9 ms·

Weird blog post. He never really attempts to answer his own question of if gender imbalance is a good thing. He just seems to be making the point that autism is

Weird blog post. He never really attempts to answer his own question of if gender imbalance is a good thing. He just seems to be making the point that autism is imbalanced in sex distribution, and engineering is appealing to autistic people, so the imbalance in engineering is expected due to autism. FWIW, as a woman on the autism spectrum myself, I actually kind of agree that some level of imbalance is due to this. But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today. Anecdotally, I've convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio/chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn't considered before was b/c nobody ever talked to them about it. Neither grew up playing video games (though one said she asked for a console and the parents put it in her brother's room for them to "share") and there weren't any mandatory programming classes, so they just were never exposed to it as an option, even though they are both highly logical people (thus the chem or bio degree paths before switching). So I guess I'm still firmly in the "Its a pipeline problem" camp. Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, and some of those women will miss out on tech. I think mandatory high school programming and networking classes are what will really help.

jasode 9y ago
>, I've convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio/chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn't considered before was b/c nobody ever talked to them about it. [...] Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, Wouldn't that anecdote also apply to men? E.g. We take 2 men currently in bio/chem and talk to them about switching to CS which had never occurred to them? Therefore, does the "uncounted" men cancel out the women "missing in the compsci pipeline"?
- oddlyaromatic 9y ago
  Wait could there really be two nerdy dudes interested in complicated stuff who never saw themselves as possibly working with computers? Like how could they have avoided the countless examples of famous male computer-related millionaires? Do you think, if there are such dudes, there are as many of them as there are women who never thought of themselves as "technical" or whatever? That seems really daft.
  - disgruntledphd2 9y ago
    I was. I didn't learn to program until I was 28, despite being interested in maths, engineering and technical topics my entire life. I started because I needed a statistical model that SPSS didn't provide, and quickly realised that coding is one of the most fun things in the world.
    - oddlyaromatic 9y ago
      Indeed! And I'm not trying to argue that you should have learned programming earlier. Just that you weren't "nudged" away from technical topics as many times as a woman might have been. You would not, for example, have run into serious people who somehow believe (or seem to) that your whole sex is less capable of working in that area. On the scale of large populations, ideas like that would have an impact on enough career choices to move the needle. I don't think everything has to be 50/50 in order to be "right". But each person should feel like their choices in where and how to work are limited by their preferences, and actual success at carrying out the work, not by some BS assignment of "suitable jobs" made at birth.
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today. Imagine a scale that goes from autism to whatever the opposite of autism is, with neurotypical as the middle. The hypothesis is that men are more likely to be on the autism side of dead center, even for people who are still in the neurotypical region. A higher percentage of men being diagnosed with autism is evidence of the hypothesis being true. > So I guess I'm still firmly in the "Its a pipeline problem" camp. They're kind of orthogonal. It clearly is the pipeline problem -- you can't hire people who don't get the relevant qualifications. But it's possible that biological differences contribute to the pipeline problem. In reality anything is affected by everything. So it makes sense to work against the pipeline problem regardless, because some of it is caused by non-biological factors that could be addressed. But some of it may also be caused by biology, which means that even if some progress is attainable, expecting the end result to be a 50/50 split may be unreasonable.
- OJFord 9y ago
  I'm going to say something contraversial, let's allow it for the sake of discussion. Is a biased pipeline even a problem? What are we trying to solve? It seems there are separate issues: equal numbers, we need to tackle the pipeline and convince women STEM is great; what happens happens, we need to not be biased against a gender and admit proportional to applications. I can see both sides; I think in different moods I ultimately agree with either. At the moment, I think if we spend long enough with admission (universities, jobs whatever) reflecting competence in the pipeline, then the pipeline will gradually come to reflect the proportion that's interested - 50:50 or not (either way around).
  - literallycancer 9y ago
    >we need to tackle the pipeline and convince women STEM is great "Great" is necessarily a function with (at least) 2 inputs, the thing being considered, and the person considering it (or their goals). Who is more likely to have a better job security, a STEM graduate or a med school graduate? What are the failure modes of each? Is a QA career better, or worse than that of a nurse (just spit-balling here, it might very well be the other way around)? -- I'd argue that men are more likely to be the risk takers, for evolutionary reasons. It makes perfect sense that they go for a career with lower chance at a bigger win. Less to lose -> take more risks. Now, if you are a woman, you are extremely likely to have a quality of life higher than the average man. Why would you take risks when you don't need to?
theoh 9y ago
You mention people you consider neurotypical who were studying hard science subjects. I wonder whether they might, all the same, be quite field independent -- this is a trait that analytical people often have, without it putting them on an autism spectrum. The visual test in the blog post is actually a field dependence test: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1698-3_1726 https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1... What I'm getting at is that there are broader, non-clinical variations in cognitive style that complicate the notion of neurotypicality. Anyone studying science is unlikely to be at the extreme field dependent end of the scale. So part of the imbalance may rest on real but non-clinically significant cognitive differences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_dependence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_dependence
- sudosteph 9y ago
  Great links! But I'm confused by the definition of "autism" that you're using. I'm referring to the DSM-V defined "autism spectrum disorder". In my comment, NT refers to "person not meeting criteria for DSM-V autism spectrum and not diagnosed as such". The field dependence test is interesting, but does not replace a actual diagnosis by an expert as far as I can tell. While I can accept "most autistic people do well on the test " (it was pretty instant for me), I'm not convinced that a strong performance by someone who does not meet the criteria for autism spectrum disorder is proof that the person in question is actually somewhat autistic. Maybe there are other factors that make someone good at recognizing it? And even if it was a good indicator, there is no guarantee that the 4:1 sex imbalance in diagnosed autism spectrum disorder translates to an equivalent imbalance in high-performing non-autistic-diagnosed (but hypothetically still autism spectrum by field dependence criteria) people. Would love to see some studies though.
graphitezepp 9y ago
While the autism imbalance may play a factor, I 100% believe it is mostly marketing driving the gender gap. Early on computers were marketed to men, because they were tools which were a "man thing". And now still video games are predominately marketed towards males, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general. So if I understand correctly, I am with you, its a pipeline problem due to historical factors which are rapidly fading.
- throw9991 9y ago
  >predominately marketed towards males Why though? Why would a company want to limit sales of video games by only marketing to one demographic?
- jasode 9y ago
  >Early on computers were marketed to men, >, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general. Video games are marketed more to males but that didn't stop females from participating in large numbers.[1] Why would "male marketing" dissuade females from computer programming but at the same time, it doesn't affect computer gaming? https://www.google.com/search?q=more+women+play+video+games+than+men https://www.google.com/search?q=more+women+play+video+games+...
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    The types of games primarily marketed to men are indeed primarily played by men.[0] [0] http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/ http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/
    - jasode 9y ago
      Genre specific games that appeal to different genders is not relevant to my point. I was responding specifically to the cause/effect of historical marketing -- specifically OP's sentence: "Early on computers were marketed to men," So "early on", we're talking about 1960s/1970s advertisements for mainframes of IBM, DEC, VAX, Burroughs, etc and the 1980s ads for personal computers like IBM PC (original), Apple IIe, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, etc. If we want to blame early period "marketing" for women's lake of interest in computer _programming_, we have to also explain the counterexample of early marketing for PacMan, DonkeyKong, Missile Command not having the same decades long suppression of female computer _gaming_. The video gaming magazines and its ads in the 1980s/1990s were heavily male-dominated. (Arguably, the videogames ads were more male-themed than mainframes' ads. The videogames' ads often had abundant cleavage and skin. The mainframe ads did not.)
heretoo 9y ago
Potentially, the author is using this example as a vehicle to ask us to consider that a 50/50 gender split is unrealistic when you ever try to correct for a different inequality. I think the author also intends to try and suggest that the 50/50 split doesn't need to be blamed on men.
- sudosteph 9y ago
  Those are both fine points and I think we would find a lot of common ground if that was the topic. However the title was: "Is gender inequality in technology a good thing?" So is the author saying it is a good thing? Does he mean that gender inequality (as it presents today) is good? Or just that some gender equality (60/40 for example) would be as good as 50/50? I hope he means the latter, but the wording implies the former. I'm just worried that he didn't acknowledge the potential for factors besides autism to be relevant or provide a more fair target equality ratio to strive for. That makes me think he thinks the current numbers are fine, which I disagree with. The level of imbalance we see today indicates to me we are missing out on talent, and my experience makes me think it's a pipeline problem due to underexposure of tech careers to logical, but non-tech hobbyist young females.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Perhaps a 50:50 split is unrealistic, but what about a 70/30 split? Representation is terrible across the board, with many universities seeing 10% female enrollment. People seem to come up with small reasons why 50:50 might be unreachable and use that as justification for halting change.
throw9991 9y ago
> in my experience we are still very much a minority overall Seems like AQ mean for software engineers is a lot higher on avg than other industries like biology where there are lots of women. https://autismodiario.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/BaronCohenWheelwrightEtAl2001.pdf https://autismodiario.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/BaronCo...
microcolonel 9y ago
My friend (also in bio/ochem) frequently says she's going to get into programming, and I frequently respond with encouragement, because it's a great skillset to have even if she stays in biology. I get her started with something, make sure she's motivated to approach the practice problems or personal project, but ultimately she just doesn't want to. She's smart and logical and all that, but I don't think that's the determining factor, and whatever that factor is, she doesn't have it. I think there are also probably two camps of people, even among people who go into software: those who never needed to be encouraged or asked to do it, and those who eventually started because of some outside pressure or incentive. A company I worked for actively seeks out and trains women for web development work for free in an effort to prop up their female numbers. They bring more than the total number of employees at the company through that program in a given year. Even with this intensely focused pipeline, they still can't keep up pace with the qualified men who arrive through normal hiring routes. It's even a bit unfair, I was hired at that company rapidly with no official credentials (granted earlier on), just an interview/demonstration; whereas apparently if I were a woman, I could still be hired even if I wouldn't qualify when I walked in, and I'd at least walk out with professional training. The men there trained and represented themselves, or paid for an education. I feel like at some point you have to stop wishing something is within your control. I don't think you can construct a fair world where women freely choose to be software developers at the same rate as men. A workplace has no obligation to be equally attractive to every working age person, I don't think they have an obligation to be attractive to exact proportions of men and women in gen pop.

jasode 9y ago

>, I've convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio/chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn't considered before was b/c nobody ever talked to them about it. [...] Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, Wouldn't that anecdote also apply to men? E.g. We take 2 men currently in bio/chem and talk to them about switching to CS which had never occurred to them? Therefore, does the "uncounted" men cancel out the women "missing in the compsci pipeline"?

oddlyaromatic 9y ago
Wait could there really be two nerdy dudes interested in complicated stuff who never saw themselves as possibly working with computers? Like how could they have avoided the countless examples of famous male computer-related millionaires? Do you think, if there are such dudes, there are as many of them as there are women who never thought of themselves as "technical" or whatever? That seems really daft.
- disgruntledphd2 9y ago
  I was. I didn't learn to program until I was 28, despite being interested in maths, engineering and technical topics my entire life. I started because I needed a statistical model that SPSS didn't provide, and quickly realised that coding is one of the most fun things in the world.
  - oddlyaromatic 9y ago
    Indeed! And I'm not trying to argue that you should have learned programming earlier. Just that you weren't "nudged" away from technical topics as many times as a woman might have been. You would not, for example, have run into serious people who somehow believe (or seem to) that your whole sex is less capable of working in that area. On the scale of large populations, ideas like that would have an impact on enough career choices to move the needle. I don't think everything has to be 50/50 in order to be "right". But each person should feel like their choices in where and how to work are limited by their preferences, and actual success at carrying out the work, not by some BS assignment of "suitable jobs" made at birth.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today. Imagine a scale that goes from autism to whatever the opposite of autism is, with neurotypical as the middle. The hypothesis is that men are more likely to be on the autism side of dead center, even for people who are still in the neurotypical region. A higher percentage of men being diagnosed with autism is evidence of the hypothesis being true. > So I guess I'm still firmly in the "Its a pipeline problem" camp. They're kind of orthogonal. It clearly is the pipeline problem -- you can't hire people who don't get the relevant qualifications. But it's possible that biological differences contribute to the pipeline problem. In reality anything is affected by everything. So it makes sense to work against the pipeline problem regardless, because some of it is caused by non-biological factors that could be addressed. But some of it may also be caused by biology, which means that even if some progress is attainable, expecting the end result to be a 50/50 split may be unreasonable.

OJFord 9y ago
I'm going to say something contraversial, let's allow it for the sake of discussion. Is a biased pipeline even a problem? What are we trying to solve? It seems there are separate issues: equal numbers, we need to tackle the pipeline and convince women STEM is great; what happens happens, we need to not be biased against a gender and admit proportional to applications. I can see both sides; I think in different moods I ultimately agree with either. At the moment, I think if we spend long enough with admission (universities, jobs whatever) reflecting competence in the pipeline, then the pipeline will gradually come to reflect the proportion that's interested - 50:50 or not (either way around).
- literallycancer 9y ago
  >we need to tackle the pipeline and convince women STEM is great "Great" is necessarily a function with (at least) 2 inputs, the thing being considered, and the person considering it (or their goals). Who is more likely to have a better job security, a STEM graduate or a med school graduate? What are the failure modes of each? Is a QA career better, or worse than that of a nurse (just spit-balling here, it might very well be the other way around)? -- I'd argue that men are more likely to be the risk takers, for evolutionary reasons. It makes perfect sense that they go for a career with lower chance at a bigger win. Less to lose -> take more risks. Now, if you are a woman, you are extremely likely to have a quality of life higher than the average man. Why would you take risks when you don't need to?

theoh 9y ago

You mention people you consider neurotypical who were studying hard science subjects. I wonder whether they might, all the same, be quite field independent -- this is a trait that analytical people often have, without it putting them on an autism spectrum. The visual test in the blog post is actually a field dependence test: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1698-3_1726 https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1... What I'm getting at is that there are broader, non-clinical variations in cognitive style that complicate the notion of neurotypicality. Anyone studying science is unlikely to be at the extreme field dependent end of the scale. So part of the imbalance may rest on real but non-clinically significant cognitive differences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_dependence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_dependence

sudosteph 9y ago
Great links! But I'm confused by the definition of "autism" that you're using. I'm referring to the DSM-V defined "autism spectrum disorder". In my comment, NT refers to "person not meeting criteria for DSM-V autism spectrum and not diagnosed as such". The field dependence test is interesting, but does not replace a actual diagnosis by an expert as far as I can tell. While I can accept "most autistic people do well on the test " (it was pretty instant for me), I'm not convinced that a strong performance by someone who does not meet the criteria for autism spectrum disorder is proof that the person in question is actually somewhat autistic. Maybe there are other factors that make someone good at recognizing it? And even if it was a good indicator, there is no guarantee that the 4:1 sex imbalance in diagnosed autism spectrum disorder translates to an equivalent imbalance in high-performing non-autistic-diagnosed (but hypothetically still autism spectrum by field dependence criteria) people. Would love to see some studies though.

graphitezepp 9y ago

While the autism imbalance may play a factor, I 100% believe it is mostly marketing driving the gender gap. Early on computers were marketed to men, because they were tools which were a "man thing". And now still video games are predominately marketed towards males, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general. So if I understand correctly, I am with you, its a pipeline problem due to historical factors which are rapidly fading.

throw9991 9y ago
>predominately marketed towards males Why though? Why would a company want to limit sales of video games by only marketing to one demographic?
jasode 9y ago
>Early on computers were marketed to men, >, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general. Video games are marketed more to males but that didn't stop females from participating in large numbers.[1] Why would "male marketing" dissuade females from computer programming but at the same time, it doesn't affect computer gaming? https://www.google.com/search?q=more+women+play+video+games+than+men https://www.google.com/search?q=more+women+play+video+games+...
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  The types of games primarily marketed to men are indeed primarily played by men.[0] [0] http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/ http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/
  - jasode 9y ago
    Genre specific games that appeal to different genders is not relevant to my point. I was responding specifically to the cause/effect of historical marketing -- specifically OP's sentence: "Early on computers were marketed to men," So "early on", we're talking about 1960s/1970s advertisements for mainframes of IBM, DEC, VAX, Burroughs, etc and the 1980s ads for personal computers like IBM PC (original), Apple IIe, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, etc. If we want to blame early period "marketing" for women's lake of interest in computer _programming_, we have to also explain the counterexample of early marketing for PacMan, DonkeyKong, Missile Command not having the same decades long suppression of female computer _gaming_. The video gaming magazines and its ads in the 1980s/1990s were heavily male-dominated. (Arguably, the videogames ads were more male-themed than mainframes' ads. The videogames' ads often had abundant cleavage and skin. The mainframe ads did not.)

heretoo 9y ago

Potentially, the author is using this example as a vehicle to ask us to consider that a 50/50 gender split is unrealistic when you ever try to correct for a different inequality. I think the author also intends to try and suggest that the 50/50 split doesn't need to be blamed on men.

sudosteph 9y ago
Those are both fine points and I think we would find a lot of common ground if that was the topic. However the title was: "Is gender inequality in technology a good thing?" So is the author saying it is a good thing? Does he mean that gender inequality (as it presents today) is good? Or just that some gender equality (60/40 for example) would be as good as 50/50? I hope he means the latter, but the wording implies the former. I'm just worried that he didn't acknowledge the potential for factors besides autism to be relevant or provide a more fair target equality ratio to strive for. That makes me think he thinks the current numbers are fine, which I disagree with. The level of imbalance we see today indicates to me we are missing out on talent, and my experience makes me think it's a pipeline problem due to underexposure of tech careers to logical, but non-tech hobbyist young females.
UncleMeat 9y ago
Perhaps a 50:50 split is unrealistic, but what about a 70/30 split? Representation is terrible across the board, with many universities seeing 10% female enrollment. People seem to come up with small reasons why 50:50 might be unreachable and use that as justification for halting change.

throw9991 9y ago

> in my experience we are still very much a minority overall Seems like AQ mean for software engineers is a lot higher on avg than other industries like biology where there are lots of women. https://autismodiario.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/BaronCohenWheelwrightEtAl2001.pdf https://autismodiario.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/BaronCo...

microcolonel 9y ago

My friend (also in bio/ochem) frequently says she's going to get into programming, and I frequently respond with encouragement, because it's a great skillset to have even if she stays in biology. I get her started with something, make sure she's motivated to approach the practice problems or personal project, but ultimately she just doesn't want to. She's smart and logical and all that, but I don't think that's the determining factor, and whatever that factor is, she doesn't have it. I think there are also probably two camps of people, even among people who go into software: those who never needed to be encouraged or asked to do it, and those who eventually started because of some outside pressure or incentive. A company I worked for actively seeks out and trains women for web development work for free in an effort to prop up their female numbers. They bring more than the total number of employees at the company through that program in a given year. Even with this intensely focused pipeline, they still can't keep up pace with the qualified men who arrive through normal hiring routes. It's even a bit unfair, I was hired at that company rapidly with no official credentials (granted earlier on), just an interview/demonstration; whereas apparently if I were a woman, I could still be hired even if I wouldn't qualify when I walked in, and I'd at least walk out with professional training. The men there trained and represented themselves, or paid for an education. I feel like at some point you have to stop wishing something is within your control. I don't think you can construct a fair world where women freely choose to be software developers at the same rate as men. A workplace has no obligation to be equally attractive to every working age person, I don't think they have an obligation to be attractive to exact proportions of men and women in gen pop.