5 ms·

The Real Reason Women Quit Tech (and How to Address It) (2016)

39 points by j_s 10y ago

PaulHoule 10y ago
"Lack of opportunities for advancement" is a problem for tech workers, Male or Female. Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises. If you are a programmer/IT person at many organizations, you might find that your organization has advancement paths for (say) salespeople, geospatial analysts, librarians, etc. but no paths for technical people.
- pyvpx 10y ago
  Interesting. Now that I think about it, every single one of my networking and/or sysadmin friends have realized significant upward mobility in the past decade. any of my programming friends have either gone freelance or simply changed employers for pay increases. Are there any public statistics on this?
  - mason240 10y ago
    Being a programmer is a lot more like skilled blue collar job such being a plumber or an electrician than we like to admit. What kind of career advancement do those fields have? Pretty close to what we have. Maybe you supervise/manage a group less experienced tradesmen. Maybe you open your own small business or go freelance. The result is the same ceiling where real, continual advancement is on the business management side.
    - buckbova 10y ago
      Exactly. When I read that in the article I was stunned. It used to be pretty standard it'd take 5+ years to make a senior engineer role, another 1 or 2 for a lead, and even more for architect which can be a slightly different path. > A study by the Center for Talent Innovation found that 27% of women in tech feel stalled in their careers and 32% are likely to quit within one year; 48% of Black women in tech feel stalled. One year?! I've been out of school for over 15 years and most of the time moving sideways. You've got to put in the time and effort. For most a senior role is all they'll achieve (or want).
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Some relevant numbers: one of the article's statistics is that of American women in science, engineering, and tech, 27% feel stalled and 32% are likely to quit within a year. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are higher than the male numbers, but I'm disappointed the source doesn't have any male numbers. It's pretty well established that software companies are bad offering raises that match job-change gains, and consequently have lots of turnover. I'd love to know what that that produces across genders in terms of feeling stalled or odds or quitting.
- emddudley 10y ago
  Don't get raises? What do you mean? Are you referring to non-technology companies? I'm curious if there are any numbers out there on the senior-to-junior salary ratio for various professions, corrected for time. I wonder which professions have the lowest and highest salary increase rates, and the mean time to hitting the salary ceiling for a profession.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    In years when I stay with my current company, I barely get a COLA raise of around 2%. When I switch companies, even involuntarily, I can often get an immediate 10% to 20% gain over my previous pay. This tells me that my employers do not look at current market rates when adjusting employee pay rates. There are detailed survey data regarding actuary pay scales at https://www.dwsimpson.com/salary https://www.dwsimpson.com/salary . It looks like they start lower than software pros, but grow faster and top out higher (everywhere outside of Silicon Valley).
- hamstercat 10y ago
  It may be location-dependent. Here in Canada, I know that dev salary increase a little less than two-fold between the time you get hired after school and whenever you get to 7-10 years of experience. Of course, one needs to change job a few times as raises within a company rarely increases that much. Starting salary is also a lot lower when freshly out of school here than what you could get in SV.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises. That's not as big of a problem as it sounds. Starting your career making lots of money is better than starting with lower pay and getting raises along the way, even if your end salary in the latter scenario ends up being higher (to a point). The reason is simple: compound interest. If you start off with $100k you can start saving (and investing) much earlier. In contrast, making a lot of money later in your career isn't as helpful. Of course, this only tackles the financial aspect. I think career advancement is important for psychological reasons as well, such as feeling fulfilled.
devnull42 10y ago
Wow this has been the opposite of my experience. I have seen many cases where women are fast tracked or given more opportunities as engineers because of diversity programs. There was one case where a female engineer got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman and they didn’t want the appearance of underpaying a female engineer, meanwhile I am 16% below company median for my position.
- buro9 10y ago
  Two things: > got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman Really? Do you ever consider that when non-women who are given more opportunities it is because they are men? White? Tall? Are not bald? Have good teeth? If that doesn't run through your mind, please don't suggest that anyone not a cis-male only gets there to meet the criteria of a diversity program. > meanwhile I am below company median The thing with medians is that half of the company will be below that point. If everyone were on the median, then everyone is receiving precisely the same salary.
  - edoceo 10y ago
    What is "cis-male"?
    - cholantesh 10y ago
      The cis- prefix denotes that the person's gender identification aligns with their biological sex.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - devnull42 10y ago
    > got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman >>Really? Yes really. She said that there was a meeting where a manager actually made a comment about underpaying her because she was a women then they immediately freaked out. >>anyone not a cis-male only gets there to meet the criteria of a diversity program. As far as this goes there was a specific initiative that was in place to cater linux to women and we were told to interview and hire them. After hiring many of these candidates and having pretty bad results we had to stop giving that program preferential treatment. Also for the record my friend who I referred to with the pay discrepancy was a fantastic engineer who was not hired through that program and she hated the program because it tried to make linux all girlie which she found offensive and demeaning.
startupdiscuss 10y ago
It would be interesting to know if these issues (lack of advancement opportunity, voice not heard, poor assignment, personality perceptions) are exclusive to technology or if they also occur in, for instance, finance and medicine. This would be informative because it would tell us if tech is doing something uniquely discouraging, or if there is a wider problem.
- moomin 10y ago
  Broadly, the answer is: they're not exclusive, but tech is particularly bad. Probably because tech has mythologised itself in a very male-normative manner.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    This seems pretty oversimplified? Especially when the point was comparison to finance and medicine, which have similarly male-normative histories. A few decades ago medicine was at least as male-normative as tech; culture said nurses were female and doctors were male and that was that. But med school matriculants are ~48% female at this point. Some specialties are way more than half female, while others remain large-majority male. Meanwhile, finance has hardly budged at all. There's clearly something to learn here, and I think we're losing insight by just saying "tech is particularly bad" without actually trying to investigate.
    - EduardoBautista 10y ago
      Not only that, nurses are still overwhelmingly female, that hasn't changed by much.
    - clay_to_n 10y ago
      Tech has been getting consistently worse in the last 20 years. As far as I know, that is _not_ true of finance or medicine. So we have a unique problem.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  The tech/medicine question is a really interesting one. A lot of the issues cited in software engineering, from initial male-dominance to long hours to rudeness from superiors, are overwhelmingly present for doctors. (As are a lot of the upsides, like high initial salary.) And yet new doctors are almost 50% female - though the question becomes much messier if you break down by speciality. Clearly the unpleasance of med school isn't driving women out, but there are massive gender gaps in specialties like surgery. I don't have any conclusions here; I just wish people would make these comparisons more often before diagnosing issues as either universal or tech-specific. edit: "More than" to "almost" - I had seen non-American statistics.
edoceo 10y ago
Please also read the Part 1 of her article about "bullshit diversity programs". Startup CEOs should read both, twice
buckbova 10y ago
"On the surface, mentorship seems like it could be a good way to help people advance their careers, but the data shows this is only true for men, because mentors provide different things for men than for women." How dare you suggest men and women are different.
- simonh 10y ago
  >> mentors provide different things for men than for women That's about men and women being treated differently, not being different themselves which is a separate issue.
- potluckyears 10y ago
  That statement didn't seem to be implying that men and women are different, but rather that men and women are treated differently by mentors -- specifically, that mentors are more likely to "endorse" men, and more likely to tell women how to improve. Immediately following that sentence the article says: > A study of 4,000 women and men who graduated from top MBA programs (surveyed in 2008 and again in 2010) found that when women receive mentorship, it’s advice on how they should change and gain more self-knowledge. When men receive mentorship, it’s public endorsement of their authority and concrete steps to take charge and make career moves. [...] Men who received mentorship were statistically more likely to be promoted, but that was not true for women who were mentored.
JamesBarney 10y ago
I think that diversity is an important goal that we should strive for in tech. I also loved that the author included actionable advice we can all take to improve the impact of our female colleagues. But I didn't like how the article bounces around a lot citing different studies without explaining why each study is relevant. For instance the first citation about how the #1 reason women leave their jobs is lack of career advancement opportunities. Well from that study(a linked in survey) the #1 reason men left their jobs was the same reason. The big difference between the 2 was men were much less likely to cite culture as a reason for switching jobs. Then later cites a study showing how Latina women are paid less than white men. Which seems like a weird comparison, maybe the author had a good reason, but she doesn't explain why Latina women vs white men is the appropriate comparison and not all men vs women, or Latina women vs Latino men.(I suspect was this was the way to find the greatest discrepancy because Latino men were the most underpaid of anyone except Latina women.) These strange comparisons and citations are pretty common in the article and set off my alarm bells that the author is using studies more for support than illumination. And while most of us agree we need to get more women into tech (not just for women's sake but because I think it would benefit tech greatly). And precisely because it's important we need to be careful that we spend time, money and effort in the right places on the right things, and don't jump to conclusions blowing it on interventions that aren't impactful.
- braveo 10y ago
  This was basically my read of it as well, I actually stopped reading right after the latina woman vs white male comparison for the very reasons you laid out.
- watwut 10y ago
  "The big difference between the 2 was men were much less likely to cite culture as a reason for switching jobs." That makes sense to me. Bad culture is more damaging to people who have bias against them - or just those who "think" there might be bias against them so they leave proactively (even when there is no bias). As in, most workplaces are not sexist, but the workplaces who are sexist will have more women then men leaving because of culture. Bias in tech is against women, not against men (I would assume it to be opposite in traditionally female fields.)
jlos 10y ago
Whats frustrating about these analysis is they ignore the reality of children and family life. The bias' mentioned, which are appear real and well evidenced, are secondary and complicating factors to the general problem of adapting family life to an urban, specialized economies. Prior to the 1900's the largest companies in the world were only a few hundred employees and over 50% of the population farmed. That meant a significant amount of the economic activity occurred in family run farms and business where all family members worked together. The trend towards men working outside the home and women staying at home was a somewhat unique phenomena in the 20th century and in some ways-not all-a natural progression since manual labor jobs favor men. While bias are real and need to be dealt with, I think attributing everything to them does little to solve the real challenge of how to harmonize specialized technical work, which at the current scale is unique to our time period, for large corporations, which did not exist prior to the 20th century, with the demands and realities of family life. Having kids below the age of schooling is a unique time and one that many very competent women are not willing to sacrifice for career advancement. And since there is almost no part-time work for STEM careers, this has the effect of limiting career advancement for those women who choose to prioritize family life and may also account for the perceptions that create the types of bias' listed in the article. I don't think theres an easy solution, and maybe not one at all, but without considering the very real component of family these types of accounts fall short.
- sharemywin 10y ago
  except a lot of women are delaying families.
  - xyzzyz 10y ago
    Sure, and there's also a lot of data suggesting that young women are paid as much if not more than young men, see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-earn-more-men-same-age-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
  - magic_beans 10y ago
    What exactly does "a lot" mean?
sharemywin 10y ago
I've seen many women(programmers) go into project management and fly up the ranks. To get an architect or other higher level senior technical title male or female requires a devotion to pedantic study that few people desire to pursue(usually with marginal monetary value).
ameister14 10y ago
I know this is a huge problem, but I really dislike how this article is built on a house of cards, reference-wise. Almost none of the statements are backed up by viewable primary sources.
- waynecolvin 10y ago
  If they misrepresent their arguements there must be a motive.
jpeg_hero 10y ago
> Listen closely at meetings, and repeat unacknowledged good ideas, giving the person who first had the idea credit. yeah? is this really a good thing? getting idea credit in meetings?
- buckbova 10y ago
  I honestly try to do this all the time, but mostly for those who are less vocal, the quiet ones. I tend to be on the other end of the spectrum, so if I never shut up at least I'm throwing someone else a bone in the process.
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  Yes, it really is a generally good thing for all humans. Everyone responds generally positively for being recognized for whatever their contributions are. Even if the ideas aren't particularly amazing, there's something pretty powerful in general human interactions that happens when you make a point of noting people's ideas, and making correct attribution. This may be somewhat of a learned skill. In practical terms, it's as easy as a summation of ideas thrown out--e.g., "Bob has suggested we take a better look at X. Sue's thinking we ought to consider Y." Some time later, when another person offers up an idea, there's a different relational outcome between saying, "Oh, nice idea, John"--while Sue is thinking, That's an awfully lot like my idea from a couple weeks ago--and saying, "Oh, hey, that sounds a lot like Sue's idea from a couple weeks ago, but with a little twist." Sue's going to respond positively because you're acknowledging her idea. John's going to respond positively because you're doing the same for her. Now both of them may be encouraged to work together on it. There's also a funny thing about us humans in that the same ideas and thoughts can hit us differently at different times. Making a point of tracking (mentally or otherwise) people's contributions to an organization isn't something that is likely to ever be a bad idea.
rogerdickey 10y ago
Why does HN love click bait so much?
msimpson 10y ago
> A study of 4,000 women who had recently changed jobs found that the #1 reason women leave companies is because of “a concern for the lack of advancement opportunity.” The same study which found that men leave companies for the exact same reason? Meaning there is no inequality in the lack of advancement opportunities ...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Mz 10y ago
I think trust and effective communication are the root cause of a lot of these problems. Articles like this one rarely address that piece at all. I talk about it on my blog, * but my writing isn't exactly getting millions of page views. I find it frustrating. * Such as: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zone.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zon...
- j_s 10y ago
  Shortcut to HN discussion of Mz's "The Gray Zone": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7407280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7407280 (3 years ago) Yowzers! Not really sure what else to say, I can see why HN avoids these types of discussions.
  - Mz 10y ago
    That was three years ago. I was actually pretty pleased at the time. I believe discussions on such topics generally go better these days than they used to.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
guard-of-terra 10y ago
If a person goes into Tech with the plan to get a quick career advance then this person is not going into Tech, really. You desire to be a manager or executive, but you make it sound like what you really want is create shippable code. That's not good. A developer would be happy if he (or she?) goes into Tech and stays in Tech, working on increasingly important/challenging projects as a developer and that's it - with sufficient pay of course. You can branch to non-coding but if that's your desire, you're not playing the same game at all.
tzs 10y ago
> Some people dismiss the gender pay gap by arguing that women choose lower-paying fields; however, the causality is opposite: pay drops as women move into a previously male-dominated field. A study by Stanford and UPenn researchers analyzed 164 occupations using 50 years of US Census data (1950–2000) and found consistent evidence that pay drops as women move into a previously male-dominated field in areas as varied as recreation, ticket agent, designers, housekeepers, and biologists. When a job attracts more men, such as computer programming, which used to be predominately female, wages rise. Those examples where women moved in on male-dominated fields all seem to have been fields that were not undergoing rapid growth. Opening them up to women would have expanded the size of the labor pool, and if the number of jobs was not expanding at the same rate, would't we expect pay to drop? Computer programming switched to male-dominated at a time of rapid rise in demand for computer programmers. Rapid rise in demand tends to raise pay.

39 points by j_s 10y ago

"Lack of opportunities for advancement" is a problem for tech workers, Male or Female. Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises. If you are a programmer/IT person at many organizations, you might find that your organization has advancement paths for (say) salespeople, geospatial analysts, librarians, etc. but no paths for technical people.

pyvpx 10y ago
Interesting. Now that I think about it, every single one of my networking and/or sysadmin friends have realized significant upward mobility in the past decade. any of my programming friends have either gone freelance or simply changed employers for pay increases. Are there any public statistics on this?
- mason240 10y ago
  Being a programmer is a lot more like skilled blue collar job such being a plumber or an electrician than we like to admit. What kind of career advancement do those fields have? Pretty close to what we have. Maybe you supervise/manage a group less experienced tradesmen. Maybe you open your own small business or go freelance. The result is the same ceiling where real, continual advancement is on the business management side.
  - buckbova 10y ago
    Exactly. When I read that in the article I was stunned. It used to be pretty standard it'd take 5+ years to make a senior engineer role, another 1 or 2 for a lead, and even more for architect which can be a slightly different path. > A study by the Center for Talent Innovation found that 27% of women in tech feel stalled in their careers and 32% are likely to quit within one year; 48% of Black women in tech feel stalled. One year?! I've been out of school for over 15 years and most of the time moving sideways. You've got to put in the time and effort. For most a senior role is all they'll achieve (or want).
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Some relevant numbers: one of the article's statistics is that of American women in science, engineering, and tech, 27% feel stalled and 32% are likely to quit within a year. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are higher than the male numbers, but I'm disappointed the source doesn't have any male numbers. It's pretty well established that software companies are bad offering raises that match job-change gains, and consequently have lots of turnover. I'd love to know what that that produces across genders in terms of feeling stalled or odds or quitting.
emddudley 10y ago
Don't get raises? What do you mean? Are you referring to non-technology companies? I'm curious if there are any numbers out there on the senior-to-junior salary ratio for various professions, corrected for time. I wonder which professions have the lowest and highest salary increase rates, and the mean time to hitting the salary ceiling for a profession.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  In years when I stay with my current company, I barely get a COLA raise of around 2%. When I switch companies, even involuntarily, I can often get an immediate 10% to 20% gain over my previous pay. This tells me that my employers do not look at current market rates when adjusting employee pay rates. There are detailed survey data regarding actuary pay scales at https://www.dwsimpson.com/salary https://www.dwsimpson.com/salary . It looks like they start lower than software pros, but grow faster and top out higher (everywhere outside of Silicon Valley).
hamstercat 10y ago
It may be location-dependent. Here in Canada, I know that dev salary increase a little less than two-fold between the time you get hired after school and whenever you get to 7-10 years of experience. Of course, one needs to change job a few times as raises within a company rarely increases that much. Starting salary is also a lot lower when freshly out of school here than what you could get in SV.
enraged_camel 10y ago
>>Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises. That's not as big of a problem as it sounds. Starting your career making lots of money is better than starting with lower pay and getting raises along the way, even if your end salary in the latter scenario ends up being higher (to a point). The reason is simple: compound interest. If you start off with $100k you can start saving (and investing) much earlier. In contrast, making a lot of money later in your career isn't as helpful. Of course, this only tackles the financial aspect. I think career advancement is important for psychological reasons as well, such as feeling fulfilled.

devnull42 10y ago

Wow this has been the opposite of my experience. I have seen many cases where women are fast tracked or given more opportunities as engineers because of diversity programs. There was one case where a female engineer got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman and they didn’t want the appearance of underpaying a female engineer, meanwhile I am 16% below company median for my position.

buro9 10y ago
Two things: > got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman Really? Do you ever consider that when non-women who are given more opportunities it is because they are men? White? Tall? Are not bald? Have good teeth? If that doesn't run through your mind, please don't suggest that anyone not a cis-male only gets there to meet the criteria of a diversity program. > meanwhile I am below company median The thing with medians is that half of the company will be below that point. If everyone were on the median, then everyone is receiving precisely the same salary.
- edoceo 10y ago
  What is "cis-male"?
  - cholantesh 10y ago
    The cis- prefix denotes that the person's gender identification aligns with their biological sex.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- devnull42 10y ago
  > got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman >>Really? Yes really. She said that there was a meeting where a manager actually made a comment about underpaying her because she was a women then they immediately freaked out. >>anyone not a cis-male only gets there to meet the criteria of a diversity program. As far as this goes there was a specific initiative that was in place to cater linux to women and we were told to interview and hire them. After hiring many of these candidates and having pretty bad results we had to stop giving that program preferential treatment. Also for the record my friend who I referred to with the pay discrepancy was a fantastic engineer who was not hired through that program and she hated the program because it tried to make linux all girlie which she found offensive and demeaning.

startupdiscuss 10y ago

It would be interesting to know if these issues (lack of advancement opportunity, voice not heard, poor assignment, personality perceptions) are exclusive to technology or if they also occur in, for instance, finance and medicine. This would be informative because it would tell us if tech is doing something uniquely discouraging, or if there is a wider problem.

moomin 10y ago
Broadly, the answer is: they're not exclusive, but tech is particularly bad. Probably because tech has mythologised itself in a very male-normative manner.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  This seems pretty oversimplified? Especially when the point was comparison to finance and medicine, which have similarly male-normative histories. A few decades ago medicine was at least as male-normative as tech; culture said nurses were female and doctors were male and that was that. But med school matriculants are ~48% female at this point. Some specialties are way more than half female, while others remain large-majority male. Meanwhile, finance has hardly budged at all. There's clearly something to learn here, and I think we're losing insight by just saying "tech is particularly bad" without actually trying to investigate.
  - EduardoBautista 10y ago
    Not only that, nurses are still overwhelmingly female, that hasn't changed by much.
  - clay_to_n 10y ago
    Tech has been getting consistently worse in the last 20 years. As far as I know, that is _not_ true of finance or medicine. So we have a unique problem.
Bartweiss 10y ago
The tech/medicine question is a really interesting one. A lot of the issues cited in software engineering, from initial male-dominance to long hours to rudeness from superiors, are overwhelmingly present for doctors. (As are a lot of the upsides, like high initial salary.) And yet new doctors are almost 50% female - though the question becomes much messier if you break down by speciality. Clearly the unpleasance of med school isn't driving women out, but there are massive gender gaps in specialties like surgery. I don't have any conclusions here; I just wish people would make these comparisons more often before diagnosing issues as either universal or tech-specific. edit: "More than" to "almost" - I had seen non-American statistics.

edoceo 10y ago

Please also read the Part 1 of her article about "bullshit diversity programs". Startup CEOs should read both, twice

buckbova 10y ago

"On the surface, mentorship seems like it could be a good way to help people advance their careers, but the data shows this is only true for men, because mentors provide different things for men than for women." How dare you suggest men and women are different.

simonh 10y ago
>> mentors provide different things for men than for women That's about men and women being treated differently, not being different themselves which is a separate issue.
potluckyears 10y ago
That statement didn't seem to be implying that men and women are different, but rather that men and women are treated differently by mentors -- specifically, that mentors are more likely to "endorse" men, and more likely to tell women how to improve. Immediately following that sentence the article says: > A study of 4,000 women and men who graduated from top MBA programs (surveyed in 2008 and again in 2010) found that when women receive mentorship, it’s advice on how they should change and gain more self-knowledge. When men receive mentorship, it’s public endorsement of their authority and concrete steps to take charge and make career moves. [...] Men who received mentorship were statistically more likely to be promoted, but that was not true for women who were mentored.

JamesBarney 10y ago

I think that diversity is an important goal that we should strive for in tech. I also loved that the author included actionable advice we can all take to improve the impact of our female colleagues. But I didn't like how the article bounces around a lot citing different studies without explaining why each study is relevant. For instance the first citation about how the #1 reason women leave their jobs is lack of career advancement opportunities. Well from that study(a linked in survey) the #1 reason men left their jobs was the same reason. The big difference between the 2 was men were much less likely to cite culture as a reason for switching jobs. Then later cites a study showing how Latina women are paid less than white men. Which seems like a weird comparison, maybe the author had a good reason, but she doesn't explain why Latina women vs white men is the appropriate comparison and not all men vs women, or Latina women vs Latino men.(I suspect was this was the way to find the greatest discrepancy because Latino men were the most underpaid of anyone except Latina women.) These strange comparisons and citations are pretty common in the article and set off my alarm bells that the author is using studies more for support than illumination. And while most of us agree we need to get more women into tech (not just for women's sake but because I think it would benefit tech greatly). And precisely because it's important we need to be careful that we spend time, money and effort in the right places on the right things, and don't jump to conclusions blowing it on interventions that aren't impactful.

braveo 10y ago
This was basically my read of it as well, I actually stopped reading right after the latina woman vs white male comparison for the very reasons you laid out.
watwut 10y ago
"The big difference between the 2 was men were much less likely to cite culture as a reason for switching jobs." That makes sense to me. Bad culture is more damaging to people who have bias against them - or just those who "think" there might be bias against them so they leave proactively (even when there is no bias). As in, most workplaces are not sexist, but the workplaces who are sexist will have more women then men leaving because of culture. Bias in tech is against women, not against men (I would assume it to be opposite in traditionally female fields.)

jlos 10y ago

Whats frustrating about these analysis is they ignore the reality of children and family life. The bias' mentioned, which are appear real and well evidenced, are secondary and complicating factors to the general problem of adapting family life to an urban, specialized economies. Prior to the 1900's the largest companies in the world were only a few hundred employees and over 50% of the population farmed. That meant a significant amount of the economic activity occurred in family run farms and business where all family members worked together. The trend towards men working outside the home and women staying at home was a somewhat unique phenomena in the 20th century and in some ways-not all-a natural progression since manual labor jobs favor men. While bias are real and need to be dealt with, I think attributing everything to them does little to solve the real challenge of how to harmonize specialized technical work, which at the current scale is unique to our time period, for large corporations, which did not exist prior to the 20th century, with the demands and realities of family life. Having kids below the age of schooling is a unique time and one that many very competent women are not willing to sacrifice for career advancement. And since there is almost no part-time work for STEM careers, this has the effect of limiting career advancement for those women who choose to prioritize family life and may also account for the perceptions that create the types of bias' listed in the article. I don't think theres an easy solution, and maybe not one at all, but without considering the very real component of family these types of accounts fall short.

sharemywin 10y ago
except a lot of women are delaying families.
- xyzzyz 10y ago
  Sure, and there's also a lot of data suggesting that young women are paid as much if not more than young men, see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-earn-more-men-same-age-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
- magic_beans 10y ago
  What exactly does "a lot" mean?

sharemywin 10y ago

I've seen many women(programmers) go into project management and fly up the ranks. To get an architect or other higher level senior technical title male or female requires a devotion to pedantic study that few people desire to pursue(usually with marginal monetary value).

ameister14 10y ago

I know this is a huge problem, but I really dislike how this article is built on a house of cards, reference-wise. Almost none of the statements are backed up by viewable primary sources.

waynecolvin 10y ago
If they misrepresent their arguements there must be a motive.

jpeg_hero 10y ago

> Listen closely at meetings, and repeat unacknowledged good ideas, giving the person who first had the idea credit. yeah? is this really a good thing? getting idea credit in meetings?

buckbova 10y ago
I honestly try to do this all the time, but mostly for those who are less vocal, the quiet ones. I tend to be on the other end of the spectrum, so if I never shut up at least I'm throwing someone else a bone in the process.
bobwaycott 10y ago
Yes, it really is a generally good thing for all humans. Everyone responds generally positively for being recognized for whatever their contributions are. Even if the ideas aren't particularly amazing, there's something pretty powerful in general human interactions that happens when you make a point of noting people's ideas, and making correct attribution. This may be somewhat of a learned skill. In practical terms, it's as easy as a summation of ideas thrown out--e.g., "Bob has suggested we take a better look at X. Sue's thinking we ought to consider Y." Some time later, when another person offers up an idea, there's a different relational outcome between saying, "Oh, nice idea, John"--while Sue is thinking, That's an awfully lot like my idea from a couple weeks ago--and saying, "Oh, hey, that sounds a lot like Sue's idea from a couple weeks ago, but with a little twist." Sue's going to respond positively because you're acknowledging her idea. John's going to respond positively because you're doing the same for her. Now both of them may be encouraged to work together on it. There's also a funny thing about us humans in that the same ideas and thoughts can hit us differently at different times. Making a point of tracking (mentally or otherwise) people's contributions to an organization isn't something that is likely to ever be a bad idea.

rogerdickey 10y ago

Why does HN love click bait so much?

msimpson 10y ago

> A study of 4,000 women who had recently changed jobs found that the #1 reason women leave companies is because of “a concern for the lack of advancement opportunity.” The same study which found that men leave companies for the exact same reason? Meaning there is no inequality in the lack of advancement opportunities ...

deleted 10y ago

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Mz 10y ago

I think trust and effective communication are the root cause of a lot of these problems. Articles like this one rarely address that piece at all. I talk about it on my blog, * but my writing isn't exactly getting millions of page views. I find it frustrating. * Such as: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zone.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zon...

j_s 10y ago
Shortcut to HN discussion of Mz's "The Gray Zone": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7407280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7407280 (3 years ago) Yowzers! Not really sure what else to say, I can see why HN avoids these types of discussions.
- Mz 10y ago
  That was three years ago. I was actually pretty pleased at the time. I believe discussions on such topics generally go better these days than they used to.
- deleted 10y ago
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guard-of-terra 10y ago

If a person goes into Tech with the plan to get a quick career advance then this person is not going into Tech, really. You desire to be a manager or executive, but you make it sound like what you really want is create shippable code. That's not good. A developer would be happy if he (or she?) goes into Tech and stays in Tech, working on increasingly important/challenging projects as a developer and that's it - with sufficient pay of course. You can branch to non-coding but if that's your desire, you're not playing the same game at all.

tzs 10y ago

> Some people dismiss the gender pay gap by arguing that women choose lower-paying fields; however, the causality is opposite: pay drops as women move into a previously male-dominated field. A study by Stanford and UPenn researchers analyzed 164 occupations using 50 years of US Census data (1950–2000) and found consistent evidence that pay drops as women move into a previously male-dominated field in areas as varied as recreation, ticket agent, designers, housekeepers, and biologists. When a job attracts more men, such as computer programming, which used to be predominately female, wages rise. Those examples where women moved in on male-dominated fields all seem to have been fields that were not undergoing rapid growth. Opening them up to women would have expanded the size of the labor pool, and if the number of jobs was not expanding at the same rate, would't we expect pay to drop? Computer programming switched to male-dominated at a time of rapid rise in demand for computer programmers. Rapid rise in demand tends to raise pay.