4 ms·

On Ada Lovelace Day, how diverse are tech companies?

20 points by jscholes 10y ago

eveningcoffee 10y ago
When I first saw a first computer I knew that I want to know more about these mysterious machines. I still remember the joy and happiness on a day of the first snow when I realized what the double for cycle does. I think I was 13 then. I also remember the passion in reading the only accessible book about object oriented programming in C++. My passion became my profession and therefore it is hard for me to relate with this dance around the diversity. People should do what they feel passionate about regardless of their gender (or skin color or other nonsense there is possible to come up with). Everything else is a moot point. It still does not follow that we should not make something more accessible for anyone, or that we should tolerate a discrimination. But if people do not share the passion then for me it does not matter what special body parts they have or have not, there is no place in my heart for them.
- amelius 10y ago
  > People should do what they feel passionate about regardless of their gender (or skin color or other nonsense there is possible to come up with). Everything else is a moot point. Yes. This is why I believe children should be raised in a gender-neutral way. It helps in steering clear of premature expectations.
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    And I am afraid that it is quite hard to do alone within a single family if for example some of opinions are programmed in the school.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    Setting premature expectations seems orthogonal to me than gender neutrality. As in, it can be as well a product of being in a successful lawyer/engineer/politicians family than gender by itself and generally more a result of parent projections than gender determinism. edit: see also this comment about Ada parents https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683739
- code_sardaukar 10y ago
  People will tell you that believing that it's possible that interest in tech is correlated with gender. However I would point out "Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers"[0] which gives evidence that a different field (law) is a meritocracy and women's relatively poor outcomes in terms of promotion, are caused by their relatively lower focus on their careers. [0] www.econ.upf.edu/~rferrer/files/PAPER.pdf
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    The question is, is this lower focus caused by their natural disabilities compared to the men. If yes, then as society we may consider to compensate for this by some measure such that they could be able to focus. For example make can take up more responsibilities for the child care or we can arrange this more collectively if this is found to be the cause.
- pyrophane 10y ago
  What are you referring to when you say "double for cycle?"
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    for i=1,10 do for j=1,10 do print(i,j) end end but in BASIC at that time.
    - pyrophane 10y ago
      Thank you. That is what I thought you were referring to but I hadn't heard it referred to in that way, so I thought it might be some wonderful thing I hadn't even heard of ;)
- superphat 10y ago
  > It still does not follow that we should not make something more accessible for anyone, or that we should tolerate a discrimination. To me, not making the effort to make this industry more accessible for those who are underrepresented is itself discrimination, even if a mild, unconscious form. Your story of passion naturally leading to a fulfilling career is wonderful, and I want that for anyone. I don't think the onus of fostering passion is only on the family, but it comes in large part from societies expectations of gender roles. That is why I believe we can't have enough efforts to make tech more accessible, even if those efforts seem contrived.
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    Well, there are plenty of jobs that mostly men are wanting to do and jobs that mostly women are wanting to do. In some cases raising the pay would do the trick, in other cases improving the work conditions would do the trick. Neither of these does not seem to be applicable here. I do not think that we should make something more accessible (at the expense of the other) for someone just because of some reason they are just under presented at the moment. CS industry should be accessible for everyone. For two above solutions everyone would win potentially. What would be the solution for the CS industry with the similar outcome?
- bbctol 10y ago
  I'm confused... do you think that people of different genders and skin colors are less likely to share your passion? If not, then what's the point of this post?
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    The point was that if there isn't any yellow transgender Martian wanting to work in Microsoft then ratio of them working in Microsoft is nonsensible. But if they exists and are not working in Microsoft then they must exists somewhere else in large numbers. This also does not appear to be the case. So perhaps it would be then smarter to move closer to the source and hope that this would help somehow. I know that Musk is working hard on this, so perhaps the others could meantime figure out how to make more children passionate about CS and tech sector in general (that is regardless of their gender)?
peruvian 10y ago
An interesting tidbit is that Ada's mother "forced" (maybe too strong a word, but obsessively encouraged her) to study the opposite of what Lord Byron did (poetry, arts) in fear that Ada would turn out like him and thus she studied mathematics and logic.
- atom-morgan 10y ago
  A good point you bring up. Similar to Ada's mother, a lot of Asian parents are very involved with their child's academics and often push their kids towards studying STEM. Yet, even as a minority in America, Asians are never included in discussions related to diversity and inclusion within tech - and it isn't because this point is addressed. If we're going to attempt to find the root cause of why there may be a disparity in tech, race or gender, what good does it do to ignore the differences in upbringing?
  - ttflee 10y ago
    “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” - John Adams (1735 - 1826)
    - jarmitage 10y ago
      No one needs to be given the right to study music.
retox 10y ago
On Tuesday, how diverse are garbage/sewer workers?
- xienze 10y ago
  Ahh they don't care about the dirty jobs. It's OK for men to dominate those fields. A better example would be teachers. Female dominated, and there's some half-hearted "concern" about the gender imbalance, but get back to me when the media and the president are harping on the issue constantly.
- bbctol 10y ago
  I'm confused as to why you think Hacker News would have a front page article on garbage workers. There are large gender gaps in waste management, as there are in programming, and there are initiatives to reduce those gaps, including action by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding illegal discrimination against women in the field.
apsec112 10y ago
This problem cannot be fixed by changing hiring policy or corporate diversity training. 18% of computer science graduates are women. If women are 18% of programmers, then arithmetic dictates that most software companies cannot reach gender parity. If one company has more than 18%, another company has to have less than 18%. It's just simple math. I applaud companies who try to increase the diversity of people learning computer science. But they cannot, by changing internal policy, reach gender parity - not without making some other company even more male-dominated. It is pointless and counter-productive to continually whack Google and Facebook over the head for their inability to make two plus two equal five.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  But they can still point to other companies and call the names. :)
- VLM 10y ago
  That assumes a perfect 1:1 mapping of grads to employees, and careers are lifetime. It would be pretty easy to downsize every white man at 30 for ageism reasons yet keep women and minorities around until retirement as diversity hires thus "fixing" the problem. Also assumes the purpose of the original story was as stated on the surface, not just to enforce prevailing politics in a preaching to the choir sense (we should all feel and share the white mans burden, etc). We don't hire (mostly white male) mechanical engineers to work on assembly lines although I'm sure corporations would enjoy that caliber of employee if they could get it, which they can't, so their assembly lines demographically look a lot more like the local neighborhood and relatively few bolt tighteners are good at differential equations or finite element analysis, although that doesn't affect productivity at all so its OK. Likewise to write boilerplate CRUD apps we traditionally hire grads with extreme levels of higher math and exotic upper level CS education because we have a huge surplus of those sort of people (who are mostly white men), although in practice there is no need and random laborer off the street is both semi-realistic and demographically more like the rest of society.
- Uehreka 10y ago
  Not all tech workers are programmers, not all programmers have CS degrees. This problem cannot be boiled down to such a simple metric. I've talked to a number of women in my office, almost all of whom have expressed that they felt like they had to overcome obstacles while growing up as a woman who was interested in technology. That when they made mistakes, they were told "maybe you should do something else" while their male counterparts were told "just try again, I'm sure you'll get it!" This may not be something Google, Facebook or Apple can unilaterally fix. We need to fix society, and that starts with privileged people simply accepting that this is a problem, even if it doesn't have a simple solution (although donating to organizations like BlackGirlsCode and GirlDevelopIt can certainly help). With that out of the way, there are real problems that women and minorities face in the workplace when diversity is ignored: abuse, harassment, being passed over for promotion in favor of less qualified white men. When the workplace is composed of 90% white men, they get to set the norms of behavior and culture. If they do so without thinking about the other 10%, they will hurt and eventually lose most of those people. When they get to the point where their workplace is 99% white and male, they may muse "hmm, I guess women and minorities just aren't that interested in tech." Someone may inevitably ask me: "alright smartypants, what are these 'white male behaviors' we're so guilty of?" To be honest, I'm not the one you need to hear it from. You need to talk to women and underrepresented minorities in your life about their experiences in the workplace (in tech or in other fields). If you don't know many women or minorities in white collar fields, and (this is very important) you're willing to patiently listen without butting in, I recommend following ericajoy and jennschiffer on twitter.

20 points by jscholes 10y ago

When I first saw a first computer I knew that I want to know more about these mysterious machines. I still remember the joy and happiness on a day of the first snow when I realized what the double for cycle does. I think I was 13 then. I also remember the passion in reading the only accessible book about object oriented programming in C++. My passion became my profession and therefore it is hard for me to relate with this dance around the diversity. People should do what they feel passionate about regardless of their gender (or skin color or other nonsense there is possible to come up with). Everything else is a moot point. It still does not follow that we should not make something more accessible for anyone, or that we should tolerate a discrimination. But if people do not share the passion then for me it does not matter what special body parts they have or have not, there is no place in my heart for them.

amelius 10y ago
> People should do what they feel passionate about regardless of their gender (or skin color or other nonsense there is possible to come up with). Everything else is a moot point. Yes. This is why I believe children should be raised in a gender-neutral way. It helps in steering clear of premature expectations.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  And I am afraid that it is quite hard to do alone within a single family if for example some of opinions are programmed in the school.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  Setting premature expectations seems orthogonal to me than gender neutrality. As in, it can be as well a product of being in a successful lawyer/engineer/politicians family than gender by itself and generally more a result of parent projections than gender determinism. edit: see also this comment about Ada parents https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683739
code_sardaukar 10y ago
People will tell you that believing that it's possible that interest in tech is correlated with gender. However I would point out "Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers"[0] which gives evidence that a different field (law) is a meritocracy and women's relatively poor outcomes in terms of promotion, are caused by their relatively lower focus on their careers. [0] www.econ.upf.edu/~rferrer/files/PAPER.pdf
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  The question is, is this lower focus caused by their natural disabilities compared to the men. If yes, then as society we may consider to compensate for this by some measure such that they could be able to focus. For example make can take up more responsibilities for the child care or we can arrange this more collectively if this is found to be the cause.
pyrophane 10y ago
What are you referring to when you say "double for cycle?"
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  for i=1,10 do for j=1,10 do print(i,j) end end but in BASIC at that time.
  - pyrophane 10y ago
    Thank you. That is what I thought you were referring to but I hadn't heard it referred to in that way, so I thought it might be some wonderful thing I hadn't even heard of ;)
superphat 10y ago
> It still does not follow that we should not make something more accessible for anyone, or that we should tolerate a discrimination. To me, not making the effort to make this industry more accessible for those who are underrepresented is itself discrimination, even if a mild, unconscious form. Your story of passion naturally leading to a fulfilling career is wonderful, and I want that for anyone. I don't think the onus of fostering passion is only on the family, but it comes in large part from societies expectations of gender roles. That is why I believe we can't have enough efforts to make tech more accessible, even if those efforts seem contrived.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  Well, there are plenty of jobs that mostly men are wanting to do and jobs that mostly women are wanting to do. In some cases raising the pay would do the trick, in other cases improving the work conditions would do the trick. Neither of these does not seem to be applicable here. I do not think that we should make something more accessible (at the expense of the other) for someone just because of some reason they are just under presented at the moment. CS industry should be accessible for everyone. For two above solutions everyone would win potentially. What would be the solution for the CS industry with the similar outcome?
bbctol 10y ago
I'm confused... do you think that people of different genders and skin colors are less likely to share your passion? If not, then what's the point of this post?
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  The point was that if there isn't any yellow transgender Martian wanting to work in Microsoft then ratio of them working in Microsoft is nonsensible. But if they exists and are not working in Microsoft then they must exists somewhere else in large numbers. This also does not appear to be the case. So perhaps it would be then smarter to move closer to the source and hope that this would help somehow. I know that Musk is working hard on this, so perhaps the others could meantime figure out how to make more children passionate about CS and tech sector in general (that is regardless of their gender)?

peruvian 10y ago

An interesting tidbit is that Ada's mother "forced" (maybe too strong a word, but obsessively encouraged her) to study the opposite of what Lord Byron did (poetry, arts) in fear that Ada would turn out like him and thus she studied mathematics and logic.

atom-morgan 10y ago
A good point you bring up. Similar to Ada's mother, a lot of Asian parents are very involved with their child's academics and often push their kids towards studying STEM. Yet, even as a minority in America, Asians are never included in discussions related to diversity and inclusion within tech - and it isn't because this point is addressed. If we're going to attempt to find the root cause of why there may be a disparity in tech, race or gender, what good does it do to ignore the differences in upbringing?
- ttflee 10y ago
  “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” - John Adams (1735 - 1826)
  - jarmitage 10y ago
    No one needs to be given the right to study music.

retox 10y ago

On Tuesday, how diverse are garbage/sewer workers?

xienze 10y ago
Ahh they don't care about the dirty jobs. It's OK for men to dominate those fields. A better example would be teachers. Female dominated, and there's some half-hearted "concern" about the gender imbalance, but get back to me when the media and the president are harping on the issue constantly.
bbctol 10y ago
I'm confused as to why you think Hacker News would have a front page article on garbage workers. There are large gender gaps in waste management, as there are in programming, and there are initiatives to reduce those gaps, including action by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding illegal discrimination against women in the field.

apsec112 10y ago

This problem cannot be fixed by changing hiring policy or corporate diversity training. 18% of computer science graduates are women. If women are 18% of programmers, then arithmetic dictates that most software companies cannot reach gender parity. If one company has more than 18%, another company has to have less than 18%. It's just simple math. I applaud companies who try to increase the diversity of people learning computer science. But they cannot, by changing internal policy, reach gender parity - not without making some other company even more male-dominated. It is pointless and counter-productive to continually whack Google and Facebook over the head for their inability to make two plus two equal five.

eveningcoffee 10y ago
But they can still point to other companies and call the names. :)
VLM 10y ago
That assumes a perfect 1:1 mapping of grads to employees, and careers are lifetime. It would be pretty easy to downsize every white man at 30 for ageism reasons yet keep women and minorities around until retirement as diversity hires thus "fixing" the problem. Also assumes the purpose of the original story was as stated on the surface, not just to enforce prevailing politics in a preaching to the choir sense (we should all feel and share the white mans burden, etc). We don't hire (mostly white male) mechanical engineers to work on assembly lines although I'm sure corporations would enjoy that caliber of employee if they could get it, which they can't, so their assembly lines demographically look a lot more like the local neighborhood and relatively few bolt tighteners are good at differential equations or finite element analysis, although that doesn't affect productivity at all so its OK. Likewise to write boilerplate CRUD apps we traditionally hire grads with extreme levels of higher math and exotic upper level CS education because we have a huge surplus of those sort of people (who are mostly white men), although in practice there is no need and random laborer off the street is both semi-realistic and demographically more like the rest of society.
Uehreka 10y ago
Not all tech workers are programmers, not all programmers have CS degrees. This problem cannot be boiled down to such a simple metric. I've talked to a number of women in my office, almost all of whom have expressed that they felt like they had to overcome obstacles while growing up as a woman who was interested in technology. That when they made mistakes, they were told "maybe you should do something else" while their male counterparts were told "just try again, I'm sure you'll get it!" This may not be something Google, Facebook or Apple can unilaterally fix. We need to fix society, and that starts with privileged people simply accepting that this is a problem, even if it doesn't have a simple solution (although donating to organizations like BlackGirlsCode and GirlDevelopIt can certainly help). With that out of the way, there are real problems that women and minorities face in the workplace when diversity is ignored: abuse, harassment, being passed over for promotion in favor of less qualified white men. When the workplace is composed of 90% white men, they get to set the norms of behavior and culture. If they do so without thinking about the other 10%, they will hurt and eventually lose most of those people. When they get to the point where their workplace is 99% white and male, they may muse "hmm, I guess women and minorities just aren't that interested in tech." Someone may inevitably ask me: "alright smartypants, what are these 'white male behaviors' we're so guilty of?" To be honest, I'm not the one you need to hear it from. You need to talk to women and underrepresented minorities in your life about their experiences in the workplace (in tech or in other fields). If you don't know many women or minorities in white collar fields, and (this is very important) you're willing to patiently listen without butting in, I recommend following ericajoy and jennschiffer on twitter.