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High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. The actual discrimination against women comes in PhD programs, programs where their success is determined by 1 or 2 superiors (mostly men in advanced research programs), areas with primarily male coworkers, and creepy bosses. The area with most discrimination for women is in non major liberal cities. I went to the Midwest twice and saw more blatant sexism in the workforce than I have my entire life. 2 friends confided that they were asked to trade sexual favors for promotions albeit this was 20 years ago and that was the deciding factor for them moving to the Bay. These things are horrible and I can’t imagime the emotional trauma for that. However, in the Bay Area and the majority of society the pendulum has swung way too far the other way. I don’t care if people think me sexist, these are my observations over my lifetime from both sides and unlesss convinced otherwise this is what I believe.

adamsea 8y ago
> No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?
- rhegart 8y ago
  I’d wager it’s the same as the composition of females in any Engineering program. If there were 25 women in your CS program out of a 100 (being generous), they can’t magically multiply and somehow end up 50 in the workforce. No one is forcing them to NOT join a STEM field. Everyone is telling them to specifically join STEM and giving likely billions of dollars in support aiding the increase.
  - kaitai 8y ago
    As someone who's raised funds for a program for HS girls in STEM recently, it seems like those 'billions of dollars' are all going to advertising or something 'cause they're sure not coming to, say, pay for teachers for my artificial intelligence camp.
  - mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
    It doesn't require magic, just discrimination.
  - simoncoulton 8y ago
    Exactly right, people don't seem to understand this basic concept. The only way to achieve an equal split with anything is to discriminate.
- AdrianB1 8y ago
  In my company in the IT department (over 1000 people) more than 50% are women, reaching around 60%. In the past 5-6 years the promotions were 4 to 1 in favor of women and when hiring, female candidates come first if the skills are comparable or not much lower than male candidates. This is because we used to have a female CIO that set diversity targets that were mandatory for all levels, so in less than 10 years we went from 15-20% females to 55-60% females by rejecting male new hires and promoting females by the dozen.
  - edejong 8y ago
    Makes me wonder how many men left the IT department in order to prevent career-suicide.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
      Anyone who realized the jig and rolled out.
    - AdrianB1 8y ago
      Just a few that are located in countries with good opportunities, not the ones outside USA or West Europe. A few like me still believe something can be done to fix it (the CIO retired), so we did not leave yet. The ones close to retirement don't care anymore.
- chrinic83 8y ago
  > .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female? So you're saying, to achieve parity, we need 80-90% of STEM grads to be female and only 10% men? Or do you think we should bypass the job interview process for women entirely, until we get a 50-50 ratio in software engineering teams? Shouldn't we apply this to nurses and teachers (for male equality) as well? That is, have more accelerated job and education programs for men?
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    >Shouldn't we apply this to nurses and teachers (for male equality) as well? That is, have more accelerated job and education programs for men? I'm not sure if that's a good argument, because maybe male teachers and nurses are disadvantaged. I have no way to tell. Instead I think it's easier to agree that it's better for everyone when everything is merit-based, especially for outsiders who have a much harder time socially (because they're outsiders) than they do professionally (because businesses are usually more rational water cooler clubs, although neither are very rational overall). Not every woman wants to be a woman in tech, some people just want to be in tech.
- charliesharding 8y ago
  What do you think the breakdown of applicants by gender is for these roles? Are you suggesting that females should be forced into occupations they don't voluntarily choose? The countries that have the most egalitarian societies show difference in gender preference maximizing, not minimizing.
  - esarbe 8y ago
    This seems to be a valid observation (see https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...), it is not insulting or demeaning and it contributes to the discussion. So, why is this downvoted?
    - CryoLogic 8y ago
      It's not being down-voted because it's not a valid discussion point, but instead probably just because HN has a very liberal audience. Even the most educated are still capable of bias, and many here do not like the opinion that it is possible that women differ from men in any significant ways. Don't take the down-votes too personally. As long as you are posting constructive feedback with some evidence to your hypothesizes they will be appreciated by many even if the vote count doesn't make it appear to be so.
      - esarbe 8y ago
        I don't take the downvotes personally (it's not my post, after all) but it makes me rather curious. I think it strange that a liberal audience would dispute the fact that there are differences between men and women, even significant differences.
        DenisM 8y ago
        You're mistaking noise for signal. Even the most innocent comments get down-voted in a random drive-by on occasion; they usually recover.
        8y ago
- NotAnEconomist 8y ago
  It's possible to both discriminate against men, yet have more men in the workforce, if women voluntarily are choosing not to enter a profession. In fact, that seems to be the problem: no amount of discrimination against men resolves that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do, but the only policy lever that can really be utilized is discrimination at various stages of education or employment. This has left people aiming for a fantasy, and using increasingly aggressive discrimination to try and carry it out, biology be damned.
  - fasdetwaew 8y ago
    > that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do Why is that, though? Are women not encouraged to pursue technology careers? Or are they being encouraged to chose other careers instead? Are they driven away from it by a toxic work place culture? Or just the perception of tech as having toxic workplace cultures? Are women moving into roles with more flexibility because they are expected to take on more domestic duties? Or my hunch... Do women just feel less comfortable entering an industry with such an unbalanced gender ratio to begin with, and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle? You say Biology be damned, but I don't think it's settled that biology is the main factor here. And I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying we don't know.
    - razorunreal 8y ago
      I think you are asking the wrong questions. Why not ask: Why are there so many men in tech? To answer that I would compare it to a field like finance, where people are well paid and over worked. I think the money comes first, then the men, and with them the bro culture. So my hunch is that men will disproportionately do anything for a dollar. And no-one notices because they are busy wondering where the women are.
      - fasdetwaew 8y ago
        That's also a possibility. I think men are pressured more to earn a lot of money. The traditional mindset was that women didn't need to be breadwinners.
- markdown 8y ago
  Your argument doesn't counter his/hers. It could be that fewer women are entering engineering fields at the top of the funnel (after high school). So every woman who applies for a job in the field could be getting one while on the whole, women still making up a tiny proportion of the workforce in that field. In any case even if every engineering class in college has women in the majority, and every one of them is getting a job that a man previously held, it will still take a generation for parity to become visible in the workplace.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- manfredo 8y ago
  How many schools have 50% make teachers? Is it because education has a rampant sexism problem? Or is it because men and women have different preferences?
  - JKCalhoun 8y ago
    Anecdotal of course, but I have an education degree. Also learned to code. (Also, am male.) Why am I not a teacher but instead a programmer? Money. I feel, as a male, I need to be the "bread winner". Sure, that's something society has imposed on me — or perhaps I allowed to impose on me. But there you are. If other men feel as I do, they may be drawn away from the notoriously underpaid field of education. Too bad. If money were not in the equation, I am fairly sure I would have found more personal satisfaction from that career than the one I chose.
  - lazyasciiart 8y ago
    It's at least partly because of rampant sexism and social suspicion of men who want to spend time around children.
- jotux 8y ago
  >how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female? All I can find is data from 2012[1], but <20% of engineering and computer science graduates are female. I help with interviews for the group I work in and just skimmed every job announcement (intern through senior level) to see the breakdown of who applied. In 5 years we had 81 people apply for jobs, which included only 3 women. Although I don't have access to any data, the previous job I had was similar: I estimate that I screened 30-40 candidates over 2 years and only one was female in that time. Our job postings (and those of my previous employer) were generic descriptions of the work and benefits. Perhaps generic job descriptions are inherently hostile towards women? [1] https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/girlsinit_report2012_final.pdf https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/girlsini...
sorum 8y ago
> 57% of college graduates are women What's the percentage female graduates in STEM fields? The 57% may not be representative for the fields which matter for engineers. Not saying the delta is big, I honestly don't know and am curious.
- FiddlyPack 8y ago
  Hey so I know this is n of 1 and off-topic, but as a liberal arts student, I went from music to signal processing to music theory to music analytics to generative music to software engineer. There can be a lot of STEM in non-STEM degrees. I did take a number of CS, acoustics, and electrical courses as a music major, but my degree still says music. I know once-English majors with a similar story of a passion for what computing can reveal/create around a discipline that resulted in rich software careers. I am over a decade out of college, and in my personal experience passion for computing is more relevant than having a STEM background in software development. All this to say, I’m not sure % STEM focused is necessarily a reliable indicator of “future software engineer.”
  - agentx3r 8y ago
    For n=1, sure, not necessarily.
  - busterarm 8y ago
    Roughly 1/3 of the engineers that I've encountered in my ~17 year career have music degrees (and one guy who went to ballet school and later wrote one of the most well-known O'Reilly books). And this is mostly on the ops side.
    - cellularmitosis 8y ago
      This seems to also be a running theme among clojurists, and the opening question on most episodes of the cognicast was inspired by this correlation.
      - busterarm 8y ago
roguecoder 8y ago
Why are you assuming the women are below average? Though even if they were, maybe they are making a premium because they aren't adding sexism to their workplaces and exposing their company to the legal liabilities you are.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- malvosenior 8y ago
  > Why are you assuming the women are below average? He said they're his friends and they agree with him. Why would you assume that he's lying about people he knows? > Though even if they were, maybe they are making a premium because they aren't adding sexism to their workplaces and exposing their company to the legal liabilities you are. By being paid more than their male counterparts while being less qualified for the job, they most definitely are adding sexism to the work place.
- codyb 8y ago
  I read that as an AND as opposed to a singular entity. Below average AND woman.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
  Are women never sexist?
- rhegart 8y ago
  Because their grades were average, they are friends and I’ve helped them. Are you threatening me? Is it because I’m making sense and instead of offering a counter argument you resort to this? Well luckily for me I’m my own boss, I’m on a forum which let’s me discuss ideas with many members who I know are far smarter than me in every field. Maybe a counter argument here makes sense, convinces me, and brings me more to your side even by 1%. Or you can vaguely threaten me, push me to more obscure extreme parts of the internet and a year from now see my relatively moderate opinions become extreme because people like you have pushed me to the fringes where I’m surrounded by likeminded people some terrible but others who have also been pushed out and don’t hear any good counter arguments. Because that’s happening all over lately. Edit: I’m using “me” as an example, I’m obviously not going to do that but I’m trying to make a point that others who speak against the majority opinion absolutely might and there are bad actors who are trying to manipulate that with intersecrionality of their own kind. Just like being against sexism is intersectional with anti racism, gun control, pro choice etc. when someone gets sucked into something seemingly innocuous as this, it’s very likely they’ll start believing a whole lot of similar ideas. That can be good or bad I suppose.
rfinney 8y ago
"non major liberal cities" I think the "me too" thing proved the coastal elite were part of the problem.
- arkh 8y ago
  Or let's get crazy: they are the problem. People tend to think other people think and act like them. That's why often the first to be vocal against some behavior are part of those displaying this behavior.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  It'd be perfectly accurate to say that San Francisco has discrimination against homosexuals, but people are still relocating there to avoid the discrimination where they are. Some places are enormously better than other places.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    It is perfectly accurate to say that anywhere has discrimination against anybody, because for any moderately sized group there is always going to be someone engaging in a given behavior. Distributions and nuanced statements are the crux of this entire matter, yet in these discussions they're cast away in favor of simplistic narratives. If you draw the metric this way, "men" are paid more. If you draw the metric that way, "women" are paid more, surprise! This is already headed down the path to madness! Generalizations using scalar metrics (or even slightly more advanced higher moments) can only inform - they simply cannot form a basis for prescriptive policies to reform! We generally see sexism/racism/xxism as wrong because they ignore individuals in favor of broken-ass group-based narratives. Yet over the past several years this collectivist thinking has re-sprouted in full force, sanctioned as acceptable because it's "helping" - yet it's still fundamentally broken! Specifically, every company's basic incentive is to cheap out on every single employee as much as possible without having them leave. They are taking advantage of every person's individual reluctance to fully negotiate, essentially arbitraging their human-emotional holdups. Is it terribly surprising that there are going to be wide disparities between what different personalities (regardless of but also including gender) are paid?
thomaslangston 8y ago
That 57% of STEM grads statistic is misleading when commenting about an article about Google. The 18% CS grads in 2015 would be more appropriate to quote. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren-t-more-women-majoring-in-computer-science http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. My daughter who is finishing the primary school has recently asked me if it's okay if she doesn't like math, but likes animals and babies. Sounds like some pressure is being applied...
- nostromo 8y ago
  Or maybe sexual differences cause men and women, on average, to have different interests. edit: thanks for pointing out that I misread which type of pressure is being applied.
  - jlawson 8y ago
    That's what the poster meant. She was being pressured to like math; her inherent interest was in animals and babies.
    - ggggtez 8y ago
      Did you know that men sometimes like babies and animals too? Crazy I know. What is taught in 4th-5th grade math? Fractions? Decimals? Multiplication and division of larger numbers (maybe the accursed "Long Division")? These are not exactly the most exciting or interesting things to learn... If I was a parent of this child, I'd take it as a notice that they are falling behind, probably from lousy teaching and parenting. It's not going to get any better by ignoring the problem. They've got another 8+ years of school to go, they aren't even halfway done. You need to show them why they can find it interesting, the same way you would show a student who really loves math why reading/writing is important. Or why history matters... If you just assume a 10 year old can fully decide what their adult self likes/doesn't like and what they need to know, then you are failing as a parent.
      - bargl 8y ago
        Are you a parent? I ask because I remember saying stuff like this before I had kids. I don't anymore. I've tried to learn not to judge others parenting but hey that's just me. No one, at least that I've seen. Is saying men don't like babies and animals too. There is nothing wrong with that. To assume that you have to like something based on your gender is ignorant. To assume that you can't like what is "stereotypical" liked by your gender is equally ignorant. People have a massive amount of fluctuation in what they like and don't like, part of being a parent is about recognizing the individual that your kid is and not pressing what YOU want on them, but balancing that with what's best for them based on what you know that they don't. I also know that as a parent, you're always failing. You just do your best to fail as little as possible.
billfruit 8y ago
I thinks what I see in South Asia, many engineering disciplines have a much more women than men, like CS and Electrical Engineering. It is in disciplines like Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering that there are less women than men. I think in the third world in general more women get engineering degrees than men.q
- MarkMc 8y ago
  "In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
roenxi 8y ago
I've never worked in a field where I could compete for a job with a woman, they'd always get first dibs. It is pretty unfair. However a distinction must be made between the formal systems (extremely sexist favouring women), informal systems (potentially extremely sexist favouring men) and workplace environment (women are continuously sexually propositioned; pretty overwhelming evidence for that IMO). Making the formal systems sexist is a stupid response to the informal systems being sexist. I wish that people would stop advocating that and instead work on the informal issue - if it isn't due to innate ability (a safe bet) then there must be something that can be done. The propositioning thing is a bit of a poser though, it is so pervasive that I suspect it points to deeper issues. Also the anecdotal evidence is that if propositioning was successfully stamped out that would do crazy things to the fabric of how relationships get established. Might be a net good or bad.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  That's a very interesting take. I know as a man, I'd rather work in a place where anyone propositioning someone else would be fired (man or woman) than a place where I may not even get the job because I'm male.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    Romances between colleagues is a fairly common and natural thing. It seems quite excessive for all propositions to result in termination.
    - pas 8y ago
      There is a difference between building an acquaintance, then friendship, and asking them out, and between offering explicit sexual acts right after/instead hello.
  - 3rdgender 8y ago
    Hope you never fall in love with a coworker.
- mjevans 8y ago
kakwa_ 8y ago
I'm not talking for the US but for what I experienced in France. In France there is a dedicated system for engineering studies (Classes preparatoires + Grandes Ecoles). You do 2 years of intensive Math and Physics (classe preparatoire), than pass a ranking exam, then go to the school of your choice provided you ranked high enough to get into this specific school. Basically, the ratio was 1/3 women 2/3 men at the "classe preparatoire" stage, and overall it's the ratio for engineer when all specialties are mixed together. But then you have disparities between fields, CS schools get between 10 to 15% of women while Chemistry is about 50%, other fields like Electronic, Civil Engineering, Applied Physics are roughly in the average of 30%. Only the schools to become a military officer have an higher disparity than CS (and the air branch is actually in the same area). For those who can read French (or have the courage to decipher) the statistics are available here: * http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/mp.html http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/mp.html (math dominant) * http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/pc.html http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/pc.html (physic dominant) * http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/psi.html http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/psi.html (technic and mechanic dominant) (Hint: CS == Informatique (often abbreviated to "Info")
soheil 8y ago
Dr. Jordan Peterson has much to say about this in terms of Psychology [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOjzCi9wIhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOjzCi9wIhE
- pas 8y ago
  tl;dw please?
  - soheil 8y ago
    play on 2x he's no ben shapiro when it comes to talking fast
lgleason 8y ago
[edited for typos and grammer] Anecdotally, I've run a couple of tech conferences and know others who have as well fairly recently. We've made a point to hold workshops for under represented groups, had the Codes of Conduct, make a lot of extra effort to reach out to women as speakers etc.. In the end, we would get 5 to 10 times as many talk submissions from men, accept nearly all of the talks by women (often turning down higher quality talks from men) trying to get diversity numbers and have a much higher cancellation rate form the women for various reasons, especially money. If we were lucky we would get 20-30% women speakers when all of that was done. I've also been told by some diversity activists that, in order to get women to speak and to get higher percentages of women as speakers etc., unlike most of the men, you need to pay for their travel etc., offer free tickets for women attendees, consider offering stipends for women who speak etc.. Others, organizing other conferences have shared similar experiences. It's one thing to fight against blatant sexism which I'm for, but this is turning into something else.
- nwienert 8y ago
  I’ll repeat points that aren’t my original ideas, but are painfully obvious here. It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men. This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    Kantian second stage For those who slept through the philosophy class, what these stages are?
    - jkaptur 8y ago
      Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic
      - 8y ago
avip 8y ago
The funny thing is it's all open. Women-only positions in unis and so. My wife was even invited to a women-only conference! I asked her if she would go to a "white only" or "Christian only" event.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  My wife was invited to a women-only wedding. I wish that all people would be open minded and just treat everyone equally by default no matter what they look like, what genitalia they have or their wealth level. Save the exclusion for people who show themselves to be *s (i.e. who cause harm to others). So ban smokers / drinkers from your wedding not men.
- dahart 8y ago
  What large scale white & Christian discrimination has existed historically, in the US? When were white Christians not allowed to vote or paid less? What's wrong with a conference for women, how exactly is that different than a conference for engineers, or a store for pet owners?
  - pas 8y ago
    It probably creates an unhelpful artificial environment. (Which is okay for teaching, learning, healing, etc.) But society supposedly tries to integrate women into higher paying fields. Those fields are not going to be all women. Now, of course as we see from the stats, anecdotes and other hints, we're pretty far from a women dominated higj tech sector, but there is already polarization. There are already women run companies actively trying to hire only women. This is not constructive on the long run. Just as the X-gender-only conferences. I'm of course interested in arguments that say otherwise, so if you have, please share them.
    - dahart 8y ago
      > there is already polarization Yes there is already polarization, the global polarization that exists already is known and documented to be in favor of men, on average. There is still a pay gap in favor of men. You’re trying to argue there is reverse discrimination, but without any evidence. There are some affirmative actions for women. Do you consider affirmative actions for women to be discrimination? If a cultural polarization occurred naturally without any intentional effort, meaning people exhibited and acted on biases without knowing it, and it was hurting a class of people, what would you do to fix it? > There are already women run companies actively trying to hire only women. This is not constructive on the long run. Just as the X-gender-only conferences. Those seem like two different things to me. Do you see the same difference I do between a job that pays you and a product you have to pay for? While it depends quite a bit on what conference we’re talking about, I don’t see a general problem with conference products made for women. I don’t believe that is automatically discriminatory or polarizing. If you do, I’d like to hear more about what you think is wrong with it. Tampons are made for women, and I don’t know any men that are mad about it or think is polarizing. There is a reason that there are laws surrounding job discrimination and no laws surrounding conference discrimination. It’s because it is perfectly fine to sell products to a specific audience. Jobs are required by law to not discriminate, though I’m sure there are some jobs that require a woman and not a man. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was legal and acceptable to hire a woman to teach Women’s Studies. Personally, I’ll wait to be concerned about jobs reserved for women until women are the majority of the workforce and management structure at all companies on average. Right now, they’re not.
nodesocket 8y ago
Despite the media and far left continuing to propagate the gender pay gap especially in technology, the reality seems to indicate the opposite. Women are given a salary boost because companies (specifically those on the west coast) are afraid of being publicly shamed by the media for perceived gender bias. The pendulum has swung way to far, except now if you stand up and try push it toward the middle, you are quickly shamed and labeled a sexist.
ggggtez 8y ago
>any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. This sounds like an uneducated opinion. Sample size of 1: My department had maybe 1 female professor for every 10 male. The student ratio was pretty similar. In your sample, you asked "your friends", which is a really biased sample. How did you meet them? Did you only meet them because they already had the high paying job? You aren't accounting for variables, and you are ignoring evidence.
jurassic 8y ago
> areas with primarily male coworkers, and creepy bosses This describes basically every tech job I have ever had. Real life engineering woman here reporting in. In 2014 I joined a series B startup as engineer #15 and was the only woman in the office other than the admin; food delivery dudes often brought things to my desk, assuming I must be the office mother. When I was late to work one day after being groped by a strange man on Caltrain, my supervisor questioned my commitment to meeting deadlines. When I moved on, they returned to being a 100% straight white male company. In 2015, I was the first female engineering hire at the new office of a growing mid-size tech company. A second woman wasn't hired until we'd reached a headcount of about 20. Men, especially clients, often forgot my name. E.g. Janice vs Janet vs Jan (none of these my real name, but you get the idea. The point is that I wasn't important enough to these men to remember.) Fast forward a few years. Now I am by far the most senior of four engineering ladies at the satellite campus of a household name tech company. Total headcount at this office is about 100 engineers. I have never had a female manager. For those keeping score, I have never worked anywhere with more than 5-10% female engineers. For my entire career, even as a noob, I have been the most senior female engineer I know. I count myself lucky because I've never had to deal with anything resembling actual harassment. (It helps that I am not conventionally attractive). But there is a psychological burden of always feeling alone, always being the first or only, worrying that your actions will be taken to represent all people of your kind, and wondering if assholes in your midst think you've only got where you've gotten because you're a woman. Your dismissive attitude toward women's supposed advantages is as common as it is damaging. Whatever unfair advantages you think your women colleagues have, unless you are black or latinx, it is unlikely you will ever experience the feelings of isolation and otherness that most women deal with throughout their tech careers.
- movedx 8y ago
  I'm honestly quite taken aback by this. I want to say sorry, and I will, but I know it's not personally my fault and I know it won't make much of a difference to your circumstances now or in the future. But still, I'm sorry you've had this experience. I have to be honest and say this, but I think what you've experienced is very much an American culture kind-of-thing. Every time I read a comment like this, besides making me sad and angry, it tends to always come from somewhere in America. I'm sure something similar has happened and continues to happen here in Australia, but I've seen little of it. That being said, as I sit here now in a very large, well known company, my line of sight gives me a head count of about 30 men and 2 women. This makes me sad and angry, too. I don't know what to do about this besides encouraging women to come into the industry and protecting them in a none condescending, white-knight, women-are-weak sort of way...
dahart 8y ago
> High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick... What is the graduation rate of women in STEM fields? 57% is not the graduation rate in STEM fields, which makes it sound like you are cherry picking statistics. What fields are all the women graduating in? Aside from Google, the pay gap still exists and women earn less than men. The WP article estimates 94 cents on the dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S... You're right that women are getting positive reinforcements, it's because (whether you agree with them or not) we have affirmative action programs for women. Affirmative actions always have and always will be debated to death, but the question you should be asking and answering before dismissing this issue is, if there's no affirmative action, how do you equalize opportunities for groups known to have been discriminated against? We already tried not having extra programs and not having extra awareness, and the result was lower pay. How would you correct this?
merlincorey 8y ago
> 2 friends confided that they were asked to trade sexual favors for promotions albeit this was 20 years ago and that was the deciding factor for them moving to the Bay. These things are horrible and I can’t imagime the emotional trauma for that. Of course, this could have, and does[0] happen in the Bay Area, too - in just the last year even. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/uber-sexual-harassment-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/uber-sexual-ha...
majani 8y ago
Funny how the pendulum hasn't swung in the garbage collection and bricklaying sectors as well though, isn't it? It's all a power struggle at the end of the day.

adamsea 8y ago

> No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level tech programs are not incredibly favored. All my below average coder friends that are women got awesome jobs with high salaries extremely easily. Yes, I talk with them and they agree with what I’m saying. .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female?

rhegart 8y ago
I’d wager it’s the same as the composition of females in any Engineering program. If there were 25 women in your CS program out of a 100 (being generous), they can’t magically multiply and somehow end up 50 in the workforce. No one is forcing them to NOT join a STEM field. Everyone is telling them to specifically join STEM and giving likely billions of dollars in support aiding the increase.
- kaitai 8y ago
  As someone who's raised funds for a program for HS girls in STEM recently, it seems like those 'billions of dollars' are all going to advertising or something 'cause they're sure not coming to, say, pay for teachers for my artificial intelligence camp.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
  It doesn't require magic, just discrimination.
- simoncoulton 8y ago
  Exactly right, people don't seem to understand this basic concept. The only way to achieve an equal split with anything is to discriminate.
AdrianB1 8y ago
In my company in the IT department (over 1000 people) more than 50% are women, reaching around 60%. In the past 5-6 years the promotions were 4 to 1 in favor of women and when hiring, female candidates come first if the skills are comparable or not much lower than male candidates. This is because we used to have a female CIO that set diversity targets that were mandatory for all levels, so in less than 10 years we went from 15-20% females to 55-60% females by rejecting male new hires and promoting females by the dozen.
- edejong 8y ago
  Makes me wonder how many men left the IT department in order to prevent career-suicide.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    Anyone who realized the jig and rolled out.
  - AdrianB1 8y ago
    Just a few that are located in countries with good opportunities, not the ones outside USA or West Europe. A few like me still believe something can be done to fix it (the CIO retired), so we did not leave yet. The ones close to retirement don't care anymore.
chrinic83 8y ago
> .... and yet, how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female? So you're saying, to achieve parity, we need 80-90% of STEM grads to be female and only 10% men? Or do you think we should bypass the job interview process for women entirely, until we get a 50-50 ratio in software engineering teams? Shouldn't we apply this to nurses and teachers (for male equality) as well? That is, have more accelerated job and education programs for men?
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >Shouldn't we apply this to nurses and teachers (for male equality) as well? That is, have more accelerated job and education programs for men? I'm not sure if that's a good argument, because maybe male teachers and nurses are disadvantaged. I have no way to tell. Instead I think it's easier to agree that it's better for everyone when everything is merit-based, especially for outsiders who have a much harder time socially (because they're outsiders) than they do professionally (because businesses are usually more rational water cooler clubs, although neither are very rational overall). Not every woman wants to be a woman in tech, some people just want to be in tech.
charliesharding 8y ago
What do you think the breakdown of applicants by gender is for these roles? Are you suggesting that females should be forced into occupations they don't voluntarily choose? The countries that have the most egalitarian societies show difference in gender preference maximizing, not minimizing.
- esarbe 8y ago
  This seems to be a valid observation (see https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...), it is not insulting or demeaning and it contributes to the discussion. So, why is this downvoted?
  - CryoLogic 8y ago
    It's not being down-voted because it's not a valid discussion point, but instead probably just because HN has a very liberal audience. Even the most educated are still capable of bias, and many here do not like the opinion that it is possible that women differ from men in any significant ways. Don't take the down-votes too personally. As long as you are posting constructive feedback with some evidence to your hypothesizes they will be appreciated by many even if the vote count doesn't make it appear to be so.
    - esarbe 8y ago
      I don't take the downvotes personally (it's not my post, after all) but it makes me rather curious. I think it strange that a liberal audience would dispute the fact that there are differences between men and women, even significant differences.
      - DenisM 8y ago
        You're mistaking noise for signal. Even the most innocent comments get down-voted in a random drive-by on occasion; they usually recover.
      - 8y ago
NotAnEconomist 8y ago
It's possible to both discriminate against men, yet have more men in the workforce, if women voluntarily are choosing not to enter a profession. In fact, that seems to be the problem: no amount of discrimination against men resolves that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do, but the only policy lever that can really be utilized is discrimination at various stages of education or employment. This has left people aiming for a fantasy, and using increasingly aggressive discrimination to try and carry it out, biology be damned.
- fasdetwaew 8y ago
  > that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do Why is that, though? Are women not encouraged to pursue technology careers? Or are they being encouraged to chose other careers instead? Are they driven away from it by a toxic work place culture? Or just the perception of tech as having toxic workplace cultures? Are women moving into roles with more flexibility because they are expected to take on more domestic duties? Or my hunch... Do women just feel less comfortable entering an industry with such an unbalanced gender ratio to begin with, and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle? You say Biology be damned, but I don't think it's settled that biology is the main factor here. And I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying we don't know.
  - razorunreal 8y ago
    I think you are asking the wrong questions. Why not ask: Why are there so many men in tech? To answer that I would compare it to a field like finance, where people are well paid and over worked. I think the money comes first, then the men, and with them the bro culture. So my hunch is that men will disproportionately do anything for a dollar. And no-one notices because they are busy wondering where the women are.
    - fasdetwaew 8y ago
      That's also a possibility. I think men are pressured more to earn a lot of money. The traditional mindset was that women didn't need to be breadwinners.
markdown 8y ago
Your argument doesn't counter his/hers. It could be that fewer women are entering engineering fields at the top of the funnel (after high school). So every woman who applies for a job in the field could be getting one while on the whole, women still making up a tiny proportion of the workforce in that field. In any case even if every engineering class in college has women in the majority, and every one of them is getting a job that a man previously held, it will still take a generation for parity to become visible in the workplace.
deleted 8y ago
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manfredo 8y ago
How many schools have 50% make teachers? Is it because education has a rampant sexism problem? Or is it because men and women have different preferences?
- JKCalhoun 8y ago
  Anecdotal of course, but I have an education degree. Also learned to code. (Also, am male.) Why am I not a teacher but instead a programmer? Money. I feel, as a male, I need to be the "bread winner". Sure, that's something society has imposed on me — or perhaps I allowed to impose on me. But there you are. If other men feel as I do, they may be drawn away from the notoriously underpaid field of education. Too bad. If money were not in the equation, I am fairly sure I would have found more personal satisfaction from that career than the one I chose.
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  It's at least partly because of rampant sexism and social suspicion of men who want to spend time around children.
jotux 8y ago
>how many workplaces have an engineering team which are 50% female? 25% female? 10% female? 5% female? All I can find is data from 2012[1], but <20% of engineering and computer science graduates are female. I help with interviews for the group I work in and just skimmed every job announcement (intern through senior level) to see the breakdown of who applied. In 5 years we had 81 people apply for jobs, which included only 3 women. Although I don't have access to any data, the previous job I had was similar: I estimate that I screened 30-40 candidates over 2 years and only one was female in that time. Our job postings (and those of my previous employer) were generic descriptions of the work and benefits. Perhaps generic job descriptions are inherently hostile towards women? [1] https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/girlsinit_report2012_final.pdf https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/girlsini...

sorum 8y ago

> 57% of college graduates are women What's the percentage female graduates in STEM fields? The 57% may not be representative for the fields which matter for engineers. Not saying the delta is big, I honestly don't know and am curious.

FiddlyPack 8y ago
Hey so I know this is n of 1 and off-topic, but as a liberal arts student, I went from music to signal processing to music theory to music analytics to generative music to software engineer. There can be a lot of STEM in non-STEM degrees. I did take a number of CS, acoustics, and electrical courses as a music major, but my degree still says music. I know once-English majors with a similar story of a passion for what computing can reveal/create around a discipline that resulted in rich software careers. I am over a decade out of college, and in my personal experience passion for computing is more relevant than having a STEM background in software development. All this to say, I’m not sure % STEM focused is necessarily a reliable indicator of “future software engineer.”
- agentx3r 8y ago
  For n=1, sure, not necessarily.
- busterarm 8y ago
  Roughly 1/3 of the engineers that I've encountered in my ~17 year career have music degrees (and one guy who went to ballet school and later wrote one of the most well-known O'Reilly books). And this is mostly on the ops side.
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    This seems to also be a running theme among clojurists, and the opening question on most episodes of the cognicast was inspired by this correlation.
    - busterarm 8y ago

roguecoder 8y ago

Why are you assuming the women are below average? Though even if they were, maybe they are making a premium because they aren't adding sexism to their workplaces and exposing their company to the legal liabilities you are.

deleted 8y ago
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malvosenior 8y ago
> Why are you assuming the women are below average? He said they're his friends and they agree with him. Why would you assume that he's lying about people he knows? > Though even if they were, maybe they are making a premium because they aren't adding sexism to their workplaces and exposing their company to the legal liabilities you are. By being paid more than their male counterparts while being less qualified for the job, they most definitely are adding sexism to the work place.
codyb 8y ago
I read that as an AND as opposed to a singular entity. Below average AND woman.
mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
Are women never sexist?
rhegart 8y ago
Because their grades were average, they are friends and I’ve helped them. Are you threatening me? Is it because I’m making sense and instead of offering a counter argument you resort to this? Well luckily for me I’m my own boss, I’m on a forum which let’s me discuss ideas with many members who I know are far smarter than me in every field. Maybe a counter argument here makes sense, convinces me, and brings me more to your side even by 1%. Or you can vaguely threaten me, push me to more obscure extreme parts of the internet and a year from now see my relatively moderate opinions become extreme because people like you have pushed me to the fringes where I’m surrounded by likeminded people some terrible but others who have also been pushed out and don’t hear any good counter arguments. Because that’s happening all over lately. Edit: I’m using “me” as an example, I’m obviously not going to do that but I’m trying to make a point that others who speak against the majority opinion absolutely might and there are bad actors who are trying to manipulate that with intersecrionality of their own kind. Just like being against sexism is intersectional with anti racism, gun control, pro choice etc. when someone gets sucked into something seemingly innocuous as this, it’s very likely they’ll start believing a whole lot of similar ideas. That can be good or bad I suppose.

rfinney 8y ago

"non major liberal cities" I think the "me too" thing proved the coastal elite were part of the problem.

arkh 8y ago
Or let's get crazy: they are the problem. People tend to think other people think and act like them. That's why often the first to be vocal against some behavior are part of those displaying this behavior.
nitwit005 8y ago
It'd be perfectly accurate to say that San Francisco has discrimination against homosexuals, but people are still relocating there to avoid the discrimination where they are. Some places are enormously better than other places.
- mindslight 8y ago
  It is perfectly accurate to say that anywhere has discrimination against anybody, because for any moderately sized group there is always going to be someone engaging in a given behavior. Distributions and nuanced statements are the crux of this entire matter, yet in these discussions they're cast away in favor of simplistic narratives. If you draw the metric this way, "men" are paid more. If you draw the metric that way, "women" are paid more, surprise! This is already headed down the path to madness! Generalizations using scalar metrics (or even slightly more advanced higher moments) can only inform - they simply cannot form a basis for prescriptive policies to reform! We generally see sexism/racism/xxism as wrong because they ignore individuals in favor of broken-ass group-based narratives. Yet over the past several years this collectivist thinking has re-sprouted in full force, sanctioned as acceptable because it's "helping" - yet it's still fundamentally broken! Specifically, every company's basic incentive is to cheap out on every single employee as much as possible without having them leave. They are taking advantage of every person's individual reluctance to fully negotiate, essentially arbitraging their human-emotional holdups. Is it terribly surprising that there are going to be wide disparities between what different personalities (regardless of but also including gender) are paid?

thomaslangston 8y ago

That 57% of STEM grads statistic is misleading when commenting about an article about Google. The 18% CS grads in 2015 would be more appropriate to quote. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren-t-more-women-majoring-in-computer-science http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. My daughter who is finishing the primary school has recently asked me if it's okay if she doesn't like math, but likes animals and babies. Sounds like some pressure is being applied...

nostromo 8y ago
Or maybe sexual differences cause men and women, on average, to have different interests. edit: thanks for pointing out that I misread which type of pressure is being applied.
- jlawson 8y ago
  That's what the poster meant. She was being pressured to like math; her inherent interest was in animals and babies.
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    Did you know that men sometimes like babies and animals too? Crazy I know. What is taught in 4th-5th grade math? Fractions? Decimals? Multiplication and division of larger numbers (maybe the accursed "Long Division")? These are not exactly the most exciting or interesting things to learn... If I was a parent of this child, I'd take it as a notice that they are falling behind, probably from lousy teaching and parenting. It's not going to get any better by ignoring the problem. They've got another 8+ years of school to go, they aren't even halfway done. You need to show them why they can find it interesting, the same way you would show a student who really loves math why reading/writing is important. Or why history matters... If you just assume a 10 year old can fully decide what their adult self likes/doesn't like and what they need to know, then you are failing as a parent.
    - bargl 8y ago
      Are you a parent? I ask because I remember saying stuff like this before I had kids. I don't anymore. I've tried to learn not to judge others parenting but hey that's just me. No one, at least that I've seen. Is saying men don't like babies and animals too. There is nothing wrong with that. To assume that you have to like something based on your gender is ignorant. To assume that you can't like what is "stereotypical" liked by your gender is equally ignorant. People have a massive amount of fluctuation in what they like and don't like, part of being a parent is about recognizing the individual that your kid is and not pressing what YOU want on them, but balancing that with what's best for them based on what you know that they don't. I also know that as a parent, you're always failing. You just do your best to fail as little as possible.

billfruit 8y ago

I thinks what I see in South Asia, many engineering disciplines have a much more women than men, like CS and Electrical Engineering. It is in disciplines like Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering that there are less women than men. I think in the third world in general more women get engineering degrees than men.q

MarkMc 8y ago
"In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

roenxi 8y ago

I've never worked in a field where I could compete for a job with a woman, they'd always get first dibs. It is pretty unfair. However a distinction must be made between the formal systems (extremely sexist favouring women), informal systems (potentially extremely sexist favouring men) and workplace environment (women are continuously sexually propositioned; pretty overwhelming evidence for that IMO). Making the formal systems sexist is a stupid response to the informal systems being sexist. I wish that people would stop advocating that and instead work on the informal issue - if it isn't due to innate ability (a safe bet) then there must be something that can be done. The propositioning thing is a bit of a poser though, it is so pervasive that I suspect it points to deeper issues. Also the anecdotal evidence is that if propositioning was successfully stamped out that would do crazy things to the fabric of how relationships get established. Might be a net good or bad.

malvosenior 8y ago
That's a very interesting take. I know as a man, I'd rather work in a place where anyone propositioning someone else would be fired (man or woman) than a place where I may not even get the job because I'm male.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  Romances between colleagues is a fairly common and natural thing. It seems quite excessive for all propositions to result in termination.
  - pas 8y ago
    There is a difference between building an acquaintance, then friendship, and asking them out, and between offering explicit sexual acts right after/instead hello.
- 3rdgender 8y ago
  Hope you never fall in love with a coworker.
mjevans 8y ago

kakwa_ 8y ago

I'm not talking for the US but for what I experienced in France. In France there is a dedicated system for engineering studies (Classes preparatoires + Grandes Ecoles). You do 2 years of intensive Math and Physics (classe preparatoire), than pass a ranking exam, then go to the school of your choice provided you ranked high enough to get into this specific school. Basically, the ratio was 1/3 women 2/3 men at the "classe preparatoire" stage, and overall it's the ratio for engineer when all specialties are mixed together. But then you have disparities between fields, CS schools get between 10 to 15% of women while Chemistry is about 50%, other fields like Electronic, Civil Engineering, Applied Physics are roughly in the average of 30%. Only the schools to become a military officer have an higher disparity than CS (and the air branch is actually in the same area). For those who can read French (or have the courage to decipher) the statistics are available here: * http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/mp.html http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/mp.html (math dominant) * http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/pc.html http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/pc.html (physic dominant) * http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/psi.html http://www.scei-concours.fr/stat2018/psi.html (technic and mechanic dominant) (Hint: CS == Informatique (often abbreviated to "Info")

soheil 8y ago

Dr. Jordan Peterson has much to say about this in terms of Psychology [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOjzCi9wIhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOjzCi9wIhE

pas 8y ago
tl;dw please?
- soheil 8y ago
  play on 2x he's no ben shapiro when it comes to talking fast

lgleason 8y ago

[edited for typos and grammer] Anecdotally, I've run a couple of tech conferences and know others who have as well fairly recently. We've made a point to hold workshops for under represented groups, had the Codes of Conduct, make a lot of extra effort to reach out to women as speakers etc.. In the end, we would get 5 to 10 times as many talk submissions from men, accept nearly all of the talks by women (often turning down higher quality talks from men) trying to get diversity numbers and have a much higher cancellation rate form the women for various reasons, especially money. If we were lucky we would get 20-30% women speakers when all of that was done. I've also been told by some diversity activists that, in order to get women to speak and to get higher percentages of women as speakers etc., unlike most of the men, you need to pay for their travel etc., offer free tickets for women attendees, consider offering stipends for women who speak etc.. Others, organizing other conferences have shared similar experiences. It's one thing to fight against blatant sexism which I'm for, but this is turning into something else.

nwienert 8y ago
I’ll repeat points that aren’t my original ideas, but are painfully obvious here. It’s very simple what it’s become: sexist against men. This is what happens when you aim for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. I believe we’re in a Kantian second stage. We were sexist against women. Now, we’re sexist against men. The hopeful third step
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  Kantian second stage For those who slept through the philosophy class, what these stages are?
  - jkaptur 8y ago
    Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic
    - 8y ago

avip 8y ago

The funny thing is it's all open. Women-only positions in unis and so. My wife was even invited to a women-only conference! I asked her if she would go to a "white only" or "Christian only" event.

radicalbyte 8y ago
My wife was invited to a women-only wedding. I wish that all people would be open minded and just treat everyone equally by default no matter what they look like, what genitalia they have or their wealth level. Save the exclusion for people who show themselves to be *s (i.e. who cause harm to others). So ban smokers / drinkers from your wedding not men.
dahart 8y ago
What large scale white & Christian discrimination has existed historically, in the US? When were white Christians not allowed to vote or paid less? What's wrong with a conference for women, how exactly is that different than a conference for engineers, or a store for pet owners?
- pas 8y ago
  It probably creates an unhelpful artificial environment. (Which is okay for teaching, learning, healing, etc.) But society supposedly tries to integrate women into higher paying fields. Those fields are not going to be all women. Now, of course as we see from the stats, anecdotes and other hints, we're pretty far from a women dominated higj tech sector, but there is already polarization. There are already women run companies actively trying to hire only women. This is not constructive on the long run. Just as the X-gender-only conferences. I'm of course interested in arguments that say otherwise, so if you have, please share them.
  - dahart 8y ago
    > there is already polarization Yes there is already polarization, the global polarization that exists already is known and documented to be in favor of men, on average. There is still a pay gap in favor of men. You’re trying to argue there is reverse discrimination, but without any evidence. There are some affirmative actions for women. Do you consider affirmative actions for women to be discrimination? If a cultural polarization occurred naturally without any intentional effort, meaning people exhibited and acted on biases without knowing it, and it was hurting a class of people, what would you do to fix it? > There are already women run companies actively trying to hire only women. This is not constructive on the long run. Just as the X-gender-only conferences. Those seem like two different things to me. Do you see the same difference I do between a job that pays you and a product you have to pay for? While it depends quite a bit on what conference we’re talking about, I don’t see a general problem with conference products made for women. I don’t believe that is automatically discriminatory or polarizing. If you do, I’d like to hear more about what you think is wrong with it. Tampons are made for women, and I don’t know any men that are mad about it or think is polarizing. There is a reason that there are laws surrounding job discrimination and no laws surrounding conference discrimination. It’s because it is perfectly fine to sell products to a specific audience. Jobs are required by law to not discriminate, though I’m sure there are some jobs that require a woman and not a man. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was legal and acceptable to hire a woman to teach Women’s Studies. Personally, I’ll wait to be concerned about jobs reserved for women until women are the majority of the workforce and management structure at all companies on average. Right now, they’re not.

nodesocket 8y ago

Despite the media and far left continuing to propagate the gender pay gap especially in technology, the reality seems to indicate the opposite. Women are given a salary boost because companies (specifically those on the west coast) are afraid of being publicly shamed by the media for perceived gender bias. The pendulum has swung way to far, except now if you stand up and try push it toward the middle, you are quickly shamed and labeled a sexist.

ggggtez 8y ago

>any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. This sounds like an uneducated opinion. Sample size of 1: My department had maybe 1 female professor for every 10 male. The student ratio was pretty similar. In your sample, you asked "your friends", which is a really biased sample. How did you meet them? Did you only meet them because they already had the high paying job? You aren't accounting for variables, and you are ignoring evidence.

jurassic 8y ago

> areas with primarily male coworkers, and creepy bosses This describes basically every tech job I have ever had. Real life engineering woman here reporting in. In 2014 I joined a series B startup as engineer #15 and was the only woman in the office other than the admin; food delivery dudes often brought things to my desk, assuming I must be the office mother. When I was late to work one day after being groped by a strange man on Caltrain, my supervisor questioned my commitment to meeting deadlines. When I moved on, they returned to being a 100% straight white male company. In 2015, I was the first female engineering hire at the new office of a growing mid-size tech company. A second woman wasn't hired until we'd reached a headcount of about 20. Men, especially clients, often forgot my name. E.g. Janice vs Janet vs Jan (none of these my real name, but you get the idea. The point is that I wasn't important enough to these men to remember.) Fast forward a few years. Now I am by far the most senior of four engineering ladies at the satellite campus of a household name tech company. Total headcount at this office is about 100 engineers. I have never had a female manager. For those keeping score, I have never worked anywhere with more than 5-10% female engineers. For my entire career, even as a noob, I have been the most senior female engineer I know. I count myself lucky because I've never had to deal with anything resembling actual harassment. (It helps that I am not conventionally attractive). But there is a psychological burden of always feeling alone, always being the first or only, worrying that your actions will be taken to represent all people of your kind, and wondering if assholes in your midst think you've only got where you've gotten because you're a woman. Your dismissive attitude toward women's supposed advantages is as common as it is damaging. Whatever unfair advantages you think your women colleagues have, unless you are black or latinx, it is unlikely you will ever experience the feelings of isolation and otherness that most women deal with throughout their tech careers.

movedx 8y ago
I'm honestly quite taken aback by this. I want to say sorry, and I will, but I know it's not personally my fault and I know it won't make much of a difference to your circumstances now or in the future. But still, I'm sorry you've had this experience. I have to be honest and say this, but I think what you've experienced is very much an American culture kind-of-thing. Every time I read a comment like this, besides making me sad and angry, it tends to always come from somewhere in America. I'm sure something similar has happened and continues to happen here in Australia, but I've seen little of it. That being said, as I sit here now in a very large, well known company, my line of sight gives me a head count of about 30 men and 2 women. This makes me sad and angry, too. I don't know what to do about this besides encouraging women to come into the industry and protecting them in a none condescending, white-knight, women-are-weak sort of way...

dahart 8y ago

> High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick... What is the graduation rate of women in STEM fields? 57% is not the graduation rate in STEM fields, which makes it sound like you are cherry picking statistics. What fields are all the women graduating in? Aside from Google, the pay gap still exists and women earn less than men. The WP article estimates 94 cents on the dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S... You're right that women are getting positive reinforcements, it's because (whether you agree with them or not) we have affirmative action programs for women. Affirmative actions always have and always will be debated to death, but the question you should be asking and answering before dismissing this issue is, if there's no affirmative action, how do you equalize opportunities for groups known to have been discriminated against? We already tried not having extra programs and not having extra awareness, and the result was lower pay. How would you correct this?

merlincorey 8y ago

> 2 friends confided that they were asked to trade sexual favors for promotions albeit this was 20 years ago and that was the deciding factor for them moving to the Bay. These things are horrible and I can’t imagime the emotional trauma for that. Of course, this could have, and does[0] happen in the Bay Area, too - in just the last year even. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/uber-sexual-harassment-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/uber-sexual-ha...

majani 8y ago

Funny how the pendulum hasn't swung in the garbage collection and bricklaying sectors as well though, isn't it? It's all a power struggle at the end of the day.