6 ms·

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 ap

by 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
  [deleted]
- 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.
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    In other words, pigeonholing them into careers? Girls get to "be whatever you want to, darling". Boys have to make sure they bring home a paycheck and support their family. Why?
    - tatersolid 9y ago
      Because someone has to raise the kids, and mothers _usually_ but not always take on that role voluntarily. Especially since infants are biologically tied to their mother for food. My wife is more educated than I, with a masters degree. But she wanted to stay home, work part time, and not have our kids raised by a third party. The traditional family structure for Homo sapiens has strong biological and environmental roots, which in turn caused "societal traditions". Changing that in a few generations seems quite unlikely.
      - muninn_ 9y ago
        Sure, so why can't we accept that then, if that's the case?
- kenjackson 9y ago
  >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. I think the change we need to make is less about the profession and more about the people in the profession. We need to make it a field that seems open to women. Currently it isn't. I don't have a daughter, but I'd be very hesitant to suggest to her to go into the SW field. BTW, my sister tinkered with PCs as a kid. It is interesting that she went on to get a degree in statistics and me in computer science. She works in policy now, and me in CS -- despite the fact that both of us had very similar achievement paths through HS. To this day she is better at most maths than I am, but most people seem to assume I'm better (at least when it comes up).
  - slackingoff2017 9y ago
    One of the great lessons I've learned in life is that you can't change other people. Indeed in this case it seems like the "old boys club" in software development is the result of the gender balance not the cause. I can't think of a single male dominated profession that isn't seen in that light. If we're serious about fixing the ratio it needs to be done with policy and young, well before students graduate highschool.
- ghort 9y ago
  I don't think people necessarily understand which career they choose. When girl wants to become ballerinas it is presumably because they have some idea that it is glamorous, not that it entails working hard under strict discipline for many years. They figure that out later. What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues. Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems. How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds. [0] 1977 Atari 2600 1977 Apple II 1981 Sinclair ZX81 1981 BBC Micro 1982 Commodore 64 1983 WarGames (movie) 1983 Nintendo Entertainment System 1985 Amiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers [1] "When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64." "My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school." "1982-83 (grammar to high school age): My parents bought a word processor in the 80's that you could also program." "In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work." "My dad brought home a 386 IBM-PC so he could learn AutoCAD." "I got started with BASICA on a Tandy 1000. My dad had a newer computer at the time but he certainly wouldn't let me use it." "I'm not sure if this counts; the birth of my hacking started on my dad's lap, doing amateur radio." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879 [2] "It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20." http://www.linfo.org/linus.html http://www.linfo.org/linus.html
  - sundvor 9y ago
- hacktothefuture 9y ago
  This was my initial thought as well but I remembered listening to this podcast and I think it touches on this idea and expands on it. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episo... One of the examples in the podcast expands on the viewpoint that computers are for men and that idea is ingrained even to the level of the family, so computers are kept in the sons bedroom so incidentally the daughter had less access to it. Its not suggested by guidance counselors to females when looking to select electives in junior high school. So if they are seen as a male hobby or interest, at a time when what your peers think is so important, girls are less likely to want to venture into that area and be outside the norm.
- curun1r 9y ago
  > 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. The interesting thing, to me, is that you can't look at those 10-year-olds in isolation. My experience mirrors yours and, yet, if you look back further, I'll bet you find that those 10-year-old tinkerers almost all have some history with Legos or other such construction toy that, very early, started building the guess-fail-iterate problem solving model that I believe is so important to computer aptitude. One of the side effects to being "good with computers" is that you end up getting asked to do a lot of tech support. Over the years, I've seen so many people who are so afraid of doing something wrong that they can't figure out how to do what they want despite being otherwise intelligent enough. They don't realize what's perfectly summed up here: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/ Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that.
  - amyjess 9y ago
    > Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that. This SMBC comic sums up the issue perfectly: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883 On a side note, I've also noticed that the bulk of my female classmates in college and the bulk of my female coworkers since then have been either Indian or Chinese. It might be worth exploring why Indian and Chinese women are more willing to work in tech than western women.
    - slackingoff2017 9y ago
      I have noticed the same. In these cultures it's more acceptable to be interested in such things. Probably because financial success is more important in such countries, gender stereotypes be damned. Still, it proves that a better gender ratio is definitely possible in the US as well
kpil 9y ago
Bill Gates happend, solidifying the nerd image.
richmarr 9y ago
There's a pretty convincing argument that the drop in apparent interest in computing from girls was caused by computers and computer games being marketed squarely at boys: https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/ https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu... The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China. As Adam Grant says, while there are some (small) differences between men and women, they're "not biologically determined" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women-vastly-exaggerated-adam-grant https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...
- sundvor 9y ago
  Back in the 80s, the computers (Vic20s/C64s) sold themselves to my group of friends in grades 4-8; we were not subject to any marketing in Norway. Games were not the primary motivator, BASIC programming was. Alas, I knew no girls who were into this even the slightest.
  - richmarr 9y ago
    Sure. I can't speak to what influenced you or friends, or the girls you knew... just that it's not a worldwide phenomenon, and is restricted to CS rather than other STEM fields... so seems to fit. There may be no way to ever know for sure.
- depressedpanda 9y ago
  > The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China. Suppose that the much higher proportions of female programmers in poorer countries might be because their choice is more limited; there is way more incentive in a poor country to want to land a fairly secure and well paid job, because you risk starving if you don't. Going for a liberal arts degree (or similar) in India, Romania or China would then be discouraged. Conversely, in the West, people are more free to pursue whatever profession they may like, because they most likely won't starve if they do. I'm not saying that this would be the only explanation for the gender gap, but I do think the explanation involves many more factors than 'computer games in the 80s'. I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely, especially since there are many studies that corroborate that they _do exist_.

by cmsj 9y ago

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
[deleted]
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.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  In other words, pigeonholing them into careers? Girls get to "be whatever you want to, darling". Boys have to make sure they bring home a paycheck and support their family. Why?
  - tatersolid 9y ago
    Because someone has to raise the kids, and mothers _usually_ but not always take on that role voluntarily. Especially since infants are biologically tied to their mother for food. My wife is more educated than I, with a masters degree. But she wanted to stay home, work part time, and not have our kids raised by a third party. The traditional family structure for Homo sapiens has strong biological and environmental roots, which in turn caused "societal traditions". Changing that in a few generations seems quite unlikely.
    - muninn_ 9y ago
      Sure, so why can't we accept that then, if that's the case?
kenjackson 9y ago
>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. I think the change we need to make is less about the profession and more about the people in the profession. We need to make it a field that seems open to women. Currently it isn't. I don't have a daughter, but I'd be very hesitant to suggest to her to go into the SW field. BTW, my sister tinkered with PCs as a kid. It is interesting that she went on to get a degree in statistics and me in computer science. She works in policy now, and me in CS -- despite the fact that both of us had very similar achievement paths through HS. To this day she is better at most maths than I am, but most people seem to assume I'm better (at least when it comes up).
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  One of the great lessons I've learned in life is that you can't change other people. Indeed in this case it seems like the "old boys club" in software development is the result of the gender balance not the cause. I can't think of a single male dominated profession that isn't seen in that light. If we're serious about fixing the ratio it needs to be done with policy and young, well before students graduate highschool.
ghort 9y ago
I don't think people necessarily understand which career they choose. When girl wants to become ballerinas it is presumably because they have some idea that it is glamorous, not that it entails working hard under strict discipline for many years. They figure that out later. What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues. Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems. How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds. [0] 1977 Atari 2600 1977 Apple II 1981 Sinclair ZX81 1981 BBC Micro 1982 Commodore 64 1983 WarGames (movie) 1983 Nintendo Entertainment System 1985 Amiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers [1] "When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64." "My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school." "1982-83 (grammar to high school age): My parents bought a word processor in the 80's that you could also program." "In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work." "My dad brought home a 386 IBM-PC so he could learn AutoCAD." "I got started with BASICA on a Tandy 1000. My dad had a newer computer at the time but he certainly wouldn't let me use it." "I'm not sure if this counts; the birth of my hacking started on my dad's lap, doing amateur radio." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879 [2] "It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20." http://www.linfo.org/linus.html http://www.linfo.org/linus.html
- sundvor 9y ago
hacktothefuture 9y ago
This was my initial thought as well but I remembered listening to this podcast and I think it touches on this idea and expands on it. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/07/22/487069271/episo... One of the examples in the podcast expands on the viewpoint that computers are for men and that idea is ingrained even to the level of the family, so computers are kept in the sons bedroom so incidentally the daughter had less access to it. Its not suggested by guidance counselors to females when looking to select electives in junior high school. So if they are seen as a male hobby or interest, at a time when what your peers think is so important, girls are less likely to want to venture into that area and be outside the norm.
curun1r 9y ago
> 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. The interesting thing, to me, is that you can't look at those 10-year-olds in isolation. My experience mirrors yours and, yet, if you look back further, I'll bet you find that those 10-year-old tinkerers almost all have some history with Legos or other such construction toy that, very early, started building the guess-fail-iterate problem solving model that I believe is so important to computer aptitude. One of the side effects to being "good with computers" is that you end up getting asked to do a lot of tech support. Over the years, I've seen so many people who are so afraid of doing something wrong that they can't figure out how to do what they want despite being otherwise intelligent enough. They don't realize what's perfectly summed up here: https://xkcd.com/627/ https://xkcd.com/627/ Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that.
- amyjess 9y ago
  > Some of the most important and least controversial efforts to address gender diversity in tech are the people trying to make better toys for young girls. As I've heard it stated, we have a shortage of engineers, not a shortage of princesses and our toy aisles should reflect that. This SMBC comic sums up the issue perfectly: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883 On a side note, I've also noticed that the bulk of my female classmates in college and the bulk of my female coworkers since then have been either Indian or Chinese. It might be worth exploring why Indian and Chinese women are more willing to work in tech than western women.
  - slackingoff2017 9y ago
    I have noticed the same. In these cultures it's more acceptable to be interested in such things. Probably because financial success is more important in such countries, gender stereotypes be damned. Still, it proves that a better gender ratio is definitely possible in the US as well

kpil 9y ago

Bill Gates happend, solidifying the nerd image.

richmarr 9y ago

There's a pretty convincing argument that the drop in apparent interest in computing from girls was caused by computers and computer games being marketed squarely at boys: https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/ https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu... The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China. As Adam Grant says, while there are some (small) differences between men and women, they're "not biologically determined" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women-vastly-exaggerated-adam-grant https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/differences-between-men-women...

sundvor 9y ago
Back in the 80s, the computers (Vic20s/C64s) sold themselves to my group of friends in grades 4-8; we were not subject to any marketing in Norway. Games were not the primary motivator, BASIC programming was. Alas, I knew no girls who were into this even the slightest.
- richmarr 9y ago
  Sure. I can't speak to what influenced you or friends, or the girls you knew... just that it's not a worldwide phenomenon, and is restricted to CS rather than other STEM fields... so seems to fit. There may be no way to ever know for sure.
depressedpanda 9y ago
> The arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't seem to prevent much higher proportions of female programmers in India, or Romania, or China. Suppose that the much higher proportions of female programmers in poorer countries might be because their choice is more limited; there is way more incentive in a poor country to want to land a fairly secure and well paid job, because you risk starving if you don't. Going for a liberal arts degree (or similar) in India, Romania or China would then be discouraged. Conversely, in the West, people are more free to pursue whatever profession they may like, because they most likely won't starve if they do. I'm not saying that this would be the only explanation for the gender gap, but I do think the explanation involves many more factors than 'computer games in the 80s'. I personally think it's naïve to dismiss inherent biological preferences entirely, especially since there are many studies that corroborate that they _do exist_.