7 ms·

Indians of Asian descent are a minority in the US, but well represented in Software Engineering. Further, there are plenty more Indian, Chinese, and Russian fem

Indians of Asian descent are a minority in the US, but well represented in Software Engineering. Further, there are plenty more Indian, Chinese, and Russian female engineers, than there are American (of european, aka White) female engineers. I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.

Manishearth 10y ago
This addresses a straw man; nobody is saying that there is systemic bias against _all_ minorities, just some. This in particular is the concept of a "model minority". Culture difference cannot explain why women are not well represented in tech. Culture difference can be a part of systemic bias, anyway. Let's say you have some programming job. The interviews focus on questions about frobbing linked lists (which is often the case). Now, it turns out that people from demographic A are more likely to focus on these questions when practicing for interviews, whereas demographic B focuses on honing the skill set they need for the actual job (algorithmy linked list stuff may not be necessary at all!). You'd say that it's not possible for /culture/ to change how you study. There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills. This stems from the general culture of finding and using a formulaic method of succeeding at academics. I don't like this culture (it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic), and always have spoken out against it, but it's there. But, you say, that's a different country, what about a minority demographic within the same country? Firstly, minorities more often than not are segregated into their own communities (socially, if not physically) due to various voluntary and involuntary reasons, and the effect can be the same as being in a different country (albeit milder). Now realize that an interviewer will probably design questions around the kind that they are used to and that they (and their peers) would do well with. This is an unconscious bias -- interview questions are more often than not tests of how similar you are to the (often non-diverse) peer group of the interviewer, and not actually a test of how good you are as a candidate. This is an association fallacy, "all people like my peer group are good programmers, hence all good programmers are like my peer group". Of course, interviewing is often about avoiding bad programmers much more than it is about hiring good ones -- generally folks are okay with accidentally not hiring a good programmer, but want to avoid hiring a bad one at all costs. Thus tweaking your interview process to target a subset of the set of all good programmers isn't that bad, is it? Except that this targeting carries an unconscious bias inside it, and unfairly ends up disproportionately excluding minorities. If you're going to use a process prone to false negatives on purpose, be damn sure that the likelihood of someone being a false negative is in no way correlated with the demographic they are from. You may not have designed the process with this correlation in mind (hence, "unconscious bias"), but this bias is still there. ----- And it doesn't have to be culture differences. You have a lot of other behavioral differences due to economic status or demographic which are unconsciously excluded in interviews. E.g. women are less likely to apply for jobs where they do not have all the listed qualifications, but men are very likely to apply, and get hired, because not all the qualifications were necessary anyway. The fix here is to be clear on what you absolutely need in a candidate, and what would be "nice to have". And it doesn't have to be behavioral differences either. Sometimes it has to do with defining your inputs. Many companies focus on hiring from a set of people which itself is biased. It can be by hiring only from certain colleges (and then inexplicably whining about the "pipeline" -- you chose the pipeline!). It can be from having unconscious or conscious discrimination against autodidacts. Or code bootcamp folks. If you restrict your inputs to an already biased source, you will get biased results. There are tons and tons of articles and papers out there about this. These aren't unknown effects. They're well established. None of this is on purpose, of course (at least, I hope it isn't!). But it's still a bias, even if it's unconscious. And the onus is on the creators of the bias to fix it. There are a million reasons out there why various demographics aren't well-represented in tech. It's just lazy to blame it on the demographics and say "it's cultural differences" without realizing the mistakes made by tech cos in making culture a factor in the first place.
- balls187 10y ago
  > This addresses a straw man; nobody is saying that there is systemic bias against _all_ minorities, just some. What bias occurs against my [Filipino,Vietnamese,Thai,Malaysian,Pakistani...] brothers, that doesn't also apply towards me, an Indian? > There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills...it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic. What about American CS Students, who presumably don't have a "teach to the test" based education system? They are well represented in tech. I'm going with Google here. It's a pipeline issue. Fewer folks that pursue degrees in tech, fewer applicants in the pool.
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    > What bias occurs against my [Filipino,Vietnamese,Thai,Malaysian,Pakistani...] brothers, that doesn't also apply towards me, an Indian? > What about American CS Students, who presumably don't have a "teach to the test" based education system? They are well represented in tech. I gave the "teach to the test" example as an example of how culture affects tech interviews and why that's a problem on the interviewer's side, not as a specific example of why Indians do well in the U.S.. Nor was it a litmus test for "people who will do well in interviews", because many other factors contribute. Though "teach to the test" is probably a part of why Indians do well. In my comment above I explained the mechanism by which the majority white-male-american tech industry unconsciously ends up crafting interviews where white-male-americans will do better. It wasn't about giving an exhaustive set of reasons as to why each demographic does the way it does. But if you want examples, just google "pipeline problem tech" and you'll get more than enough examples in the hundreds of articles out there about why the "pipeline" is a red herring, often with examples as to why various interview practices (or other practices) end up excluding demographics. I gave one example about women, and below I talk a bit more about "choosing the pipeline", but I'm not going to start a discussion where I give an example of systemic bias for/against one group and you ask why it doesn't apply to another group ad infinitum. These biases are complex, intertwined, and not always tangible. There is a simple mechanism as to how they appear, and lots of evidence that they exist (interviewing.io itself has done some of research on this by running voice modulation etc on their platform, but there's plenty more research otherwise too), independently of the pipeline. Edit: I guess an example that folks might find easier to understand is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12860397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12860397 , it's an unconscious bias against self taught people. Most self taught people are pretty picky in what they actually do, because they're often doing it for fun. On the other hand, if you are a CS student, you will learn whatever is taught in colleges, and follow what your peers do (e.g. practice coding puzzles for interviews). So a self taught person may not be great at coding puzzles because that's not an actual skill that they've ever needed when coding for fun, whereas CS students tend to be competent with these. I know many autodidacts who have had issues with this but are otherwise great programmers. I myself am self taught, and while I did practice coding puzzles, I have felt such biases too. > Fewer folks that pursue degrees in tech, fewer applicants in the pool. ... > degrees in tech and here it is again, you're choosing your pipeline. I just talked about that. There are plenty of autodidacts out there. Plenty of folks (often from a lower income background who cannot afford college, or be able to juggle college and work) who go to coding bootcamps. Plenty of folks who do go to college, but go to less prestigious ones because they can't afford it or they have to go to college near their holes (and they have less mobility because of job/family to support/whatever). Again, there are articles all over the internet about this. I recall reading about companies which target historically black colleges in their interview process. They don't quota it or otherwise disallow people from interviewing with them; they just go to the colleges for campus interviews. No different from other companies who go to Stanford for campus interviews.
pj_mukh 10y ago
That's because Indian (particularly) men consider engineering to be a safe choice (source: am Indian). Anecdotally, speaking to women (esp American), they find engineering to be categorically unsafe from a career progress perspective. You may not 'see' the bias, but they definitely feel it. The effect is measurable. I am no expert, maybe it has something to do with maternity leave regimes or the interviews (like OP mentions)?
- mark-r 10y ago
  My wife worked as a programmer for a while. There were two aspects that drove her out. First was the cliquey nature of the guys she worked with, she just felt like she didn't fit in. Second was the rate of change, just as she felt like she mastered something the new flavor of the month would take hold and she had to start over.
  - facepalm 10y ago
    What is she doing instead now?
    - mark-r 10y ago
      When our first child was born she decided to take a sideline sales business and make it full time, working from home. She does very well, in her peak year she made more than I did.
  - dozzie 10y ago
    A man would feel unfit in exactly the same way when put into an environment composed of mostly women (e.g. teacher in ground education). No surprise here. Then, your wife must have worked with dynamic web pages (a.k.a. web applications), probably frontend, to have that tool churn. Other areas don't change that quickly and even then new tool allows to use most of the past experience.
- balls187 10y ago
  My wife is white, PhD in engineering. She choose the field because that is what she was excited about and wanted to study. Still works in Tech. Is a mother. Not so great maternity benefits though.
stanleydrew 10y ago
> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not. This reveals a complete misunderstanding of how "systemic bias" occurs and persists. [Edited with further thoughts] "Cultural differences" don't just appear out of nowhere. Culture itself is an amalgamation of different human experiences that have combined and recombined over tens of thousands of years. It's not static. The things you deem "cultural differences" have many causes, and "differences" can and do change all the time. When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation. "Systemic bias" may or may not exist in this case, but if you think cultural differences themselves can't lead to systemic bias then you are mistaken.
- elgenie 10y ago
  The reason this comment is getting downvoted is not because it's (necessarily) incorrect, but because saying only "You just don't get it" in fancier words contributes neither to understanding nor to the discussion.
- anon2986 10y ago
  Summarize: So American women are raised includes a systemic bias that we don't see in other cultures.
- balls187 10y ago
  What bias exists that targets women, and minorities, but doesn't also target Indian, Chinese, and Russian woman, and Indian and Chinese men[1]? > When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation. Except the article (and conversation) isn't about cultural differences, but instead about "diversity problem[s in tech]" and in this case, how the technical interview unfairly penalizes underrepresented groups. 1: I believe that in general, Caucasian Russian males can be safely lumped into the "white male" category that dominates the tech industry.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rhizome 10y ago
Are you saying that cultural differences can't be explained by systemic biases? Systemic bias may be the cultural difference, and in this context appears redundant.
- balls187 10y ago
  As asked elsewhere--what systemic bias exists that targets certain women (white, black, mexican), but not women of other races (particularly Chinese, Indian and Russian)? Perhaps instead, it's because schools (government?) in Russia, India, and China have emphasized Computer Science, and produce higher number of female grads. Anecdotally, I attended a tiny engineering school in the midwest, and pretty much all the grad students were international students--women from India and China.
  - kolokolo 10y ago
    TIL Russian women are not white.
    - dijit 10y ago
      Some are, some aren't. Russia is big. Also, we take it to mean that he's talking about traditionally western culture, Russia doesn't have a western culture.
    - pluma 10y ago
      Newsflash: "race" is a bullshit concept that's a leaky abstraction on top of "ethnicities" at best (which is in turn a leaky abstraction on top of genetics and ancestry).
  - rhizome 10y ago
    what systemic bias exists that targets certain women (white, black, mexican), but not women of other races (particularly Chinese, Indian and Russian)? Well, from what GP said, it may be attributable to the culture itself: "a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not." Which is to equate (or conflate) systemic bias and cultural difference. In other words, it sounds to me like, "it's not systemic bias, prejudice just comes from people doing the things." It's just a simple substitution, because "systemic" refers to a system, not an overarching one, so while we may not be able to ascribe these tendencies in The Technology Sector (or similar large group), systems have subsystems (a la culture vs. subculture), and it may be that those are where bias becomes encoded.
T2_t2 10y ago
> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not. And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE. When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks. Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a Norwegian documentary on this, in 8 parts, and it is well worth a watch.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- minikites 10y ago
  > they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions Oh? Which ones are those? There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men, for example. The shift happened because computer programming turned a corner and became prestigious, at which point it became "stereotypically male", and the pattern of "stereotypically male" = prestigious holds through a number of professions. Men are doctors while women are nurses. Men are professors while women are primary school teachers. You can't just look at the present, you have to look at past shifts in employment demographics and "prestige" explains a lot more than "some genders just intrinsically desire certain kinds of work" (which, just to ensure my point is clear, is bullshit).
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men // Can you cite a good source for this. I'm concerned it might be confusing the job called "programmer" with the role we now call programmer. AIUI in the early days of computers a "programmer" was a sort of typist that took a written program and punched the cards that allowed the program to be entered in to a computer, the technical tasks of algorithm design, program construction and such were generally not done by these same people. That aside, I'm not sure it matters: why aren't there more female top chefs? It's certainly not because women don't like to cook. I posit that it's because in general they care less about being competitive and prefer to avoid high-stress situations. Do you consider that testosterone is inert? It's mood and mind altering and men have lots of it. Denying the basic biological differences between the sexes is a dangerous axiom on which to attempt to create a stable and fair society. Men, as an example, undergo hormonal changes when they become parents. These changes lead to greater tendencies towards nurturing behaviours, tendencies that female ordinarily possess by default and which make men and women naturally suitable for different societal and occupational roles. It makes a lot of sense for humans to be hormonally perturbed towards preference and ability at different roles -- why we are fighting against that rather than embracing it is well beyond my ken.
avasylev 10y ago
I have the same conclusion. The pipeline problem cited in the article is real problem, imho all the diversity efforts have to be directed at schools and parents. This is were the decision is made for college. After that you can't do much. My team is mostly male, we'd be happy to hire female developer, I think being a female would actually help to pass interview. But the resumes we see are all male, with very rare exceptions. My analogy for the situation are as with seeds, if you only planted "potatos" in spring, there's not much you can do in autumn to get more "tomatos". (hope this is not offensive analogy in anyway, English is not my native language) Situation with lack of female developers is not US-specific. I went to college in Ukraine, of ~100 sudents on computer science faculty, less than 10 were woman.
avasylev 10y ago
The fact that there're more Russian/Indian woman I think is because they are from immigrant families where husband is a developer. I'm developer and I met my wife at work back in Ukraine. But if you look % of woman developers in Ukraine, it's the same as in US. A lot of my friends taught their wifes to become QA\developers after they moved to US and wife's profession didn't transfer to US well. Imho, entering IT is not that hard even without prevous experience, you do need to put hours to learn/practice, but unlike many other professions you can do that by just sitting at home and spending couple hundreds on books/video courses.
pasquinelli 10y ago
why? why should you be more inclined to think the explanation is found in a pertinent cultural difference between two large groups of people, (asian women, non-asian women) rather than that the explanation is to be found in the culture of one, small group, (tech)? maybe you're right, but i don't understand the inclination.

Manishearth 10y ago

This addresses a straw man; nobody is saying that there is systemic bias against _all_ minorities, just some. This in particular is the concept of a "model minority". Culture difference cannot explain why women are not well represented in tech. Culture difference can be a part of systemic bias, anyway. Let's say you have some programming job. The interviews focus on questions about frobbing linked lists (which is often the case). Now, it turns out that people from demographic A are more likely to focus on these questions when practicing for interviews, whereas demographic B focuses on honing the skill set they need for the actual job (algorithmy linked list stuff may not be necessary at all!). You'd say that it's not possible for /culture/ to change how you study. There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills. This stems from the general culture of finding and using a formulaic method of succeeding at academics. I don't like this culture (it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic), and always have spoken out against it, but it's there. But, you say, that's a different country, what about a minority demographic within the same country? Firstly, minorities more often than not are segregated into their own communities (socially, if not physically) due to various voluntary and involuntary reasons, and the effect can be the same as being in a different country (albeit milder). Now realize that an interviewer will probably design questions around the kind that they are used to and that they (and their peers) would do well with. This is an unconscious bias -- interview questions are more often than not tests of how similar you are to the (often non-diverse) peer group of the interviewer, and not actually a test of how good you are as a candidate. This is an association fallacy, "all people like my peer group are good programmers, hence all good programmers are like my peer group". Of course, interviewing is often about avoiding bad programmers much more than it is about hiring good ones -- generally folks are okay with accidentally not hiring a good programmer, but want to avoid hiring a bad one at all costs. Thus tweaking your interview process to target a subset of the set of all good programmers isn't that bad, is it? Except that this targeting carries an unconscious bias inside it, and unfairly ends up disproportionately excluding minorities. If you're going to use a process prone to false negatives on purpose, be damn sure that the likelihood of someone being a false negative is in no way correlated with the demographic they are from. You may not have designed the process with this correlation in mind (hence, "unconscious bias"), but this bias is still there. ----- And it doesn't have to be culture differences. You have a lot of other behavioral differences due to economic status or demographic which are unconsciously excluded in interviews. E.g. women are less likely to apply for jobs where they do not have all the listed qualifications, but men are very likely to apply, and get hired, because not all the qualifications were necessary anyway. The fix here is to be clear on what you absolutely need in a candidate, and what would be "nice to have". And it doesn't have to be behavioral differences either. Sometimes it has to do with defining your inputs. Many companies focus on hiring from a set of people which itself is biased. It can be by hiring only from certain colleges (and then inexplicably whining about the "pipeline" -- you chose the pipeline!). It can be from having unconscious or conscious discrimination against autodidacts. Or code bootcamp folks. If you restrict your inputs to an already biased source, you will get biased results. There are tons and tons of articles and papers out there about this. These aren't unknown effects. They're well established. None of this is on purpose, of course (at least, I hope it isn't!). But it's still a bias, even if it's unconscious. And the onus is on the creators of the bias to fix it. There are a million reasons out there why various demographics aren't well-represented in tech. It's just lazy to blame it on the demographics and say "it's cultural differences" without realizing the mistakes made by tech cos in making culture a factor in the first place.

balls187 10y ago
> This addresses a straw man; nobody is saying that there is systemic bias against _all_ minorities, just some. What bias occurs against my [Filipino,Vietnamese,Thai,Malaysian,Pakistani...] brothers, that doesn't also apply towards me, an Indian? > There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills...it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic. What about American CS Students, who presumably don't have a "teach to the test" based education system? They are well represented in tech. I'm going with Google here. It's a pipeline issue. Fewer folks that pursue degrees in tech, fewer applicants in the pool.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  > What bias occurs against my [Filipino,Vietnamese,Thai,Malaysian,Pakistani...] brothers, that doesn't also apply towards me, an Indian? > What about American CS Students, who presumably don't have a "teach to the test" based education system? They are well represented in tech. I gave the "teach to the test" example as an example of how culture affects tech interviews and why that's a problem on the interviewer's side, not as a specific example of why Indians do well in the U.S.. Nor was it a litmus test for "people who will do well in interviews", because many other factors contribute. Though "teach to the test" is probably a part of why Indians do well. In my comment above I explained the mechanism by which the majority white-male-american tech industry unconsciously ends up crafting interviews where white-male-americans will do better. It wasn't about giving an exhaustive set of reasons as to why each demographic does the way it does. But if you want examples, just google "pipeline problem tech" and you'll get more than enough examples in the hundreds of articles out there about why the "pipeline" is a red herring, often with examples as to why various interview practices (or other practices) end up excluding demographics. I gave one example about women, and below I talk a bit more about "choosing the pipeline", but I'm not going to start a discussion where I give an example of systemic bias for/against one group and you ask why it doesn't apply to another group ad infinitum. These biases are complex, intertwined, and not always tangible. There is a simple mechanism as to how they appear, and lots of evidence that they exist (interviewing.io itself has done some of research on this by running voice modulation etc on their platform, but there's plenty more research otherwise too), independently of the pipeline. Edit: I guess an example that folks might find easier to understand is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12860397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12860397 , it's an unconscious bias against self taught people. Most self taught people are pretty picky in what they actually do, because they're often doing it for fun. On the other hand, if you are a CS student, you will learn whatever is taught in colleges, and follow what your peers do (e.g. practice coding puzzles for interviews). So a self taught person may not be great at coding puzzles because that's not an actual skill that they've ever needed when coding for fun, whereas CS students tend to be competent with these. I know many autodidacts who have had issues with this but are otherwise great programmers. I myself am self taught, and while I did practice coding puzzles, I have felt such biases too. > Fewer folks that pursue degrees in tech, fewer applicants in the pool. ... > degrees in tech and here it is again, you're choosing your pipeline. I just talked about that. There are plenty of autodidacts out there. Plenty of folks (often from a lower income background who cannot afford college, or be able to juggle college and work) who go to coding bootcamps. Plenty of folks who do go to college, but go to less prestigious ones because they can't afford it or they have to go to college near their holes (and they have less mobility because of job/family to support/whatever). Again, there are articles all over the internet about this. I recall reading about companies which target historically black colleges in their interview process. They don't quota it or otherwise disallow people from interviewing with them; they just go to the colleges for campus interviews. No different from other companies who go to Stanford for campus interviews.

pj_mukh 10y ago

That's because Indian (particularly) men consider engineering to be a safe choice (source: am Indian). Anecdotally, speaking to women (esp American), they find engineering to be categorically unsafe from a career progress perspective. You may not 'see' the bias, but they definitely feel it. The effect is measurable. I am no expert, maybe it has something to do with maternity leave regimes or the interviews (like OP mentions)?

mark-r 10y ago
My wife worked as a programmer for a while. There were two aspects that drove her out. First was the cliquey nature of the guys she worked with, she just felt like she didn't fit in. Second was the rate of change, just as she felt like she mastered something the new flavor of the month would take hold and she had to start over.
- facepalm 10y ago
  What is she doing instead now?
  - mark-r 10y ago
    When our first child was born she decided to take a sideline sales business and make it full time, working from home. She does very well, in her peak year she made more than I did.
- dozzie 10y ago
  A man would feel unfit in exactly the same way when put into an environment composed of mostly women (e.g. teacher in ground education). No surprise here. Then, your wife must have worked with dynamic web pages (a.k.a. web applications), probably frontend, to have that tool churn. Other areas don't change that quickly and even then new tool allows to use most of the past experience.
balls187 10y ago
My wife is white, PhD in engineering. She choose the field because that is what she was excited about and wanted to study. Still works in Tech. Is a mother. Not so great maternity benefits though.

stanleydrew 10y ago

> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not. This reveals a complete misunderstanding of how "systemic bias" occurs and persists. [Edited with further thoughts] "Cultural differences" don't just appear out of nowhere. Culture itself is an amalgamation of different human experiences that have combined and recombined over tens of thousands of years. It's not static. The things you deem "cultural differences" have many causes, and "differences" can and do change all the time. When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation. "Systemic bias" may or may not exist in this case, but if you think cultural differences themselves can't lead to systemic bias then you are mistaken.

elgenie 10y ago
The reason this comment is getting downvoted is not because it's (necessarily) incorrect, but because saying only "You just don't get it" in fancier words contributes neither to understanding nor to the discussion.
anon2986 10y ago
Summarize: So American women are raised includes a systemic bias that we don't see in other cultures.
balls187 10y ago
What bias exists that targets women, and minorities, but doesn't also target Indian, Chinese, and Russian woman, and Indian and Chinese men[1]? > When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation. Except the article (and conversation) isn't about cultural differences, but instead about "diversity problem[s in tech]" and in this case, how the technical interview unfairly penalizes underrepresented groups. 1: I believe that in general, Caucasian Russian males can be safely lumped into the "white male" category that dominates the tech industry.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rhizome 10y ago

Are you saying that cultural differences can't be explained by systemic biases? Systemic bias may be the cultural difference, and in this context appears redundant.

balls187 10y ago
As asked elsewhere--what systemic bias exists that targets certain women (white, black, mexican), but not women of other races (particularly Chinese, Indian and Russian)? Perhaps instead, it's because schools (government?) in Russia, India, and China have emphasized Computer Science, and produce higher number of female grads. Anecdotally, I attended a tiny engineering school in the midwest, and pretty much all the grad students were international students--women from India and China.
- kolokolo 10y ago
  TIL Russian women are not white.
  - dijit 10y ago
    Some are, some aren't. Russia is big. Also, we take it to mean that he's talking about traditionally western culture, Russia doesn't have a western culture.
  - pluma 10y ago
    Newsflash: "race" is a bullshit concept that's a leaky abstraction on top of "ethnicities" at best (which is in turn a leaky abstraction on top of genetics and ancestry).
- rhizome 10y ago
  what systemic bias exists that targets certain women (white, black, mexican), but not women of other races (particularly Chinese, Indian and Russian)? Well, from what GP said, it may be attributable to the culture itself: "a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not." Which is to equate (or conflate) systemic bias and cultural difference. In other words, it sounds to me like, "it's not systemic bias, prejudice just comes from people doing the things." It's just a simple substitution, because "systemic" refers to a system, not an overarching one, so while we may not be able to ascribe these tendencies in The Technology Sector (or similar large group), systems have subsystems (a la culture vs. subculture), and it may be that those are where bias becomes encoded.

T2_t2 10y ago

> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not. And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE. When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks. Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a Norwegian documentary on this, in 8 parts, and it is well worth a watch.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
minikites 10y ago
> they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions Oh? Which ones are those? There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men, for example. The shift happened because computer programming turned a corner and became prestigious, at which point it became "stereotypically male", and the pattern of "stereotypically male" = prestigious holds through a number of professions. Men are doctors while women are nurses. Men are professors while women are primary school teachers. You can't just look at the present, you have to look at past shifts in employment demographics and "prestige" explains a lot more than "some genders just intrinsically desire certain kinds of work" (which, just to ensure my point is clear, is bullshit).
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  >There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men // Can you cite a good source for this. I'm concerned it might be confusing the job called "programmer" with the role we now call programmer. AIUI in the early days of computers a "programmer" was a sort of typist that took a written program and punched the cards that allowed the program to be entered in to a computer, the technical tasks of algorithm design, program construction and such were generally not done by these same people. That aside, I'm not sure it matters: why aren't there more female top chefs? It's certainly not because women don't like to cook. I posit that it's because in general they care less about being competitive and prefer to avoid high-stress situations. Do you consider that testosterone is inert? It's mood and mind altering and men have lots of it. Denying the basic biological differences between the sexes is a dangerous axiom on which to attempt to create a stable and fair society. Men, as an example, undergo hormonal changes when they become parents. These changes lead to greater tendencies towards nurturing behaviours, tendencies that female ordinarily possess by default and which make men and women naturally suitable for different societal and occupational roles. It makes a lot of sense for humans to be hormonally perturbed towards preference and ability at different roles -- why we are fighting against that rather than embracing it is well beyond my ken.

avasylev 10y ago

I have the same conclusion. The pipeline problem cited in the article is real problem, imho all the diversity efforts have to be directed at schools and parents. This is were the decision is made for college. After that you can't do much. My team is mostly male, we'd be happy to hire female developer, I think being a female would actually help to pass interview. But the resumes we see are all male, with very rare exceptions. My analogy for the situation are as with seeds, if you only planted "potatos" in spring, there's not much you can do in autumn to get more "tomatos". (hope this is not offensive analogy in anyway, English is not my native language) Situation with lack of female developers is not US-specific. I went to college in Ukraine, of ~100 sudents on computer science faculty, less than 10 were woman.

avasylev 10y ago

The fact that there're more Russian/Indian woman I think is because they are from immigrant families where husband is a developer. I'm developer and I met my wife at work back in Ukraine. But if you look % of woman developers in Ukraine, it's the same as in US. A lot of my friends taught their wifes to become QA\developers after they moved to US and wife's profession didn't transfer to US well. Imho, entering IT is not that hard even without prevous experience, you do need to put hours to learn/practice, but unlike many other professions you can do that by just sitting at home and spending couple hundreds on books/video courses.

pasquinelli 10y ago

why? why should you be more inclined to think the explanation is found in a pertinent cultural difference between two large groups of people, (asian women, non-asian women) rather than that the explanation is to be found in the culture of one, small group, (tech)? maybe you're right, but i don't understand the inclination.