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You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is

by slackingoff2017 9y ago

You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. If the author is wrong, that there definitely isn't some inherit genetic behavioral bias influencing job choice, than the bias is happening before students finish highschool. I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory because of far lower female graduation and entry level application rates to CS jobs. If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. That means that the overall point of the authors manifesto, that programs designed to specifically increase the ratio of female engineers are unfair, is true. We need to do something about the low number of women going into tech fields in school. Punishing companies for not hiring women when the vast majority of candidates are men is a perverse incentive that is biased against men and doesn't fix the real problem. It's like punishing someone for taking more yellow onions at the market when there's 3 times as many nice looking ones as white onions. The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase. Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude. Fixing this at the education level would mean owning up to a mistake. It's much easier to just fine everyone to make it look like you're fixing a "problem" caused by inadequate regulations.

andreasklinger 9y ago
a) i agree that it's a problem for the whole society not just the corporates. it starts by far earlier as you said b) your argument is that 50% is currently not possible most companies are <20% in tech positions and <20-30% for management a few years ago even <10% [2] [1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-numbers-2016/ https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-nu... [2] https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers/ https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers...
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  Yup. 50% is possible if you reject 3-4 men for every woman you hire for a programmer position. I don't think the percentages in management really matter because you tend to get promoted from lower rungs. Management % probably reflects the programmer hires 5-10 years ago. We really need to look at the percentage of female applicants. In the ~1000 applications I've seen directly from indeed etc, less than 20% we're female. I didn't count, but it seemed closer to 10%. It's so bad that for some job listings I remember not receiving a single female application for 20+ males.
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    Is it possible that women switch jobs less frequently than men? Or that they're drawn to different types of companies (e.g. established companies that they expect to have real HR departments and harassment policies, rather than startups that may be exciting but they perceive as presenting a higher risk of being a hostile environment)?
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      They are drawn to different types of industries less volatile and demanding. They also start fewer companies. So choices in life means much more than we want to admit. Of course women are being affected early on just as men but then the discussion should be about that rather than putting the guilt on companies who are just trying to make a business.
      - sardonicbryan 9y ago
        Or, maybe they're drawn to companies that aren't already filled with men with antiquated attitudes toward women. I run a product & design team for a high growth startup. Very demanding and volatile. We coincidentally will have exactly 6/12 female after our newest designer starts after Labor Day. While we definitely cultivate a spirit of diversity and inclusiveness, we don't have any explicit hiring practices other than requiring a woman to be on every hiring panel. Even a basic perusal of the tech press should make it really easy to understand why it might be important for a workplace to have gender diversity. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/14/betterworks-duggan-kim-assault-sexual-manner-lawsuit/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/14/betterworks-duggan-kim-ass... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/dave-mcclure-has-resigned-as-gp-of-500-startups/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/dave-mcclure-has-resigned-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/23/female-founders-accuse-vc-justin-caldbeck-of-making-unwanted-advances/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/23/female-founders-accuse-vc-... We are literally working in an industry with an unacceptable amount of sexual assault and harassment. It doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to form some strong hypotheses around how a male dominated workplace/industry might contribute to that. It doesn't exactly take a "leftist-feminazi-crusader" to be disgusted and want to make a change. It doesn't take Warren Buffett to realize that it might be good business to expand the talent pool in business/industry that faces endemic labor shortages.
cmsj 9y ago
Might be worth remembering that companies like Google have significant links with education systems, so they can address their hiring not just at the "who is applying" stage. Also, regarding "lowering the bar" - remember there is a lot more to building a SWE team than finding people who can do the best whiteboard coding challenges. Coding skills can be improved, diversity of backgrounds is also a team strength and one that can't be taught. So, one would hope that by forcing hiring diversity now, companies 1) force the white dude monoculture to break down, encouraging 2) more women to see SWE as an appealing opportunity, making 3) their future hiring pipeline and hiring committees sufficiently diverse that they don't need to force numbers. Also worth remembering that women CS grads entering the field used to be climbing at the same rate as lawyers and other similar fields, then something changed in the mid-1980s and while the other fields progressed ever-nearer 50%, CS numbers took a nosedive. I don't have good research into exactly why that happened, but I'm guessing women didn't say "oh we're doing 32bit computers now? Nah you keep this one bros" ;)
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  My guess is that software became known as a "wild" career around the same time. I think the boom-bust cycles and gold Rush mentality are the main contributors to women leaving the profession. How do we fix this? I don't think the silicon valley startup will ever appeal to women. Live in a closet for three years for a 10% chance to make a million dollars. Those odds only attract people with an appetite for risk. Mostly, unsurprisingly, young men. The problem with that is that silicon valley represents the field. To get more women we need to change the image of the profession. I'm of the opinion that females just don't want to do software development and that decision is made really young. Anecdotal, but I know plenty of guys that tinkered with PC's as young as 10 years old, and zero women that did so. It's seen as a boy thing, like cars.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - faceplanted 9y ago
    The thing that always got me as a kid was that as a boy, if you showed any signs of a technical aptitude in STEM and your parents found out, they'd practically have your life planned out right then and there, you'd get lots of "Oh, you can be an engineer then", or "you could become a scientist", but girls showing aptitude in STEM would basically get "Oh that's nice, tell me if you need anything". Girls seemed to have the same if not better grades on average, but girls in the advanced classes never seemed to have been pushed in the same way. That's my memory of it anyway, boys got pushed to go into STEM the second they showed any aptitude, girls were just sort of expected to keep it up.
samolang 9y ago
I agree mostly. But there may also be a cyclical effect where women don't go into CS because they don't see women working in tech. In which case Google shouldn't necessarily have a legal obligation to hire more women, but there may be a moral argument or even a long-term self-interest argument (i.e. increase supply of good engineers) for it.
twobyfour 9y ago
It's also possible for there to be multiple bottlenecks in the pipeline where women and girls are dropping out - including elementary school, college, entry level, and experienced engineers. There seems to be evidence that there's an effect at each of these levels that causes women to switch to other fields. If so, the existence of a problem at one stage in the pipeline is a poor excuse for failing to address a bottleneck at a later stage. Particularly when the actor in question is mostly involved in the later stages.
deleted 9y ago
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peak_body_yo 9y ago
I disagree that gender and race disparities in tech is even a problem. The majority of careers have gender and race disparities. It is normal. There needs to be good reasoning for why tech is more special than the hundreds of other careers that enjoy this same phenomenon.
belorn 9y ago
Does "early bias" theory include the leaky pipe line model? Ie: University students that fail a exam will switch program at a higher rate if their gender is a minority. In polls, they are also more likely to question their decision in career choice and have more self doubt about their ability to finish the program. The data that I have seen on this is that it is gender neutral, ie that the doubt caused by being a local minority is similar for both men and women. To make up numbers, if a student has 3 times a high risk of switching a program after a failed exam, the chance that they will graduates will be significant lower. Having a gender segregated education fixes this, but as soon the graduate enters the work market the same phenomenon happen after a failed interview unless they only seek work which is also gender segregated.
- deleted 9y ago
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jbreckmckye 9y ago
> You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. You are assuming that women are choosing their college degrees in a vacuum. They don't. They ask: can I see myself doing this job? Is this a worthwhile investment? And when they cannot see themselves working in tech, because they see no-one like themselves in IT, they choose other fields. > Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude. What specific mistakes can you point to? What particular solutions are within reach of the government? Because right now this just looks like shifting responsibility onto the state.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Absolutely right on this first point. I've always suspected my wife would have been a good programmer (she destroyed me on the logic games section of the LSAT, which imo correlates with engineering reasoning ability: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1198455392.shtml http://www.volokh.com/posts/1198455392.shtml). But she never even considered it, partly because she didn't want to choose a field in which she'd be facing all the hurdles of being a minority.
  - FeepingCreature 9y ago
    I feel like "choosing to go into it" is maybe the wrong model. Like, as far as I can recall I didn't choose to go into programming, computers were just there and I could write programs for them. Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code. Maybe it's different for "career programmers," if such a thing even exists.
    - ashark 9y ago
      Hell, I'd go a step farther: I don't even particularly like software development as a career, but I picked up programming early because I liked it as a hobby and needed to program & assemble computers & configure servers to do stuff I wanted to do and... it just became the path of least resistance to a decent-paying career. It's hard to turn away from it when you're just walking into places cold in high school and college and landing relatively high-paying jobs on the first try, but I definitely didn't choose it like sitting down and saying "I want to be a software developer, so I better learn programming now". FFS I did most of a Poli-Sci/IS degree my first attempt at college because actual classes about programming/computers seemed like an intolerably dull thing to do (I was proven right when I later picked up my CS degree—god was it boring). So, > Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code. Yep.
nightspirit 9y ago
> If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. If Google is anything like Redacted, that's the case. Redacted pays monthly bonuses to their international offices for each woman on the office's payroll. I have two friends working at Redacted in a relatively cheap region and they say the bonuses are as high as their junior-level salaries - they can afford to hire a second junior developer for each junior woman they have. Your guess what happens. An upside is that this poses no threat to male developers so they don't complain and just have a chuckle when their mandatory diversity training explains how the company's policy improves performance by "tapping into the pool of female talent formerly overlooked due to systemic discrimination".
raverbashing 9y ago
> You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. Or it implies that the bias has a more profound origin than simply hiring practices (the funnel tapers earlier in the process)
- red75prime 9y ago
  But not as early as conception, that would be too early. /s /s
tchaffee 9y ago
If women get paid more for the same qualifications because the supply of women is lower and the demand is higher, then market forces will eventually make sure education at all levels gets fixed. There are many ways to solve the same problem. Fixing a government run school directly sounds like one of the harder ways to go about it.
- troupe 9y ago
  > If women get paid more for the same qualifications Isn't that kind of the definition of the gender discrimination most companies are trying to avoid?
  - tchaffee 9y ago
    Women are getting paid measurably less, even by Google at the moment. There are a few decades of underpaid women's salaries to make up for before we can call it even.
lerpa 9y ago
> I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory Or maybe women just enjoy doing different kind of things than men.
BeetleB 9y ago
>You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. >it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts. However, I will say I'm a little tired of this notion that such companies are aiming for 50%. I know one company that has really ramped up hiring of minorities (mostly women, though). And everyone is criticizing them for targeting 50% when there is a problem in the supply. Except they never said they were targeting 50%. Not once. What they did was look at their different grade levels' skills, and compared that to the number of women in the market who should qualify, and compared that to the proportion in the company. Example: They found that 20% of PhDs in a relevant field that they hired from were women, whereas in the company only 10% of PhDs hired were women. So their recruitment efforts are to hit 20%. Not 50%. Any time someone says 50%, they are likely invoking a strawman.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Then perhaps this is a teaching moment for Google's PR team. As an outsider, and based on what I've heard and read on blog posts and hiring pages about affirmative action, a common method of meeting their goals is diversity quotas. Given the fact that men and women have a 50/50 balance, and given that many programs reach as close to perfect equality as they can, it seems obvious to me at least that they would be trying for a 50/50 distrobution between the sexes. If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    >Given the fact that men and women have a 50/50 balance, and given that many programs reach as close to perfect equality as they can, it seems obvious to me at least that they would be trying for a 50/50 distrobution between the sexes. >If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men. You want them to go out of their way to clarify assumptions you are making about things they never claimed?
deleted 9y ago
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mmgutz 9y ago
I agree with most of what you say. Except blaming "a mostly government run school system". I came out OK from a poorly rated public system in California. Please stop blaming the school system and our government. Our society puts so much emphasis on women looking a certain way; the way they should socialize; they need to be pretty, cheerleaders and subordinate ... Little girls aren't supposed to be nerdy and engineers. That's what society tells them in the movies they watch, the songs they hear and reinforced at home ... Let's get Jane some dolls. We'll give John a lego set. That's the "problem"
briancooley 9y ago
> The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase. I think you've got it backwards. In the real world, supply is increased to meet demand. Farmers aren't going to grow more white onions just to see what happens. They've got to believe it's going to be a more profitable crop because it is in demand. To extend your food analogy, it's like when Paul Prudhomme introduced blackened redfish at fine dining establishment Commander's Palace in the 1980's. Redfish went from being a "trash" fish to a species overfished to the point of near extinction. Importantly, nothing changed about the redfish itself. What changed was a new emphasis on using it in a dish. Similarly, lobster went from being a peasant or prisoner food to a delicacy when railways and canning helped extend the demand beyond the northeast US. What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics? I think this has to be the case because no one is getting into an employment pipeline that ends with what is perceived to be a hostile working environment.
- observation 9y ago
  > What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics? Last I read, the Economist said there is an advantage to diversity when attempting to be creative, but in other scenarios the advantage goes to the homogeneous team. https://www.economist.com/news/business/21692865-making-most-workplace-diversity-requires-hard-work-well-good-intentions-diversity https://www.economist.com/news/business/21692865-making-most... I think it was that article I read, can't tell because I'm over my article limit.
scotty79 9y ago
People are not onions. People learn. Even if companies will lower the bar on entry for women they will be just forced to educate their employees more on the job. For people just out of school it might seem strange but jobs are where you get most of you useful education. Is it additional burden on the companies? Sure. But we are fine with taxing companies and placing on them the burden of workers protections and environmental protection. This is just another protection. Protection against reinforcing inequality. I'm not saying it's good but additional education for less educated and more equality in society doesn't seem bad if the only cost is money from the richest corporations especially the ones that get most of their money from advertising which nowaydays is less about informing customer about your product existance and all about everything else.
pacificleo11 9y ago
"The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. " I agree with your point but economist will say that increasing the demand will be a better technique. Supply side will take care of itself. Affirmative actions are usually intended to create an artificial spike in demand for the purpose of greater good. How effective they are is a different matter altogether.

andreasklinger 9y ago

a) i agree that it's a problem for the whole society not just the corporates. it starts by far earlier as you said b) your argument is that 50% is currently not possible most companies are <20% in tech positions and <20-30% for management a few years ago even <10% [2] [1] https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-numbers-2016/ https://pxlnv.com/blog/diversity-of-tech-companies-by-the-nu... [2] https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers/ https://unreasonable.is/silicon-valley-more-female-engineers...

slackingoff2017 9y ago
Yup. 50% is possible if you reject 3-4 men for every woman you hire for a programmer position. I don't think the percentages in management really matter because you tend to get promoted from lower rungs. Management % probably reflects the programmer hires 5-10 years ago. We really need to look at the percentage of female applicants. In the ~1000 applications I've seen directly from indeed etc, less than 20% we're female. I didn't count, but it seemed closer to 10%. It's so bad that for some job listings I remember not receiving a single female application for 20+ males.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Is it possible that women switch jobs less frequently than men? Or that they're drawn to different types of companies (e.g. established companies that they expect to have real HR departments and harassment policies, rather than startups that may be exciting but they perceive as presenting a higher risk of being a hostile environment)?
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    They are drawn to different types of industries less volatile and demanding. They also start fewer companies. So choices in life means much more than we want to admit. Of course women are being affected early on just as men but then the discussion should be about that rather than putting the guilt on companies who are just trying to make a business.
    - sardonicbryan 9y ago
      Or, maybe they're drawn to companies that aren't already filled with men with antiquated attitudes toward women. I run a product & design team for a high growth startup. Very demanding and volatile. We coincidentally will have exactly 6/12 female after our newest designer starts after Labor Day. While we definitely cultivate a spirit of diversity and inclusiveness, we don't have any explicit hiring practices other than requiring a woman to be on every hiring panel. Even a basic perusal of the tech press should make it really easy to understand why it might be important for a workplace to have gender diversity. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/14/betterworks-duggan-kim-assault-sexual-manner-lawsuit/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/14/betterworks-duggan-kim-ass... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/dave-mcclure-has-resigned-as-gp-of-500-startups/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/dave-mcclure-has-resigned-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/23/female-founders-accuse-vc-justin-caldbeck-of-making-unwanted-advances/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/23/female-founders-accuse-vc-... We are literally working in an industry with an unacceptable amount of sexual assault and harassment. It doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to form some strong hypotheses around how a male dominated workplace/industry might contribute to that. It doesn't exactly take a "leftist-feminazi-crusader" to be disgusted and want to make a change. It doesn't take Warren Buffett to realize that it might be good business to expand the talent pool in business/industry that faces endemic labor shortages.

cmsj 9y ago

Might be worth remembering that companies like Google have significant links with education systems, so they can address their hiring not just at the "who is applying" stage. Also, regarding "lowering the bar" - remember there is a lot more to building a SWE team than finding people who can do the best whiteboard coding challenges. Coding skills can be improved, diversity of backgrounds is also a team strength and one that can't be taught. So, one would hope that by forcing hiring diversity now, companies 1) force the white dude monoculture to break down, encouraging 2) more women to see SWE as an appealing opportunity, making 3) their future hiring pipeline and hiring committees sufficiently diverse that they don't need to force numbers. Also worth remembering that women CS grads entering the field used to be climbing at the same rate as lawyers and other similar fields, then something changed in the mid-1980s and while the other fields progressed ever-nearer 50%, CS numbers took a nosedive. I don't have good research into exactly why that happened, but I'm guessing women didn't say "oh we're doing 32bit computers now? Nah you keep this one bros" ;)

slackingoff2017 9y ago
My guess is that software became known as a "wild" career around the same time. I think the boom-bust cycles and gold Rush mentality are the main contributors to women leaving the profession. How do we fix this? I don't think the silicon valley startup will ever appeal to women. Live in a closet for three years for a 10% chance to make a million dollars. Those odds only attract people with an appetite for risk. Mostly, unsurprisingly, young men. The problem with that is that silicon valley represents the field. To get more women we need to change the image of the profession. I'm of the opinion that females just don't want to do software development and that decision is made really young. Anecdotal, but I know plenty of guys that tinkered with PC's as young as 10 years old, and zero women that did so. It's seen as a boy thing, like cars.
- deleted 9y ago
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- faceplanted 9y ago
  The thing that always got me as a kid was that as a boy, if you showed any signs of a technical aptitude in STEM and your parents found out, they'd practically have your life planned out right then and there, you'd get lots of "Oh, you can be an engineer then", or "you could become a scientist", but girls showing aptitude in STEM would basically get "Oh that's nice, tell me if you need anything". Girls seemed to have the same if not better grades on average, but girls in the advanced classes never seemed to have been pushed in the same way. That's my memory of it anyway, boys got pushed to go into STEM the second they showed any aptitude, girls were just sort of expected to keep it up.

samolang 9y ago

I agree mostly. But there may also be a cyclical effect where women don't go into CS because they don't see women working in tech. In which case Google shouldn't necessarily have a legal obligation to hire more women, but there may be a moral argument or even a long-term self-interest argument (i.e. increase supply of good engineers) for it.

twobyfour 9y ago

It's also possible for there to be multiple bottlenecks in the pipeline where women and girls are dropping out - including elementary school, college, entry level, and experienced engineers. There seems to be evidence that there's an effect at each of these levels that causes women to switch to other fields. If so, the existence of a problem at one stage in the pipeline is a poor excuse for failing to address a bottleneck at a later stage. Particularly when the actor in question is mostly involved in the later stages.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

peak_body_yo 9y ago

I disagree that gender and race disparities in tech is even a problem. The majority of careers have gender and race disparities. It is normal. There needs to be good reasoning for why tech is more special than the hundreds of other careers that enjoy this same phenomenon.

belorn 9y ago

Does "early bias" theory include the leaky pipe line model? Ie: University students that fail a exam will switch program at a higher rate if their gender is a minority. In polls, they are also more likely to question their decision in career choice and have more self doubt about their ability to finish the program. The data that I have seen on this is that it is gender neutral, ie that the doubt caused by being a local minority is similar for both men and women. To make up numbers, if a student has 3 times a high risk of switching a program after a failed exam, the chance that they will graduates will be significant lower. Having a gender segregated education fixes this, but as soon the graduate enters the work market the same phenomenon happen after a failed interview unless they only seek work which is also gender segregated.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jbreckmckye 9y ago

> You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. You are assuming that women are choosing their college degrees in a vacuum. They don't. They ask: can I see myself doing this job? Is this a worthwhile investment? And when they cannot see themselves working in tech, because they see no-one like themselves in IT, they choose other fields. > Unfortunately, our supply of women is governed by a mostly government run school system that doesn't exist in a world of supply and demand and likes to shift the blame for their ineptitude. What specific mistakes can you point to? What particular solutions are within reach of the government? Because right now this just looks like shifting responsibility onto the state.

rayiner 9y ago
Absolutely right on this first point. I've always suspected my wife would have been a good programmer (she destroyed me on the logic games section of the LSAT, which imo correlates with engineering reasoning ability: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1198455392.shtml http://www.volokh.com/posts/1198455392.shtml). But she never even considered it, partly because she didn't want to choose a field in which she'd be facing all the hurdles of being a minority.
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  I feel like "choosing to go into it" is maybe the wrong model. Like, as far as I can recall I didn't choose to go into programming, computers were just there and I could write programs for them. Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code. Maybe it's different for "career programmers," if such a thing even exists.
  - ashark 9y ago
    Hell, I'd go a step farther: I don't even particularly like software development as a career, but I picked up programming early because I liked it as a hobby and needed to program & assemble computers & configure servers to do stuff I wanted to do and... it just became the path of least resistance to a decent-paying career. It's hard to turn away from it when you're just walking into places cold in high school and college and landing relatively high-paying jobs on the first try, but I definitely didn't choose it like sitting down and saying "I want to be a software developer, so I better learn programming now". FFS I did most of a Poli-Sci/IS degree my first attempt at college because actual classes about programming/computers seemed like an intolerably dull thing to do (I was proven right when I later picked up my CS degree—god was it boring). So, > Like, I didn't choose to go into software development and so learnt to code, I chose to go into software development because I could code. Yep.

nightspirit 9y ago

> If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. If Google is anything like Redacted, that's the case. Redacted pays monthly bonuses to their international offices for each woman on the office's payroll. I have two friends working at Redacted in a relatively cheap region and they say the bonuses are as high as their junior-level salaries - they can afford to hire a second junior developer for each junior woman they have. Your guess what happens. An upside is that this poses no threat to male developers so they don't complain and just have a chuckle when their mandatory diversity training explains how the company's policy improves performance by "tapping into the pool of female talent formerly overlooked due to systemic discrimination".

raverbashing 9y ago

red75prime 9y ago
But not as early as conception, that would be too early. /s /s

tchaffee 9y ago

If women get paid more for the same qualifications because the supply of women is lower and the demand is higher, then market forces will eventually make sure education at all levels gets fixed. There are many ways to solve the same problem. Fixing a government run school directly sounds like one of the harder ways to go about it.

troupe 9y ago
> If women get paid more for the same qualifications Isn't that kind of the definition of the gender discrimination most companies are trying to avoid?
- tchaffee 9y ago
  Women are getting paid measurably less, even by Google at the moment. There are a few decades of underpaid women's salaries to make up for before we can call it even.

lerpa 9y ago

> I'm a proponent for an "early bias" theory Or maybe women just enjoy doing different kind of things than men.

BeetleB 9y ago

>You imply bias in the the hiring process is what is causing the gender imbalance in tech. Indicators such university enrollment in CS programs show that this is unlikely to be the case. >it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women. I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts. However, I will say I'm a little tired of this notion that such companies are aiming for 50%. I know one company that has really ramped up hiring of minorities (mostly women, though). And everyone is criticizing them for targeting 50% when there is a problem in the supply. Except they never said they were targeting 50%. Not once. What they did was look at their different grade levels' skills, and compared that to the number of women in the market who should qualify, and compared that to the proportion in the company. Example: They found that 20% of PhDs in a relevant field that they hired from were women, whereas in the company only 10% of PhDs hired were women. So their recruitment efforts are to hit 20%. Not 50%. Any time someone says 50%, they are likely invoking a strawman.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Then perhaps this is a teaching moment for Google's PR team. As an outsider, and based on what I've heard and read on blog posts and hiring pages about affirmative action, a common method of meeting their goals is diversity quotas. Given the fact that men and women have a 50/50 balance, and given that many programs reach as close to perfect equality as they can, it seems obvious to me at least that they would be trying for a 50/50 distrobution between the sexes. If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >Given the fact that men and women have a 50/50 balance, and given that many programs reach as close to perfect equality as they can, it seems obvious to me at least that they would be trying for a 50/50 distrobution between the sexes. >If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men. You want them to go out of their way to clarify assumptions you are making about things they never claimed?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mmgutz 9y ago

I agree with most of what you say. Except blaming "a mostly government run school system". I came out OK from a poorly rated public system in California. Please stop blaming the school system and our government. Our society puts so much emphasis on women looking a certain way; the way they should socialize; they need to be pretty, cheerleaders and subordinate ... Little girls aren't supposed to be nerdy and engineers. That's what society tells them in the movies they watch, the songs they hear and reinforced at home ... Let's get Jane some dolls. We'll give John a lego set. That's the "problem"

briancooley 9y ago

> The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase. I think you've got it backwards. In the real world, supply is increased to meet demand. Farmers aren't going to grow more white onions just to see what happens. They've got to believe it's going to be a more profitable crop because it is in demand. To extend your food analogy, it's like when Paul Prudhomme introduced blackened redfish at fine dining establishment Commander's Palace in the 1980's. Redfish went from being a "trash" fish to a species overfished to the point of near extinction. Importantly, nothing changed about the redfish itself. What changed was a new emphasis on using it in a dish. Similarly, lobster went from being a peasant or prisoner food to a delicacy when railways and canning helped extend the demand beyond the northeast US. What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics? I think this has to be the case because no one is getting into an employment pipeline that ends with what is perceived to be a hostile working environment.

observation 9y ago
> What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics? Last I read, the Economist said there is an advantage to diversity when attempting to be creative, but in other scenarios the advantage goes to the homogeneous team. https://www.economist.com/news/business/21692865-making-most-workplace-diversity-requires-hard-work-well-good-intentions-diversity https://www.economist.com/news/business/21692865-making-most... I think it was that article I read, can't tell because I'm over my article limit.

scotty79 9y ago

People are not onions. People learn. Even if companies will lower the bar on entry for women they will be just forced to educate their employees more on the job. For people just out of school it might seem strange but jobs are where you get most of you useful education. Is it additional burden on the companies? Sure. But we are fine with taxing companies and placing on them the burden of workers protections and environmental protection. This is just another protection. Protection against reinforcing inequality. I'm not saying it's good but additional education for less educated and more equality in society doesn't seem bad if the only cost is money from the richest corporations especially the ones that get most of their money from advertising which nowaydays is less about informing customer about your product existance and all about everything else.

pacificleo11 9y ago

"The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. " I agree with your point but economist will say that increasing the demand will be a better technique. Supply side will take care of itself. Affirmative actions are usually intended to create an artificial spike in demand for the purpose of greater good. How effective they are is a different matter altogether.