25 ms·

Nevertheless, She Coded

325 points by lmcnish14 10y ago

weirdshape 10y ago
There are disparities in pay and representation between men and women in the tech industry, favouring men. Are we then to work to create parity in pay and representation between men and women in the fastest possible way? Some people say yes. Some people say companies need to immediately go out of their way to hire more women, hire a more racially diverse staff and carefully calibrate their pay so that, ideally, your company diversity is a reflection of the diversity of the country you're in. But to me this seems really really wrong. Is it because I'm bigoted? Maybe. I don't think it's just that though, I honestly think its a really unfair approach, my own regrettable biases aside. To do that to tech would be unfair to many people, and also, would only be because tech is lucrative.
msimpson 10y ago
I've handled the hiring of almost all Web developers within my company for the last half decade, and in that time I have hired absolutely zero women. Yet, this has nothing to do with discrimination and much more to do with the applicants themselves and the numbers by which they apply. During this time, I've seen Web design positions attract females applicants by about a two-thirds majority, whereas Web development positions attract only one in twenty (if that). And yet, those who have applied seem to fit into two distinct categories of undesirables: First, the designer, with a design degree, who learned to code from some two-week academy that now feels the need to apply for a position well beyond their skill level. Or second, the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things... So I'll be happy to discuss the potential of a wage gap if I ever seem to hire a true female Web developer.
- watwut 10y ago
  " the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things" All companies I worked for routinely hired guys like that assuming they will learn on the job. Most did, some did not. In any case, many professional programmers I see studied mathematics, physics or something similar and then changed career. Edited to add: it is possible that your company can not afford a bit longer learning curve in the beginning. Did not wanted to make it sound like I am accusing you. I actually thought that big difference between men and women is that men assume they can do tech by default, apply for jobs even as they have minimum qualification or experience and it oftentimes works out.
  - msimpson 10y ago
    > it is possible that your company can not afford a bit longer learning curve in the beginning. That is exactly my point and what I would have replied, otherwise. I just cannot spend that level of non-billable time teaching.
- spopejoy 10y ago
  In truth, your real issue is you don't value an integrated workplace. Once you decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce, you will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent. You clearly have not decided this is important to you, which is your choice. However, because you choose not to pursue it, you are now concluding that you are entirely blameless for your objectively abysmal performance in hiring women. That is not a valid conclusion. My experience is that once I chose to prioritize hiring women, a bunch of my own hidden biases, assumptions and yes, values, became clear. I realized that I had missed opportunities to hire women in the past. I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" when in fact they just matched mine. I have a high opinion of my skills, so it's perhaps natural that I would do so, but in the end it actively hurt my abilities to recruit a diverse workforce. It was actually quite painful to realize I was the reason for not hiring women in many cases. The other thing to realize is women, like all humans, have their own biases, and instinctively suss out those organizations that are seriously hiring women, and avoid those that don't. So until you decide that you want to recruit women, and succeed in doing so, you will continue to have a terrible record for hiring women.
  - msimpson 10y ago
    > Your real issue is you don't value an integrated workplace ... > You decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce ... > You will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent ... > You clearly have not decided this is important to you ... > You choose not to pursue it ... > You are now concluding that you are entirely blameless ... > I chose to prioritize hiring women ... > I realized that I had missed opportunities ... > I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" ... > I have a high opinion of my skills ... > I was the reason for not hiring women ... In truth, your real issue is that you project your own failures in an amazingly presumptuous manner. Whereas I merely left a comment detailing my factual observations regarding hiring for a specific type of position advertised equally to both men and women on services like LinkedIn and Craigslist.
hl5 10y ago
The only reason this garbage gets published is because it's trendy to discriminate against white males.
- kampkrusty 10y ago
  Can you quantify this discrimination?
  - hl5 10y ago
    http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-incentives-using-minorityowned-business-30659.html http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-incentives-using-minority...
    - hl5 10y ago
      http://abc7.com/education/race-based-school-budget-cuts-spark-outrage-in-noho/1818792/ http://abc7.com/education/race-based-school-budget-cuts-spar...
      - hl5 10y ago
        http://www.fox5dc.com/news/244420583-story http://www.fox5dc.com/news/244420583-story
        hl5 10y ago
        http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/03/black-lives-matter-philly-bans-white-people-from-its-meetings/ http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/03/black-lives-matter-philly-...
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't post grandiose inflammatory claims about divisive topics. That's trolling, and destructive of the thoughtful conversation we're hoping for. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13826005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13826005 and marked it off-topic.
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curyous 10y ago
The whole premise of this article as espoused in the first sentence, seems rather divorced from reality, to me.
- proaralyst 10y ago
  How do you see that? What do you disagree with?
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    It's the little things. For example, the inclusion of Elizabeth Warren and McConnell's line. What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun (edit: yodon is right). Nobody would have paid much attention to it if he'd said "nevertheless he persisted", but a partisan attack was made into something about gender when there's no reason to believe it was so. What does it really have to do with coding, anyway? It's inclusion says more about the author's goals than it does about the topic.
    - yodon 10y ago
      King is not "on camera praising sessions." She was a speaker at a public event where she was expected to acknowledge the other headliners in the room. She acknowledged his physical presence, nothing more, and if you watch the tape it's fairly clear she isn't happy about doing so and left him to the end of the list because of it.
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    - st3v3r 10y ago
      "What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun" If that were true, then why were the several men who spoke after her, and read the exact same letter, not disciplined?
Pigo 10y ago
"continued pay disparity" here we go...
- prepend 10y ago
  It would be interesting to see the data on this. I've worked in software development for 20 years and hired tons of people (maybe over 100). I think that professional jobs have the lowest pay disparity. I would imagine it's really hard to measure the pay gap between programmers because there are literally coders that are 2x or 5x more productive than other coders. So I don't think it's as simple as checking all the people with "programmer" in their title by gender.
  - zephyrthenoble 10y ago
    https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-computer-programmers/ https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-compute...
    - prepend 10y ago
      This is all self-reported and not-representative data. So while an interesting story, is not evidence of a pay gap. There should be a statistical paper with a proper analysis somewhere, I'll try looking for it.
      - KirinDave 10y ago
        It's not proof of a pay gap, but it's evidence of a pay gap. Loads of other evidence of a pay gap is trivially available. I won't entertain the ignorance articulated here on that. You can Google. But I will add an aside that is less obvious. It's entirely possible to have perfectly even pay between every member of your team and still have an overall pay gap if you don't have good diversity in the upper levels of your organization. Many otherwise very good and well-meaning organizations fall prey to this. My position for example, as a distributed systems engineer, is very hard to get into. You don't learn about it in college, you don't find a ton of great books about it, and the field changes rapidly using terms and concepts that were only recently overturned. The way I got into it: a pair of very smart men decided to mentor me when I was younger. But were it not for that apprenticeship/mentorship, I would not be in the field. Women claim they have fewer opportunities for this and that follows with my observations. Therefore, my (higher paying and more in-demand) position is more difficult for many women to acquire.
dijit 10y ago
Virtue Signalling and attempting to divide the genders in the opening, before the quotes from women in tech. I expect better from The Practical Dev, you don't have to paint men in a derogatory light to bring up women.
- oconnor663 10y ago
  > paint men in a derogatory light I'm not sure I see what you're referring to. I don't think the article mentions men at all, apart from the senators?
  - and0 10y ago
    Equality scares people when inequality is all they have to lean on. It makes them do strange things to re-frame discussions.
    - oconnor663 10y ago
      Let's be the change we want to see in the world and avoid assuming other people's experiences, no matter what side they're on :|
    - bobbington 10y ago
      The problem is that this turns into women demanding equal pay for inferior work. If their boss thinks they don't do as good work, why should they get paid the same? And who are you to decide how good the person is at working? Experience and education are not the sole determiners of a persons efficiency
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        How do you know they didn't do as good of work? You and I both know that objectively judging "quality of work" in this industry is extremely difficult, and more often it just comes down to someone's biased opinion.
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elastic_church 10y ago
Don't recruiters keep stats on the offers and demographics that people get? I had heard wage gap wasn't an accurate disparity in software engineering jobs. Like there isnt a cabal of people at every company conspiring against equally qualified candidates based on gender. In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid. Lets work on it but we have to get the discussion right first. I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere if a persistent reality is more nuanced.
- oconnor663 10y ago
  I think we have to be really careful to avoid putting words in other people's mouths with these things. > I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere I don't think anyone is denying that sexist rhetoric exists, or that a pay gap exists. It could be "vilifying a sexist boogeyman" to say that one is primarily caused by the other, and it's fair to criticize articles that say that. But I don't think this article says anything like that. I think it addresses them separately.
  - elastic_church 10y ago
    The article is based on the circumstances that perpetuate a wage gap under the guise that the awareness of gender discrimination applies to wages for programmers. I like the cause: awareness of gender discrimination, harassment and awareness of contributions in the workforce. I think the wage gap is tangential to these circumstances, when there is evidence to the contrary for equally qualified individuals in software engineering roles. This isn't saying that gender based averages won't reveal the existence of a gap, it is saying that the current discussion misses the mark, as if this is a form of harassment that is either deliberate or unconscious bias that people simply aren't aware of, when there are other circumstances that are more nuanced and likely more prevalent, in the field of "coding".
- flukus 10y ago
  > In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid. It's not PC to suggest that the source of the problem may be with women themselves and their interests.
dethswatch 10y ago
Warren violated the rules- it has _nothing_ to do with her gender. Whether her points are validate or not, the rules were followed as they would have been with any man. If she wants to get her opinion out, she can hold a press conference outside the Senate or simply call Maddow, like she did- a friendly audience that would allow her to speak as long as they had time for.
- cmiles74 10y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to flag this page because of the link to Senator Warren.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    It is when the whole framing of the piece is to equate a) flouting Senate rules for equal speaking opportunity with b) resistance to sexism.
- zeveb 10y ago
  Seconded, and it's why I flagged the article. The Senate has rules, and those rules are fairly enforced regardless of gender. Tying a movement to the perceived unfairness of a fair enforcement seems to me to be unwise.
  - jmcqk6 10y ago
    >The Senate has rules, and those rules are fairly enforced regardless of gender. Later that same night, a male senator from Oregon read the complete letter that Warren was trying to read from the floor of the senate.
    - 1_2__3 10y ago
      Did he do it according to the rules of Senate procedure? Honest question. Please provide an article or reference.
- mgbmtl 10y ago
Zikes 10y ago
> Gender inequality has permeated the technology and computer science fields since their earliest beginnings. It's true. The earliest "computers" were overwhelmingly women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#Wartime_computing_and_the_invention_of_electronic_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#Wartime_computi...
- prepend 10y ago
  Those were secretarial jobs and not equivalent to today's computer programmers, like Ada Lovelace.
  - panglott 10y ago
    Those were secretarial jobs because the men designing the hardware thought that was the hard stuff, and that designing software was basically secretarial work. When they discovered that designing software was hard, they forced the women out. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...
    - dobbin 10y ago
      It's a common pattern throughout history and one that really annoys me. People argue that the pay gap isn't real because men choose more highly-valued positions, but the reality is that positions favoured by women are inherently considered low-value. If some type of "women's work" somehow starts to become respectable or starts to pay better, it stops being "women's work" and the women are pushed out. If women start entering a respectable field and the field becomes "women's work", it stops being respectable. You can see it with the salaries of doctors in Russia, and the narrowing definition of what is considered "hard science" or STEM as women enter these fields in the US. It has very little to do with how difficult or important the work is.
      - mmel 10y ago
        I'm curious, what used to be considered a "hard science" that is now no longer considered so due to (or corralated with) the influx of women into that field?
u_wot_m8 10y ago
there's no pay gap in any industry when you take into account hours worked and years of experience. Women generally work less than men and take time off to have babies, man lands on moon.
- Pigo 10y ago
  If there is a gap, it's nothing compared to the figures our last President liked to throw out. I can believe there are some Mad Men-era guys lingering around huge corporations, but they are exceptions to rule (I've never seen it). Let me go ask my female team lead how subjugated she feels.
- acdha 10y ago
  This is a common assertion but there's research showing that the gap persists even after controlling for education, years of experience, etc.: http://time.com/money/4285843/gender-pay-gap-excuses-wrong/ http://time.com/money/4285843/gender-pay-gap-excuses-wrong/ “A 2011 study from Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce found that "men with some college but no degree earn about the same as women with a Bachelor’s degree," and that "wo men have to have a Ph.D. to make as much as men with a B.A." So you can't chalk the wage gap up to education. What about time in the workforce then? Attributing differences in pay to women's perceived inexperience ignores the studies that show the more years a woman spends in the workforce, the bigger the gap gets between her and her equally experienced male colleagues. Women in their late 20s earn around 92% of what their male peers receive, whereas women in their early 50s make just 71% of the average man's wages, according to a report from Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University.”
  - LyndsySimon 10y ago
    None of this addresses the parent's comment - they believe the pay disparity along gender lines disappears when hours worked and time spent out of the workforce. > Women in their late 20s earn around 92% of what their male peers receive, whereas women in their early 50s make just 71% of the average man's wages That makes sense, but doesn't mean that disparity increases as a woman ages - my first impression is that a woman in her late 50s entered the workforce about 40 years ago. There was certainly pervasive inequity at that time, and the opportunities those women were excluded from early in their careers compound.
zephyrthenoble 10y ago
I'm frankly quite surprised by the initial wave of comments disparaging this message. The facts are that women are poorly represented in the tech community[1], and do make less than men[2]. Any attempt to let women feel more accepted and bring about much needed change should be championed, not picked apart and belittled because you feel like you are personally being attacked when people are just asking for help. 1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-releases-employee-diversity-figures/9697049/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-release... 2. https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-computer-programmers/ https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-compute...
- badwulf 10y ago
  There are also less women in the military, construction works etc. Women tend to also live longer, should we cook up some conspiracy theories related to these facts as well? Seeing sexism everywhere is not helping the fight against remaining actual sexism.
- prepend 10y ago
  This is a really good point, but I think for me it's more of a visceral response to falseness or inaccuracy that was developed by programming actually. It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on- but I feel we can do this by being objectively accurate. I'm with you on the underrepresented story, this is very common. But the glassdoor study has many major flaws and I don't think is really that useful. The biggest flaw is that it's only using self-reported data for location, gender, salary and job title; and it has a very broad comparison by job title that doesn't really fit when you are comparing "programmer" with "qa engineer"
  - gshulegaard 10y ago
    To build off your comment, I went ahead and found the glassdoor study: https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/03/Glassdoor-Gender-Pay-Gap-Study.pdf https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2... And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem. The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed. For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis. One way to look at this is: * My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors another way would be: * My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation. Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body? I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it! Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_distributed_random_variables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di... [2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrollment-glance https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
dijit 10y ago
I'm desperate to push the "women aren't victims" narrative. If we tell them they're victims enough then they'll believe it. There is evidence of this in other things for instance refugees who are told that they're victims are less likely to integrate. I'm more focused on pointing out that we're all equal. If you're a woman on my team, I'm incredibly sorry but I'm not going to celebrate your feminity any more than I'd celebrate my other colleagues manliness. You do your job and I'll reward everyone with good pay, a bonus and a cake or two.
- and0 10y ago
  In this case women are definitely victims of you talking about them like they're misbehaving toddlers. You're literally commenting on a page written by women for women, saying that they're being manipulated by outside forces, and suggesting better ways to manipulate them. Have you ever thought about your opinions on feminism at all?
  - dijit 10y ago
    I live in Sweden, in Sweden it's believed that Women and Men are equal. That's all I have to say about feminism- if there are cases where they are not then that needs to be addressed. However, the "Women in tech" push, while noble sounding has not done much to assuade confidence that they're actually doing anything. My awareness of women in tech is absolutely sky-high, with all the back-patting praise they're giving themselves almost constantly. I don't mind it of course, they're completely free to do what they wish, but it doesn't sit right with me to keep calling them victims. If they're victims give me something to use to help them. Don't point at invisible sexism (which I have seen _once_ and subsequently that person was fired for it). I get that you have an agenda regarding this, I, kinda don't. My personal belief is that Women are a plus to any company, and if some company is sexist then (on a purely capitalist level) great! more coders/sysadmins for me. If someone else is going to pay them less, great! I could give a shit what you have between your legs, it's what's between your ears that matters, so, again, I'm gonna pay fair and others will probably too, but otherwise, more coders/sysadmins for me. If I find out someone is being sexist in my org and pushing coders/sysadmins away, that person is going to feel a big wrath _regardless_ of my moral code. But because they're costing the company talent, and talent is hard to find. Then of course I _do_ feel a moral obligation to ensure everyone in my org is happy, but my previous sentences were referring to pure logic.
Pigo 10y ago
I think Ellen Pao is a prime example of why it's a liability to pretend you're working at Sterling Cooper. There are shrews out there with lawyers on their speed-dial, and they will pull the trigger even if they have no ammunition.
- dang 10y ago
  This is the sort of uncivil slur we ban people for, as well as a personal attack, which we also ban people for. Please don't comment like this here again. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13821899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13821899 and marked it off-topic.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - tptacek 10y ago
    It's also just bad writing. What happens when you pull a trigger without any ammunition? Nothing.
    - Pigo 10y ago
      Which is exactly what happened to Pao's case. She had nothing, but sued anyways. Making what I wrote a pretty apt metaphor for the situation. I disagree, but respect their decision to say my comment was off-topic. But your comment shows you have no idea what I was even writing about.
cholantesh 10y ago
Why was this flagged?
codingisfunny 10y ago
I worked with a lot of women in software development, and not only didn't they face much discrimination, they were also constantly praised and helped by everybody, because people in that industry are taught constantly that women need help, that women are harassed, that we need more women. I'm tired of that crap, when a male coder face problems with teammates, at best he's called arrogant for defending himself, at worst incompetent because somewhat that loser deserved to be bullied. It's a tough industry but women are a lot more preserved by their colleagues than men are.
pkd 10y ago
I personally don't find anything flag worthy in this. Can the mods please unflag this?
- OrwellianChild 10y ago
  Seconded. Please unflag - this conversation is worth having.
- _nothing 10y ago
  Agreed. These conversations are important and relevant.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  I concur. There is nothing flagworthy here. This is only controversial because people doing flagworthy things are trying to inject politics into a celebration of people who write code and build software.
chrisbrandow 10y ago
I just had a conversation with a friend of mine today about the issues she is facing as a "woman in tech". It was some stuff that really surprised me. On today of all days. Treatment of women as full-fledged peers is definitely something that needs better attention in our industry.
- badwulf 10y ago
  Are you saying that every tech circle treats women badly? Are men just inherently evil?
- sdflkd 10y ago
  Yep. I go to the top university in Canada (wrt being employable in technology) and work with/know many qualified females. I can say that there is only one (out of ~25) that claims she has never experienced any sexism.
  - cholantesh 10y ago
    But how do we know the other 24 aren't just crazy/hysterical/paranoid? /s
  - ljknight 10y ago
    Even the women who say they have never experienced blatant sexism have no idea how many job offers or interviews they didn't get simply for being a woman, or how much less money they are making over the course of their life, etc. Sexism is not always explicit and obvious.
- dashundchen 10y ago
  I am always amazed by the stories I hear. It's a common yet toxic mentality where women are told they can't or shouldn't do something, or aren't cut out for STEM because they are female. I recently saw this surface on HN in the basement of this thread, discussing the appointment of Jennifer Widom as the dean of Stanford Engineering. Many posters speculated, without knowledge of her credentials, that she was unqualified compared to her male peers and only selected because she's a woman. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13779165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13779165 I don't know how it escapes them that this attitude is the literal definition of sexism, and that women in tech have to fight this constantly. I saw it happen all the time in engineering school. I even occasionally see it in workplace. So many of my female classmates and coworkers are talked down to, discouraged and have their skills written off by their male counterparts (nevertheless, they persist). No wonder the share of women in STEM fields dwindles, the culture can be absolutely toxic. I don't doubt that many people are honestly being unintentionally sexist. But it's on everyone to constructively call out this behavior and support a healthier culture in the school and workplace. At the very least, why would one want to write off the ideas and talent of half the population?
tzs 10y ago
> Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had arrived on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2017 to debate the confirmation of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions. Feb 8, 2017 was a Wednesday, not a Tuesday.
- paloaltokid 10y ago
  Thank you for your thoughtful contribution. If you hadn't pointed this out, I might have gone through life thinking February 8th was a Tuesday. That would have diminished my overall quality of life. Keep up the good work!
bobbington 10y ago
I'm going to drop a bombshell here... Maybe women just don't like coding as much as men and that's why they are "underrepresented". I'm going to drop another bombshell... Maybe it's OK that women focus on other things they prefer because specialization of labor is a good thing. Crazy thoughts, I know. I'm going to drop the biggest bombshell right now... Men have a Y chromosome, and women don't. The effects on a person are huge from physically different body parts to powerfully different hormones. Maybe our rabbid push for equality has failed to account for differences that truly exist between male and female... Maybe if we took that into account we would seek to find the best job for each individual, not try to make women act like men and disparage those who don't. Maybe if we acknowledged the benefits of gender differences we would never have come to the mentally ill conclusion that two males make a great marriage couple. studies show that women have more money and power today and yet are less happy. Let's let women be women. Then instead of expecting them to protect themselves because they are no different than men, we would treat them with special honor.
- nilved 10y ago
  Read a book dude. Everything you just said is both wrong and sexist.
  - bobbington 10y ago
    I don't think it's sexist to acknowledge that a lot of women just want to be moms and wives. A lot of them don't want to do complex analytical work, instead wanting to raise children. And the world looks down on them for that, like there is something wrong with them for not getting into tech. I think that is the real sexism. I don't like it how women are taught they need to act like men. The fact is they are not men, and their uniqueness and femininity should be celebrated. Instead today we constantly compare them to men saying "your not good enough, not doing enough STEM, blah blah blah." being a great mom is underrated, but it's an amazing contribution to her kids and society. The real sexism is society telling women there is something wrong with them for wanting to just be wives and moms.
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phlakaton 10y ago
If ever I had a notion that an expression of solidarity for women in tech was unnecessary or quixotic, the response to this article on this very forum would be sufficient to dispel it.
- niggerdeath 10y ago
  ladies, if you need to cry about the wage gap or something and you're not on your period, my messages are open ;)
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Black Lives Matter
- tnones 10y ago
  This is what we call a kafkatrap.
- deleted 10y ago
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- bhalp1 10y ago
  As the creator of https://dev.to https://dev.to and the co-author of this article, I concur mightily.
- Mz 10y ago
  HN has actually improved dramatically in recent years. There used to be no one like you speaking up in support. And, yet, it took me a long time to see the sexism here because it was already so much more civil than other places I had known. (In case you are unaware, I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member here. I strongly suspect I really am because I have been saying that for a couple of years or so and no one has shot me down yet with "Nope!!! THIS member is openly female AND on the leaderboard, you dumbass!!!!!")
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Well, the very first claim the article brings up is that women face a pay gap, which is simply not true when you control for other variables. So that's not a good start. Also, the origin of the quote 'Nevertheless, she persisted' is from a completely non-gendered context, where a woman persisted in breaking the non-gendered rules of the US Congress.
ruleabidinguser 10y ago
Also because the issue essentially doesnt exist. A victim complex is a real thing and there are real victims. You must acknowledge both, not just the latter (or just the former for that matter.) Sexism is real but severely overblown in my experience.
- smt88 10y ago
  Is your experience that of a woman? If not, you really have no idea whether it's overblown or not.
  - ruleabidinguser 10y ago
    So I'm barred from having an opinion because I'm not a woman? Perhaps rather than my "experience" I should have said "real life observations." Regardless, so be it, but don't expect my support if you ever end up wanting it.
    - smt88 10y ago
      You're not barred from having an opinion at all. I'm just saying that you don't have good information behind your opinion.
  - pyronik 10y ago
    By that logic, women can never know if there is sexism because they don't have all that mythical privilege to compare it to. I'd love to see one time ... one time.. there be a focus on the disparity between men and women in waste services, janitorial services, etc. We accept they don't prefer those jobs but suddenly in tech (since it became sexy) its now a problem?
    - sanswork 10y ago
      >I'd love to see one time ... one time.. there be a focus on the disparity between men and women in waste services, janitorial services, etc. Why? >We accept they don't prefer those jobs but suddenly in tech (since it became sexy) its now a problem? You answered this yourself. One of the fields is desirable and the other isn't so of course there is going to be more concern about the desirable one.
HiResSleep 10y ago
People who forward the feminist narrative always insist that they are interested in having a "conversation", but this is a lie, as evidenced by this statement. Agreement with my position proves my position. Disagreement with my position proves my position. You're not interested in speaking with people who disagree with you. A dialogue you want not. You wish to have a monologue, where you are the teacher and anyone who doesn't think like you is the pupil, who knows his place, sits down, shuts up, and listens. You are a bigot in the purest definition of the word.
- BadassFractal 10y ago
  One of the major issues here is that if you disagree with the currently fashionable narrative then you're immediately painted as a sexist. It's completely binary: you're either on the side of the narrative OR you're a bigot to be purged, a heretic to be burned at the social stake, there is no room for inquiry, debate or applying critical thinking. Accusing someone of being a bigot is 100% risk free, it's all upside, the accuser is always safe on a moral pedestal. Even going meta like I did gets you flagged, case in point.
- dang 10y ago
  We banned this account for trolling and detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824976 and marked it off-topic.
unknownsavage 10y ago
The grandstanding is corny at best. Take the first example: > Despite continued assaults on the credibility of her contributions to modern computer science as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace coded. Yet in reality she was very much respected in her day, and despite her challenges received widespread support. The first "assaults" on her scope of her contributions came over 100 after her death, and not some sexism she had to fight and overcome.
- illumin8 10y ago
  The fact that this comment is the top comment on this post, and pedantically tries to tarnish the entire article, which contains many real-life quotes from female software developers who are real, and live today, speaks volumes. Please, take a moment and reflect on what is most important. Is it gender equality, or is it nitpicking the temporal sequencing of Ada Lovelace's contributions?
- donretag 10y ago
  It was difficult for me to read the rest of the article once I came across that sentence. Granted, I have not read everything regarding Ada Lovelace, but she has always been acknowledged and respected. There is a major programming language named after her! The "assaults" on her credibility did not happen to her during her lifetime. Even if they are proven to be true, her proven contributions are still impressive.
- mc32 10y ago
  Because it's somewhat a cross cultural and cross racial issue --that is women don't only get the lower hand among white men (in given industries, sectors), but also non-white women are also disincentivized within/among other "races" and cultures, so it's a pan-human issue. women are ~50% of the pop across all races and cultures (sometimes less so due to active pop. suppression).
- tomlock 10y ago
  She never attended University. Do you think she just wasn't interested in attending?
dongslol 10y ago
I wish comments were scored in a way that was weighted by the degree of bravery it took to write them. What a shame that most of the top comments here are boring, stand-up-for-the-vulnerable types agreed with by the majority— "women face difficulties in tech, and we should help them whenever we can"—while the downvoted posts are the ones trying (not necessarily successfully) to arrive at politically incorrect truths.
- om2 10y ago
  All debates are bravery debates. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-braver...
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  They are. The mechanism greys them out quickly due to downvotes followed by ungreying later due to upvotes if the post was substantive with citations. It's what happened to me early on countering BS that was popular.
- BadassFractal 10y ago
  Very much this. It's the easy, trite, safe, politically correct position to take. You get a pat on the back for being a good moral upstanding person according to the mores du jour. You feel good. No hard conversations are had. It becomes a cult. People are burned at the proverbial stake for not subscribing to the Geocentric model.
- Mz 10y ago
  It is incredibly hard to have a good discussion about this topic. I think it is getting better on Hacker News, but there is still a lot of work to do. I sometimes write about such topics, but can't get much traction. A few of my pieces have gotten a few thousand page views, mostly on HN, but most of what I write is largely ignored. If you want something meatier, you might enjoy my personal blog. Best.
  - dongslol 10y ago
    I'll check it out.
danso 10y ago
Loved this anecdote: https://dev.to/thepracticaldev/nevertheless-she-coded/comments/459 https://dev.to/thepracticaldev/nevertheless-she-coded/commen... > The first thing I coded was an Everquest 7-page website in plain-old HTML. I was 15 and I had figured out HTML from right-clicking and wondering if 'View Source' was how it was made. I went into computer engineering because I loved video games and wanted to write games. I believe my one of my first webpages was a Final Fantasy fanpage with Microsoft FrontPage, uploaded to my dad's Prodigy web space. I don't know what the actual stats are in terms of girls playing video games, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a correlation between that childhood activity and a later interest in programming.
bsder 10y ago
I really wish they would quit promulgating this because it's actually counterproductive: "women face continued pay disparity" Seeing this statement tells me immediately that the author is grinding an ax. In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear. Complaining about discrimination or harassment? Sure, go for it. Lack of child care and having undue burden with family health issues? The stats back you up. However, attempting to promulgate something which is not true hurts the overall movement when there is so much that is true and needs to be fixed.
- tomlock 10y ago
  >pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear. So what you're saying is there are pay disparities in most tech fields. Aka, women face continued pay disparity.
  - 59nadir 10y ago
    It's a hard sell to say someone "faces" something when they're on the better end of it.
    - tomlock 10y ago
      >In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). As you can see, you disagree with the commenter I was responding to. They think women only get paid more in "some" fields, not most. The original comment is both inconsistent with itself, and your comment.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  Except—women DO face continued pay disparity. Just because a hand-picked statistic deviates from this norm doesn't mean it's not true.
- Harimwakairi 10y ago
  Do you have citations for the stats you claim? That's not a dig, btw; I'd honestly like to see them.
sattoshi 10y ago
This is the first thread of hn that I would label as cancer. "Pay gap is fake" "Prove it" Cites stuff "Unrelated/invalid" *Conversation derails Scrollinf half way, i saw this easily 5 times. It's as if people stick to their beliefs despite any arguments that are made.
jondubois 10y ago
I couldn't name a single programmer, man or woman who worked on any Apollo mission. The problem is not that women are under-recognized as coders, it's just that engineers as a class of workers are often under-recognized. Humans just don't care enough about intelligence unfortunately. Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong though.
asher_ 10y ago
These types of articles seem to always get the same mixture of responses. The biggest problem that I see is that everyone starts with completely different sets of assumptions and they are almost never up front about them. The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also. Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following: 1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct). 2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same. Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true. One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor. Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world.

325 points by lmcnish14 10y ago

There are disparities in pay and representation between men and women in the tech industry, favouring men. Are we then to work to create parity in pay and representation between men and women in the fastest possible way? Some people say yes. Some people say companies need to immediately go out of their way to hire more women, hire a more racially diverse staff and carefully calibrate their pay so that, ideally, your company diversity is a reflection of the diversity of the country you're in. But to me this seems really really wrong. Is it because I'm bigoted? Maybe. I don't think it's just that though, I honestly think its a really unfair approach, my own regrettable biases aside. To do that to tech would be unfair to many people, and also, would only be because tech is lucrative.

msimpson 10y ago

I've handled the hiring of almost all Web developers within my company for the last half decade, and in that time I have hired absolutely zero women. Yet, this has nothing to do with discrimination and much more to do with the applicants themselves and the numbers by which they apply. During this time, I've seen Web design positions attract females applicants by about a two-thirds majority, whereas Web development positions attract only one in twenty (if that). And yet, those who have applied seem to fit into two distinct categories of undesirables: First, the designer, with a design degree, who learned to code from some two-week academy that now feels the need to apply for a position well beyond their skill level. Or second, the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things... So I'll be happy to discuss the potential of a wage gap if I ever seem to hire a true female Web developer.

watwut 10y ago
" the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things" All companies I worked for routinely hired guys like that assuming they will learn on the job. Most did, some did not. In any case, many professional programmers I see studied mathematics, physics or something similar and then changed career. Edited to add: it is possible that your company can not afford a bit longer learning curve in the beginning. Did not wanted to make it sound like I am accusing you. I actually thought that big difference between men and women is that men assume they can do tech by default, apply for jobs even as they have minimum qualification or experience and it oftentimes works out.
- msimpson 10y ago
  > it is possible that your company can not afford a bit longer learning curve in the beginning. That is exactly my point and what I would have replied, otherwise. I just cannot spend that level of non-billable time teaching.
spopejoy 10y ago
In truth, your real issue is you don't value an integrated workplace. Once you decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce, you will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent. You clearly have not decided this is important to you, which is your choice. However, because you choose not to pursue it, you are now concluding that you are entirely blameless for your objectively abysmal performance in hiring women. That is not a valid conclusion. My experience is that once I chose to prioritize hiring women, a bunch of my own hidden biases, assumptions and yes, values, became clear. I realized that I had missed opportunities to hire women in the past. I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" when in fact they just matched mine. I have a high opinion of my skills, so it's perhaps natural that I would do so, but in the end it actively hurt my abilities to recruit a diverse workforce. It was actually quite painful to realize I was the reason for not hiring women in many cases. The other thing to realize is women, like all humans, have their own biases, and instinctively suss out those organizations that are seriously hiring women, and avoid those that don't. So until you decide that you want to recruit women, and succeed in doing so, you will continue to have a terrible record for hiring women.
- msimpson 10y ago
  > Your real issue is you don't value an integrated workplace ... > You decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce ... > You will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent ... > You clearly have not decided this is important to you ... > You choose not to pursue it ... > You are now concluding that you are entirely blameless ... > I chose to prioritize hiring women ... > I realized that I had missed opportunities ... > I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" ... > I have a high opinion of my skills ... > I was the reason for not hiring women ... In truth, your real issue is that you project your own failures in an amazingly presumptuous manner. Whereas I merely left a comment detailing my factual observations regarding hiring for a specific type of position advertised equally to both men and women on services like LinkedIn and Craigslist.

hl5 10y ago

The only reason this garbage gets published is because it's trendy to discriminate against white males.

kampkrusty 10y ago
Can you quantify this discrimination?
- hl5 10y ago
  http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-incentives-using-minorityowned-business-30659.html http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-incentives-using-minority...
  - hl5 10y ago
    http://abc7.com/education/race-based-school-budget-cuts-spark-outrage-in-noho/1818792/ http://abc7.com/education/race-based-school-budget-cuts-spar...
    - hl5 10y ago
      http://www.fox5dc.com/news/244420583-story http://www.fox5dc.com/news/244420583-story
      - hl5 10y ago
        http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/03/black-lives-matter-philly-bans-white-people-from-its-meetings/ http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/03/black-lives-matter-philly-...
dang 10y ago
Please don't post grandiose inflammatory claims about divisive topics. That's trolling, and destructive of the thoughtful conversation we're hoping for. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13826005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13826005 and marked it off-topic.

deleted 10y ago

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curyous 10y ago

The whole premise of this article as espoused in the first sentence, seems rather divorced from reality, to me.

proaralyst 10y ago
How do you see that? What do you disagree with?
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  It's the little things. For example, the inclusion of Elizabeth Warren and McConnell's line. What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun (edit: yodon is right). Nobody would have paid much attention to it if he'd said "nevertheless he persisted", but a partisan attack was made into something about gender when there's no reason to believe it was so. What does it really have to do with coding, anyway? It's inclusion says more about the author's goals than it does about the topic.
  - yodon 10y ago
    King is not "on camera praising sessions." She was a speaker at a public event where she was expected to acknowledge the other headliners in the room. She acknowledged his physical presence, nothing more, and if you watch the tape it's fairly clear she isn't happy about doing so and left him to the end of the list because of it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    "What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun" If that were true, then why were the several men who spoke after her, and read the exact same letter, not disciplined?

Pigo 10y ago

"continued pay disparity" here we go...

prepend 10y ago
It would be interesting to see the data on this. I've worked in software development for 20 years and hired tons of people (maybe over 100). I think that professional jobs have the lowest pay disparity. I would imagine it's really hard to measure the pay gap between programmers because there are literally coders that are 2x or 5x more productive than other coders. So I don't think it's as simple as checking all the people with "programmer" in their title by gender.
- zephyrthenoble 10y ago
  https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-computer-programmers/ https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-compute...
  - prepend 10y ago
    This is all self-reported and not-representative data. So while an interesting story, is not evidence of a pay gap. There should be a statistical paper with a proper analysis somewhere, I'll try looking for it.
    - KirinDave 10y ago
      It's not proof of a pay gap, but it's evidence of a pay gap. Loads of other evidence of a pay gap is trivially available. I won't entertain the ignorance articulated here on that. You can Google. But I will add an aside that is less obvious. It's entirely possible to have perfectly even pay between every member of your team and still have an overall pay gap if you don't have good diversity in the upper levels of your organization. Many otherwise very good and well-meaning organizations fall prey to this. My position for example, as a distributed systems engineer, is very hard to get into. You don't learn about it in college, you don't find a ton of great books about it, and the field changes rapidly using terms and concepts that were only recently overturned. The way I got into it: a pair of very smart men decided to mentor me when I was younger. But were it not for that apprenticeship/mentorship, I would not be in the field. Women claim they have fewer opportunities for this and that follows with my observations. Therefore, my (higher paying and more in-demand) position is more difficult for many women to acquire.

dijit 10y ago

Virtue Signalling and attempting to divide the genders in the opening, before the quotes from women in tech. I expect better from The Practical Dev, you don't have to paint men in a derogatory light to bring up women.

oconnor663 10y ago
> paint men in a derogatory light I'm not sure I see what you're referring to. I don't think the article mentions men at all, apart from the senators?
- and0 10y ago
  Equality scares people when inequality is all they have to lean on. It makes them do strange things to re-frame discussions.
  - oconnor663 10y ago
    Let's be the change we want to see in the world and avoid assuming other people's experiences, no matter what side they're on :|
  - bobbington 10y ago
    The problem is that this turns into women demanding equal pay for inferior work. If their boss thinks they don't do as good work, why should they get paid the same? And who are you to decide how good the person is at working? Experience and education are not the sole determiners of a persons efficiency
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      How do you know they didn't do as good of work? You and I both know that objectively judging "quality of work" in this industry is extremely difficult, and more often it just comes down to someone's biased opinion.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

elastic_church 10y ago

Don't recruiters keep stats on the offers and demographics that people get? I had heard wage gap wasn't an accurate disparity in software engineering jobs. Like there isnt a cabal of people at every company conspiring against equally qualified candidates based on gender. In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid. Lets work on it but we have to get the discussion right first. I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere if a persistent reality is more nuanced.

oconnor663 10y ago
I think we have to be really careful to avoid putting words in other people's mouths with these things. > I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere I don't think anyone is denying that sexist rhetoric exists, or that a pay gap exists. It could be "vilifying a sexist boogeyman" to say that one is primarily caused by the other, and it's fair to criticize articles that say that. But I don't think this article says anything like that. I think it addresses them separately.
- elastic_church 10y ago
  The article is based on the circumstances that perpetuate a wage gap under the guise that the awareness of gender discrimination applies to wages for programmers. I like the cause: awareness of gender discrimination, harassment and awareness of contributions in the workforce. I think the wage gap is tangential to these circumstances, when there is evidence to the contrary for equally qualified individuals in software engineering roles. This isn't saying that gender based averages won't reveal the existence of a gap, it is saying that the current discussion misses the mark, as if this is a form of harassment that is either deliberate or unconscious bias that people simply aren't aware of, when there are other circumstances that are more nuanced and likely more prevalent, in the field of "coding".
flukus 10y ago
> In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid. It's not PC to suggest that the source of the problem may be with women themselves and their interests.

dethswatch 10y ago

Warren violated the rules- it has _nothing_ to do with her gender. Whether her points are validate or not, the rules were followed as they would have been with any man. If she wants to get her opinion out, she can hold a press conference outside the Senate or simply call Maddow, like she did- a friendly audience that would allow her to speak as long as they had time for.

cmiles74 10y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to flag this page because of the link to Senator Warren.
- SilasX 10y ago
  It is when the whole framing of the piece is to equate a) flouting Senate rules for equal speaking opportunity with b) resistance to sexism.
zeveb 10y ago
Seconded, and it's why I flagged the article. The Senate has rules, and those rules are fairly enforced regardless of gender. Tying a movement to the perceived unfairness of a fair enforcement seems to me to be unwise.
- jmcqk6 10y ago
  >The Senate has rules, and those rules are fairly enforced regardless of gender. Later that same night, a male senator from Oregon read the complete letter that Warren was trying to read from the floor of the senate.
  - 1_2__3 10y ago
    Did he do it according to the rules of Senate procedure? Honest question. Please provide an article or reference.
mgbmtl 10y ago

Zikes 10y ago

> Gender inequality has permeated the technology and computer science fields since their earliest beginnings. It's true. The earliest "computers" were overwhelmingly women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#Wartime_computing_and_the_invention_of_electronic_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#Wartime_computi...

prepend 10y ago
Those were secretarial jobs and not equivalent to today's computer programmers, like Ada Lovelace.
- panglott 10y ago
  Those were secretarial jobs because the men designing the hardware thought that was the hard stuff, and that designing software was basically secretarial work. When they discovered that designing software was hard, they forced the women out. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...
  - dobbin 10y ago
    It's a common pattern throughout history and one that really annoys me. People argue that the pay gap isn't real because men choose more highly-valued positions, but the reality is that positions favoured by women are inherently considered low-value. If some type of "women's work" somehow starts to become respectable or starts to pay better, it stops being "women's work" and the women are pushed out. If women start entering a respectable field and the field becomes "women's work", it stops being respectable. You can see it with the salaries of doctors in Russia, and the narrowing definition of what is considered "hard science" or STEM as women enter these fields in the US. It has very little to do with how difficult or important the work is.
    - mmel 10y ago
      I'm curious, what used to be considered a "hard science" that is now no longer considered so due to (or corralated with) the influx of women into that field?

u_wot_m8 10y ago

there's no pay gap in any industry when you take into account hours worked and years of experience. Women generally work less than men and take time off to have babies, man lands on moon.

Pigo 10y ago
If there is a gap, it's nothing compared to the figures our last President liked to throw out. I can believe there are some Mad Men-era guys lingering around huge corporations, but they are exceptions to rule (I've never seen it). Let me go ask my female team lead how subjugated she feels.
acdha 10y ago
This is a common assertion but there's research showing that the gap persists even after controlling for education, years of experience, etc.: http://time.com/money/4285843/gender-pay-gap-excuses-wrong/ http://time.com/money/4285843/gender-pay-gap-excuses-wrong/ “A 2011 study from Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce found that "men with some college but no degree earn about the same as women with a Bachelor’s degree," and that "wo men have to have a Ph.D. to make as much as men with a B.A." So you can't chalk the wage gap up to education. What about time in the workforce then? Attributing differences in pay to women's perceived inexperience ignores the studies that show the more years a woman spends in the workforce, the bigger the gap gets between her and her equally experienced male colleagues. Women in their late 20s earn around 92% of what their male peers receive, whereas women in their early 50s make just 71% of the average man's wages, according to a report from Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University.”
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  None of this addresses the parent's comment - they believe the pay disparity along gender lines disappears when hours worked and time spent out of the workforce. > Women in their late 20s earn around 92% of what their male peers receive, whereas women in their early 50s make just 71% of the average man's wages That makes sense, but doesn't mean that disparity increases as a woman ages - my first impression is that a woman in her late 50s entered the workforce about 40 years ago. There was certainly pervasive inequity at that time, and the opportunities those women were excluded from early in their careers compound.

zephyrthenoble 10y ago

I'm frankly quite surprised by the initial wave of comments disparaging this message. The facts are that women are poorly represented in the tech community[1], and do make less than men[2]. Any attempt to let women feel more accepted and bring about much needed change should be championed, not picked apart and belittled because you feel like you are personally being attacked when people are just asking for help. 1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-releases-employee-diversity-figures/9697049/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-release... 2. https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-computer-programmers/ https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-compute...

badwulf 10y ago
There are also less women in the military, construction works etc. Women tend to also live longer, should we cook up some conspiracy theories related to these facts as well? Seeing sexism everywhere is not helping the fight against remaining actual sexism.
prepend 10y ago
This is a really good point, but I think for me it's more of a visceral response to falseness or inaccuracy that was developed by programming actually. It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on- but I feel we can do this by being objectively accurate. I'm with you on the underrepresented story, this is very common. But the glassdoor study has many major flaws and I don't think is really that useful. The biggest flaw is that it's only using self-reported data for location, gender, salary and job title; and it has a very broad comparison by job title that doesn't really fit when you are comparing "programmer" with "qa engineer"
- gshulegaard 10y ago
  To build off your comment, I went ahead and found the glassdoor study: https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/03/Glassdoor-Gender-Pay-Gap-Study.pdf https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2... And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem. The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed. For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis. One way to look at this is: * My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors another way would be: * My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation. Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body? I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it! Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_distributed_random_variables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di... [2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrollment-glance https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...

dijit 10y ago

I'm desperate to push the "women aren't victims" narrative. If we tell them they're victims enough then they'll believe it. There is evidence of this in other things for instance refugees who are told that they're victims are less likely to integrate. I'm more focused on pointing out that we're all equal. If you're a woman on my team, I'm incredibly sorry but I'm not going to celebrate your feminity any more than I'd celebrate my other colleagues manliness. You do your job and I'll reward everyone with good pay, a bonus and a cake or two.

and0 10y ago
In this case women are definitely victims of you talking about them like they're misbehaving toddlers. You're literally commenting on a page written by women for women, saying that they're being manipulated by outside forces, and suggesting better ways to manipulate them. Have you ever thought about your opinions on feminism at all?
- dijit 10y ago
  I live in Sweden, in Sweden it's believed that Women and Men are equal. That's all I have to say about feminism- if there are cases where they are not then that needs to be addressed. However, the "Women in tech" push, while noble sounding has not done much to assuade confidence that they're actually doing anything. My awareness of women in tech is absolutely sky-high, with all the back-patting praise they're giving themselves almost constantly. I don't mind it of course, they're completely free to do what they wish, but it doesn't sit right with me to keep calling them victims. If they're victims give me something to use to help them. Don't point at invisible sexism (which I have seen _once_ and subsequently that person was fired for it). I get that you have an agenda regarding this, I, kinda don't. My personal belief is that Women are a plus to any company, and if some company is sexist then (on a purely capitalist level) great! more coders/sysadmins for me. If someone else is going to pay them less, great! I could give a shit what you have between your legs, it's what's between your ears that matters, so, again, I'm gonna pay fair and others will probably too, but otherwise, more coders/sysadmins for me. If I find out someone is being sexist in my org and pushing coders/sysadmins away, that person is going to feel a big wrath _regardless_ of my moral code. But because they're costing the company talent, and talent is hard to find. Then of course I _do_ feel a moral obligation to ensure everyone in my org is happy, but my previous sentences were referring to pure logic.

Pigo 10y ago

I think Ellen Pao is a prime example of why it's a liability to pretend you're working at Sterling Cooper. There are shrews out there with lawyers on their speed-dial, and they will pull the trigger even if they have no ammunition.

dang 10y ago
This is the sort of uncivil slur we ban people for, as well as a personal attack, which we also ban people for. Please don't comment like this here again. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13821899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13821899 and marked it off-topic.
- deleted 10y ago
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- tptacek 10y ago
  It's also just bad writing. What happens when you pull a trigger without any ammunition? Nothing.
  - Pigo 10y ago
    Which is exactly what happened to Pao's case. She had nothing, but sued anyways. Making what I wrote a pretty apt metaphor for the situation. I disagree, but respect their decision to say my comment was off-topic. But your comment shows you have no idea what I was even writing about.

cholantesh 10y ago

Why was this flagged?

codingisfunny 10y ago

I worked with a lot of women in software development, and not only didn't they face much discrimination, they were also constantly praised and helped by everybody, because people in that industry are taught constantly that women need help, that women are harassed, that we need more women. I'm tired of that crap, when a male coder face problems with teammates, at best he's called arrogant for defending himself, at worst incompetent because somewhat that loser deserved to be bullied. It's a tough industry but women are a lot more preserved by their colleagues than men are.

pkd 10y ago

I personally don't find anything flag worthy in this. Can the mods please unflag this?

OrwellianChild 10y ago
Seconded. Please unflag - this conversation is worth having.
_nothing 10y ago
Agreed. These conversations are important and relevant.
KirinDave 10y ago
I concur. There is nothing flagworthy here. This is only controversial because people doing flagworthy things are trying to inject politics into a celebration of people who write code and build software.

chrisbrandow 10y ago

I just had a conversation with a friend of mine today about the issues she is facing as a "woman in tech". It was some stuff that really surprised me. On today of all days. Treatment of women as full-fledged peers is definitely something that needs better attention in our industry.

badwulf 10y ago
Are you saying that every tech circle treats women badly? Are men just inherently evil?
sdflkd 10y ago
Yep. I go to the top university in Canada (wrt being employable in technology) and work with/know many qualified females. I can say that there is only one (out of ~25) that claims she has never experienced any sexism.
- cholantesh 10y ago
  But how do we know the other 24 aren't just crazy/hysterical/paranoid? /s
- ljknight 10y ago
  Even the women who say they have never experienced blatant sexism have no idea how many job offers or interviews they didn't get simply for being a woman, or how much less money they are making over the course of their life, etc. Sexism is not always explicit and obvious.
dashundchen 10y ago
I am always amazed by the stories I hear. It's a common yet toxic mentality where women are told they can't or shouldn't do something, or aren't cut out for STEM because they are female. I recently saw this surface on HN in the basement of this thread, discussing the appointment of Jennifer Widom as the dean of Stanford Engineering. Many posters speculated, without knowledge of her credentials, that she was unqualified compared to her male peers and only selected because she's a woman. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13779165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13779165 I don't know how it escapes them that this attitude is the literal definition of sexism, and that women in tech have to fight this constantly. I saw it happen all the time in engineering school. I even occasionally see it in workplace. So many of my female classmates and coworkers are talked down to, discouraged and have their skills written off by their male counterparts (nevertheless, they persist). No wonder the share of women in STEM fields dwindles, the culture can be absolutely toxic. I don't doubt that many people are honestly being unintentionally sexist. But it's on everyone to constructively call out this behavior and support a healthier culture in the school and workplace. At the very least, why would one want to write off the ideas and talent of half the population?

tzs 10y ago

> Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had arrived on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2017 to debate the confirmation of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions. Feb 8, 2017 was a Wednesday, not a Tuesday.

paloaltokid 10y ago
Thank you for your thoughtful contribution. If you hadn't pointed this out, I might have gone through life thinking February 8th was a Tuesday. That would have diminished my overall quality of life. Keep up the good work!

bobbington 10y ago

I'm going to drop a bombshell here... Maybe women just don't like coding as much as men and that's why they are "underrepresented". I'm going to drop another bombshell... Maybe it's OK that women focus on other things they prefer because specialization of labor is a good thing. Crazy thoughts, I know. I'm going to drop the biggest bombshell right now... Men have a Y chromosome, and women don't. The effects on a person are huge from physically different body parts to powerfully different hormones. Maybe our rabbid push for equality has failed to account for differences that truly exist between male and female... Maybe if we took that into account we would seek to find the best job for each individual, not try to make women act like men and disparage those who don't. Maybe if we acknowledged the benefits of gender differences we would never have come to the mentally ill conclusion that two males make a great marriage couple. studies show that women have more money and power today and yet are less happy. Let's let women be women. Then instead of expecting them to protect themselves because they are no different than men, we would treat them with special honor.

nilved 10y ago
Read a book dude. Everything you just said is both wrong and sexist.
- bobbington 10y ago
  I don't think it's sexist to acknowledge that a lot of women just want to be moms and wives. A lot of them don't want to do complex analytical work, instead wanting to raise children. And the world looks down on them for that, like there is something wrong with them for not getting into tech. I think that is the real sexism. I don't like it how women are taught they need to act like men. The fact is they are not men, and their uniqueness and femininity should be celebrated. Instead today we constantly compare them to men saying "your not good enough, not doing enough STEM, blah blah blah." being a great mom is underrated, but it's an amazing contribution to her kids and society. The real sexism is society telling women there is something wrong with them for wanting to just be wives and moms.
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phlakaton 10y ago

If ever I had a notion that an expression of solidarity for women in tech was unnecessary or quixotic, the response to this article on this very forum would be sufficient to dispel it.

niggerdeath 10y ago
ladies, if you need to cry about the wage gap or something and you're not on your period, my messages are open ;)
paulddraper 10y ago
Black Lives Matter
tnones 10y ago
This is what we call a kafkatrap.
deleted 10y ago
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bhalp1 10y ago
As the creator of https://dev.to https://dev.to and the co-author of this article, I concur mightily.
Mz 10y ago
HN has actually improved dramatically in recent years. There used to be no one like you speaking up in support. And, yet, it took me a long time to see the sexism here because it was already so much more civil than other places I had known. (In case you are unaware, I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member here. I strongly suspect I really am because I have been saying that for a couple of years or so and no one has shot me down yet with "Nope!!! THIS member is openly female AND on the leaderboard, you dumbass!!!!!")
oh_sigh 10y ago
Well, the very first claim the article brings up is that women face a pay gap, which is simply not true when you control for other variables. So that's not a good start. Also, the origin of the quote 'Nevertheless, she persisted' is from a completely non-gendered context, where a woman persisted in breaking the non-gendered rules of the US Congress.

ruleabidinguser 10y ago

Also because the issue essentially doesnt exist. A victim complex is a real thing and there are real victims. You must acknowledge both, not just the latter (or just the former for that matter.) Sexism is real but severely overblown in my experience.

smt88 10y ago
Is your experience that of a woman? If not, you really have no idea whether it's overblown or not.
- ruleabidinguser 10y ago
  So I'm barred from having an opinion because I'm not a woman? Perhaps rather than my "experience" I should have said "real life observations." Regardless, so be it, but don't expect my support if you ever end up wanting it.
  - smt88 10y ago
    You're not barred from having an opinion at all. I'm just saying that you don't have good information behind your opinion.
- pyronik 10y ago
  By that logic, women can never know if there is sexism because they don't have all that mythical privilege to compare it to. I'd love to see one time ... one time.. there be a focus on the disparity between men and women in waste services, janitorial services, etc. We accept they don't prefer those jobs but suddenly in tech (since it became sexy) its now a problem?
  - sanswork 10y ago
    >I'd love to see one time ... one time.. there be a focus on the disparity between men and women in waste services, janitorial services, etc. Why? >We accept they don't prefer those jobs but suddenly in tech (since it became sexy) its now a problem? You answered this yourself. One of the fields is desirable and the other isn't so of course there is going to be more concern about the desirable one.

HiResSleep 10y ago

People who forward the feminist narrative always insist that they are interested in having a "conversation", but this is a lie, as evidenced by this statement. Agreement with my position proves my position. Disagreement with my position proves my position. You're not interested in speaking with people who disagree with you. A dialogue you want not. You wish to have a monologue, where you are the teacher and anyone who doesn't think like you is the pupil, who knows his place, sits down, shuts up, and listens. You are a bigot in the purest definition of the word.

BadassFractal 10y ago
One of the major issues here is that if you disagree with the currently fashionable narrative then you're immediately painted as a sexist. It's completely binary: you're either on the side of the narrative OR you're a bigot to be purged, a heretic to be burned at the social stake, there is no room for inquiry, debate or applying critical thinking. Accusing someone of being a bigot is 100% risk free, it's all upside, the accuser is always safe on a moral pedestal. Even going meta like I did gets you flagged, case in point.
dang 10y ago
We banned this account for trolling and detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824976 and marked it off-topic.

unknownsavage 10y ago

The grandstanding is corny at best. Take the first example: > Despite continued assaults on the credibility of her contributions to modern computer science as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace coded. Yet in reality she was very much respected in her day, and despite her challenges received widespread support. The first "assaults" on her scope of her contributions came over 100 after her death, and not some sexism she had to fight and overcome.

illumin8 10y ago
The fact that this comment is the top comment on this post, and pedantically tries to tarnish the entire article, which contains many real-life quotes from female software developers who are real, and live today, speaks volumes. Please, take a moment and reflect on what is most important. Is it gender equality, or is it nitpicking the temporal sequencing of Ada Lovelace's contributions?
donretag 10y ago
It was difficult for me to read the rest of the article once I came across that sentence. Granted, I have not read everything regarding Ada Lovelace, but she has always been acknowledged and respected. There is a major programming language named after her! The "assaults" on her credibility did not happen to her during her lifetime. Even if they are proven to be true, her proven contributions are still impressive.
mc32 10y ago
Because it's somewhat a cross cultural and cross racial issue --that is women don't only get the lower hand among white men (in given industries, sectors), but also non-white women are also disincentivized within/among other "races" and cultures, so it's a pan-human issue. women are ~50% of the pop across all races and cultures (sometimes less so due to active pop. suppression).
tomlock 10y ago
She never attended University. Do you think she just wasn't interested in attending?

dongslol 10y ago

I wish comments were scored in a way that was weighted by the degree of bravery it took to write them. What a shame that most of the top comments here are boring, stand-up-for-the-vulnerable types agreed with by the majority— "women face difficulties in tech, and we should help them whenever we can"—while the downvoted posts are the ones trying (not necessarily successfully) to arrive at politically incorrect truths.

om2 10y ago
All debates are bravery debates. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-braver...
nickpsecurity 10y ago
They are. The mechanism greys them out quickly due to downvotes followed by ungreying later due to upvotes if the post was substantive with citations. It's what happened to me early on countering BS that was popular.
BadassFractal 10y ago
Very much this. It's the easy, trite, safe, politically correct position to take. You get a pat on the back for being a good moral upstanding person according to the mores du jour. You feel good. No hard conversations are had. It becomes a cult. People are burned at the proverbial stake for not subscribing to the Geocentric model.
Mz 10y ago
It is incredibly hard to have a good discussion about this topic. I think it is getting better on Hacker News, but there is still a lot of work to do. I sometimes write about such topics, but can't get much traction. A few of my pieces have gotten a few thousand page views, mostly on HN, but most of what I write is largely ignored. If you want something meatier, you might enjoy my personal blog. Best.
- dongslol 10y ago
  I'll check it out.

danso 10y ago

Loved this anecdote: https://dev.to/thepracticaldev/nevertheless-she-coded/comments/459 https://dev.to/thepracticaldev/nevertheless-she-coded/commen... > The first thing I coded was an Everquest 7-page website in plain-old HTML. I was 15 and I had figured out HTML from right-clicking and wondering if 'View Source' was how it was made. I went into computer engineering because I loved video games and wanted to write games. I believe my one of my first webpages was a Final Fantasy fanpage with Microsoft FrontPage, uploaded to my dad's Prodigy web space. I don't know what the actual stats are in terms of girls playing video games, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a correlation between that childhood activity and a later interest in programming.

bsder 10y ago

I really wish they would quit promulgating this because it's actually counterproductive: "women face continued pay disparity" Seeing this statement tells me immediately that the author is grinding an ax. In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear. Complaining about discrimination or harassment? Sure, go for it. Lack of child care and having undue burden with family health issues? The stats back you up. However, attempting to promulgate something which is not true hurts the overall movement when there is so much that is true and needs to be fixed.

tomlock 10y ago
>pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear. So what you're saying is there are pay disparities in most tech fields. Aka, women face continued pay disparity.
- 59nadir 10y ago
  It's a hard sell to say someone "faces" something when they're on the better end of it.
  - tomlock 10y ago
    >In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). As you can see, you disagree with the commenter I was responding to. They think women only get paid more in "some" fields, not most. The original comment is both inconsistent with itself, and your comment.
throwaway91111 10y ago
Except—women DO face continued pay disparity. Just because a hand-picked statistic deviates from this norm doesn't mean it's not true.
Harimwakairi 10y ago
Do you have citations for the stats you claim? That's not a dig, btw; I'd honestly like to see them.

sattoshi 10y ago

This is the first thread of hn that I would label as cancer. "Pay gap is fake" "Prove it" Cites stuff "Unrelated/invalid" *Conversation derails Scrollinf half way, i saw this easily 5 times. It's as if people stick to their beliefs despite any arguments that are made.

jondubois 10y ago

I couldn't name a single programmer, man or woman who worked on any Apollo mission. The problem is not that women are under-recognized as coders, it's just that engineers as a class of workers are often under-recognized. Humans just don't care enough about intelligence unfortunately. Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong though.

asher_ 10y ago

These types of articles seem to always get the same mixture of responses. The biggest problem that I see is that everyone starts with completely different sets of assumptions and they are almost never up front about them. The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also. Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following: 1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct). 2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same. Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true. One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor. Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world.