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I think this was well written. There were a few instances where, upon first reading it, I objected. But rereading it, I thought the language used was chosen wel

I think this was well written. There were a few instances where, upon first reading it, I objected. But rereading it, I thought the language used was chosen well. I have one main gripe, though: The scope limitation to tech. > "Toxic tech cultures are those that demean and devalue you as holistic, multifaceted human beings. Toxic tech cultures are those that prioritize profits and growth over human and societal well being. Toxic tech cultures are those that treat you as replaceable cogs within a system of constant churn and burnout. This is __not__ a tech specific problem. This is a systemic aspect of labor in an overly-capitalist society. Not bashing capitalism, either. But, spare me the 'woe is me, tech bros are out to get us'. Sure, some are. But these problems exist in every industry; the service industry, Hollywood and film, architecture and construction, finance, etc. As I said, I think the rest of the article was well written and on-topic. That, though, is trying to paint rice grains with a broom.

tptacek 9y ago
In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. STEM fields in general range from ~30-55% women, and those fields include things like Mathematics --- anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room --- which are strong proxies for CS ability. And, of course, among the professions in general, the difference is even more stark; compared to law, we're stuck in the 1960's.
- dralley 9y ago
  The irony is that there were probably significantly more female computer scientists and programmers in the 1960s than there are now. The industry has regressed severely from the early days.
  - crunchatized 9y ago
    The extra irony is that's because computer programming was considered "women's work" in those early days, as basically a form of clerical work, like being a secretary. So it was one of the few occupations that was traditionally socially acceptable for women to be in.
    - wglb 9y ago
      The period following "women's work" view of programming was the 60s. Balance was much better in the 60s and 70s, maybe part of the 80s.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-percentage-women-and-men-each-profession/GBX22YsWl0XaeHghwXfE4H/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce... For web developers, it's 34%, which is roughly the same as dentists. Computer "science" is kinda BS as a field.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    In that breakdown, "web developer" very likely includes a large number of designers and marketing specialists. We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%.
    - walterclifford 9y ago
      > We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%. Is it possible that a "concerted effort to recruit and retain women" perhaps does more harm than good? Med schools in this country are now very nearly 50/50[1] and law schools are very slightly over 50% female[2]. Did medicine and law achieve this by the same type of concerted effort we've seen in tech? I honestly don't know the answer to that but I think it's an interesting question. I do feel though that we treat females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors whereas in tech we have a habit of treating them like female developers instead of developers (and I'm referring to when that's done with the best intentions such as female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups). [1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduates-by-gender/ https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-gra... [2] https://www.enjuris.com/students/ranking-universities.html https://www.enjuris.com/students/ranking-universities.html
      - tptacek 9y ago
        Yes, that is what law firms did. Use the search bar at the bottom of the page to search author:rayiner for more information. Rayiner is an appellate lawyer (married to a corporate lawyer) and former/part-time compiler hacker, and he's written at length about how law fixed this problem deliberately.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cutcss 9y ago
  Where did you get this idea that all professions need to be 50%/50%? Just for example 90% of nurses are female but we are as a society are OK with that right?
  - tptacek 9y ago
    You wrote this comment a few minutes ago before it was flagged off the site. You then deleted it and reposted it. Please don't do that.
    - cutcss 9y ago
      No I didn't, I rewrote it to make it sound less inflammatory because I though that was the reason it got flagged. I still believe its a valid point, you may think otherwise of course.
  - adamsea 9y ago
    Nursing is an interesting example. In places right now in the U.S. with high unemployment among men, there are a lot of nursing jobs, however men are not taking them because said nursing job doesn't satisfy the traditional requirements of masculinity (not knocking it) with which those guys were raised. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-want-to-be-nurses-their-wives-agree.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-w... The article actually cites other potential issues such as the quality of the job itself, but traditional gender roles is a big part of it: > "It seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up. The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are often held by women. Why not get men to do them? > The problem is that notions of masculinity die hard, in women as well as men. It’s not just that men consider some of the jobs that will be most in demand — in health care, education and administration — to be unmanly or demeaning, or worry that they require emotional skills they don’t have. So do some of their wives, prospective employers and women in these same professions." ... > “Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?” > That may be, he said, because other sociologists have found that while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity,” he said. So at the moment society is trying to figure out if it is OK with nursing being a "woman's" profession.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  A more equal gender distribution doesn't mean that women are treated better. Take Hollywood, for example.
  - mcv 9y ago
    Does Hollywood have a more equal gender distribution? I heard the average movie has about 6 male roles for every female roles, including extras.
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Watch the credits roll some time. Actors are a tiny part of making a movie.
      - mcv 9y ago
        They get all of the screen time, though.
        rainbowmverse 9y ago
        An overall more diverse production provides more pathways into the industry for marginalized people, and some of those pathways will lead to acting.
    - belorn 9y ago
      Depend on what movies you include when counting. Many studies prefer to only look at the top 10 or 100 highest gross earning movies and those only cover a tiny portion of the female audience. Selection bias. Looking at the gender distribution of the movies that a sample of 10000 women and 10000 men has seen, you get very different numbers.
      - mcv 9y ago
        This sounds like you've got data backing this up. Do you have a link?
- trhway 9y ago
  >In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. sounds like you equate the toxic environment definition as given by the article with the issue of low representation of women. Well, do you really think that the environment isnt' toxic (as defined by the article) in the industries where women are over-represented? I mean do you really think that the employees aren't treated like replaceable cogs or companies don't pursue profit and growth as the first and foremost priority in hospitality or in the clothing sewing industry ?
- hueving 9y ago
  >anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room As someone who has spent a lot of time in academic security conferences, I have to wonder what you are comparing them to. The only field with a worse female participation rate in my experience is networking (e.g. SIGCOMM). Check out this picture from EuroCrypt in 97 and count the ratio of women to men. It looks like under 1 in 10 which is worse than general CS enrollment numbers: http://www.crypto-uni.lu/jscoron/misc/euro_97.jpg http://www.crypto-uni.lu/jscoron/misc/euro_97.jpg Anyway, back to the main point. >CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. I agree. However, a 1/4 female/male ratio coming out of CS programs is going to be reflected in the industry and attempting to bring the balance on the industry side to 50/50 is folly while the enrollment balance stays the same. Clearly something is discouraging women from enrolling at the college level, but I can't fathom how 50/50 quotas are supposed to help solve that problem. Implementing things like Google's "extra interview retries" for minorities just seems to cause division and make it worse for minorities because some people assume they are there for the wrong reason. Are you aware of programs focusing on getting more women enrolled at the high-school and college level? It seems like it would be significantly more productive as a community to put a significant focus there in terms of resources (money, advocacy, etc). I know almost nobody that has a problem with improving enrollment numbers of women in CS (equality of opportunity). However, there is a significant chunk of people that have problems with the "white males are over-represented and we need to give everyone else an advantage" approach (equality of outcomes). What am I missing here? Why are so many resources being poured into something as fundamentally flawed as trying to get equal representation with a supply that doesn't have equal representation?
  - archagon 9y ago
    It could be argued that the “pull” from top companies will entice members of underrepresented groups to get into tech on the college level. It is also not necessarily the case that picking 50:50 out of a 75:25 distribution will lead to a competence imbalance. Even if the skill distribution is the same for both populations, maybe only certain baselines matter for doing good work, and maybe any skill gaps could be corrected via on-the-job training. Maybe having that kind of diversity is worth the extra effort for the company.
  - deleted 9y ago
- belorn 9y ago
  This is wrong on so many levels. Where are you getting your data that CS is almost uniquely imbalanced? Sweden has a complete record for what every citizen here work, their education and their gender. The data is gathered as part of tax collection and as a matter of policy they also make this information public so anyone can see what the gender distribution is for any industry or profession. 70%/30% distribution is extremely average, and the wast majority of the working population (equal amount women and men) work in such professions. If you want the most uniquely imbalanced fields, look at the professions and industries that has over 99% of a single gender. From a few years back, that covers around 5 different professions. If the the professions from the CS field is stuck in the 1960, what should we call the psychology profession with 90% women and 10% men? Nearer the 99% bracket we have professions such as mechanics, midwifes and tile installers. If we again take a look around 90% we see professions such as veterinarians, dentists, construction worker, kindergarten teachers, secretary, truck driver, and the list just goes on and on if we were to list every profession with worse gender distribution that those from CS. 93% of the working population work in a industry that the government classified as having imbalanced gender distribution, ie professions that has above 60% of a single gender. 93% is a very huge number and without a question the norm. A fair distribution is the exception, one which hopefully will grow but where the trend has been in the opposite direction since 1960~1970 and just hopefully have now reached the peak. The only uniqueness about CS+Mathematics as academic fields is that they have more men and women rather than the opposite.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    _Science_, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", Vol 347 Issue 6219, 2011. Note also that you've unsubtly moved the goalposts. I'm comparing STEM fields, you're comparing all occupations (and: in Sweden, but that's less important to my point). I mean, whatever, make whatever argument you'd like, but modulate your stridency. With some satisfaction, I'll also observe that you're only able to marshal evidence (unsuccessfully, I think?) for _one_ level, not "so many".
    - belorn 9y ago
      Uniquely imbalanced is not a very good description with such small sample size of fields, but to be clear I was not the one to first bringing in non-stem fields. When you compared CS to law you was first to move the goal post. Among the professions in general, you said, the difference is supposed to be stark. This is false since there is no general difference between the average profession and CS. Second thing is that we're stuck in the 1960. This is also false since all professions has on average a worse gender segregation in 2018 than in 1960, which includes the STEM fields. The third would be the conclusion that toxic culture causing segregated work environment is a tech-specific problem. Every report (including government issued ones) that I have read describe similar problems in profession with similar or greater gender imbalance than CS. The service industry especially has many horror stories being printed in news with rather regular intervals.
tlb 9y ago
The problem isn't tech-specific at all. But an article trying to cover all workplaces from medicine to trucking would be vague and boring. The authors are doing what good authors should: writing what they know, which is the tech world.
- wcarron 9y ago
  I understand that but find it a bit facetious, is all. I would've appreciated a strikethrough on the "tech" in those sentences. Am I asking too much? Perhaps. All in all I found it a good read.
adamsea 9y ago
Perhaps you could say there is a specific instantiation of this problem in tech.
- hypatiadotca 9y ago
  Well put. I’m always amused by arguments of the form “but this isn’t just a tech problem” - people get so mad about limiting the scope to one’s own expertise and experience, but also accuse you of overreach when you try to generalize beyond it! Can’t win.
  - gaius 9y ago
    I’m always amused by arguments of the form “but this isn’t just a tech problem” Well, it isn’t. You can’t take a problem that is universal to all workers in all industries as evidence that one demographic in one industry is discriminated against. And, it is easy to generalise: Workers on one side, bosses on the other.
  - m00g00 9y ago
    Not only is it not just a problem in tech, it's not just problem for women and minorities. Focusing on tech is fine, but claiming there's a unique problem of demoralization, underappreciation, shit management etc. to only "marginalized people" is what makes this article highly questionable. All that "toxicity" applies just as well to white males in tech.

tptacek 9y ago

In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. STEM fields in general range from ~30-55% women, and those fields include things like Mathematics --- anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room --- which are strong proxies for CS ability. And, of course, among the professions in general, the difference is even more stark; compared to law, we're stuck in the 1960's.

dralley 9y ago
The irony is that there were probably significantly more female computer scientists and programmers in the 1960s than there are now. The industry has regressed severely from the early days.
- crunchatized 9y ago
  The extra irony is that's because computer programming was considered "women's work" in those early days, as basically a form of clerical work, like being a secretary. So it was one of the few occupations that was traditionally socially acceptable for women to be in.
  - wglb 9y ago
    The period following "women's work" view of programming was the 60s. Balance was much better in the 60s and 70s, maybe part of the 80s.
codinghorror 9y ago
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-percentage-women-and-men-each-profession/GBX22YsWl0XaeHghwXfE4H/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce... For web developers, it's 34%, which is roughly the same as dentists. Computer "science" is kinda BS as a field.
- tptacek 9y ago
  In that breakdown, "web developer" very likely includes a large number of designers and marketing specialists. We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%.
  - walterclifford 9y ago
    > We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%. Is it possible that a "concerted effort to recruit and retain women" perhaps does more harm than good? Med schools in this country are now very nearly 50/50[1] and law schools are very slightly over 50% female[2]. Did medicine and law achieve this by the same type of concerted effort we've seen in tech? I honestly don't know the answer to that but I think it's an interesting question. I do feel though that we treat females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors whereas in tech we have a habit of treating them like female developers instead of developers (and I'm referring to when that's done with the best intentions such as female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups). [1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduates-by-gender/ https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-gra... [2] https://www.enjuris.com/students/ranking-universities.html https://www.enjuris.com/students/ranking-universities.html
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Yes, that is what law firms did. Use the search bar at the bottom of the page to search author:rayiner for more information. Rayiner is an appellate lawyer (married to a corporate lawyer) and former/part-time compiler hacker, and he's written at length about how law fixed this problem deliberately.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cutcss 9y ago
Where did you get this idea that all professions need to be 50%/50%? Just for example 90% of nurses are female but we are as a society are OK with that right?
- tptacek 9y ago
  You wrote this comment a few minutes ago before it was flagged off the site. You then deleted it and reposted it. Please don't do that.
  - cutcss 9y ago
    No I didn't, I rewrote it to make it sound less inflammatory because I though that was the reason it got flagged. I still believe its a valid point, you may think otherwise of course.
- adamsea 9y ago
  Nursing is an interesting example. In places right now in the U.S. with high unemployment among men, there are a lot of nursing jobs, however men are not taking them because said nursing job doesn't satisfy the traditional requirements of masculinity (not knocking it) with which those guys were raised. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-want-to-be-nurses-their-wives-agree.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-w... The article actually cites other potential issues such as the quality of the job itself, but traditional gender roles is a big part of it: > "It seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up. The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are often held by women. Why not get men to do them? > The problem is that notions of masculinity die hard, in women as well as men. It’s not just that men consider some of the jobs that will be most in demand — in health care, education and administration — to be unmanly or demeaning, or worry that they require emotional skills they don’t have. So do some of their wives, prospective employers and women in these same professions." ... > “Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?” > That may be, he said, because other sociologists have found that while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity,” he said. So at the moment society is trying to figure out if it is OK with nursing being a "woman's" profession.
brucephillips 9y ago
A more equal gender distribution doesn't mean that women are treated better. Take Hollywood, for example.
- mcv 9y ago
  Does Hollywood have a more equal gender distribution? I heard the average movie has about 6 male roles for every female roles, including extras.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    Watch the credits roll some time. Actors are a tiny part of making a movie.
    - mcv 9y ago
      They get all of the screen time, though.
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        An overall more diverse production provides more pathways into the industry for marginalized people, and some of those pathways will lead to acting.
  - belorn 9y ago
    Depend on what movies you include when counting. Many studies prefer to only look at the top 10 or 100 highest gross earning movies and those only cover a tiny portion of the female audience. Selection bias. Looking at the gender distribution of the movies that a sample of 10000 women and 10000 men has seen, you get very different numbers.
    - mcv 9y ago
      This sounds like you've got data backing this up. Do you have a link?
trhway 9y ago
>In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. sounds like you equate the toxic environment definition as given by the article with the issue of low representation of women. Well, do you really think that the environment isnt' toxic (as defined by the article) in the industries where women are over-represented? I mean do you really think that the employees aren't treated like replaceable cogs or companies don't pursue profit and growth as the first and foremost priority in hospitality or in the clothing sewing industry ?
hueving 9y ago
>anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room As someone who has spent a lot of time in academic security conferences, I have to wonder what you are comparing them to. The only field with a worse female participation rate in my experience is networking (e.g. SIGCOMM). Check out this picture from EuroCrypt in 97 and count the ratio of women to men. It looks like under 1 in 10 which is worse than general CS enrollment numbers: http://www.crypto-uni.lu/jscoron/misc/euro_97.jpg http://www.crypto-uni.lu/jscoron/misc/euro_97.jpg Anyway, back to the main point. >CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. I agree. However, a 1/4 female/male ratio coming out of CS programs is going to be reflected in the industry and attempting to bring the balance on the industry side to 50/50 is folly while the enrollment balance stays the same. Clearly something is discouraging women from enrolling at the college level, but I can't fathom how 50/50 quotas are supposed to help solve that problem. Implementing things like Google's "extra interview retries" for minorities just seems to cause division and make it worse for minorities because some people assume they are there for the wrong reason. Are you aware of programs focusing on getting more women enrolled at the high-school and college level? It seems like it would be significantly more productive as a community to put a significant focus there in terms of resources (money, advocacy, etc). I know almost nobody that has a problem with improving enrollment numbers of women in CS (equality of opportunity). However, there is a significant chunk of people that have problems with the "white males are over-represented and we need to give everyone else an advantage" approach (equality of outcomes). What am I missing here? Why are so many resources being poured into something as fundamentally flawed as trying to get equal representation with a supply that doesn't have equal representation?
- archagon 9y ago
  It could be argued that the “pull” from top companies will entice members of underrepresented groups to get into tech on the college level. It is also not necessarily the case that picking 50:50 out of a 75:25 distribution will lead to a competence imbalance. Even if the skill distribution is the same for both populations, maybe only certain baselines matter for doing good work, and maybe any skill gaps could be corrected via on-the-job training. Maybe having that kind of diversity is worth the extra effort for the company.
- deleted 9y ago
belorn 9y ago
This is wrong on so many levels. Where are you getting your data that CS is almost uniquely imbalanced? Sweden has a complete record for what every citizen here work, their education and their gender. The data is gathered as part of tax collection and as a matter of policy they also make this information public so anyone can see what the gender distribution is for any industry or profession. 70%/30% distribution is extremely average, and the wast majority of the working population (equal amount women and men) work in such professions. If you want the most uniquely imbalanced fields, look at the professions and industries that has over 99% of a single gender. From a few years back, that covers around 5 different professions. If the the professions from the CS field is stuck in the 1960, what should we call the psychology profession with 90% women and 10% men? Nearer the 99% bracket we have professions such as mechanics, midwifes and tile installers. If we again take a look around 90% we see professions such as veterinarians, dentists, construction worker, kindergarten teachers, secretary, truck driver, and the list just goes on and on if we were to list every profession with worse gender distribution that those from CS. 93% of the working population work in a industry that the government classified as having imbalanced gender distribution, ie professions that has above 60% of a single gender. 93% is a very huge number and without a question the norm. A fair distribution is the exception, one which hopefully will grow but where the trend has been in the opposite direction since 1960~1970 and just hopefully have now reached the peak. The only uniqueness about CS+Mathematics as academic fields is that they have more men and women rather than the opposite.
- tptacek 9y ago
  _Science_, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", Vol 347 Issue 6219, 2011. Note also that you've unsubtly moved the goalposts. I'm comparing STEM fields, you're comparing all occupations (and: in Sweden, but that's less important to my point). I mean, whatever, make whatever argument you'd like, but modulate your stridency. With some satisfaction, I'll also observe that you're only able to marshal evidence (unsuccessfully, I think?) for _one_ level, not "so many".
  - belorn 9y ago
    Uniquely imbalanced is not a very good description with such small sample size of fields, but to be clear I was not the one to first bringing in non-stem fields. When you compared CS to law you was first to move the goal post. Among the professions in general, you said, the difference is supposed to be stark. This is false since there is no general difference between the average profession and CS. Second thing is that we're stuck in the 1960. This is also false since all professions has on average a worse gender segregation in 2018 than in 1960, which includes the STEM fields. The third would be the conclusion that toxic culture causing segregated work environment is a tech-specific problem. Every report (including government issued ones) that I have read describe similar problems in profession with similar or greater gender imbalance than CS. The service industry especially has many horror stories being printed in news with rather regular intervals.

tlb 9y ago

The problem isn't tech-specific at all. But an article trying to cover all workplaces from medicine to trucking would be vague and boring. The authors are doing what good authors should: writing what they know, which is the tech world.

wcarron 9y ago
I understand that but find it a bit facetious, is all. I would've appreciated a strikethrough on the "tech" in those sentences. Am I asking too much? Perhaps. All in all I found it a good read.

adamsea 9y ago

Perhaps you could say there is a specific instantiation of this problem in tech.

hypatiadotca 9y ago
Well put. I’m always amused by arguments of the form “but this isn’t just a tech problem” - people get so mad about limiting the scope to one’s own expertise and experience, but also accuse you of overreach when you try to generalize beyond it! Can’t win.
- gaius 9y ago
  I’m always amused by arguments of the form “but this isn’t just a tech problem” Well, it isn’t. You can’t take a problem that is universal to all workers in all industries as evidence that one demographic in one industry is discriminated against. And, it is easy to generalise: Workers on one side, bosses on the other.
- m00g00 9y ago
  Not only is it not just a problem in tech, it's not just problem for women and minorities. Focusing on tech is fine, but claiming there's a unique problem of demoralization, underappreciation, shit management etc. to only "marginalized people" is what makes this article highly questionable. All that "toxicity" applies just as well to white males in tech.