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Stipulate that men and women like things and people respectively, and this is a fundamental biological truth. With this, tech is more biased than it should be.

by likpok 9y ago

Stipulate that men and women like things and people respectively, and this is a fundamental biological truth. With this, tech is more biased than it should be. Engineering as a whole is pretty people-oriented: projects are team efforts and require a lot of collaboration, requirements gathering and user research. Math, as a counterpoint, requires much less of this but is less biased. That suggests that the Thing/People dichotomy doesn't fully explain the gender distribution of high tech. As a side note, it is suspicious that science is exactly matching up with how the West has structured it's society. Other societies have different distributions despite having the same biological impulses.

freeflight 9y ago
> Engineering as a whole is pretty people-oriented: projects are team efforts and require a lot of collaboration, requirements gathering and user research. Just like the statement about coding, I think that's a tad bit generalized because you can apply this to anything you scale bigger. You can make a big project, involving lots of different people, out of pretty much any skill. Tho that doesn't change the basic "requirements" to be good at a specific skill. A coder can still code an app on his/her own, he/she might need more time, but the whole "additional people" thing is entirely optional in this scenario. Same deal with engineering: It might take more time, but even big projects can be done with very few people. Adding more people is an entirely optional thing to speed up the process. It's for that very same reason that many big projects, involving lots of people, have positions solely build around managing the whole "people" part of the project, leaving the engineers to do their engineering and the coders to their coding. Because that's just how we humans are: We ain't perfect at everything, we can't be because lots of it is based on trade-offs.

by likpok 9y ago

freeflight 9y ago

> Engineering as a whole is pretty people-oriented: projects are team efforts and require a lot of collaboration, requirements gathering and user research. Just like the statement about coding, I think that's a tad bit generalized because you can apply this to anything you scale bigger. You can make a big project, involving lots of different people, out of pretty much any skill. Tho that doesn't change the basic "requirements" to be good at a specific skill. A coder can still code an app on his/her own, he/she might need more time, but the whole "additional people" thing is entirely optional in this scenario. Same deal with engineering: It might take more time, but even big projects can be done with very few people. Adding more people is an entirely optional thing to speed up the process. It's for that very same reason that many big projects, involving lots of people, have positions solely build around managing the whole "people" part of the project, leaving the engineers to do their engineering and the coders to their coding. Because that's just how we humans are: We ain't perfect at everything, we can't be because lots of it is based on trade-offs.