It can be literally free to learn programming if you're a woman. Girls Who Code, countless initiatives, you name it, it's there. Yet if you check contributors of any open source project it's going to be all men. What if most women are just... not that interested in programming?
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.
Is there any way to actually measure this? Not the bounce rate of women leaving, but the reasons they do. You say it's the 'toxic culture' but is there any metric to measure it?
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.
>The women in tech pipeline is a leaky, toxic pipeline that results in talented women being driven out of the industry.
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?
People don't give (or often even know) the real reasons they do things.
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".
I've attended Women in STEM meetings at university as an undergrad and there was already weeding out. Posters for the Women in STEM meetings were always getting torn down. Asian Americans in STEM or Robotics Club posters were not removed as aggressively as the Women in STEM posters. Furthermore, pretty much every woman ther had an experience that I would find hard to say could ever happen to me as a male. One told me of a story where a TA called them "woman" instead of their real name several times. One told me they heard their boss saying "we should only hire the hot ones(referring only to hiring females if they're attractive to the boss)". I really can't imagine either of those things happening to a man in the workspace.
Except that every single one of these is a problem for MEN too ...
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.
I taught an elective coding class to middle school students. We had somewhat over 50% girls participate and most of the strongest students were girls. Make of that what you will.
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.
