5 ms·

Based on discussions we have had with women in tech at https://keepwomen.com https://keepwomen.com, it's not just sexism, but many women leave tech due to worki

by userium 11y ago

Based on discussions we have had with women in tech at https://keepwomen.com https://keepwomen.com, it's not just sexism, but many women leave tech due to working conditions (low salary, no advancement), work-life balance (too much travelling, commuting), or the company environment (poor cultural "fit"). Some solutions for retaining women in tech are e.g. flexible working hours, personal development opportunities and workforce diversity.

asuffield 11y ago
I would say, based on everything that I've seen and heard, that the problems you describe here are far bigger and more important than the things which usually dominate the debate. These problems are also not specific to gender: they affect most minority groups and also other wide swathes of the population (based on personality type, lifestyle, etc). The tech industry norms have ended up favouring a very specific type of individual, and that is the fundamental problem that we need to address in order to get the genuinely diverse workforce that I believe we need. What usually frustrates me about the "sexism" debate is that it studiously avoids addressing these issues, and drowns out most attempts to focus on them.
falcolas 11y ago
If I'm honest, it sounds like the same issues everybody in tech faces. We're all consistently under-compensated for the value we bring to the company (sometimes because measuring the value is genuinely hard, other times because the tech industry is solely focused on making investors money), have to leave a job to advance our careers, fight the internal politics and cliques which form between departments and teams...
- joshkpeterson 11y ago
  Yeah but if you listen to women's experiences, there clearly are distinct problems women in tech face.
eric-hu 11y ago
Those are the same reasons I've heard for why we have a young age distribution in tech relative to the age distribution of the general population. Poor industry retention seems to be a problem across the board.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  How much of the industry retention problem is that the high pay scale allows for early retirement or early semi-retirement for many? I'm in my mid-40s and could retire today if I wanted to. I don't because I really enjoy the challenge and stimulation of my work, but I could. To the extent that's the root cause of low industry retention, I'd consider it a feature not a bug.
Balgair 11y ago
Hmm, what does flexible working hours, personal development opportunities and workforce diversity mean in practice? The faults are hard measurable things, but the solutions are more fuzzy and not as easy to measure. When you measure flexible hours, what is your metric for saying that someone has that? When you say dev opportunities, how do I know if I have given my employees enough of them and of what quality? What does workforce diversity mean in terms of age, gender, sex, race, and religion and what targets should I shoot for? Should my workforce match the community I am in or the nation? I think a hard goal for these would be nice to have so I know what to shoot for and be 'good' (again, a fuzzy thing itself)
- kazinator 11y ago
  Probably this has to be just be looked as simply avoiding being bad. To avoid being bad, you don't have to overcompensate; that just creates reverse biases. Just don't have a bias: for instance, don't make a decision because someone is a woman, or Asian or whatever. Any decision: hiring, awarding a raise or promotion, etc. A discriminatory bias cannot be measured by simple proportions, like how many women work at Company X out of the total, and therefore it cannot be eliminated by something naive like a hiring quota or similar. Such a program necessarily involves making decisions based on gender, and so on and so doesn't avoid being bad. The concept of "workforce diversity" is basically rooted in poor understanding of statistics, together with a willingness to apply a corrective discrimination. Even if half the software developers in a country are women, and there is no bias anywhere, it can still so happen that men constitute, say, 80% of the developers in some organization. Such an event has a certain nonzero probability which allows it to happen.
  - Balgair 11y ago
    great points on the stats. BTW, re: your username; zisteau?
  - leaverou 11y ago
    “Just don’t have a bias”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. The problem is that it’s very hard to know when biases are affecting your decisions. You cannot just decide to not have them. Agreed though that fighting bias with bias is not a solution. What is the solution then? I don’t know. :(
kazinator 11y ago
If the low salary and no advancement are simply due to having XX chromosomes (similarly skilled and productive males at the same organization do get paid more and advance), then she's in fact leaving due to sexism, not simply working conditions.
dikdik 11y ago
I was just having a conversation with my roommate about why I have trouble identifying/believing a lot of feminist propaganda. And your statement is exactly why. Even when it is not a gender issue, femnism seems to only focus on improving female standing. That's not equality.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  This seems like seeing someone trying to stop genocide in the Congo, and yelling at them because they're not simultaneously trying to stop street violence in Brazil. There are a lot of problems, they have varying magnitudes, and some people choose to focus on a particular problem. That's okay. It's frustrating how often it seems like feminists are expected to solve every problem in the world simultaneously to legitimize their attempts to solve one problem.
  - dikdik 11y ago
    I think about it differently. They are alienating and fragmenting people that would otherwise be on their side by turning every issue into "this is how it affects me and since it affects me and my gender we have to fix it." If we came together as people, regardless of gender, and demanded more rights in the work place (family leave instead of just focusing on maternity leave for example), we would have a LOT more standing to accomplish our goals. By fragmenting the population, telling the middle class white guy it's his fault the middle class white woman doesn't have maternity leave because the boss happens to be a white male (though upperclass), you are only hurting your cause.
Grishnakh 11y ago
>work-life balance (too much travelling, commuting) I have to take issue with this. Work/life balance is indeed a common problem in tech, with long working hours expected in many places when they make up unreasonable schedules. However, I've never heard of traveling or commuting being big problems in tech at all. In my years as a software engineer, I only traveled a lot for a telecommute job where I had to meet with customers and also travel to the home office; outside of that I've barely traveled at all (and a good chunk of that was at a job during the dot-com boom when they were really liberal with travel funds and sent people to a lot of overpriced conferences and trade shows). For programmers, travel just isn't a big part of the job, unless you have a rare job where you need to meet with customers a lot (which is usually more of an applications engineering or sales support role). As for commuting, that's entirely based on where you choose to live. It's probably a problem in the Bay Area, but in most other places it's no more a problem for tech workers than everyone else. Every metro area has problems with commuting: people frequently live not that close to work, due either to housing prices or because they already had a house and happened to get a job on the other side of the city or something. This isn't unique to tech jobs, except maybe the Bay Area thing because that metro area is dominated by tech jobs. The problem with work/life balance in tech is working hours, and that's it. Tech workers are frequently expected to work too much, young males with no social lives are too often willing or able to dedicate too many hours to their jobs (thus making those who don't look bad), and as a result, people who value their free time (like, oh, women who tend to get pregnant and have children) don't do so well and get forced out. Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer here is. Flexible working hours aren't going to help a working mother much if she's still expected to put in 12 hour days. The only answer I see is eliminating the "exempt" status for tech workers and having them be paid hourly like factory workers. This of course has its own set of problems. But it's exactly what they do for, say, nurses, who are also professional workers who are usually college educated.

by userium 11y ago

asuffield 11y ago

I would say, based on everything that I've seen and heard, that the problems you describe here are far bigger and more important than the things which usually dominate the debate. These problems are also not specific to gender: they affect most minority groups and also other wide swathes of the population (based on personality type, lifestyle, etc). The tech industry norms have ended up favouring a very specific type of individual, and that is the fundamental problem that we need to address in order to get the genuinely diverse workforce that I believe we need. What usually frustrates me about the "sexism" debate is that it studiously avoids addressing these issues, and drowns out most attempts to focus on them.

falcolas 11y ago

If I'm honest, it sounds like the same issues everybody in tech faces. We're all consistently under-compensated for the value we bring to the company (sometimes because measuring the value is genuinely hard, other times because the tech industry is solely focused on making investors money), have to leave a job to advance our careers, fight the internal politics and cliques which form between departments and teams...

joshkpeterson 11y ago
Yeah but if you listen to women's experiences, there clearly are distinct problems women in tech face.

eric-hu 11y ago

Those are the same reasons I've heard for why we have a young age distribution in tech relative to the age distribution of the general population. Poor industry retention seems to be a problem across the board.

sokoloff 11y ago
How much of the industry retention problem is that the high pay scale allows for early retirement or early semi-retirement for many? I'm in my mid-40s and could retire today if I wanted to. I don't because I really enjoy the challenge and stimulation of my work, but I could. To the extent that's the root cause of low industry retention, I'd consider it a feature not a bug.

Balgair 11y ago

Hmm, what does flexible working hours, personal development opportunities and workforce diversity mean in practice? The faults are hard measurable things, but the solutions are more fuzzy and not as easy to measure. When you measure flexible hours, what is your metric for saying that someone has that? When you say dev opportunities, how do I know if I have given my employees enough of them and of what quality? What does workforce diversity mean in terms of age, gender, sex, race, and religion and what targets should I shoot for? Should my workforce match the community I am in or the nation? I think a hard goal for these would be nice to have so I know what to shoot for and be 'good' (again, a fuzzy thing itself)

kazinator 11y ago
Probably this has to be just be looked as simply avoiding being bad. To avoid being bad, you don't have to overcompensate; that just creates reverse biases. Just don't have a bias: for instance, don't make a decision because someone is a woman, or Asian or whatever. Any decision: hiring, awarding a raise or promotion, etc. A discriminatory bias cannot be measured by simple proportions, like how many women work at Company X out of the total, and therefore it cannot be eliminated by something naive like a hiring quota or similar. Such a program necessarily involves making decisions based on gender, and so on and so doesn't avoid being bad. The concept of "workforce diversity" is basically rooted in poor understanding of statistics, together with a willingness to apply a corrective discrimination. Even if half the software developers in a country are women, and there is no bias anywhere, it can still so happen that men constitute, say, 80% of the developers in some organization. Such an event has a certain nonzero probability which allows it to happen.
- Balgair 11y ago
  great points on the stats. BTW, re: your username; zisteau?
- leaverou 11y ago
  “Just don’t have a bias”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. The problem is that it’s very hard to know when biases are affecting your decisions. You cannot just decide to not have them. Agreed though that fighting bias with bias is not a solution. What is the solution then? I don’t know. :(

kazinator 11y ago

If the low salary and no advancement are simply due to having XX chromosomes (similarly skilled and productive males at the same organization do get paid more and advance), then she's in fact leaving due to sexism, not simply working conditions.

dikdik 11y ago

I was just having a conversation with my roommate about why I have trouble identifying/believing a lot of feminist propaganda. And your statement is exactly why. Even when it is not a gender issue, femnism seems to only focus on improving female standing. That's not equality.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
This seems like seeing someone trying to stop genocide in the Congo, and yelling at them because they're not simultaneously trying to stop street violence in Brazil. There are a lot of problems, they have varying magnitudes, and some people choose to focus on a particular problem. That's okay. It's frustrating how often it seems like feminists are expected to solve every problem in the world simultaneously to legitimize their attempts to solve one problem.
- dikdik 11y ago
  I think about it differently. They are alienating and fragmenting people that would otherwise be on their side by turning every issue into "this is how it affects me and since it affects me and my gender we have to fix it." If we came together as people, regardless of gender, and demanded more rights in the work place (family leave instead of just focusing on maternity leave for example), we would have a LOT more standing to accomplish our goals. By fragmenting the population, telling the middle class white guy it's his fault the middle class white woman doesn't have maternity leave because the boss happens to be a white male (though upperclass), you are only hurting your cause.

Grishnakh 11y ago

>work-life balance (too much travelling, commuting) I have to take issue with this. Work/life balance is indeed a common problem in tech, with long working hours expected in many places when they make up unreasonable schedules. However, I've never heard of traveling or commuting being big problems in tech at all. In my years as a software engineer, I only traveled a lot for a telecommute job where I had to meet with customers and also travel to the home office; outside of that I've barely traveled at all (and a good chunk of that was at a job during the dot-com boom when they were really liberal with travel funds and sent people to a lot of overpriced conferences and trade shows). For programmers, travel just isn't a big part of the job, unless you have a rare job where you need to meet with customers a lot (which is usually more of an applications engineering or sales support role). As for commuting, that's entirely based on where you choose to live. It's probably a problem in the Bay Area, but in most other places it's no more a problem for tech workers than everyone else. Every metro area has problems with commuting: people frequently live not that close to work, due either to housing prices or because they already had a house and happened to get a job on the other side of the city or something. This isn't unique to tech jobs, except maybe the Bay Area thing because that metro area is dominated by tech jobs. The problem with work/life balance in tech is working hours, and that's it. Tech workers are frequently expected to work too much, young males with no social lives are too often willing or able to dedicate too many hours to their jobs (thus making those who don't look bad), and as a result, people who value their free time (like, oh, women who tend to get pregnant and have children) don't do so well and get forced out. Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer here is. Flexible working hours aren't going to help a working mother much if she's still expected to put in 12 hour days. The only answer I see is eliminating the "exempt" status for tech workers and having them be paid hourly like factory workers. This of course has its own set of problems. But it's exactly what they do for, say, nurses, who are also professional workers who are usually college educated.