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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],

• 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...
    • alainv 10y ago
      You're building a strawman. No one is calling for "a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice [and] perfectly equal distributions of any sort." One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable. Continuing on the theme of using the sources presented in this thread: do you find it more likely that Google's worldwide tech workforce is 83% male because A) there is "no causal influence, insidious or otherwise" and there is perfect freedom of choice or because B) there are systemic factors at play? That is the only question.
      • intellegacy 10y ago
        oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline. So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason
        • handojin 10y ago
          And they hate being doctors too. Except they don't. And deconstruction of what was a frankly pervasive culture of sexism in medicine and law has resulted in much higher participation of the second sex in these fields. Willful blindness is what it is.
          • intellegacy 10y ago
            well there are definitely cultural and sexist factors holding women out of STEM, that I agree with. What's the solution then?
        • jakelazaroff 10y ago
          There's been plenty written about how "the pipeline problem" is a myth: - http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426364306/more-than-a-pipeline-problem-in-search-of-diversity-in-silicon-valley http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426... - https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-is-more-than-a-pipeline-problem/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...
  • zephyrthenoble 10y ago
    You bring up a fair point that the study is not perfect. I would be interested to find a better study, but to be honest I'm not sure where I would be able to find one... I'll see if I can find a more objective one after work.
  • cmiles74 10y ago
    It's going to be easy to find problems with any study with which you disagree. I want to be clear: studies that are trying to distill something with this vast a number of moving parts will never be entirely satisfactory to everyone. The issues are simply too complicated. That said, I find it much easier to believe that women are paid less than men, on average, than to believe otherwise. This has been the case historically since pretty much the founding of the nation. While I would certainly hope and do believe that women now make more than they have in the past, and that their pay is now approaching that of men, I think it's unreasonable to believe that we have reached "pay equity" between the sexes. In my opinion, I would not consider pay between men and women equitable until I have seen reasonable looking studies that have proven the case. I think it would be wise to be skeptical of such studies but look forward to their being published.
    • prepend 10y ago
      That's pretty fatalistic, there are many quality studies that people disagree with. The soundness of a paper isn't based on whether you agree with it or disagree with it, it is based on the methods and the data. It's interesting that you require data to change your assumption that there's not a problem.
      • cmiles74 10y ago
        I think it is easy to nitpick studies, especially when they are trying to measure something that is this complicated. While the soundness of the paper should be grounded in the methods and the data, it is far too easy for an individual to discount it's value based on a perceived mistake in method. The more complex the methods, the more polarizing the results, the more this is the case. For this particular issue, I think the methods by definition need to be fairly complex. I am comfortable with my assertion that I will need to see some data before I take the position that women are not paid less than men in a discriminatory fashion. In my opinion, that women are discriminated against is a historical truth. I am not trying to be insulting, but I do find it hard to believe that people disagree on this.
        • 10y ago
  • thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on I don't follow the logic. Someone who enters tech through such an intervention is someone taken away from another field; why do we need another awesome programmer more than we need another awesome salesperson?
• microcolonel 10y ago
  You really have to ask yourself: Why would women, as a cohort, make the same amount per individual as men? Do you assume that nothing can be different enough between men and women to reasonably justify the statistics? I know of women who are paid more than me in tech, and I know why. I know of women who are paid less than me, and I can think of n reasons why. As for sheer numbers, ask yourself: are there any industries where there are considerably fewer men than women? The answer is, of course, yes. Look at nursing. In the most gender-equitable societies on the planet, I'm talking the Norways and Swedens of the world, you'll see 80-90% female involvement in nursing. Look at construction. In those same societies, you will see almost the exact opposite, probably even greater disparities. Look at sales departments, I don't know a single woman who likes sales work, and I know at least a few who have given it a serious try. I'm sure there are some, but you won't convince me that it's the norm without hard data. On the flip side of that, I grew up with guys who love working with their hands in construction, and who like that it's honest work. My intuition is that men and women(real, living individual men and women) are different in some way which drives them to prefer different work based on schedules, the way their job has them interact with people, the amount of solitary vs. collaborative work, work-life balance, and hosts of other complex differences. As for harassment, I find it hard to believe that tech is a particularly bad place for it. I would believe you if you said that startups are prone to harassment (HR vacuum). Until I see a non-partisan study with an appreciable number of respondents, a consistent rubric for assessing individual situations, I will continue to believe what I see in person. No CNET or USA Today article is going to convince me that it's a problem in itself that there is a statistical difference between the average yearly earnings of different cohorts. I'm sure married and unmarried people make different amounts of money on average. I'm sure people with and without kids make different amounts of money on average. Nothing about those statistics says that there is a discriminatory or unfair advantage. If you could prove that a major company is systematically underpaying women for work of equivalent holistic value, then it would be the case of the decade; this case has clearly never happened, because if it ever did, it would be an outrage, and at very least the people making this argument would be pointing at it every time they got a chance. And I know you'll downvote this before reading it through, but maybe the first few open-minded people will get a chance to reflect. I can spare a few HN hivemind cohesion points.
  • 10y ago
• sheepmullet 10y ago
  Perhaps there are disparaging comments because people love to quote misleading statistics... kind of just like you did. From the glassdoor wage gap study you mentioned in [2]: > After taking into account differences in education and experience, men working at tech companies overall make 5.9 percent more than women do From a brief scan of the study they didn't control for hours worked and they are already down to 5.9% Since full-time men work 5% longer than full-time women[3] just adjusting for hours worked almost entirely eliminates the gap. [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/06/30/new-report-men-work-longer-hours-than-women/#2f35760118b4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/06/30/new-repo... Edit: Sorry I put the overall adjusted US pay gap of 5.4% when I meant to put the adjusted tech pay gap of 5.9% from the glassdoor study.
  • ajross 10y ago
    So... your response to finding an uncorrected variable in the study (which I don't see the value of, honestly, given that tech workers are near-uniformly salaried in this country) is to go out and cherry pick a "correction" from an entirely unrelated study that confirms your worldview? Who's quoting misleading statistics now? Yeah, I've gone through and scanned that BLS report you linked to (actually you didn't, you linked to Forbes, but this is what they were talking about): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf It doesn't say what you think it does at all. This isn't a study of men vs. women working identical jobs and doing less work, this is a finding that across the entire workforce, a men's "work day" is somewhat longer than a woman's. Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs.
    • sheepmullet 10y ago
      > Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs. Please stop trying to mislead people. From your link on the very first page: > However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women—8.2 hours compared with 7.8 hours. (See table 4.) Like I said this is an ~5% difference. If you don't like this particular study the results have been replicated dozens of times across a wide range of industries. If you have some evidence that full time male tech workers work fewer hours than full time female tech workers I'd love to see it.
• ar15saveslives 10y ago
  If they make less than men, why don't companies hire women alone? Don't they want to save money on salaries?
  • hexane360 10y ago
    Because women are subconsciously undervalued as workers. This discussion is complex and it's not entirely obvious how much of the pay gap is caused by discrimination, but this is one stupid argument.
    • dongslol 10y ago
      Dismissing this argument with "because women are undervalued" amounts to saying that every company thus far has been too obtuse to manage their biases and collect 23% in discounts. Say people do have widespread, subconscious biases against women. 23% in savings is enormous. If it really exists, someone out there is going to try super, super hard to exploit it while all the other suckers are stupidly paying 100/77 times more than they have to. Are you saying that despite this opportunity, no one has succeeded, because we're all too stupid to view women equally—every last one of us? If not, where is that clever company? A more likely explanation is that the people already tried doing this, and found that the opportunity they were trying to exploit didn't exist.
    • ar15saveslives 10y ago
      What do you mean by "subconsciously undervalued"? Do you have studies that show it? What about participation in opensource? Side projects? StackOverflow profiles? - none of these can be affected by "subconscious undervaluation". And how to value, let's say, a developer? How do you, personally, differentiate good and bad programmers?
    • gspetr 10y ago
      There are software companies composed of all men (or 95% men if we want to be a bit more relaxed). Successful ones - as in making profit. Where are all-women (or 95% women) companies? If you can get away with paying them less, where are all the capitalists exploiting the market inefficiency and getting rich in the process? Hell, nowadays companies like Starbucks[0] routinely put social causes first, profits second. So where are these companies? [0] https://www.starbucks.com/blog/an-open-letter-from-howard-schultz-ceo-of-starbucks-coffee-company/1268 https://www.starbucks.com/blog/an-open-letter-from-howard-sc...