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> 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 a

> 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...

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...