10 ms·

> The measurable advantage men have in the tech community What is that advantage and how is it measured ?

rev_bird 9y ago
As I noted above, "advantage" was the wrong word, my apologies. There's tons of information out there about the disproportionate number of men working in tech, to say nothing of the salary discrepancies that cause so much drama here. At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male, and that being able to connect with other women and discuss their experiences is a valuable way to stay in a career that they might otherwise bail on. I'm inclined to believe them.
- eevilspock 9y ago
  What do you mean "advantage" is the wrong word? In general men clearly have an advantage in tech. Denying it is like denying that white people generally have an advantage in America. That you feel compelled to apologize reflects the self-preserving power of this male advantage.
- fvdessen 9y ago
  > At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male. I would like to offer another point of view; A lot of the males who ended up in that industry are, to be blunt, social rejects. They were not the popular kids in high school, but those guys who were playing magic in the corner. Being a male in IT is a big stigma in the outside world. Nerd and Geek are still insults. There are entire sitcoms (IT Guys, Big Bang Theory) designed to laugh at them. Many dating website have the option to filter out men working in IT. I usually hide the fact that I work in IT and have found it very beneficial. Now that there's money and power involved, things are changing a bit. But I still feel that a large reason that the IT community is like it is because it was simply excluded from society at large for a long time and still is in a way. I think that people coming now and turning the table around with such righteousness is a bit insensitive. How would you feel about being excluded from the club you build for yourself after having been excluded from everywhere else ?
  - rev_bird 9y ago
    >I would like to offer another point of view Honestly, I don't give a shit about "another point of view," and that you think it matters here is a great illustration of why women would run for the hills, whichever hills don't have you on them. This is not about someone's experience as a "social reject," this isn't about sad boys not being cool in high school because they like comic books. This is about women wanting a place to talk to other women about an experience that they feel isolates them from their male colleagues. That men sometimes feel lonely too has nothing to do with it.
    - dang 9y ago
      Your comments have been crossing into incivility in this thread—not principled incivility, just garden-variety internet swipes like "I don't give a shit", "this is nonsense", and "you're pretending". All this breaks the HN guidelines, regardless of how wrong someone else is or how right you are or feel. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and get on the right side of the rules if you want to keep commenting here.
      - rev_bird 9y ago
        Oh! A moderator! How nice of you to arrive. No need to worry, I won't be coming back.
  - forgottenpass 9y ago
    You'd probably like this essay if you haven't seen it before: https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
  - etjossem 9y ago
    Revbird was right. Leap isn't about men trying to claw their way out of the stigma of their industry. It's about women having a place to share their experiences - because right now, it's really common for them not to feel welcome in male-dominated tech water coolers like HN or software subreddits. Nobody is trying to exclude you from these larger spaces. Though if we want to get rid of the stigma of tech, we can start by making them more welcoming and inclusive. In other words: if seeing something like Leap makes you viscerally mad, focus on fixing the reason it needs to exist in the first place.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
metaphoracle 9y ago
We women in tech frequently need to re-hash this discussion. We offer personal anecdotes, and they are written off as outliers. We present diversity numbers and pay gap data, and we are told that those are due to women either choosing family life over career or that we are biologically predisposed to not being as good as men at tech. We present data and stories about rampant, institutionalized sexism at large industry leaders, and we are scolded for being "overly sensitive". Assertiveness is conflated as bitchiness. Timidness as incompetence. The advantage is apparent - the real goal of constantly asking us to prove the advantage is to create doubt and the appearance of a controversy over the data. But I see these as thinly veiled gaslighting attempts. I have worked in tech all my life, and have had many men take credit for my initiatives and ideas, talk over me constantly through most meetings, pass me up for promotions because I didn't "engage with the team" (ie. attending late night drinking sessions at strip clubs), always get second guessed - even when I am the resident SME and was hired specifically for task, etc. I have lived it. If more men would make themselves aware of the systemic sexism in the industry instead of making women repeat themselves, argue every data point, and be 3x as good as their peers to receive recognition, maybe we could stop having this discussion . . . See: https://blog.100tb.com/the-technology-industry-is-a-mans-world https://blog.100tb.com/the-technology-industry-is-a-mans-wor... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/women-in-tech-gender-parity/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/women-in-tech-gender-... https://www.witi.com/articles/1165/Men-Dominate-the-Tech-Industry--But-They-Want-More-Say-and-Rights/?-This-is-/ https://www.witi.com/articles/1165/Men-Dominate-the-Tech-Ind... https://qz.com/940660/tech-is-overwhelmingly-male-and-men-are-just-fine-with-that/ https://qz.com/940660/tech-is-overwhelmingly-male-and-men-ar... Also: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents There are piles of data. Seriously, you are one google away from incontrovertible evidence.
beat 9y ago
Measurement is easy. Just look around you. The majority of people working in tech are men. An even larger majority of its leadership is men. Why is this? There are only two possible causes that I can see - genetic, or cultural. The genetic argument is basically that men are, by nature, better at being programmers and leaders than women - that women are inferior. The cultural argument is that there is a social advantage to being male (and a social disadvantage to being female) - that, all else being equal, things tend to default in favor of men. Personally, I reject the genetic explanation. Most people do. If you also reject it, then you're stuck with the cultural explanation, or finding something I haven't come up with.
- fvdessen 9y ago
  Could it be that the cultural problem is the low social status of IT Work ?
  - etjossem 9y ago
    Lawyers have about the same gender breakdown as computer systems analysts, so I don't think this is the case. CEOs are even more predominantly male, at a fairly shocking 73% by 2016 numbers (we'll have '17 soon). The problem with tech in particular is that we're often viewed as an inclusive and progressive industry. But when you run the numbers, we're no better than the law firms.
  - beat 9y ago
    That seems unlikely, considering that you see similar issues in high-status work, such as business executives or politicians.
  - brucephillips 9y ago
    How does IT work have low social status?
- adventured 9y ago
  So your argument is that men and women are exactly identical on all tasks for genetic purposes? Or are you arguing that such just happens to be the case as it pertains to programming? From my observation, women are frequently proclaimed to be superior to men in numerous ways. My entire life I've heard that women mature faster than men. Women are proclaimed to be more nurturing. Women have higher 'emotional intelligence.' You'll see it almost universally proclaimed that if women ran the world, conflicts (eg war) would be far less common, this is a constant refrain in the US across all media. There are very well understood differences between men and women when it comes to things like vision, physical strength, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, physical aggression, and so on. We also have many different health risks due to our genetic differences. All of these things add up to women universally living longer from one culture to the next, and women commiting drastically fewer acts of violence (and thus making up a far smaller percentage of the prison population). If any of that is actually true, why can't men be superior at various tasks due to genetic differences? Why not programming? What I'm asking is: what's the scientific argument to say that men are not superior at programming, how can that be proven either direction? Just saying such is the case (either direction), is not enough.
_zachs 9y ago
Note the lack of specifics. It's much easier to hold a viewpoint that can't be refuted if it's not measurable in the first place.
- metaphoracle 9y ago
  What specifics are you seeking? Have you read any of the linked articles in this thread? Or performed a single google search? -Pay Gap: https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/ https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gen... -Employment Gap: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinawallace/2016/10/20/girls-in-coding-the-problem-is-getting-worse/#7939003564d2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinawallace/2016/10/20/gir... -Leadership Gap: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/why-so-few-women-break-through-tech-s-bro-culture-quicktake-q-a https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/why-so-fe... -Visibility Gap: https://hbr.org/2016/09/to-succeed-in-tech-women-need-more-visibility https://hbr.org/2016/09/to-succeed-in-tech-women-need-more-v... -Sexism/Hostile Workplaces: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... -Hiring Discrimination: https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/ https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/ -General Discrimination: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-industrys-gender-discrimination-problem https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-indus... And just in case you missed it the last time: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

As I noted above, "advantage" was the wrong word, my apologies. There's tons of information out there about the disproportionate number of men working in tech, to say nothing of the salary discrepancies that cause so much drama here. At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male, and that being able to connect with other women and discuss their experiences is a valuable way to stay in a career that they might otherwise bail on. I'm inclined to believe them.

eevilspock 9y ago
What do you mean "advantage" is the wrong word? In general men clearly have an advantage in tech. Denying it is like denying that white people generally have an advantage in America. That you feel compelled to apologize reflects the self-preserving power of this male advantage.
fvdessen 9y ago
> At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male. I would like to offer another point of view; A lot of the males who ended up in that industry are, to be blunt, social rejects. They were not the popular kids in high school, but those guys who were playing magic in the corner. Being a male in IT is a big stigma in the outside world. Nerd and Geek are still insults. There are entire sitcoms (IT Guys, Big Bang Theory) designed to laugh at them. Many dating website have the option to filter out men working in IT. I usually hide the fact that I work in IT and have found it very beneficial. Now that there's money and power involved, things are changing a bit. But I still feel that a large reason that the IT community is like it is because it was simply excluded from society at large for a long time and still is in a way. I think that people coming now and turning the table around with such righteousness is a bit insensitive. How would you feel about being excluded from the club you build for yourself after having been excluded from everywhere else ?
- rev_bird 9y ago
  >I would like to offer another point of view Honestly, I don't give a shit about "another point of view," and that you think it matters here is a great illustration of why women would run for the hills, whichever hills don't have you on them. This is not about someone's experience as a "social reject," this isn't about sad boys not being cool in high school because they like comic books. This is about women wanting a place to talk to other women about an experience that they feel isolates them from their male colleagues. That men sometimes feel lonely too has nothing to do with it.
  - dang 9y ago
    Your comments have been crossing into incivility in this thread—not principled incivility, just garden-variety internet swipes like "I don't give a shit", "this is nonsense", and "you're pretending". All this breaks the HN guidelines, regardless of how wrong someone else is or how right you are or feel. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and get on the right side of the rules if you want to keep commenting here.
    - rev_bird 9y ago
      Oh! A moderator! How nice of you to arrive. No need to worry, I won't be coming back.
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  You'd probably like this essay if you haven't seen it before: https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
- etjossem 9y ago
  Revbird was right. Leap isn't about men trying to claw their way out of the stigma of their industry. It's about women having a place to share their experiences - because right now, it's really common for them not to feel welcome in male-dominated tech water coolers like HN or software subreddits. Nobody is trying to exclude you from these larger spaces. Though if we want to get rid of the stigma of tech, we can start by making them more welcoming and inclusive. In other words: if seeing something like Leap makes you viscerally mad, focus on fixing the reason it needs to exist in the first place.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

metaphoracle 9y ago

We women in tech frequently need to re-hash this discussion. We offer personal anecdotes, and they are written off as outliers. We present diversity numbers and pay gap data, and we are told that those are due to women either choosing family life over career or that we are biologically predisposed to not being as good as men at tech. We present data and stories about rampant, institutionalized sexism at large industry leaders, and we are scolded for being "overly sensitive". Assertiveness is conflated as bitchiness. Timidness as incompetence. The advantage is apparent - the real goal of constantly asking us to prove the advantage is to create doubt and the appearance of a controversy over the data. But I see these as thinly veiled gaslighting attempts. I have worked in tech all my life, and have had many men take credit for my initiatives and ideas, talk over me constantly through most meetings, pass me up for promotions because I didn't "engage with the team" (ie. attending late night drinking sessions at strip clubs), always get second guessed - even when I am the resident SME and was hired specifically for task, etc. I have lived it. If more men would make themselves aware of the systemic sexism in the industry instead of making women repeat themselves, argue every data point, and be 3x as good as their peers to receive recognition, maybe we could stop having this discussion . . . See: https://blog.100tb.com/the-technology-industry-is-a-mans-world https://blog.100tb.com/the-technology-industry-is-a-mans-wor... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/women-in-tech-gender-parity/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/women-in-tech-gender-... https://www.witi.com/articles/1165/Men-Dominate-the-Tech-Industry--But-They-Want-More-Say-and-Rights/?-This-is-/ https://www.witi.com/articles/1165/Men-Dominate-the-Tech-Ind... https://qz.com/940660/tech-is-overwhelmingly-male-and-men-are-just-fine-with-that/ https://qz.com/940660/tech-is-overwhelmingly-male-and-men-ar... Also: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents There are piles of data. Seriously, you are one google away from incontrovertible evidence.

beat 9y ago

Measurement is easy. Just look around you. The majority of people working in tech are men. An even larger majority of its leadership is men. Why is this? There are only two possible causes that I can see - genetic, or cultural. The genetic argument is basically that men are, by nature, better at being programmers and leaders than women - that women are inferior. The cultural argument is that there is a social advantage to being male (and a social disadvantage to being female) - that, all else being equal, things tend to default in favor of men. Personally, I reject the genetic explanation. Most people do. If you also reject it, then you're stuck with the cultural explanation, or finding something I haven't come up with.

fvdessen 9y ago
Could it be that the cultural problem is the low social status of IT Work ?
- etjossem 9y ago
  Lawyers have about the same gender breakdown as computer systems analysts, so I don't think this is the case. CEOs are even more predominantly male, at a fairly shocking 73% by 2016 numbers (we'll have '17 soon). The problem with tech in particular is that we're often viewed as an inclusive and progressive industry. But when you run the numbers, we're no better than the law firms.
- beat 9y ago
  That seems unlikely, considering that you see similar issues in high-status work, such as business executives or politicians.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  How does IT work have low social status?
adventured 9y ago
So your argument is that men and women are exactly identical on all tasks for genetic purposes? Or are you arguing that such just happens to be the case as it pertains to programming? From my observation, women are frequently proclaimed to be superior to men in numerous ways. My entire life I've heard that women mature faster than men. Women are proclaimed to be more nurturing. Women have higher 'emotional intelligence.' You'll see it almost universally proclaimed that if women ran the world, conflicts (eg war) would be far less common, this is a constant refrain in the US across all media. There are very well understood differences between men and women when it comes to things like vision, physical strength, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, physical aggression, and so on. We also have many different health risks due to our genetic differences. All of these things add up to women universally living longer from one culture to the next, and women commiting drastically fewer acts of violence (and thus making up a far smaller percentage of the prison population). If any of that is actually true, why can't men be superior at various tasks due to genetic differences? Why not programming? What I'm asking is: what's the scientific argument to say that men are not superior at programming, how can that be proven either direction? Just saying such is the case (either direction), is not enough.

_zachs 9y ago

Note the lack of specifics. It's much easier to hold a viewpoint that can't be refuted if it's not measurable in the first place.

metaphoracle 9y ago
What specifics are you seeking? Have you read any of the linked articles in this thread? Or performed a single google search? -Pay Gap: https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/ https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gen... -Employment Gap: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinawallace/2016/10/20/girls-in-coding-the-problem-is-getting-worse/#7939003564d2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinawallace/2016/10/20/gir... -Leadership Gap: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/why-so-few-women-break-through-tech-s-bro-culture-quicktake-q-a https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/why-so-fe... -Visibility Gap: https://hbr.org/2016/09/to-succeed-in-tech-women-need-more-visibility https://hbr.org/2016/09/to-succeed-in-tech-women-need-more-v... -Sexism/Hostile Workplaces: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... -Hiring Discrimination: https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/ https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/ -General Discrimination: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-industrys-gender-discrimination-problem https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-indus... And just in case you missed it the last time: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents