6 ms·

The Difficulty of Hiring Women

20 points by fogus 16y ago

pavelludiq 16y ago
Im male. When i first got interested in computers(back when my age was a single digit), i didn't follow role models, i just got drawn to these machines, almost instinctively, and not just computers, cars, electronics, any kind of machines. I had my technical influence of course, my dad knew a lot about machines and electronics, but i think its something a bit deeper. Men have been making tools for hundreds of thousands of years, in my complete lack of experience in genetics, i think its foolish to dismiss genetic factors. Which is not to say that role models and culture have no effect, i just think that it has less of an effect than genes. Bottom line is that my politically correct(i hope) opinion is that while women positively have the ability do be good developers(physicists, mathematicians, engineers), and even though some of them DO become good, most lack this internal drive(almost an obsession) I've had since before i can remember.
- wccrawford 16y ago
  When I got into computers, I didn't realize there COULD be role models for that. I had never heard of any successful programmers. I couldn't name anyone famous for anything related to computers. That certainly didn't stop me from being interested.
  - frgbhnmnjh 16y ago
    But the lack of role models is the reason I didn't get that job - it was nothing to do with me not working in school. It was all somebody else's fault - those damn role models. Oh, that and 'da-man' keeping me down. Actually the lack of women in tech is probably because they realize earlier than guys that if they do a psychology degree they only have to study 6hours/week and get to be a manager over all the engineer types.
- anateus 16y ago
  It tends to come into it earlier, here's a humorous example: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883 It turns out that in even very young children, adults react subconsciously to the problem-solving behaviors of children. In an observational study adults were very quick to swoop in and help girls out when they couldn't perform a task, while boys were allowed to fail until success. Of course, dismissing genetic factors outright is just as problematic as creating just-so stories and fitting evidence on them. Alas, the answer is usually more complex. My point is that there are a lot of subtle cues that pervade our society. Girls know to like pink at ages younger than 3, and yet just over a century ago pink was mostly associated with boys (pink is based on red, a proper manly color). And even well-meaning comp sci folks often subtly make women uncomfortable (feminist theory calls this "othering"). Edit: removed useless line.
- jbgoddard 16y ago
  Your response is so elitist it makes me sick. With admittedly little knowledge of genetics, you are willing to claim genetics as an important factor? Women have also been making tools for hundreds of thousands of years and many women are just as passionate as you. Do you even have any reason to make such a sexist claim as "most [women] lack this internal drive(almost an obsession) I've had since before I can remember"? Why does it even matter at what age someone first became interested in computers? I didn't know what binary, linux, or programming is until first semester of college. It doesn't matter at all now. Attitudes like yours alienate women who might be interested.
  - pavelludiq 16y ago
    My claim was maid on the only reliable source of information i have: my own experience. Most "interesting" girls i know are extremely passionate, just not about machines, the once that are, see them a bit differently than i do. Call me what ever you like, in the world I've grown up in, boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls. What ever the reason, i don't know, i expressed an opinion, and CLEARLY stated that im no expert on the mater.
- pchristensen 16y ago
  Most men employed as programmers lack that obsession too. HN has lots of people that have loved computers their whole lives, and tech entrepreneurs and companies like Google, Facebook, old-school MSFT are probably loaded with these obsessives, but there are tens of millions of professional programmers out there worldwide. Most of them chose programming as a job because it passed the cost/benefit test vs other fields. That's why so many Indians (male and female) work as programmers - IT outsourcing jobs in India pay quadruple a normal wage and are more prestigious. In the US, programmers get good but not mind-boggling wage and have very little prestige outside of SV, Seattle, Boston and Austin.
- zacharycohn 16y ago
  "i didn't follow role models, i just got drawn to these machines, almost instinctively, and not just computers, cars, electronics, any kind of machines." You may not have had any role models, but as your interest grew, you would have heard the names of people that are doing things (making things you used, big in the industry, etc). If the situation was reversed and you were a girl, I wonder if you'd subconsciously notice that there weren't hearing about any other women, and I wonder if this would subconsciously make it seem like women "weren't allowed."
  - pavelludiq 16y ago
    When i think about it, i did have a role model, his name was Dexter, and he had a secret lab in his bedroom. Although im not sure, i think i liked Decter's lab, because i liked tech, not the other way around. But this is a weak point in my argument, yes.
    - zacharycohn 16y ago
      Also, his sister was always screwing up his tech stuff. :)
- ebiester 16y ago
  Eh, nearly all women lack this drive. Nearly all men lack this drive, too.
wccrawford 16y ago
"I would like to hire more women, but the number of job applications from women were well below 5 percent." Wait, WHY do you want more women? Are they more skilled somehow? Because if not, that's sexist. You should be hiring the best person for the job, not looking for people that fit a certain concept in your mind.
- sanswork 16y ago
  A good mix of genders can lead to a healthier office life and better work. All male and all female offices are not ideal for various(and sometimes different) reasons.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Could you perhaps state those reasons? [edit: sorry for asking. Didn't realize asking a poster to explain their reasoning was frowned upon here. ]
    - juliamae 16y ago
      I'm a female dev who has mostly worked in male-dominated teams. I'm currently working in a female-dominated team. The differences are extreme, with the largest being that the mostly-female team has a really difficult time taking criticism and giving criticism (saying 'no' to bad ideas). They're too optimistic and not realistic enough IMO. But what do I know, I'm just the dev! :\
      - dkarl 16y ago
        I'm not surprised that giving criticism is harder, since women are socialized to give feedback indirectly, through body language and other social signs, and even when speaking about a problem not to do so plainly. Simply saying what you think is treated as a "masculine" trait. I imagine the ways of communicating that are treated as appropriately "feminine" are much less effective in a technical context. Do you consciously model ways to give criticism that your female coworkers will feel comfortable with? Does it help them open up and criticize each other? What works? (This is a subject I have an interest in in a personal context as well, since I sometimes get baffled and frustrated by indirect communication and would like to be better at coaxing women to be more direct, which is hard if the relationship isn't already close.) Also, I'm surprised that women have a hard time taking criticism. I didn't expect that at all. Can you say more?
tptacek 16y ago
It is obviously true that the applicant pool for tech jobs is dominated by male candidates. It is less obvious but equally true that women are mistreated in interviews more often then men are. I did not believe this even a little bit up to 2004. I had, after all, hired women; once, I even hired one as my boss. Then I watched a woman go through a series of tech interviews with other people. Oops. This person has the same broken mental model that I had: "I'm fair to both women and men, and I get very few women applicants, so the problem must be lower in the stack." There clearly are problems lower in the stack, but that's not all that's wrong.
- mmelin 16y ago
  Perhaps you could expand on how women are mistreated in interviews? Are you saying that even though you thought you were treating men and women fairly, you were actually mistreating the women you were interviewing? Or are you saying that "other people" mistreat women in interviews - which begs the question how you know that those other people are actually treating women differently than men (they could just be assholes to everyone, I mean).
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I don't think I've mistreated anyone in an interview (except that when I started interviewing in the '90s, I treated them as excuses to demonstrate how smart I was, which was a waste of everyone's time). But, no, when you ask someone whether they're really going to be able to take care of their kids and handle the demands of the job you're interviewing them for, you're clearly not being an equal-opportunity douchebag. I have many more examples than that, some of them worse, but I'm not going to give you a bulleted list; I expect most people who've known women who've interviewed widely have similar examples.
    - untamedmedley 16y ago
      I don't want to push too hard, but here's two reasons it would be better for you to pull out that list: The first is that it gives a heads up to the few women here who are just entering the field. It may open up discussions for how to handle such situations when they arise. The other reason is that not sharing these examples is just as good as saying they never happened. Real concerns become phantom accusations of prejudice against women that don't ever get addressed.
Arun2009 16y ago
IMO, a large part of underrepresentation of women in software is due to the following self-reinforcing stereotype. 1. For historical reasons, men got a head-start in the software sector. 2. Software sector came to be seen as a male-dominated field. 3. Both the recruiters and candidates adjust their behavior based on the "knowledge" that software-jobs are more suited for men than women. I think such accidental clustering happens in many other fields. For e.g., here is a situation where men are the victims: http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/01-05/men.html http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/01-05/men.html
- scott_s 16y ago
  The really curious thing is that the first programmers were women. This was back in the ENIAC days, before anyone appreciated how difficult it would be to "program" a general purpose computer, before the word "software" existed, or even before "program" was a verb. The ENIAC designers figured the programming part would be easy. See Section II, starting on page 8: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf
dkarl 16y ago
I remember a few days before the start of my freshman year of high school, I was at the college library making copies of math competition tests so I could start practicing for the upcoming season of competition. While I was there, I saw a girl who was on the math team the year before in junior high, so I told her what I was doing and asked her if she wanted some practice tests. She said, "No," and just walked away, but there was a world in that "No." She was offended. She was insulted. She had been pretty good at the math competitions in junior high, but she quickly fell behind in high school and then quit the math team/club. She did drama and speech instead. She still took honors math classes and aced them, and I even heard she did engineering in college, but she would never admit to actually liking it enough to go beyond what was required by classwork. Similarly, the girls I met in college who were getting degrees in math and engineering never admitted to having an interest in those subjects beyond doing well in their classes and getting degrees. The two girls in the math program were keen to express their interest in the money they would make as actuaries or what-not. They had to like math, or they never would have chosen to be math majors, but they never showed any sign of it, and (stung by my previous experience) I was scared to even imply that they might. So yeah, there is a huge fear of nerdiness among women, and I don't think the "nerd chic" thing helps at all. There's no celebration in "nerd chic" culture of honestly frumpy people (there can't be in any "___ chic" culture, "___ chic" will never help anyone who isn't chic) so of all the girls I've known who I suspected of secretly liking math, maybe one of them would have felt at home there. I went to high school in a small city (large town, really) in a rural area, and I went to college at a non-elite public school (went there for the honors program) so you guys who went the elite route may have seen vastly different things. In terms of numbers, though, I suspect my experience was more representative.
- telemachos 16y ago
  So yeah, there is a huge fear of nerdiness among women I suppose my only problem with your story (or the conclusions you draw from it, really) is that you could substitute "men" or "boys" or "people" or "high school students" or "college students" for "women" without any real problem. Lots of people are afraid to appear smart in public.
  - 16y ago
johngalt 16y ago
Why are there so few male nurses? Why are there so few male daycare providers? Why are there so few male teachers? Why are the so few female pest control techs? Why do so few women work on a fishing boat? Why do so few women work on an oil rig? Why do so few men work at a bank branch? Why are there so few male domestic violence shelters? Boys and Girls are different. They have different goals, risks and pressures. If a certain career path lines up with gender based goals/pressures then people self select into that path. Bias does exist, but overall the pendulum has swung in favor of women. I'd argue that a woman has a much easier time becoming a programmer, than a man becoming a daycare provider.

20 points by fogus 16y ago

Im male. When i first got interested in computers(back when my age was a single digit), i didn't follow role models, i just got drawn to these machines, almost instinctively, and not just computers, cars, electronics, any kind of machines. I had my technical influence of course, my dad knew a lot about machines and electronics, but i think its something a bit deeper. Men have been making tools for hundreds of thousands of years, in my complete lack of experience in genetics, i think its foolish to dismiss genetic factors. Which is not to say that role models and culture have no effect, i just think that it has less of an effect than genes. Bottom line is that my politically correct(i hope) opinion is that while women positively have the ability do be good developers(physicists, mathematicians, engineers), and even though some of them DO become good, most lack this internal drive(almost an obsession) I've had since before i can remember.

wccrawford 16y ago
When I got into computers, I didn't realize there COULD be role models for that. I had never heard of any successful programmers. I couldn't name anyone famous for anything related to computers. That certainly didn't stop me from being interested.
- frgbhnmnjh 16y ago
  But the lack of role models is the reason I didn't get that job - it was nothing to do with me not working in school. It was all somebody else's fault - those damn role models. Oh, that and 'da-man' keeping me down. Actually the lack of women in tech is probably because they realize earlier than guys that if they do a psychology degree they only have to study 6hours/week and get to be a manager over all the engineer types.
anateus 16y ago
It tends to come into it earlier, here's a humorous example: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883 It turns out that in even very young children, adults react subconsciously to the problem-solving behaviors of children. In an observational study adults were very quick to swoop in and help girls out when they couldn't perform a task, while boys were allowed to fail until success. Of course, dismissing genetic factors outright is just as problematic as creating just-so stories and fitting evidence on them. Alas, the answer is usually more complex. My point is that there are a lot of subtle cues that pervade our society. Girls know to like pink at ages younger than 3, and yet just over a century ago pink was mostly associated with boys (pink is based on red, a proper manly color). And even well-meaning comp sci folks often subtly make women uncomfortable (feminist theory calls this "othering"). Edit: removed useless line.
jbgoddard 16y ago
Your response is so elitist it makes me sick. With admittedly little knowledge of genetics, you are willing to claim genetics as an important factor? Women have also been making tools for hundreds of thousands of years and many women are just as passionate as you. Do you even have any reason to make such a sexist claim as "most [women] lack this internal drive(almost an obsession) I've had since before I can remember"? Why does it even matter at what age someone first became interested in computers? I didn't know what binary, linux, or programming is until first semester of college. It doesn't matter at all now. Attitudes like yours alienate women who might be interested.
- pavelludiq 16y ago
  My claim was maid on the only reliable source of information i have: my own experience. Most "interesting" girls i know are extremely passionate, just not about machines, the once that are, see them a bit differently than i do. Call me what ever you like, in the world I've grown up in, boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls. What ever the reason, i don't know, i expressed an opinion, and CLEARLY stated that im no expert on the mater.
pchristensen 16y ago
Most men employed as programmers lack that obsession too. HN has lots of people that have loved computers their whole lives, and tech entrepreneurs and companies like Google, Facebook, old-school MSFT are probably loaded with these obsessives, but there are tens of millions of professional programmers out there worldwide. Most of them chose programming as a job because it passed the cost/benefit test vs other fields. That's why so many Indians (male and female) work as programmers - IT outsourcing jobs in India pay quadruple a normal wage and are more prestigious. In the US, programmers get good but not mind-boggling wage and have very little prestige outside of SV, Seattle, Boston and Austin.
zacharycohn 16y ago
"i didn't follow role models, i just got drawn to these machines, almost instinctively, and not just computers, cars, electronics, any kind of machines." You may not have had any role models, but as your interest grew, you would have heard the names of people that are doing things (making things you used, big in the industry, etc). If the situation was reversed and you were a girl, I wonder if you'd subconsciously notice that there weren't hearing about any other women, and I wonder if this would subconsciously make it seem like women "weren't allowed."
- pavelludiq 16y ago
  When i think about it, i did have a role model, his name was Dexter, and he had a secret lab in his bedroom. Although im not sure, i think i liked Decter's lab, because i liked tech, not the other way around. But this is a weak point in my argument, yes.
  - zacharycohn 16y ago
    Also, his sister was always screwing up his tech stuff. :)
ebiester 16y ago
Eh, nearly all women lack this drive. Nearly all men lack this drive, too.

wccrawford 16y ago

"I would like to hire more women, but the number of job applications from women were well below 5 percent." Wait, WHY do you want more women? Are they more skilled somehow? Because if not, that's sexist. You should be hiring the best person for the job, not looking for people that fit a certain concept in your mind.

sanswork 16y ago
A good mix of genders can lead to a healthier office life and better work. All male and all female offices are not ideal for various(and sometimes different) reasons.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Could you perhaps state those reasons? [edit: sorry for asking. Didn't realize asking a poster to explain their reasoning was frowned upon here. ]
  - juliamae 16y ago
    I'm a female dev who has mostly worked in male-dominated teams. I'm currently working in a female-dominated team. The differences are extreme, with the largest being that the mostly-female team has a really difficult time taking criticism and giving criticism (saying 'no' to bad ideas). They're too optimistic and not realistic enough IMO. But what do I know, I'm just the dev! :\
    - dkarl 16y ago
      I'm not surprised that giving criticism is harder, since women are socialized to give feedback indirectly, through body language and other social signs, and even when speaking about a problem not to do so plainly. Simply saying what you think is treated as a "masculine" trait. I imagine the ways of communicating that are treated as appropriately "feminine" are much less effective in a technical context. Do you consciously model ways to give criticism that your female coworkers will feel comfortable with? Does it help them open up and criticize each other? What works? (This is a subject I have an interest in in a personal context as well, since I sometimes get baffled and frustrated by indirect communication and would like to be better at coaxing women to be more direct, which is hard if the relationship isn't already close.) Also, I'm surprised that women have a hard time taking criticism. I didn't expect that at all. Can you say more?

tptacek 16y ago

It is obviously true that the applicant pool for tech jobs is dominated by male candidates. It is less obvious but equally true that women are mistreated in interviews more often then men are. I did not believe this even a little bit up to 2004. I had, after all, hired women; once, I even hired one as my boss. Then I watched a woman go through a series of tech interviews with other people. Oops. This person has the same broken mental model that I had: "I'm fair to both women and men, and I get very few women applicants, so the problem must be lower in the stack." There clearly are problems lower in the stack, but that's not all that's wrong.

mmelin 16y ago
Perhaps you could expand on how women are mistreated in interviews? Are you saying that even though you thought you were treating men and women fairly, you were actually mistreating the women you were interviewing? Or are you saying that "other people" mistreat women in interviews - which begs the question how you know that those other people are actually treating women differently than men (they could just be assholes to everyone, I mean).
- tptacek 16y ago
  I don't think I've mistreated anyone in an interview (except that when I started interviewing in the '90s, I treated them as excuses to demonstrate how smart I was, which was a waste of everyone's time). But, no, when you ask someone whether they're really going to be able to take care of their kids and handle the demands of the job you're interviewing them for, you're clearly not being an equal-opportunity douchebag. I have many more examples than that, some of them worse, but I'm not going to give you a bulleted list; I expect most people who've known women who've interviewed widely have similar examples.
  - untamedmedley 16y ago
    I don't want to push too hard, but here's two reasons it would be better for you to pull out that list: The first is that it gives a heads up to the few women here who are just entering the field. It may open up discussions for how to handle such situations when they arise. The other reason is that not sharing these examples is just as good as saying they never happened. Real concerns become phantom accusations of prejudice against women that don't ever get addressed.

Arun2009 16y ago

IMO, a large part of underrepresentation of women in software is due to the following self-reinforcing stereotype. 1. For historical reasons, men got a head-start in the software sector. 2. Software sector came to be seen as a male-dominated field. 3. Both the recruiters and candidates adjust their behavior based on the "knowledge" that software-jobs are more suited for men than women. I think such accidental clustering happens in many other fields. For e.g., here is a situation where men are the victims: http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/01-05/men.html http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/01-05/men.html

scott_s 16y ago
The really curious thing is that the first programmers were women. This was back in the ENIAC days, before anyone appreciated how difficult it would be to "program" a general purpose computer, before the word "software" existed, or even before "program" was a verb. The ENIAC designers figured the programming part would be easy. See Section II, starting on page 8: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf

dkarl 16y ago

I remember a few days before the start of my freshman year of high school, I was at the college library making copies of math competition tests so I could start practicing for the upcoming season of competition. While I was there, I saw a girl who was on the math team the year before in junior high, so I told her what I was doing and asked her if she wanted some practice tests. She said, "No," and just walked away, but there was a world in that "No." She was offended. She was insulted. She had been pretty good at the math competitions in junior high, but she quickly fell behind in high school and then quit the math team/club. She did drama and speech instead. She still took honors math classes and aced them, and I even heard she did engineering in college, but she would never admit to actually liking it enough to go beyond what was required by classwork. Similarly, the girls I met in college who were getting degrees in math and engineering never admitted to having an interest in those subjects beyond doing well in their classes and getting degrees. The two girls in the math program were keen to express their interest in the money they would make as actuaries or what-not. They had to like math, or they never would have chosen to be math majors, but they never showed any sign of it, and (stung by my previous experience) I was scared to even imply that they might. So yeah, there is a huge fear of nerdiness among women, and I don't think the "nerd chic" thing helps at all. There's no celebration in "nerd chic" culture of honestly frumpy people (there can't be in any "___ chic" culture, "___ chic" will never help anyone who isn't chic) so of all the girls I've known who I suspected of secretly liking math, maybe one of them would have felt at home there. I went to high school in a small city (large town, really) in a rural area, and I went to college at a non-elite public school (went there for the honors program) so you guys who went the elite route may have seen vastly different things. In terms of numbers, though, I suspect my experience was more representative.

telemachos 16y ago
So yeah, there is a huge fear of nerdiness among women I suppose my only problem with your story (or the conclusions you draw from it, really) is that you could substitute "men" or "boys" or "people" or "high school students" or "college students" for "women" without any real problem. Lots of people are afraid to appear smart in public.
- 16y ago

johngalt 16y ago

Why are there so few male nurses? Why are there so few male daycare providers? Why are there so few male teachers? Why are the so few female pest control techs? Why do so few women work on a fishing boat? Why do so few women work on an oil rig? Why do so few men work at a bank branch? Why are there so few male domestic violence shelters? Boys and Girls are different. They have different goals, risks and pressures. If a certain career path lines up with gender based goals/pressures then people self select into that path. Bias does exist, but overall the pendulum has swung in favor of women. I'd argue that a woman has a much easier time becoming a programmer, than a man becoming a daycare provider.