17 ms·

Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

46 points by teklaperry 10y ago

rarec 10y ago
Is it also possible that the men are usually being more aggressive towards getting more interesting work? After all, in their example the girls could've just told the guys no and came to an agreement instead of just accepting their lot.
- cowpewter 10y ago
  The problem with that is that once you do it a few times, you get a reputation as a "bitch". Assertive men are seen as a "leaders", assertive women are seen as "bitches".
  - SeanMGonzalez 10y ago
    As a leader you get criticized. When we're assertive, men are called assholes and women bitches. I think the difference is men tend not to care what they think and believe they're right, regardless. This is useful in that it lets you press on despite the adversity, but detrimental if there really is an issue. It's good that women listen better and are more aware than men of peoples' feedback, it makes them a different kind of leader. Perhaps we need corporate cultures that value listening more. We all have our strengths.
- sp332 10y ago
  Yes. That's the conclusion of Valerie Coffman, who works in the industry and read the study, at the end of the article.
franciscop 10y ago
So maybe the difference is in the behavior (learned). As the example suggests, men try to do what they do aggressively while women are not so aggressive. For men: understand that others should have fun, understand that women are more likely to be more passive and overcompensate for it. For women: let others know that brushing you off is not okay. Many do it without realizing it and most do it for both other men and women.
seany 10y ago
No. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... )
MattGrommes 10y ago
I think using the word 'fun' in this title is demeaning and misleading. Women aren't looking for fun, they're looking for meaningful, interesting work and are being denied it. (Obviously not all women, etc. etc.) I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opinions instead of her, even when she's leading the meeting. Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.
- rayiner 10y ago
  I don't think it's demeaning and misleading. Professionals--men and women--generally consider "meaningful, interesting work" to be the "fun" part of their jobs.
- heartbreak 10y ago
  The example seems like a problem that quiet people have. Not all women are quiet, and not all quiet people are women.
  - kilroy123 10y ago
    Was thinking the same. Lot's of introverted and shy men, deal with the same issues as well.
    - MattGrommes 10y ago
      As an introvert myself, I agree that there is a bias against quieter people but I think these are issues that some people _also_ face, not that it's one issue instead of the other.
  - zzalpha 10y ago
    Sure, but when you have a culture that punishes women for not being quiet by labeling them as aggressive, b*tchy, etc (after all, a certain presidential candidate often demeans his female opponent for "yelling" and so forth, despite that behaviour being perfectly acceptable in a man), you have now sown the seeds for gender bias.
tdfischer 10y ago
Women are leaving engineering because men don't want women to have fun. Who honestly thinks men having fun means women don't want it?
utternerd 10y ago
I question the method of this "study". I don't think it's a leap to say 40 undergrads writing in their journals is anecdote.
- MattGrommes 10y ago
  It's a very common methodology and it's hard to do sociological studies any other way really. They can't follow subjects around with cameras or something without creating a fake environment.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    That doesn't seem like an argument that the technique is valid
    - gravypod 10y ago
      I agree with you. The grandparent of this post is commuting an appeal to nature fallacy. Just because sociologists do it, doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do.
- sp332 10y ago
  Not every study is a double-blind random sample with statistical modeling and error bars.
  - buchanaf 10y ago
    Which also means not every study should be used to project its results over an entire population.
    - rquantz 10y ago
      You're maybe non familiar with qualitative research methods? A study like this can be used to discover the kinds of challenges that women face in engineering work environments. It would be a mistake to try to make quantitative claims about these results, but no one is doing that here.
snovv_crash 10y ago
Couldn't this come down more to men being conditioned to be more assertive and women being conditioned to de-escalate?
- sp332 10y ago
  That wouldn't explain why men were assigned different jobs than women. ...sexist infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling papers while their oftentimes less experienced male counterparts had legitimate “engineering” assignments.
  - loco5niner 10y ago
    Actually, it would. Example: "Hey boss, why wasn't I assigned to X project?" is something someone more assertive would say.
    - eevilspock 10y ago
      When women do that they get labeled "bitch".
      - loco5niner 10y ago
        Foul language aside, I believe it's possible to make my previously mentioned assertion in either an offensive, or a non-offensive manner.
    - sp332 10y ago
      If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with, that means the sexist behavior already happened. Women shouldn't have to play damage control constantly.
      - loco5niner 10y ago
        > If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with That is quite the assumption. What if we consider the possibility that they were initially given assignments equally? Then, because some pushed back more than others, they ended up getting better assignments the next time around (and the next, and the next).
Redoubts 10y ago
> Twenty percent of engineering graduates are women—but only 13 percent of the engineering workforce is female. >It’s not a pipeline issue Aren't women half the population? That still sounds like a pipeline issue.
- eevilspock 10y ago
  Not necessarily. It could be the experience of the 20% that leads to a whittling to 13% influences women to never enter the pipeline in the first place, which means the root problem isn't the pipeline but what lies at the end of it.
  - justaman 10y ago
    After half a decade in college you have women in their mid-twenties(optimum time for birth) finding themselves desiring children. Many individuals meet their S/O in college. It has been this way for many years. This many not account for the nearly 40% gap however it cannot be disregarded. >There was this one case where, in our design class, 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 in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop. This individual could have been more vocal about their disdain for the more "menial" tasks. Perhaps even taking a leadership role in the project. This requires an assertive attitude. Assertiveness generally is a masculine trait which can explain more than this article.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    The problem is it's self-reinforcing. When you have a gender imbalance of something like 10:1, everything bad that happens in the 1:1 case now happens ten times as often even if all the men behave exactly the same. A bad experience that would have occurred to 3.5% of women then occurs to 35%, assuming exactly identical behavior. And worse than that if the bad actors become more aggressive for lack of prospects. Which means you can't solve it there. You're not going to reduce the number of bad acts to 10% of the general-population level because the good methods of inhibiting bad acts are going to be widely deployed. You can't use them to get a relative advantage. Probably the only way to fix it is over-representation at the start of the pipeline. Make it so that 75% of high school seniors applying to CS programs are female so that by the time a third of them drop out the gender balance is right, and in ten or fifteen years that will no longer be necessary because then the gender balance at the end of the pipeline is fixed and the female dropout rate goes down.
sixhobbits 10y ago
I just heard another first hand account of a female computer science masters candidate dropping out shortly before completion due to sexual harassment from her supervisor and no support on the matter from the University. Interesting that the study focuses on the "fun" aspect while the journals themselves highlight unwanted advances and "creepiness" from males. There are many factors keeping women out of computer science, but rape culture seems to me to be the most serious and under-addressed one.
- DisposableMike 10y ago
  Unless your first hand account involves an actual rape, please leave the term 'rape culture' to situations involving actual rape. The linked story certainly didn't invoke any mentions of rapes occurring - why dilute a real problem with unrelated 'creepiness'? Secondly, females complaining about 'creepiness' is a difficult problem to quantify or solve, as females find attention from unattractive males 'creepy' regardless of their actual intentions.
  - dpark 10y ago
    I agree that the term "rape culture" is unhelpful. It's an extreme term that alienates people. When you equate undesired behavior to rape, you both trivialize rape and cause people engaging in the undesired behavior to disregard anything of substance you might say. When you call someone a rapist, they aren't going to listen to you when you try to explain why hitting on a 21-year-old coworker is inappropriate. I do not agree with your dismissiveness of female complaints about "creepiness". Solving "creepiness" is a hard problem, but not because women are bad at distinguishing between creepy guys and normal guys who happen to be unattractive. If you repeatedly hit on someone and fail to pick up on the social cues that say your advances are unwanted, you are a creepy person, regardless of whether you are unattractive or not. It is not reasonable to disregard the discomfort this causes the recipient of the unwanted attention. It is also not reasonable that the recipient should have to be blunt, abrasive, or combative to make the unwanted attention stop.
    - DisposableMike 10y ago
eevilspock 10y ago
Wow, the comments so far are so disappointing. (When I wrote this they are all completely dismissive of this study.)
- jdp23 10y ago
  The comments on any HN thread about barriers to gender equity in software engineering illustrate the barriers to gender equity in software engineering.
  - jarvic 10y ago
    Comments that take legitimate concerns with the merits of a particular study and dismiss them as misogyny don't add anything to the discussion either.
    - jdp23 10y ago
      Thanks for illustrating my point so nicely :) For one thing, rather than engaging with what I actually said, you inaccurately framed it as an accusation of misogyny. What other ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying? How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?
  - gravypod 10y ago
    Refute their claims, don't label them.
    - jdp23 10y ago
      Another fine example! In what ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying? How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  At the time of your comment, there were only three other comments in this thread. Two that were mildly dismissive, and one discussing "rape culture". Are you really disappointed about that dataset of three... or were you just racing to proactively get this comment in before the thread starts, and someone else beats you to it?
deleted 10y ago
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zeteo 10y ago
This is a very interesting article because it avoids the usual pitfalls of demography-based arguments. ("Group G is underrepresented in activity A. Therefore we should completely overhaul A with policy P, which appears to be pro-G. If you have any concerns about P it can only mean you're an anti-G bigot.") The article instead asks a novel question and leaves solutions open. How do tasks get divided among peer groups? It seems like people who are vulnerable to peer pressure (girls in engineering, in the examples here) are likely to get booted out of tasks they enjoy and relegated to routine chores instead. It's a testable hypothesis, it opens a new perspective, and if proven true it lends itself to very reasonable remedies for both employers (e.g. formalize the task assignment process) and the affected engineers (watch out and prepare to stand up to it if needed).
kogepathic 10y ago
My company has desperately tried to hire female candidates into our engineering team, which is currently all male. From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5% were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women, we have lots of guys fail it too!) So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked to thus far haven't made it onto the team. Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!
- MattGrommes 10y ago
  I don't know where you are but there are bound to be multiple woman-focused tech groups in your area. I'd encourage you to reach out specifically to those groups. A lot of times when companies can't find candidates who aren't the same as the rest of the company it's because they only use the same networks and resources that got the other employees in the first place.
  - kogepathic 10y ago
    I'm in Germany. If you're not in Berlin (which we are not) it's difficult to find female tech groups unless it's at a university.
    - err4nt 10y ago
      Start one! That's how all of them began :D
- nickparker 10y ago
  How does the top of your funnel work? I don't know how your organization does it, but the three worst companies I've worked in diversity-wise all recruited about the same way: Word of mouth and some weak outreach through the easiest channels ie craigslist and a careers page on their own poorly trafficked site. If your organization does on-campus recruiting, Society of Women Engineers and Women in Computing have well organized chapters at most tech schools, and simply telling them about your recruitment events can have a huge positive impact. I don't have much experience with this issue outside the academic world beyond its results at internships, but there might be similar options around for general recruitment.
paulus_magnus2 10y ago
Aren't women just not entering engineering because management is more fun and pays more??
ffn 10y ago
Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to "lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the wrong. Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them (the ones who dreamed of sexist careers like fashion designer, models, teachers, or most sexist of them all mothers) realize they really don't enjoy this work, there was never any "painful injustice" that needed their "sacrifice" to right, and that they've just been tricked by the popular political agenda. And, after effectively wasting a decade of their lives chasing careers that means nothing to them, they quit and actually go follow their dreams (instead of someone else's).
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  I doubt many women enter the field for some kind of social justice reason, how about we look at more likely explainations.
- curtis 10y ago
  I feel like maybe you are overstating the case, but I gave you an upvote anyway, since I think there is a case to be made along those lines. I upvoted the article as well, for similar reasons.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    What is the case to be made along those lines--a case based on evidence and not rank speculation? I loved building software. Like nearly everyone here on HN, I put up with the drudgery of debugging race conditions in other peoples' code in return for the opportunity to work on the fun parts. Why should we credit an argument that presupposes that women wouldn't feel the same way? In particular, why should we credit that argument over the article's argument: that women leave the profession in greater numbers because men give them more of the drudgery and less of the fun stuff?
- 10y ago
kmiroslav 10y ago
I've long thought that the best way to get more women into engineering is for parents of young girls to realize that they need to buy their daughters more engineering labs and electronic kits and fewer dolls.
hristov 10y ago
You want to know why women are trying to exit tech? -- read today's dilbert cartoon (Jun 17). In it Dilbert proudly proclaims that he does not take vacations and anyone that takes vacations is a loser with a bad career. This kind of shit is being constantly pushed on engineering employees. The only people that would willingly go for that are those with autism spectrum disorders and we all know that autism hits men more often. There some people that would go for that unwillingly (i.e., grudgingly) in a calculated bet to sacrifice their health for the sake of better career and better life later on, but those are also more likely to be men. Most women want to have children and they know that sacrificing your health affects the health of the children regardless of how good your career has gotten.
socrates1998 10y ago
I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out. If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue. The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't. And as time goes on, I think you will see this type of prejudice disappear. However, men and women and their differences will be around forever. There are clearly differences in how we think, act, behave and look. It's up for debate how much of this is cultural and how much is biological. So, I don't see this going away, maybe ever. Is there only 13% female engineers because men are sexist and treat them poorly? Or is it because men like math, science and engineering more than women? I was a high school math teacher. I did everything I could do encourage my strong female students to go into a STEM field. They were some of my strongest students, they worked hard, they were ambitious, but they just didn't want to do it. I have no idea why, but they didn't want to study any more math than they had to. On the opposite end, I had a few male students who weren't great (not even as good as a lot of the female students), yet they went on to study in a STEM field. Why? Because they really wanted to do it. They were drawn to it. This is all anecdotal, but there is something there when I saw the same issue play out in several of my classes. I even brought it up with my female math teachers and they saw the same problem. Girls just aren't interested in studying math and science in college at the same rate as boys.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  Lawyers and Doctors seem to be faring better than Programmers. "Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw.
  - nickparker 10y ago
    >"Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw. Absolutely this. I think a lot of educators today understand that they should encourage diverse students, but they still exhibit a variation on the old "X hours of homework isn't that bad" where they ignore that their class isn't your whole academic life. Socrates may be a fantastic ally himself, but it's very likely some of his students' other teachers aren't, so it's completely reasonable for them to fall out of STEM "despite the support."
mandeepj 10y ago
I am sharing this experience from my job during 2008. We tried to hire our first female engineer. She cleared all the interviews. We gave her a tour of our company and showed her future work location. At the end, she listed down few reasons and declined to join. I don't remember all the reasons she mentioned. Would you like to know what I remember? As I cannot forget this one. She said one of the reasons she can't join is - there is no other female. I wish someone told her - "you start from somewhere".
- guantanamo_bob 10y ago
  That's a fair point, but in an interview she's also assessing you. If she sees no other women working there, then it could be a red flag. From her perspective no other women could signal that all the other women left, or all other women interviewing noticed something bad that she missed.
  - mandeepj 10y ago
    May be I missed mentioning this. For whatever reason, we never had a female engineer in that company. Either too few applied or whoever applied did not made it to job offer.
sp332 10y ago
Oh no, they were tricked into a high-paying, in-demand career! What a disaster!
- dang 10y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855 and marked it off-topic.
ColinDabritz 10y ago
I appreciate insights and research like this. It seems clear to me that these issues are complex, multi-faceted, and often subtle. If they were obvious single issues they would be much easier to address. Figuring out hard to see sources of bias and discrimination make them easier to address. For my part, I'll try to consider fair distribution of both boring and fun tasks in groups when breaking down work.
balls187 10y ago
My wife, PhD in engineering, finds interesting and challenging work fun. Lucky for her, I guess, that she is usually the only one of her level of expertise at a company because no one else can typically do the work she is capable of.
cbanek 10y ago
I'm not sure this is actually a gender problem. I'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted. On the other side, usually when a manager wants to get rid of someone, they just give them the crap work. It doesn't matter if they are a man or woman. It's part of the process of showing "we don't like you, so start looking for a job."
- zzalpha 10y ago
  I'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted. Have you found you've needed to work harder to get noticed and promoted as compared to your male counterparts? As a man, I've certainly observed that among my female co-workers, but that's as an outsider looking in.
  - cbanek 10y ago
    For sure. Although I think again, it's mostly about people in the big companies fighting over each other for what management has allocated for raises and promotions. I've seen men duke it out as well. Overall I would agree it's a higher up-hill climb for women, but I think getting the crap work means you're generally a less valued employee (most likely some strong correlation there between being a woman, but not causation IMHO).
scythe 10y ago
Everybody's criticizing the study but nobody has actually linked to it and the link isn't in the article. What's up with that (and airline food)? http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178 http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178 The thing that really bugs me isn't that they read undergrad students' diaries, it's that they didn't quantify their findings in a way which could be represented in the abstract, which probably means they weren't quantified well at all. As such we're left with scare quotes (like the diary bits in the article) and the researchers' impression of their findings. This isn't an unfixable limitation -- one wonders, how much room is there for algorithmic natural language processing in the data analysis here?
LogicFailsMe 10y ago
My question: Are they exiting engineering because of brogrammers or are they becoming leaders because of their higher empathy?
fatdog 10y ago
Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general. Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort. Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people. Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak. A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity. Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she? Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes. The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.
- dpark 10y ago
  I've seen this argument before and it makes no sense. You're basically arguing that smart women recognize that engineering is a bad deal. Why do smart men not recognize the same? You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in any field in the US, because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long paternity leave, and many women choose not to have children anyway. So what exactly is it about engineering that makes it the smart move for women to leave the field but not men? Or what is it about women that makes them recognize that it's the smart move when men don't see it? I'm not saying that your assertion is strictly wrong, but I am saying it's not interesting. If women are leaving engineering because of entrenched sexism, that might well be the "smart move" for them. But this isn't a useful insight because the underlying problem remains the entrenched sexism.
deleted 10y ago
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rambos 10y ago
Sounds like a problem with leadership. Failure should result out of poor leadership in the end. On my team I don't care for your gender, your race, your culture or your social image. I only care that you can get the job done. If I know you can, then I'll give it to you. If I think it allows for time to learn, then I'll give it to the ones who need to grow. If you think you aren't given a chance, then speak up and I'll give you a shot at something. Poor leaders will deny those opportunities. But I believe that there is more good leadership as opposed to poor leadership in our industry, and that articles like this create misguided issues. Also, it is too easy for anyone to go and find another job; especially if they have talent. A full on exit means something else, something these articles haven't shown yet. For example, my last experience with this type of issue was with a coworker, a gay black male, who decided to quit in the middle of a project he was leading. He was falling way behind and presenting demos with bugs & poor functionality. All would've been fine and understandable if it weren't for the developer misleading the boss and stating that the project was on track and doing well. After continuous failure our boss eventually gave him extensions but was obviously was not happy about it. The boss began to put pressure on and keep a watchful eye over new commits. The senior ultimately chose not to continue and quit. On his way out he complained of bullying and not being appreciated. He declared that he was a senoir and should've been included in more decision making and that other senior developers were treated with higher favoritism because they got "cooler projects" and he did not. He was partly right, but only because he had not shown that he could get the work done, and rather shown quite the opposite. He had never proven his skills when given the chance. He faltered at all chances and yet still had some type of delusional self-entitlement. He left and his project was delivered 2 months late even after his poor code-base was heavily refactored by the next lead. I recently chatted him to ask how he was doing and he stated that his experience on our team and with our boss was so negative that he hasn't looked for a new job yet, and is even considering a career change. I agreed that he should do what is good for him, but only because I consciously knew he is in no place to be a senior developer in this industry (but he will never tell you that, and neither will any journalist trying to make a story out of it).
thescribe 10y ago
As someone who has had the statistically rare opportunity to be the only man on a software engineering team I can see this explanation reflects my experience. I took so many fewer days off than the team average that I tended to get assigned the most vital work.
punyearthling 10y ago
I might be over-simplifying, but isn't this the crux of the whole "lean-in" approach? Being more assertive in the workplace definitely helps you get more interesting and meaningful work.

46 points by teklaperry 10y ago

rarec 10y ago

Is it also possible that the men are usually being more aggressive towards getting more interesting work? After all, in their example the girls could've just told the guys no and came to an agreement instead of just accepting their lot.

cowpewter 10y ago
The problem with that is that once you do it a few times, you get a reputation as a "bitch". Assertive men are seen as a "leaders", assertive women are seen as "bitches".
- SeanMGonzalez 10y ago
  As a leader you get criticized. When we're assertive, men are called assholes and women bitches. I think the difference is men tend not to care what they think and believe they're right, regardless. This is useful in that it lets you press on despite the adversity, but detrimental if there really is an issue. It's good that women listen better and are more aware than men of peoples' feedback, it makes them a different kind of leader. Perhaps we need corporate cultures that value listening more. We all have our strengths.
sp332 10y ago
Yes. That's the conclusion of Valerie Coffman, who works in the industry and read the study, at the end of the article.

franciscop 10y ago

So maybe the difference is in the behavior (learned). As the example suggests, men try to do what they do aggressively while women are not so aggressive. For men: understand that others should have fun, understand that women are more likely to be more passive and overcompensate for it. For women: let others know that brushing you off is not okay. Many do it without realizing it and most do it for both other men and women.

seany 10y ago

No. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... )

MattGrommes 10y ago

I think using the word 'fun' in this title is demeaning and misleading. Women aren't looking for fun, they're looking for meaningful, interesting work and are being denied it. (Obviously not all women, etc. etc.) I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opinions instead of her, even when she's leading the meeting. Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.

rayiner 10y ago
I don't think it's demeaning and misleading. Professionals--men and women--generally consider "meaningful, interesting work" to be the "fun" part of their jobs.
heartbreak 10y ago
The example seems like a problem that quiet people have. Not all women are quiet, and not all quiet people are women.
- kilroy123 10y ago
  Was thinking the same. Lot's of introverted and shy men, deal with the same issues as well.
  - MattGrommes 10y ago
    As an introvert myself, I agree that there is a bias against quieter people but I think these are issues that some people _also_ face, not that it's one issue instead of the other.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  Sure, but when you have a culture that punishes women for not being quiet by labeling them as aggressive, b*tchy, etc (after all, a certain presidential candidate often demeans his female opponent for "yelling" and so forth, despite that behaviour being perfectly acceptable in a man), you have now sown the seeds for gender bias.

tdfischer 10y ago

Women are leaving engineering because men don't want women to have fun. Who honestly thinks men having fun means women don't want it?

utternerd 10y ago

I question the method of this "study". I don't think it's a leap to say 40 undergrads writing in their journals is anecdote.

MattGrommes 10y ago
It's a very common methodology and it's hard to do sociological studies any other way really. They can't follow subjects around with cameras or something without creating a fake environment.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  That doesn't seem like an argument that the technique is valid
  - gravypod 10y ago
    I agree with you. The grandparent of this post is commuting an appeal to nature fallacy. Just because sociologists do it, doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do.
sp332 10y ago
Not every study is a double-blind random sample with statistical modeling and error bars.
- buchanaf 10y ago
  Which also means not every study should be used to project its results over an entire population.
  - rquantz 10y ago
    You're maybe non familiar with qualitative research methods? A study like this can be used to discover the kinds of challenges that women face in engineering work environments. It would be a mistake to try to make quantitative claims about these results, but no one is doing that here.

snovv_crash 10y ago

Couldn't this come down more to men being conditioned to be more assertive and women being conditioned to de-escalate?

sp332 10y ago
That wouldn't explain why men were assigned different jobs than women. ...sexist infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling papers while their oftentimes less experienced male counterparts had legitimate “engineering” assignments.
- loco5niner 10y ago
  Actually, it would. Example: "Hey boss, why wasn't I assigned to X project?" is something someone more assertive would say.
  - eevilspock 10y ago
    When women do that they get labeled "bitch".
    - loco5niner 10y ago
      Foul language aside, I believe it's possible to make my previously mentioned assertion in either an offensive, or a non-offensive manner.
  - sp332 10y ago
    If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with, that means the sexist behavior already happened. Women shouldn't have to play damage control constantly.
    - loco5niner 10y ago
      > If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with That is quite the assumption. What if we consider the possibility that they were initially given assignments equally? Then, because some pushed back more than others, they ended up getting better assignments the next time around (and the next, and the next).

Redoubts 10y ago

> Twenty percent of engineering graduates are women—but only 13 percent of the engineering workforce is female. >It’s not a pipeline issue Aren't women half the population? That still sounds like a pipeline issue.

eevilspock 10y ago
Not necessarily. It could be the experience of the 20% that leads to a whittling to 13% influences women to never enter the pipeline in the first place, which means the root problem isn't the pipeline but what lies at the end of it.
- justaman 10y ago
  After half a decade in college you have women in their mid-twenties(optimum time for birth) finding themselves desiring children. Many individuals meet their S/O in college. It has been this way for many years. This many not account for the nearly 40% gap however it cannot be disregarded. >There was this one case where, in our design class, 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 in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop. This individual could have been more vocal about their disdain for the more "menial" tasks. Perhaps even taking a leadership role in the project. This requires an assertive attitude. Assertiveness generally is a masculine trait which can explain more than this article.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  The problem is it's self-reinforcing. When you have a gender imbalance of something like 10:1, everything bad that happens in the 1:1 case now happens ten times as often even if all the men behave exactly the same. A bad experience that would have occurred to 3.5% of women then occurs to 35%, assuming exactly identical behavior. And worse than that if the bad actors become more aggressive for lack of prospects. Which means you can't solve it there. You're not going to reduce the number of bad acts to 10% of the general-population level because the good methods of inhibiting bad acts are going to be widely deployed. You can't use them to get a relative advantage. Probably the only way to fix it is over-representation at the start of the pipeline. Make it so that 75% of high school seniors applying to CS programs are female so that by the time a third of them drop out the gender balance is right, and in ten or fifteen years that will no longer be necessary because then the gender balance at the end of the pipeline is fixed and the female dropout rate goes down.

sixhobbits 10y ago

I just heard another first hand account of a female computer science masters candidate dropping out shortly before completion due to sexual harassment from her supervisor and no support on the matter from the University. Interesting that the study focuses on the "fun" aspect while the journals themselves highlight unwanted advances and "creepiness" from males. There are many factors keeping women out of computer science, but rape culture seems to me to be the most serious and under-addressed one.

DisposableMike 10y ago
Unless your first hand account involves an actual rape, please leave the term 'rape culture' to situations involving actual rape. The linked story certainly didn't invoke any mentions of rapes occurring - why dilute a real problem with unrelated 'creepiness'? Secondly, females complaining about 'creepiness' is a difficult problem to quantify or solve, as females find attention from unattractive males 'creepy' regardless of their actual intentions.
- dpark 10y ago
  I agree that the term "rape culture" is unhelpful. It's an extreme term that alienates people. When you equate undesired behavior to rape, you both trivialize rape and cause people engaging in the undesired behavior to disregard anything of substance you might say. When you call someone a rapist, they aren't going to listen to you when you try to explain why hitting on a 21-year-old coworker is inappropriate. I do not agree with your dismissiveness of female complaints about "creepiness". Solving "creepiness" is a hard problem, but not because women are bad at distinguishing between creepy guys and normal guys who happen to be unattractive. If you repeatedly hit on someone and fail to pick up on the social cues that say your advances are unwanted, you are a creepy person, regardless of whether you are unattractive or not. It is not reasonable to disregard the discomfort this causes the recipient of the unwanted attention. It is also not reasonable that the recipient should have to be blunt, abrasive, or combative to make the unwanted attention stop.
  - DisposableMike 10y ago

eevilspock 10y ago

Wow, the comments so far are so disappointing. (When I wrote this they are all completely dismissive of this study.)

jdp23 10y ago
The comments on any HN thread about barriers to gender equity in software engineering illustrate the barriers to gender equity in software engineering.
- jarvic 10y ago
  Comments that take legitimate concerns with the merits of a particular study and dismiss them as misogyny don't add anything to the discussion either.
  - jdp23 10y ago
    Thanks for illustrating my point so nicely :) For one thing, rather than engaging with what I actually said, you inaccurately framed it as an accusation of misogyny. What other ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying? How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?
- gravypod 10y ago
  Refute their claims, don't label them.
  - jdp23 10y ago
    Another fine example! In what ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying? How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?
StevePerkins 10y ago
At the time of your comment, there were only three other comments in this thread. Two that were mildly dismissive, and one discussing "rape culture". Are you really disappointed about that dataset of three... or were you just racing to proactively get this comment in before the thread starts, and someone else beats you to it?

deleted 10y ago

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zeteo 10y ago

This is a very interesting article because it avoids the usual pitfalls of demography-based arguments. ("Group G is underrepresented in activity A. Therefore we should completely overhaul A with policy P, which appears to be pro-G. If you have any concerns about P it can only mean you're an anti-G bigot.") The article instead asks a novel question and leaves solutions open. How do tasks get divided among peer groups? It seems like people who are vulnerable to peer pressure (girls in engineering, in the examples here) are likely to get booted out of tasks they enjoy and relegated to routine chores instead. It's a testable hypothesis, it opens a new perspective, and if proven true it lends itself to very reasonable remedies for both employers (e.g. formalize the task assignment process) and the affected engineers (watch out and prepare to stand up to it if needed).

kogepathic 10y ago

My company has desperately tried to hire female candidates into our engineering team, which is currently all male. From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5% were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women, we have lots of guys fail it too!) So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked to thus far haven't made it onto the team. Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!

MattGrommes 10y ago
I don't know where you are but there are bound to be multiple woman-focused tech groups in your area. I'd encourage you to reach out specifically to those groups. A lot of times when companies can't find candidates who aren't the same as the rest of the company it's because they only use the same networks and resources that got the other employees in the first place.
- kogepathic 10y ago
  I'm in Germany. If you're not in Berlin (which we are not) it's difficult to find female tech groups unless it's at a university.
  - err4nt 10y ago
    Start one! That's how all of them began :D
nickparker 10y ago
How does the top of your funnel work? I don't know how your organization does it, but the three worst companies I've worked in diversity-wise all recruited about the same way: Word of mouth and some weak outreach through the easiest channels ie craigslist and a careers page on their own poorly trafficked site. If your organization does on-campus recruiting, Society of Women Engineers and Women in Computing have well organized chapters at most tech schools, and simply telling them about your recruitment events can have a huge positive impact. I don't have much experience with this issue outside the academic world beyond its results at internships, but there might be similar options around for general recruitment.

paulus_magnus2 10y ago

Aren't women just not entering engineering because management is more fun and pays more??

ffn 10y ago

Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to "lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the wrong. Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them (the ones who dreamed of sexist careers like fashion designer, models, teachers, or most sexist of them all mothers) realize they really don't enjoy this work, there was never any "painful injustice" that needed their "sacrifice" to right, and that they've just been tricked by the popular political agenda. And, after effectively wasting a decade of their lives chasing careers that means nothing to them, they quit and actually go follow their dreams (instead of someone else's).

throwaway2048 10y ago
I doubt many women enter the field for some kind of social justice reason, how about we look at more likely explainations.
curtis 10y ago
I feel like maybe you are overstating the case, but I gave you an upvote anyway, since I think there is a case to be made along those lines. I upvoted the article as well, for similar reasons.
- rayiner 10y ago
  What is the case to be made along those lines--a case based on evidence and not rank speculation? I loved building software. Like nearly everyone here on HN, I put up with the drudgery of debugging race conditions in other peoples' code in return for the opportunity to work on the fun parts. Why should we credit an argument that presupposes that women wouldn't feel the same way? In particular, why should we credit that argument over the article's argument: that women leave the profession in greater numbers because men give them more of the drudgery and less of the fun stuff?
10y ago

kmiroslav 10y ago

I've long thought that the best way to get more women into engineering is for parents of young girls to realize that they need to buy their daughters more engineering labs and electronic kits and fewer dolls.

hristov 10y ago

You want to know why women are trying to exit tech? -- read today's dilbert cartoon (Jun 17). In it Dilbert proudly proclaims that he does not take vacations and anyone that takes vacations is a loser with a bad career. This kind of shit is being constantly pushed on engineering employees. The only people that would willingly go for that are those with autism spectrum disorders and we all know that autism hits men more often. There some people that would go for that unwillingly (i.e., grudgingly) in a calculated bet to sacrifice their health for the sake of better career and better life later on, but those are also more likely to be men. Most women want to have children and they know that sacrificing your health affects the health of the children regardless of how good your career has gotten.

socrates1998 10y ago

I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out. If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue. The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't. And as time goes on, I think you will see this type of prejudice disappear. However, men and women and their differences will be around forever. There are clearly differences in how we think, act, behave and look. It's up for debate how much of this is cultural and how much is biological. So, I don't see this going away, maybe ever. Is there only 13% female engineers because men are sexist and treat them poorly? Or is it because men like math, science and engineering more than women? I was a high school math teacher. I did everything I could do encourage my strong female students to go into a STEM field. They were some of my strongest students, they worked hard, they were ambitious, but they just didn't want to do it. I have no idea why, but they didn't want to study any more math than they had to. On the opposite end, I had a few male students who weren't great (not even as good as a lot of the female students), yet they went on to study in a STEM field. Why? Because they really wanted to do it. They were drawn to it. This is all anecdotal, but there is something there when I saw the same issue play out in several of my classes. I even brought it up with my female math teachers and they saw the same problem. Girls just aren't interested in studying math and science in college at the same rate as boys.

RodericDay 10y ago
Lawyers and Doctors seem to be faring better than Programmers. "Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw.
- nickparker 10y ago
  >"Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw. Absolutely this. I think a lot of educators today understand that they should encourage diverse students, but they still exhibit a variation on the old "X hours of homework isn't that bad" where they ignore that their class isn't your whole academic life. Socrates may be a fantastic ally himself, but it's very likely some of his students' other teachers aren't, so it's completely reasonable for them to fall out of STEM "despite the support."

mandeepj 10y ago

I am sharing this experience from my job during 2008. We tried to hire our first female engineer. She cleared all the interviews. We gave her a tour of our company and showed her future work location. At the end, she listed down few reasons and declined to join. I don't remember all the reasons she mentioned. Would you like to know what I remember? As I cannot forget this one. She said one of the reasons she can't join is - there is no other female. I wish someone told her - "you start from somewhere".

guantanamo_bob 10y ago
That's a fair point, but in an interview she's also assessing you. If she sees no other women working there, then it could be a red flag. From her perspective no other women could signal that all the other women left, or all other women interviewing noticed something bad that she missed.
- mandeepj 10y ago
  May be I missed mentioning this. For whatever reason, we never had a female engineer in that company. Either too few applied or whoever applied did not made it to job offer.

sp332 10y ago

Oh no, they were tricked into a high-paying, in-demand career! What a disaster!

dang 10y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855 and marked it off-topic.

ColinDabritz 10y ago

I appreciate insights and research like this. It seems clear to me that these issues are complex, multi-faceted, and often subtle. If they were obvious single issues they would be much easier to address. Figuring out hard to see sources of bias and discrimination make them easier to address. For my part, I'll try to consider fair distribution of both boring and fun tasks in groups when breaking down work.

balls187 10y ago

My wife, PhD in engineering, finds interesting and challenging work fun. Lucky for her, I guess, that she is usually the only one of her level of expertise at a company because no one else can typically do the work she is capable of.

cbanek 10y ago

I'm not sure this is actually a gender problem. I'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted. On the other side, usually when a manager wants to get rid of someone, they just give them the crap work. It doesn't matter if they are a man or woman. It's part of the process of showing "we don't like you, so start looking for a job."

zzalpha 10y ago
I'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted. Have you found you've needed to work harder to get noticed and promoted as compared to your male counterparts? As a man, I've certainly observed that among my female co-workers, but that's as an outsider looking in.
- cbanek 10y ago
  For sure. Although I think again, it's mostly about people in the big companies fighting over each other for what management has allocated for raises and promotions. I've seen men duke it out as well. Overall I would agree it's a higher up-hill climb for women, but I think getting the crap work means you're generally a less valued employee (most likely some strong correlation there between being a woman, but not causation IMHO).

scythe 10y ago

Everybody's criticizing the study but nobody has actually linked to it and the link isn't in the article. What's up with that (and airline food)? http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178 http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178 The thing that really bugs me isn't that they read undergrad students' diaries, it's that they didn't quantify their findings in a way which could be represented in the abstract, which probably means they weren't quantified well at all. As such we're left with scare quotes (like the diary bits in the article) and the researchers' impression of their findings. This isn't an unfixable limitation -- one wonders, how much room is there for algorithmic natural language processing in the data analysis here?

LogicFailsMe 10y ago

My question: Are they exiting engineering because of brogrammers or are they becoming leaders because of their higher empathy?

fatdog 10y ago

Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general. Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort. Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people. Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak. A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity. Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she? Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes. The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.

dpark 10y ago
I've seen this argument before and it makes no sense. You're basically arguing that smart women recognize that engineering is a bad deal. Why do smart men not recognize the same? You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in any field in the US, because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long paternity leave, and many women choose not to have children anyway. So what exactly is it about engineering that makes it the smart move for women to leave the field but not men? Or what is it about women that makes them recognize that it's the smart move when men don't see it? I'm not saying that your assertion is strictly wrong, but I am saying it's not interesting. If women are leaving engineering because of entrenched sexism, that might well be the "smart move" for them. But this isn't a useful insight because the underlying problem remains the entrenched sexism.

deleted 10y ago

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rambos 10y ago

Sounds like a problem with leadership. Failure should result out of poor leadership in the end. On my team I don't care for your gender, your race, your culture or your social image. I only care that you can get the job done. If I know you can, then I'll give it to you. If I think it allows for time to learn, then I'll give it to the ones who need to grow. If you think you aren't given a chance, then speak up and I'll give you a shot at something. Poor leaders will deny those opportunities. But I believe that there is more good leadership as opposed to poor leadership in our industry, and that articles like this create misguided issues. Also, it is too easy for anyone to go and find another job; especially if they have talent. A full on exit means something else, something these articles haven't shown yet. For example, my last experience with this type of issue was with a coworker, a gay black male, who decided to quit in the middle of a project he was leading. He was falling way behind and presenting demos with bugs & poor functionality. All would've been fine and understandable if it weren't for the developer misleading the boss and stating that the project was on track and doing well. After continuous failure our boss eventually gave him extensions but was obviously was not happy about it. The boss began to put pressure on and keep a watchful eye over new commits. The senior ultimately chose not to continue and quit. On his way out he complained of bullying and not being appreciated. He declared that he was a senoir and should've been included in more decision making and that other senior developers were treated with higher favoritism because they got "cooler projects" and he did not. He was partly right, but only because he had not shown that he could get the work done, and rather shown quite the opposite. He had never proven his skills when given the chance. He faltered at all chances and yet still had some type of delusional self-entitlement. He left and his project was delivered 2 months late even after his poor code-base was heavily refactored by the next lead. I recently chatted him to ask how he was doing and he stated that his experience on our team and with our boss was so negative that he hasn't looked for a new job yet, and is even considering a career change. I agreed that he should do what is good for him, but only because I consciously knew he is in no place to be a senior developer in this industry (but he will never tell you that, and neither will any journalist trying to make a story out of it).

thescribe 10y ago

As someone who has had the statistically rare opportunity to be the only man on a software engineering team I can see this explanation reflects my experience. I took so many fewer days off than the team average that I tended to get assigned the most vital work.

punyearthling 10y ago

I might be over-simplifying, but isn't this the crux of the whole "lean-in" approach? Being more assertive in the workplace definitely helps you get more interesting and meaningful work.