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This incident looks horrible, and it's sad how terrifically disrespectful the administrative assistant was towards the department head. Events like this often
by Archio 10y ago
This incident looks horrible, and it's sad how terrifically disrespectful the administrative assistant was towards the department head.
Events like this often serve (understandably) as explanations for why the tech industry's gender ratio is so heavily skewed. The data, while empirical, seems to be there as well:
>Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return.
There's one thing I am genuinely confused by though. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why a woman might want to leave an industry after being treated this way. However, _why is it_ that the tech industry _specifically_ has not evolved like other high paying, high knowledge, and high value fields (principally: medicine and law)?
Medicine and law were both fields traditionally dominated by old white men, that's a simple fact. Another fact is that gender discrimination, harassment, and all of the issues attributed to the tech industry today were also rampant in medicine and law while the gender ratio was so skewed. Yet for some reason, these fields were able to move towards parity, and the gender issues they experience now are a shadow of what they were previously. By gender, roughly equal numbers of women enter medicine as men, for example [0]. If I were to walk into the office of a doctor or lawyer today, I honestly would not be surprised to see a man or woman of any race/background.
What is it about technology, or the tech industry, that is not like medicine or law? While incidents of harassment and discrimination are terrible and deserve the strongest condemnation, I don't think they are the answer for our gender ratio problem. Why is it that while women outnumber men (a lead which grows every year) in graduation rates from colleges, the ratio of CS students in those same colleges is extraordinarily skewed towards men?
[0] http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduates-by-gender/?dataView=1¤tTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduate...
- tedunangst 10y agoWell, read any HN thread on the topic. "There's no problem in the tech industry. Women just don't like computers."
- Archio 10y agoAre you being sarcastic? I repeated multiple times in my analysis that I think there most definitely is a problem with the tech industry, and I don't believe the answer is "women just don't like computers". I think the question I'm positing here is very reasonable, given how other fields have been able to improve their situations dramatically. I don't know the answer to my question, that's why I asked it.
- tedunangst 10y agoThe answer is the legal field at some point acknowledged a problem and made an effort to recruit more women. The tech field is still mostly wrestling with no problem here status.
- csours 10y agoI am guilty of nudging a woman towards the exit of CS. In college one of my classmates was not understanding the material, and I asked her if she thought she really wanted to do CS... The thing is, a bunch of other guys were also not understanding the material, and I didn't say anything to them. I still think about it from time to time, and wherever you are, I'm sorry M. I don't think I can fix that, but I can speak up now.
- wolf550e 10y agoObjectively, if it's true that women need to perform much better than men to get promoted, then being a woman who struggles with the material in a male dominated field would suck, and maybe you did her a favor. I think the cycle can be broken if current practitioners can find young women who are willing to work extra hard (harder than their male peers) and give those women as much tutoring as they can handle (I certainly can't study for a full day, and I guess this plan requires studying overtime) so they can ace tests/projects, advance in the industry, change norms and people's expectations from women and make it easier for the next generation of women. There will be accusations of favoritism but as long as it's clear that they succeed because they worked hard and did the work themselves and not because they were helped, the accusations shouldn't get anywhere. Basically, I'm against favoring women over more qualified (or even as-qualified) men, but helping women become the most qualified candidate is definitely fair game.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]