capable of filling senior roles and then helping them get there.

He specifically used the phrasing "It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team". That is not consistent with your interpretation - yours is that he is advocating for identifying people who are fit for management roles, who happen to be women, and then using their resources to make it easier for them to get there. Instead, his phrasing quite unambiguously advocates selecting women over men when hiring. I would love to hear your argument for why this is both not sexist and also valuable to society at large.

>This does mean giving them an unfair advantage, but only in the sense that life is unfair in general. Ultimately they are the most capable individuals for the roles they assume, and lifting them to that level pays dividends for our entire industry.

So, unfairly discriminating against people makes them "the most capable individuals for the roles they assume"?

>If you believe in both bolstering the meritocracy and furthering gender equality (as I do), this should be your reaction. Positioning a meritocratic ideal as in opposition to equal representation is just veiled misogyny.

As I have said in innumerable other comments, that equal representation is even desirable, much less possible, rests on the assumption that all demographics have equal interest and potential. This has not been proven, and to advocate intentionally disadvantaging people based on their sex when you don't even know if the group to whose benefit this is all for even wants to be here I find naive at best and bigoted at worst.

> So, unfairly discriminating against people makes them "the most capable individuals for the roles they assume"?

Yes, it does. If you find a woman with ambition and potential, then train and mentor her to succeed, you'll create in that nurturing the manager you need.

Choosing a high-potential candidate based on gender is no more "wrong" than choosing someone for their school affiliation, their shared hobbies or how they "remind one of themselves at that age"; all of which are common, and all of which privilege the status quo (men).

> It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team, just because, or promoting women more freely.

Doing this would violate the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits hiring discrimination based on, "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin".[1] I'm also sure such a practice would be extremely counterproductive.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2

If Congress wanted to systematically disadvantage men in favour of women they should have called it the "Female Rights Act".

With respect to your question the answer is yes, such cases have been won, like this one:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/men-rights-unruh...

I strongly suspect that you don't like quotas, or intentional correction of a massive gender disparity in hiring, and so on, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the limits of the Civil Rights Act with regards to hiring.

Hiring more women after realizing "we have a huge gender disparity problem" seems to me (not a lawyer) the sort of thing a company's employment lawyers would be happy to defend in court. If there are any real counterexamples, yeah, that'd be interesting to read about.

'Just because' what? You're asking for 'more women excelling in the field' but promoting somebody just because isn't going to make them excel.

If, on the other hand, brilliant women were not being promoted 'just because' that would suggest a problem. But is this so?

See also McKinsey's finding: "Several diversity officers and experts told us that despite their best efforts, women are often evaluated for promotions primarily on performance, while men are often promoted on potential." https://www.mckinsey.com/womenineconomy (PDF)

Perhaps women find better things to do :) I'm starting to think there is something wrong with those of us who pursue this.

Good point though - neither of them tried to self-learn in high school.

Even if true, the reasons for it might be interesting.

Back when I was contracting I visited a lot of sites, my heart would sink when it was an all male team, you just knew the tone would be different.

If some organization isn't meritocrous in how it promotes people and participation, the solution is to make it so. And it will take time for the effects of the previous bias to unwind.

There are a number of papers (and I'm very afraid I'm on my phone right now, so I can't cite them. I am sorry for that) which show that things like severe gender imbalance are not self-correcting systems in the case of extreme bias -- you have to push them back closer to 50/50, but then the system will remain balanced.

This makes (to me) intuitive sense -- current staff / managers will tend to employ, and promote, people "like them", creating a self-perpetuating system.

The problem is going to remain - Where do we draw the line? Where does pressure towards the center start to hurt progress because of pushback? I'd posit that much of the "Black Lives Matter" debate is actually this debate - But that the communities are speaking past one another. The places where Black Lives Matter is considered axiomatic are already past that line, while the places where it's viewed with disdain are where racism is still firmly rooted.

Developer hiring is pretty rigorous compared to a lot of fields where the process boils down to "turn up, is the candidate presentable and interested, do they avoid saying anything dumb in the interview, do they have a good CV, hired". People are asked to actually demonstrate their skills during the hiring process, for instance, something a lot of job interviews lack.

Moreover, the demand for skilled talent is enormous. All sorts of people who are kind of weird or anti-social get hired as programmers when they would struggle to get hired as, say, business analysts or salespeople, simply because people want software and beggars can't be choosers.

In such an environment, implying that the industry is not meritocratic or hopelessly biased against women is especially silly. Women programmers are sought after everywhere. They already have the playing field tipped in their favour in precise, specific, concrete ways. The idea that there's some impossible to see glass barriers stopping them from getting into programming is never nailed down with specifics, probably because no such barriers exist.

edit: we are also assuming things are an in general meritocracy in technology amd I suspect that isn't true, but that is a different but relatef discussion.

Coming from a country at the boundary between east and west, poor and developed, civilisation and 3rd world, I find it fascinating how there is less diversity of thought at Google (where people come from all over the place, have all the colors and sexual orientations) then a random group of old people in some fundamentalist rural area in my home country.

Which means its measured by heuristics, and heuristics are very sensitive to preconceptions, stereotypes, etc.

An extreme opinion stated as if it's a fact. Can you show me the phalanx of companies systematically beating their competition by deliberately hiring incompetent but genetically "diverse" people?

Focusing on diversity makes your company MORE competent, not less.

And the current world that we live in is NOT meritocratic, as half of the good talent is getting driven out of the industry.

The way to promote meritocracy IS to support women. Anti diversity initiatives and environments are unmeritocratic.

Would such an environment be "unmeritocratic"?

You don't even have to be as extreme as your example (nobody could work in the conditions that you mentioned).

Things like blind resume screening have been shown to significantly reduce hiring bias, and more companies should be doing it.

Also, the biggest discrimination problems in tech aren't even direct hiring discrimination problems. One big reason why companies are not very diverse is that companies tell their employees "refer your friends!" and then they are surprised when the white men only refer other white men.

Making efforts to specifically reach out to women, and making sure they apply to your company (without lowering any bars or anything), work very well in increasing diversity.

So you seem to be simultaneously saying that 1) a system in which gender was a non-factor would be more meritocratic than contemporary systems; and 2) that a system in which women are given preferential treatment over men would be more meritocratic than contemporary systems; and 3) that a system in which women are given preferential treatment over men would be still more meritocratic than the hypothetical system.

Point 3 seems a natural conclusion given that you have argued for point 2; if point 3 were not true, it would seem logical to argue for point 1.

Am I misunderstanding you?

I work with several people remotely, have for months, have made paying projects, haven't heard their voices ever (or even seen photos of them in some cases).

Thinking on it, in some cases I literally don't know the person's ethnic background. One of my guys could be black or white or Indian and I wouldn't know. Even his name is a strange three-letter thing I haven't heard before. Huh.

So yeah, you can work like this.

I think I'll continue to promote people who seem to do good work, regardless of their gender. If some women lose interest in computing because they lack role models, too bad for them: there are plenty of female programmers in eastern Europe and Russia who don't seem to care.

Yes, if you define "merit" as including particular genes in your DNA, then you can get away with Pike's attitude and still claim to be merit-based.

But hello, reality check, Pike is advocating for something that is not only immoral but also explicitly illegal. The law says that people should be assessed on their skill at the job and not selected due to their gender. Like, whether they write good code or not. The industry has a lot of different ways of measuring merit that are gender neutral - Pike is saying ignore those ways and promote bad coders over good, "just because" they're women.

He was contriving to engage with it; you should be less brief/concise with your talk about priors and premises in this thread.

I haven't heard any plausible theories for this. The best I've heard is plausible theories for why, given existing biases in society, more men are entering and succeeding in the field than women. That's usually used to argue that some individual company or process isn't at fault for having an imbalanced output. But that's hardly a meritocracy when you know you're leaving qualified people behind, neither for the company, nor at all for the field as a whole!

(Incidentally, the term "meritocracy" is from a dystopian essay trying to satirize the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy )

[1] if you don't see his story as a parody, intentional or otherwise, look again...

But if diversity is your yardstick, then it's surprising how much better the military services are at it than tech. Indeed, if I were an ambitious woman, I am not sure that's not the path to take for tech.

It may also expedite the creation of useful products. Why would we consider there is inevitably a tradeoff?

There's a lot we just don't know.

Do I understand you to mean that as there's currently no method for disentanglement that one can only use profit as a yardstick? That other values a business owner may have, such as employee satisfaction, or health, or retention, can't be measured or discussed? I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I'm trying to unpack what you've said.

The problem is that what we mark down on the books as profit may or may not actually reflect any social benefit to the larger society through the mechanism of consumer surplus.

This state of affairs means that any discussion on profit may or may not be all that coherent because we would have to clarify if we mean rent-profit or consumer-surplus-profit.

"consumer-surplus-profit" is a signal to do more. "rent-profit" means you're not both doing good while doing well.

This is a much larger point than designing a corporate architecture. This goes to how we evaluate ethical behavior.

But yes - the ethics of a company are a serious part of the architecture. Good ethics are of self-interest even more than they are a collective good.

1. Add red-tinted water to the jar to counter-balance the existing blue-tinted water in the jar.

2. Add more clean water to the jar to dilute the blue-tinted water.

Question: Which solution would result in clearer water?

feminine social primacy != equality

Why is this part of the narrative of women in STEM? Do people not realize this language is counterproductive?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margherita_Hack

Definition 2

I think this was chosen to contrast it to an alternative method of diversity where many women are included but they are not as important. His thesis is not to optimize for "numbers of bodies" equal representation, but equal representation of influence.

Do you think there are benefits to being shy in such a context?

One doesn't decide to be shy after doing cost/benefit analysis of a situation, it's a character trait.

In this particular context women have 'confidence gap'[1] so its kind of stange to brush them off as 'wallflowers'

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-con...

I'm extremely shy in certain situations (for instance, I hate introducing myself to people at parties, bars, etc.), but if I'm in a meeting for a group I'm involved with, I will absolutely say as much as I'm allowed to say.

Like someone at a dance hall who is not asked to dance and stands at the wall when others go to the floor?

I think they meant to say that the women in question were active participants.

I find the idea that we should "push them into positions of influence" abhorrent. These are zero sum games, to give them a special advantage over any other demographic is to disadvantage another. This is antithetical to everything most people believe about fairness and equality. And what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap, pushed upwards beyond their skill by well-meaning but naive men? What sort of message will that send to them?

None of this is even mentioning the basic question of, what do we even get out of trying to "correct" disparities in employment demographics? How do we even know that women as a demographic have an equal interest in computer science to men? If they don't, what do we get out of "correcting" the disparity by given them special treatment, handicaps, incentives, etc?

Pushing people into positions of influence based on their gender is nothing other than deeply sexist, discriminatory to people who don't need to be pushed, and should be absolutely unacceptable to anyone who actually cares about equality.

One very simple, coherent way to arrive at Pike's position without sacrificing the notion of merit is to accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men, and thus the gender gap must itself be an indication that something other that merit is systematically advantaging men and disadvantaging women.

You're welcome to argue that point (or any other), but don't pretend that you've beaten it by default.

To tell it flat out, tech to me seems to be signalintocracy much more then meritocracy. We don't even talk about what merit is - like ever. We don\t know. If you broadcast the right set of signals and are confident, then you go up. If you are humble or fail at whatever signals are in fashion that time, you go down. I remember quite a few dudes (whether in school or work) who were total respected geniuses doing completely difficult things - until I had to do the same thing and it turned out to be easy. It would be also super awesome if the best argued for ideas would win instead of most confidently and aggressively pronounced ideas.

I also think that lack of women in tech has more to do with how strongly little kids learn to associate being boy with anything tech related. It has nothing to do with math abilities, at least here boys who go to engineering and rarely really good in math (compared to pool of people who go to college). However, it is a good job for a boy that wants a job and does not have any special interest or hobby. It is not seen as good job for girl that dont really are.

This seems slightly absurd. Tech is one of the few jobs which people move into after taking it up as a hobby, and for which doing it as a hobby is almost seen as a requirement. This is not generally what happens for doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, teachers or surveyors. Other jobs for which this applies are generally very poorly paid for the vast majority e.g. actor, footballer, musician, etc. Although many people do go into IT because they have no specific interests, moreso admin roles at big companies, which tend to be have a higher proportion of women than programming roles at startups.

To expand on the idea: in meritocracy, networking would matter much less then it matters in tech. Meritocracy would not see "culture fit" as so important as tech have it. Ability to work with others would matter, but there would be no beer test and crap like that. In meritocracy, your ability to socialize after work would matter less. Ability to organize own work would matter more then ability to sit there 80 hour a week being ineffective.

I also think meritocracy would lead to less fads nobody criticize until they are out of fashion at which point everyone criticizes.

So yeah, I stand by tech is not meritocratic and if it stopped being so self-confident about it, it could move closer to that ideal.

Of course I don't know you, but that might have more to do with your self esteem, or lack thereof, than anything else. Some people's reaction would be pleasure at their accomplishment.

There are a bunch of other professions where women are under/over-represented. CS is one of them. Others include:

    Mechanical Engineering
    Construction
    Electrical Engineering
    Physics
    Aerospace Engi
    Geography
    Finance

I think it's going to be difficult to compose an argument for how computer science could be intrinsically better suited to men in a way that didn't also apply to other popular hard-science fields.

Neuro/molecular/chem ~= biology and is similar to each other for the most part.

women are underrepresented in almost all major engineering fields. It's not like the math there is harder than pure maths or that it's more challenging. Just different.

stats is its own beast. Accounting is very different from computers-related fields or biology for example. Statistics classes are also pretty much evenly balanced.

pure math is also very different from everything else. It might be in some cases similar to theoretical CS/applied math but to get to theoretical CS most people have to go through undergrad CS classes that paint a completely different picture of what that work is like.

One suspects that if there was some subfield of programming, like distributed systems, that had 45/65 female/male, there'd be an elaborate justification for how that programming discipline was so different from the rest of programming that any comparisons to it were invalid (and, in fact, I've noticed at academic crypto conferences that women are much more common than in the rest of CS, so maybe that's an example).

Again, this is what it means for an argument to be a special pleading: we're required to accept an obstacle course of criterion that ignores the simplest, most plausible comparisons.

On the contrary, if you look at lists of the representation gap between professions, computer programmers fit right into their surroundings. It requires special pleading to explain why programming is systematically discriminating against women, and not civil engineers, sound technicians, chemical engineers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers, professionally active mathematicians, chemical engineers etc...

Computer science, physics, and engineering are the three male bastions of STEM. Nothing else in STEM compares. Moreover, the rest of STEM is significantly and increasingly dependent on computer science, so a very large number of practicing scientists in non-CS, non-engineering fields are spending much of their working time programming computers. Somehow, we've led ourselves to believe that plugging form fields into database columns is serious men's only business, but working with computational models of molecular biology isn't.

It would not challenge my intuitions to find that women in STEM are doing more significant CS work than the overwhelming majority of professional computer programmers.

I would tend to agree. I think that women are not interested in staring at a computer screen and making CRUD apps all day, they do something more interesting or rewarding that require technical skills. That is, the lower aptitude men stick it out, while the lower aptitude women quit and become nurses or whatever. It's just a theory, but plausible right? You seem stuck on a false choice between it there being some simple super-cause or else sexism. It's probably a bunch of things. I mean why else would the most gener-equal societies show the most segregation between professions?

1) Men & women have differently structured brains.

2) Different brains result in different behaviour.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275

Women in mining: http://internationalwim.org/

http://www.womeninmining.org/

Women in construction:

http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp

(some editing to tone it down a bit.)

By accept, you mean assume, and assuming is what Oxitendwe was warning against.

You haven't stated anything to rebut any of the points made by Oxitendwe.

Instead, you demonstrated your ignorance of basic argumentation skills and your proclivity for self-righteousness.

You would do well to drop the sanctimonious tone ("don't huff about", "don't pretend") during discussions.

If anybody here is huffing, it is you.

And the explanation would need to be simple, because it competes with another explanation, which is that computer technology is systemically biased against women, the way every other profession was before those professions took explicit steps to correct disparity.