8 ms·

Yeah - I'm not even expressing an unpopular opinion, just asking a (leading) question: where are all these women who are chomping at the bit to get into _techni

Yeah - I'm not even expressing an unpopular opinion, just asking a (leading) question: where are all these women who are chomping at the bit to get into _technical_ positions like programming but find themselves being turned away by biased recruiters? I've never even seen somebody _claim_ that they were a woman who couldn't find a tech job, just people wondering where all the women were.

bicubic 8y ago
Last place I worked at had to invest in additional resources to hire several females because the office was mostly male and applicants were overwhelmingly male. We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal. There does not exist some magical undiscovered pool of talented female engineers that are being turned away by biased recruiters. It's hard enough to find any sort of talented engineers regardless of other factors. Shit, it's not uncommon to recruit from other countries and cover relocation costs these days.
- dudul 8y ago
  Can you share a little more what you did specifically to find female candidates?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
    Not the person you responded to, but a few hiring managers at my office found once they changed up the language in the job listing it made a huge improvement in female applications. If your staff is predominately male then you're wording will skew a particular way that may not seem inviting. Glassdor has a write up on how to go about removing gender bias with links out to studies: https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/10-ways-remove-gender-bias-job-listings/ https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/10-ways-remove-gend...
- N0RMAN 8y ago
  Just being female is a qualification at your workplace?
  - hnbroseph 8y ago
    a rather curious question... what prompted it?
    - paavoova 8y ago
      The parent post? Evidently, for whatever reason, male applicants and coworkers are a problem for their organization, so they go out of their way and invest in "additional resources" to hire female candidates from the hiring pool. They're not hiring on merit, but on gender. How exactly do you hire for female candidates without discriminating against the "overwhelming" body of male applicants? I would be really interested to know how this goes on behind the scenes: do you have open positions but cherry pick female candidates while disregarding male candidates from the get-go?
      - dx87 8y ago
        If it's anything like conferences trying to increase diversity numbers, they don't specifically target one gender, they focus their recruiting efforts on sites and locations that typically have a much higher representation, like a girls college, or a girls hacker group. That way they aren't actively saying "we won't accept male applicants", but they ensure that 90% of the applicants will be from the target demographic.
        ramblerouser 8y ago
        >We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal. How is this not sexism? Replace female with male in the above quote and tell me it isnt sexist.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
crooked-v 8y ago
They all stopped joining up around 1985. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
- MetalGuru 8y ago
  What came first? Was the cast of Revenge of the Nerds all males because nerds were males and art was depicting reality, or did only men start becoming nerds become this movie had an all-male cast? I get being envious of people who had a head start with computers and feeling behind. I had zero coding experience before my first CS class in college. It sucked, but I grinded through it. It's relatively easy to catch up with determination. Probably going to be an unpopular opinion.
  - dx87 8y ago
    I'll start by saying that I agree that determination can overcome a late start, but familial and society pressures can be really difficult to overcome. My wife comes from a small southern town and wanted to be a writer and college professor, but was constantly ridiculed and chastized by teachers and family because she is a woman, so they said she should just be a nurse, or get married and be a housewife. Her family refused to help with her college education, and her dad and mom would tell her that she should quit her masters program to cook and clean while I was at work. She didn't listen to them, but a lot of her female cousins do, and just get stuck in shitty marriages and deadend jobs, never doing what they want. Progamming is also manufactured to be a "male" profession. It used to be that researchers were males, and programming was considered womans work, like doing data entry. When companies like IBM discovered that the best programmers tended to be anti-social males, and that females tended to leave careers earlier to start a family, big tech companies focused all their recruitment on males until progamming became a "male" job. It's similar to how light beer used to be considered a womans drink, but beer companies started running ads showing football players and other masculine figures drinking it, and now it's acceptable for anyone to drink.
    - keithnoizu 8y ago
arandr0x 8y ago
They don't need to be currently unemployed. There are certainly enough women currently employed as programmers in the US to fill all the currently open Amazon positions, it's just it would be positively insane for Amazon to offer twice the salary and work-from-home to female candidates just to have prettier numbers. Amazon (and a lot of other big non-diverse companies) are therefore hoping what is actually happening is that they are the women's first choice already, but turn them down for some reason, and that they would not have to change a thing about their work process to attract more women, except to start seeing them. It's obvious why companies like thinking that way, and it's possible to some extent it's true. However, the fact is, if they're playing like this it's a zero-sum game and it is not actually going to improve the diversity numbers. On my part, I've been wondering. If all these companies want to know where the women who can code are... why not just ask them? Why do you never see a "Female Programmer's Career Survey" with questions such as "On average, over the last ten years, how long have you been looking for a job?" "Would you accept a new job for a $5k raise?" "Have you ever dropped out of a hiring process because of sexism?" Take it out there in the open. Ask the real questions.
Dirlewanger 8y ago
It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because they've chosen not to be. They're wired differently and therefore have different interests.
- beat 8y ago
  But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers? Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    But you're not comparing the same thing generation to generation. The job of developer has changed massively, the number of developers, the expectations, the salary. Sociaety has also changed, and not just in culture but in income distribution, etc etc. If tomorrow we say that you have to do 30 chinups to be a waitress, and the job will involve regular fistfights then we count the number of waitresses by gender and say "it must be cultural", we're kind of missing the point. Or if we say "OK now waitresses make 200k and are respected" and watch the numbers shift.
    - beat 8y ago
      "The job of the developer has changed massively". What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.
      - zimablue 8y ago
        I wasn't around two generations ago to make the comparison but I imagine that with the higher income has come much higher expectations that you'll be in the office for 12 hours a day and weekends. You also have much higher wealth in western nations which correlates with higher ability to seek jobs that fit your preferences. Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. There are hundreds of ways the world and job are very different, and you're flipping the argument to say that I have to assert the one specific causal link. If you're proposing an argument "it's misogynist culture, as evidence compare two generations ago". Then it's more the case that you need to demonstrate that the conditions and job are the same, for your link to be valid. Or that all the ways they're different are irrelevant, which they're just obviously not.

bicubic 8y ago

Last place I worked at had to invest in additional resources to hire several females because the office was mostly male and applicants were overwhelmingly male. We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal. There does not exist some magical undiscovered pool of talented female engineers that are being turned away by biased recruiters. It's hard enough to find any sort of talented engineers regardless of other factors. Shit, it's not uncommon to recruit from other countries and cover relocation costs these days.

dudul 8y ago
Can you share a little more what you did specifically to find female candidates?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
  Not the person you responded to, but a few hiring managers at my office found once they changed up the language in the job listing it made a huge improvement in female applications. If your staff is predominately male then you're wording will skew a particular way that may not seem inviting. Glassdor has a write up on how to go about removing gender bias with links out to studies: https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/10-ways-remove-gender-bias-job-listings/ https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/10-ways-remove-gend...
N0RMAN 8y ago
Just being female is a qualification at your workplace?
- hnbroseph 8y ago
  a rather curious question... what prompted it?
  - paavoova 8y ago
    The parent post? Evidently, for whatever reason, male applicants and coworkers are a problem for their organization, so they go out of their way and invest in "additional resources" to hire female candidates from the hiring pool. They're not hiring on merit, but on gender. How exactly do you hire for female candidates without discriminating against the "overwhelming" body of male applicants? I would be really interested to know how this goes on behind the scenes: do you have open positions but cherry pick female candidates while disregarding male candidates from the get-go?
    - dx87 8y ago
      If it's anything like conferences trying to increase diversity numbers, they don't specifically target one gender, they focus their recruiting efforts on sites and locations that typically have a much higher representation, like a girls college, or a girls hacker group. That way they aren't actively saying "we won't accept male applicants", but they ensure that 90% of the applicants will be from the target demographic.
      - ramblerouser 8y ago
        >We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal. How is this not sexism? Replace female with male in the above quote and tell me it isnt sexist.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]

crooked-v 8y ago

They all stopped joining up around 1985. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

MetalGuru 8y ago
What came first? Was the cast of Revenge of the Nerds all males because nerds were males and art was depicting reality, or did only men start becoming nerds become this movie had an all-male cast? I get being envious of people who had a head start with computers and feeling behind. I had zero coding experience before my first CS class in college. It sucked, but I grinded through it. It's relatively easy to catch up with determination. Probably going to be an unpopular opinion.
- dx87 8y ago
  I'll start by saying that I agree that determination can overcome a late start, but familial and society pressures can be really difficult to overcome. My wife comes from a small southern town and wanted to be a writer and college professor, but was constantly ridiculed and chastized by teachers and family because she is a woman, so they said she should just be a nurse, or get married and be a housewife. Her family refused to help with her college education, and her dad and mom would tell her that she should quit her masters program to cook and clean while I was at work. She didn't listen to them, but a lot of her female cousins do, and just get stuck in shitty marriages and deadend jobs, never doing what they want. Progamming is also manufactured to be a "male" profession. It used to be that researchers were males, and programming was considered womans work, like doing data entry. When companies like IBM discovered that the best programmers tended to be anti-social males, and that females tended to leave careers earlier to start a family, big tech companies focused all their recruitment on males until progamming became a "male" job. It's similar to how light beer used to be considered a womans drink, but beer companies started running ads showing football players and other masculine figures drinking it, and now it's acceptable for anyone to drink.
  - keithnoizu 8y ago

arandr0x 8y ago

They don't need to be currently unemployed. There are certainly enough women currently employed as programmers in the US to fill all the currently open Amazon positions, it's just it would be positively insane for Amazon to offer twice the salary and work-from-home to female candidates just to have prettier numbers. Amazon (and a lot of other big non-diverse companies) are therefore hoping what is actually happening is that they are the women's first choice already, but turn them down for some reason, and that they would not have to change a thing about their work process to attract more women, except to start seeing them. It's obvious why companies like thinking that way, and it's possible to some extent it's true. However, the fact is, if they're playing like this it's a zero-sum game and it is not actually going to improve the diversity numbers. On my part, I've been wondering. If all these companies want to know where the women who can code are... why not just ask them? Why do you never see a "Female Programmer's Career Survey" with questions such as "On average, over the last ten years, how long have you been looking for a job?" "Would you accept a new job for a $5k raise?" "Have you ever dropped out of a hiring process because of sexism?" Take it out there in the open. Ask the real questions.

Dirlewanger 8y ago

It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because they've chosen not to be. They're wired differently and therefore have different interests.

beat 8y ago
But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers? Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.
- zimablue 8y ago
  But you're not comparing the same thing generation to generation. The job of developer has changed massively, the number of developers, the expectations, the salary. Sociaety has also changed, and not just in culture but in income distribution, etc etc. If tomorrow we say that you have to do 30 chinups to be a waitress, and the job will involve regular fistfights then we count the number of waitresses by gender and say "it must be cultural", we're kind of missing the point. Or if we say "OK now waitresses make 200k and are respected" and watch the numbers shift.
  - beat 8y ago
    "The job of the developer has changed massively". What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.
    - zimablue 8y ago
      I wasn't around two generations ago to make the comparison but I imagine that with the higher income has come much higher expectations that you'll be in the office for 12 hours a day and weekends. You also have much higher wealth in western nations which correlates with higher ability to seek jobs that fit your preferences. Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. There are hundreds of ways the world and job are very different, and you're flipping the argument to say that I have to assert the one specific causal link. If you're proposing an argument "it's misogynist culture, as evidence compare two generations ago". Then it's more the case that you need to demonstrate that the conditions and job are the same, for your link to be valid. Or that all the ways they're different are irrelevant, which they're just obviously not.