42 ms·

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

• sbilstein 7y ago
  I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs. After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating class. I heard anecdotally from those majoring in EE how they had professors actually discourage them from continuing because they were 'too anxious' about grades and other stuff. I'm male and I was the only LatinX person in my CS major; there were several more in EE by comparison. Part of the problem might be cultural pressure...my parents were extremely disappointed when I decided to major in 'Computer Science' rather than a major with 'Engineering' in the title. They did not get that it was part of the school of engineering, that for all intents and purposes I was an engineer, and the job kicks ass. They wanted to be able to say I was an 'ingeniero' to family in Peru. I ignored them. As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white guy personality type and somehow these feelings of being poor, being bilingual, going to a shit public school, etc bubble up in my head while I'm trying to rotate a binary tree. The two times I interviewed onsite at Google I couldn't escape the feeling. It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that. The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect. It feels stupid to say but when I interview with people of other races, I feel more confident. When I interview with immigrants as well. It's my personal bias that I need to work against. EDIT: I'm not arguing that these anxieties are rational or desirable...they simply exist in my mind and that makes interviewing more challenging. Just as a musician may fear they'll forget their parts when they go on stage even if they are virtuosos, these sources of anxiety are real. For engineering interviews, not acknowledging some of these issues lowers your signal to noise ration. Someone might be a fantastic engineer but a 45 minute interview might present enough anxiety that they won't be able to show it.
  • whb07 7y ago
    So I'm ready for the downvotes, but its worth it. I don't think it is generally good to look for divisions and more ways to separate from the whole. I don't know if that is because you're out somewhere in super woke SF or similar but you've already used terms like "LatinX" and "person of color" like someone who is already woke but maybe stop for a sec? Why don't you see yourself as a person who likes CS/tech and likes doing XYZ things with ABC tools? Or maybe believe for a brief second that the "caucasian American", is probably thinking about what show to watch on Netflix rather than some shitty thoughts about how you don't fit in. I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. I'm willing to bet there are way too many Asians (yellow and brown) for that to be true. Also, seriously wtf is LatinX? Seriously. <--- this author is also an immigrant from that small country north of Peru.
    • deogeo 7y ago
      > I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. You would win that bet - Google is 54.4% white, 39.8% asian, according to https://diversity.google/annual-report/#!#_this-years-data https://diversity.google/annual-report/#!#_this-years-data The US is 61.5% white, so whites are underrepresented at Google.
      • logfromblammo 7y ago
        I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to match the demographics of the entire US unless they have a uniform presence across the entire US, such as one might find with Wal-Mart. It's a big country, and the people tend to aggregate into clumps. Alphabet keeps about 1/4 of its people in Mountain View. In terms of the demographics of San Francisco metropolitan area, those diversity report numbers likely only slightly overrepresent whites and Asians. Statistically, it is unlikely that Alphabet/Google has a racial bias in hiring, but it certainly has a geographical bias for California. I might bet a dollar--other than my bottom one--that the offices outside of California all feel like a small town in Silicon Valley.
• kevintb 7y ago
  Key point: > there really aren’t enough women to meet demand… if we keep hiring the way we’re hiring. Namely, if we keep over-indexing on CS degrees from top schools, and even if we remove unconscious bias from the process entirely, we will not get to gender parity. And yes, there is a way to surface strong candidates without relying on proxies like college degree. I am all in favour of reducing the industry’s reliance on fancy name schools for hiring.
  • xyzzyz 7y ago
    > I am all in favour of reducing the industry’s reliance on fancy name schools for hiring. Soon after the industry seriously stops doing this, the fancy name schools will quickly get female-dominated, and whatever the industry starts using as a signal of candidate quality that hadn't been male-dominated before, will start to be. When proposing new policies, always solve for equilibrium, don't ignore second order effects, and never assume the world is steady state system.
    • majos 7y ago
      > Soon after the industry seriously stops doing this, the fancy name schools will quickly get female-dominated Why would this happen? Is your thinking that men will respond to the lower incentive of a fancy school degree by pursuing other options, but women won't? If so, why?
      • Pharaoh2 7y ago
        Presumably because the gap exists in the current system, and the current system is optimized for the current scoring function. Changing the scoring function will cause the system to rebalance into a new steady state. Although, there is no clear reason why the new steady state would not be female dominant or evenly split, but if I were to take a bet, I would bet that the new scoring function will still hold existing bias because the problem starts much earlier.
      • xyzzyz 7y ago
        Pretty much, yes. You are asking why would the response to this incentive affect people of different gender differently. I don’t have any clear answer to this question, other than pointing out that in the current system, we already have an existing imbalance, so there is already a difference in how incentives affect different people, and unless we determine the exact mechanism here, random changes are unlikely to change it. By the way, this is called Campbell’s law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
• jdmoreira 7y ago
  at my workplace we try very hard to hire women programmers and we are at about 10% - 15% which is still quite low but better than other companies around us. At the same time I noticed that the majority of engineering managers, product owners and agile coaches in our company are women. Some of these women were programmers at some point in their career. I'm not deducing anything from this (especially since it’s a single datapoint) but it sure is interesting.
  • rofo1 7y ago
    > at my workplace we try very hard to hire women programmers and we are at about 10% - 15% which is still quite low but better than other companies around us. Are you actually counting how many of you are woman and conclude based on that, that you are better off than other companies? It's not low, or high, or medium. It just is. As long as you are not rejecting perfectly capable women/females (just because they are so), you are not doing anything wrong and you are not worse off.
    • jdmoreira 7y ago
      True. But I also believe that a diverse workplace is a better workplace because of a combination of different perspectives. I also believe women are underrepresented in programming, the main consequence being the infantile machismo we all know exists.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    My suspicion is that the pipeline has fewer women, partly because they leave Engineering so quickly. Thus there are hardly any experienced women in the pipeline. Since an Engineer may change jobs half a dozen times over a career, but women generally change once (to non-Engineering job) we have a cumulative effect.
    • abjKT26nO8 7y ago
      > Since an Engineer may change jobs half a dozen times over a career, but women generally change once (to non-Engineering job) we have a cumulative effect. I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying that women generally have one engineering job and then they change to a non-engineering one? If not, where is the number difference coming from? Off-topic: why do you capitalize "engineering"?
• stormbrew 7y ago
  I don't think the point of criticizing "it's a pipeline problem" is that there isn't a pipeline problem, but that it's an easy out to avoid taking action at whatever stage of the 'pipeline' you happen to be working at. If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say "it's a pipeline problem" you're probably saying that there aren't enough candidates because not enough women graduate from ST programs. If you're a program development person at a university you're probably saying not enough enroll. If you say it as a high school guidance counsellor you probably are saying there's not enough push for girls to do well in science and math classes and apply that to their higher education even if there is. The point is that whatever stage of the pipeline you're at, if you want things to improve, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. You can't wait for universities to both increase enrollment and increase graduation (two separate problems as well). As this post points out you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem and recognize that the path to your job for a minority in your field will probably look drastically different to yours. It's just never going to be enough to wave your hand at the problem and blame the stage before you. The post does get at this for sure, so I'm not really criticizing it for its conclusion, but the first couple of paragraphs build a strawman that I think is very unhelpful to understanding the nature of the problem.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    And the point of criticizing the criticism of "it's a pipeline problem" is that, wherever you try to improve the pipeline, you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment. Working near the end of the pipe, you'll quickly hit diminishing returns. If the input at your segment is biased 4:1, then you can't improve past it. Sure, if your output is 8:1 then it's bad, but you won't get it better than 4:1. You definitely won't achieve parity, despite what the people screaming "it's not a pipeline problem" the loudest would want from you. For further improvement, you have to work on earlier segments of the pipe. EDIT: And another point: moving through the pipeline takes time. So e.g. if you're working on university recruiting and trying to fix the input bias at the high school->university interface, you can't expect to see improvement at the output (university->job) earlier than in 3 to 5 years. But the "it's not a pipeline problem" activists rarely have that kind of patience. EDIT2: "you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment", unless you're willing to start doing corrective discrimination - i.e. throwing overrepresented people out from the pipeline.
• nradov 7y ago
  My alma mater Harvey Mudd College has had rough gender parity in Computer Science for several years now. It's a small school but other colleges could learn from their practices. https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-achieved-gender-parity-computer-science-engineering-physics.html https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-...
  • majos 7y ago
    For anyone who didn't read the linked article (it's short), it suggests that a key element is careful design of intro courses. Students with computer science experience get a more advanced course that is explicitly designed not to make them more competitive in second-year courses (instead, it starts on material that will re-appear in third-year courses). Students with no computer science experience get their own intro course. And there is yet another "green" intro course tailored to biological applications. The article suggests that these practices help level the playing field in the first two years of the computer science major, by which point people have enough invested to finish. On reflection, these aren't new suggestions. Unlocking the Clubhouse, a 2002 book on women's experiences studying computer science, made similar recommendations. But I guess most colleges are struggling to handle the glut of first-year computer science students, let alone teach more courses to encourage more of them.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • plughs 7y ago
      It's an interesting insight. When applying to colleges I never considered applying for CS as I (female) had no programming experience whatsoever, and seemed to be surrounded by people (male) who'd been working on computers for years, ( I'll leave speculation on that for another day ) It was only because they forced EE majors to take programming courses that I ended up in the field. I wrote my first "hello world" as an 18 year old freshman, but it never really seemed to matter.
      • 7y ago
• seangrogg 7y ago
  I'll preface this with the usual "my views are my own" but I do think that diversity in the workplace is a very deep and interesting problem and that we do a major disservice to it by creating ridiculous metrics. I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender; "We aim to have 50% women in the workplace" is a prime example of this. If this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is reached the intent will not be (one could be a female by sex but a male by gender and thus from a diversity standpoint is largely contributing as a male). If this is by gender assignment not only is the metric focused on a fluid concept but it's also not a binary - in order to reach 50% women we'd only have 50% for the remaining non-women, which represents a broad range of gender expression and is not exclusively male. I do respect that many companies (not just in tech) see diversity as an issue and are trying to do something about it. However, I do hope that they spend more time investigating the full range of the issue and begin by making small attempts at approaching the problem space before declaring metrics as objectives.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Uh, people like this are rounding errors in these kinds of statistics...
  • abjKT26nO8 7y ago
    The companies, I've worked at so far, had 0 female software engineers. I'm not even looking at percentages. It's horrible.
    • sukilot 7y ago
      How many engineers at these companies? The only place I had to extend my range a bit to find women engineers in my part of the organization was at Amazon.
  • romwell 7y ago
    This is a strawman argument. The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things. It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that I am not sure which universe your comment applies to. And yes, what you said matters, as does race, country of origin, and economic background. Intersectionality is a fancy word, but it's useful, and the article mentions it. So that said, 50% is a useful number. It's useful to say that if the actual hiring rate is at 15%, we still have a problem.
• btilly 7y ago
  I know it is not politically correct to say it, but I remain unconvinced that gender parity is a desirable goal. Particularly given the current state of research into differences in gender averages. Here is a real example. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#Gender_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#... men have about a one standard deviation advantage in spacial reasoning over women. Assuming that both distributions are normal with the same variance, that means that if we pick the top X% of the population on spacial reasoning where X is fairly small, we will get about an 80/20 split of male/female. Within that top group there will be no remaining difference between men and women. Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering. This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of engineering students. Decades of hand-wringing later, women are still about 20% of engineering students. Based on spacial reasoning ability, perhaps women SHOULD be about 20% of engineering students. What happens if we force gender parity? If the research on gender differences is right, selecting on spacial reasoning except making sure to select 50% women would result in a situation where you had 50% men, 12.5% women who are as good as the men, and the remaining 37.5% women who are worse than EVERY man at spacial reasoning. The result is that 3/4 of the women are worse than all the men. Is this a better outcome? Why? Now I picked an example where men have an advantage. But men don't in all fields though. According to other research, women are better on average at management. This is an argument to accept the data and do our best to hire and promote on competence. Now that argument applies to hard engineering. It isn't software development. I do not know why the ratio is so extreme in software development. (More extreme than in, say, mechanical engineering.) However I have also never seen data suggesting that sorting on interest and ability shouldn't result in the ratios that we see. Before we double down on equality as a mandate, I would like to see that data collected. As long as, on average, the men and women you hire are equally good, your hiring process is not broken. If your data finds that there is a difference in average ability, then adjust your practices to get higher average competence. Encourage everyone to have the opportunity. Make it clear that all people with title X are equivalent regardless of secondary characteristics, AND work to make that true. (I believe that it is pretty true today.)
  • wrs 7y ago
    Of course, if doing more things that involve spatial reasoning makes you better at spatial reasoning (which seems like a very likely assumption), this becomes a circular argument. (Did you read the Gender Differences section of that Wikipedia article?)
• meristem 7y ago
  Underneath all this: although companies need talent, interviews are adversarial and not structured to create a supportive environment so candidates are at their best. Quite often the interview setup is to see how the candidate performs at their worst-- stressed, time pressured, on the spot, performing for fragments of time to a number of people while in what (feels|is) an asymmetrical power relationship.
  • pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
    That's independent of gender or race, though.
    • ambernightcrush 7y ago
      What is labor discrimination?
      • pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
        I don't know what your question refers to, tbh?
  • dijit 7y ago
    > Interviews are adversarial and not structured to create a supportive environment so candidates are at their best. This is a really broad stroke and it may even be true to a high degree. But I've had (and given) plenty of interviews where we engage a topic and just talk about it openly as if we were already colleagues. Maybe that's a Swedish thing?
    • unishark 7y ago
      I suspect the grueling interview process is the result of CS being overrun by people who cheated through their programming classes and/or exaggerated (lied) on their resume, things which have become extremely prevalent in recent years. Plus in the US you can't get a meaningful reference anymore because of fear of lawsuits (former employers will often only confirm employment). There's nothing left to trust. Worse, I have come across a number of CS graduates who can't write a working program to save their lives, though many (particular international students) seem to be very well-prepared to talk all day about the technologies and all the cool projects they supposedly did. Not that a surprise exam is a good solution.
• rofo1 7y ago
  I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Be it women, or black, or whatever. Why? Why can't you just hire the right person for the job? To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups of people. Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn't make sense, that's not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end up doing is crunching the numbers to "make it work on paper". Are women or black or whatever group we discuss equally represented across all jobs across the whole universe, everywhere? It's a ridiculous concept, I don't understand who came up with it.
  • eq_sd_ 7y ago
    > I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Because humans are biased.
  • VRay 7y ago
    Look into "unconscious biases" Basically, someone similar to you will naturally seem like a better and more skilled person
    • pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
      Unconscious bias has been debunked.
  • DoreenMichele 7y ago
    It's an awkward, overly simplified attempt to correct systemic errors. There is reason to believe that women, people of color, etc are unfairly kept out and it does great harm to their lives (and has other undesirable consequences). We mostly don't know how to remedy that, so we come up with some cludgy thing like "Let's set a goal of hiring more women" instead of looking for a more elegant solution. Unsurprisingly, it tends to not work all that well. Then you get articles like this one trying to explain the failure, in essence. Edit: The Rooney Rule is the only elegant solution I've really seen for systemic bias in hiring. The NFL requires teams to interview people of color who apply for certain positions because they determined that the bias in their pipeline was pre-interview stage. It did wonders to improve the numbers without setting a quota. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
• romaaeterna 7y ago
  HR is far more of a nepotistic clique as regards as hiring their own for race and gender, and they often wield power over everybody else on those terms.
• jariel 7y ago
  When ~15% of CS graduates in a nation are women, it's going to be nary impossible for most companies to get too far beyond that. If companies are hiring commensurate with that level, then that's good on them, it gets very impossible to much beyond that at scale without serious distortions. 'The Pipeline Problem' shouldn't be used as an all out excuse - but - it's a fundamental reality, like gravity. It's shameful that someone would get sidelined for pointing out the blatantly obvious fact that 'the pipeline' is the problem. Of course the pipeline is the problem, on what planet do the laws of gravity not apply? There's always room for discussion, but avoiding the Elephant in the Room is smacks me as a lot of koolaid. There's a few things that can done beyond that surely, particularly highlighting women and minorities in certain fields so as they don't lack encouragement/role models etc. - but no single company, not even Google is going to move any needle in a short period of time. Finally, consider this: "The 'problem' may never be solved". There is evidence that as societies evolve, that gender disparity in fields doesn't necessarily increase or decrease. (The classical progressive thinking would have us believe that as we gain more rights etc. gender difference goes away, but this doesn't seem to be the case) We may have to try to create the most 'fair world we can' given that genderism may be an innate feature of human culture, at least for a very long time. So a) the Pipeline is the primary thing b) we can help make sure people are encouraged and not systematically pushed out c) no one group will change anything d) there may always be differences between genders.
• tasogare 7y ago
  Collective madness is largely reached at this point: the writer is complaining about a totally self-made issue. If I was trying to recruit men for nurse jobs, or people of color in Korea I would ran in a similar pipeline problem. The real issue is that "diversity" had became a metrics to reach for its own sake by companies instead of simply recruiting people that fit the job. Moreover, you can’t complain about so-called systemic sexism or racism when your policy is to not recruit white, asian or men that could fulfill the job precisely because of their race/sex.
  • rofo1 7y ago
    > The real issue is that "diversity" had became a metrics to reach for its own sake by companies instead of simply recruiting people that fit the job. Completely insane. I can't understand who came up with and spread it around with a straight face. "hey we better hire predetermined % of <insert any group that is non-white-christian-men> otherwise we are bigots" Truly remarkable how insane it is. I haven't seen a single case where the people that ought to be employed are white Christian men. Why is that so? Does nobody ask this question? Can it be coincidence that nobody, ever, ever raised an issue that not enough white Christian men were employed? A lot of illogical and improbable things, and IMHO it's just not a coincidence. But I don't have good understanding on why it happens, though.
    • tasogare 7y ago
      > Can it be coincidence that nobody, ever, ever raised an issue that not enough white Christian men were employed? Multiple reasons: - in European countries (USA is particular because of imported slaves) the white unemployment used to be the general unemployment rate until 40 years ago. Tons of white men are seeking jobs, at this moment. So yes, the issue exists. - some minorities are in the business of complaining, other aren’t. In my country, which has a significant East-Asian population, none of them plays the victim cards. It seems going to school make wonders, who would have guess? - then there is the natural difference between sexes that drive different interests, and the average IQ difference between races. Of course someone with a 80 IQ will have hard time competing on the education and job market against people with 100+. That’s why Jews and East-Asian are over represented in Ivy league. So, there are few reasons that explain the state of things very well. But of course, I guess it’s more interesting to not look at basic science and dive instead into conspiracy theories implicating "the Patriarchy" and super evil White men.
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I'm just going to leave this here as food for thought: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684088
• billti 7y ago
  This stood out to me, and aligns with my observations in the (limited) female representation in the workplace: > In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16% Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to? What is India doing so well in this space to have over double the percentage of female software developers as the U.S.?
  • Pharaoh2 7y ago
    Basing this solely as a person from India and not some research background, In the small minority of hacker rank study set, I would say that women are just as much encouraged or frankly expected to be in STEM as men. Although I am fairly certain that this observation will quickly disappear and will be heavily male dominated on a larger percentage of the population. Really, looking at the actual hacker rank source, it seems like their sample set is really tiny and heavily biased.
  • sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
    In India, your major is largely determine by your academic results and social pressure when you finish up secondary schools. If you score at the top in your entrance exams, you will applying to medical or engineering schools. The good schools are hyper selective and only take the top scorers (at a rate more selective than our ivy's). Very, very few people consider majors outside of these areas. Secondly, there is a huge amount of social pressure to be an engineer or doctor. It is quite often that parents choose your major, or at least heavily push their kids into one. There are lots of Bollywood movies whose plots are centered around parents forcing their kids into engineering. Since your choice of major is largely determined by academic and social reasons there isn't a big gender disparity. Females do just as well on the entrance exams, and there is no societal view that engineering is a male major. If you are a parent who wants your kids to earn well and marry well, you will push your kids towards medicine or engineering regardless of gender. If you are female who scored well and got entrance into a top engineering school, dropping out would be unthinkable. It would be an insult to your family. You would be throwing away years of hard work in their view; some kids start preparing for entrance exams when the hit 14. There is even a suicide problem when people fail out of the top schools (see the movie 3 Idiots). Essentially majors and careers have a hierarchy which is the same regardless of gender. As to why there isn't a societal bias that engineering is a male major, I'm not sure. It was definitely a quick change as it was only in the 1960s when most engineering colleges started admitting females. There is definitely still a gender gap (many women are not supported to even finish basic schooling), but there isn't a huge societal bias that engineering major or STEM is a male profession. I have heard that some of the USSR countries (Russia, Ukraine) have a similar culture and don't view engineering or STEM as "male" majors. Maybe the problem is parents don't bully their daughters and sons into engineering here :)
• sokoloff 7y ago
  Is the right thing to assume we should target 50-50 gender representation as a first-principle outcome target in all fields? If so, it’s a negative sign that the marquee companies analyzed hired at about the gender split of universities they targeted. Is it equally plausible that we should be looking bottoms-up from the perspective of a fresh college graduate entering the field and asking the question, “am I likely to get a systemically fair shake when interviewing?” From the data presented, it seems likely that the answer is “yes”. By all means we should work on the pipeline. I’m supportive to the idea that, by default, we should expect 50-50 representation, but when we find pockets where that does not hold, we must be open to understanding possible reasons. Army/Marines, oil/gas work, and airline pilots are other readily identifiable fields without a 50-50 representation. Is this good, bad, or indifferent? If women who enter those fields achieve success at the same rate as the overall population, is the hiring and evaluation system (basically after their decision to enter the field) “fair”? If not, why not?
  • ryandrake 7y ago
    I’ve got a bunch of hobbies and none of them are even close to gender parity. Go check out poker rooms in Vegas and find me a single table where the players are 50-50 men-women. Visit flying clubs, carpentry groups, engine mechanics shops, you won’t find gender parity in any of these. And nobody is really tackling any of these as some urgent problem to solve. Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies? EDIT: Also, why do we think it can be fixed? Can the gender balances in hobbies be fixed? Is the lack of female metalworker hobbyists or male quilters attributable to a “pipeline problem”?
    • bcrosby95 7y ago
      It's all about the money. People care about professions because "female" professions tend to be paid less than "male" ones.
      • stonejolt 7y ago
        I assume you mean something like care professions? They don't pay less because it's mainly female workers, they pay less because they can't easily scale the generated profits.
• papreclip 7y ago
  They keep saying "top schools", but lower tier schools have the same gender disparity. And 40% of bootcamp grads might be female, but how much of that is due to the fact that there are bootcamps, apprenticeships, etc. that exist purely to pluck women & underrepresented groups from the mass of mostly-male non-traditional candidates? And other bootcamps that give scholarships preferentially to those groups? I am pretty confident I would have gotten into LEAP or ADA if I were a woman. Instead I went fully self-taught because I didn't want to pay $20k for a bootcamp.
• commandlinefan 7y ago
  Well, the gist of this is: there aren’t enough women in “tech”, so different standards should be applied for women until there are. Setting aside all the other problems I have with this: law and medicine have much stricter barriers for entry. There are no practicing doctors or lawyers without advanced degrees, but there are plenty of women in both professions. So even if you accept the premise, it’s still pretty clear you’re barking up the wrong tree here.
  • ajross 7y ago
    Alternative hypothesis: law and medicine started proactively working on their "pipeline problem" many decades earlier, and have had time to reach parity. Computer science, in the sense of the modern job market of elite grads going to bay area employers, is barely into its third decade of existence. Seriously: go back to the 50's and 60's and you'll find all these same arguments about how women can't be good doctors and law is a man's world. And they were all wrong. Why is computer science special in a way that medicine isn't? Why can women heal but not code? Isn't that the harder point to prove than "it's a pipeline problem"?
    • AdrianB1 7y ago
      Have you considered that women may prefer to heal than to code and when they need to choose a career they choose healing, so this is the real explanation why most doctors in my country are women and most people in IT are men?
      • sukilot 7y ago
        What are lawyers healing? Did women suddenly discover an interest in healing in the past 50 years?
        • Draiken 7y ago
          They learned that being a lawyer earns you prestige and lots of money. Compare that to computer science and being viewed as a geek, nerd, loner. Even though it's less bad at this day and age, it's not even comparable to medicine and law. Equality of opportunity does not generate equality of outcome as soffits revealed on Scandinavia. And it shouldn't. People are individuals and they should not need to conform to a flawed notion that everything should be 50/50
• rb808 7y ago
  Honestly for young children I wouldn't want any of the girls to become software engineers. Most Software Engineers including myself are friendly but also grumpy, nerdy and annoying, with poor communication skills and an unhealthy lifestyle. For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment - esp one without developers in it. Yeah its sexist when I write it down but that's how I'm sure a lot of parents feel, which is one reason why there aren't so many women at the entry to the pipeline.
  • choppaface 7y ago
    One of the most effective ways to make devs less “grumpy nerdy and annoying” is to inject the dev community with voices that are different. There must be bottom-up pressure for there to be positive change.
    • tomp 7y ago
      I like it being needy and “annoying” (I actually enjoy awkward jokes and general asociality).
  • jalgos_eminator 7y ago
    Counterpoint: If not you, then who? Your daughters could be part of a cultural shift with respect to the tech workplace, so why discourage them?
    • pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
      Because you would sacrifice your kid's wellbeing just to make some arbitrary, meaningless statistic look good. And do you think women having to work with computers all day would end up being less grumpy than men who have to do it? Why?
      • jalgos_eminator 7y ago
        You misunderstood my comment. I said "why discourage them?", not "push them to become programmers". The parent I was responding to made it seem like he/she would want to actively steer their daughter away from programming because of the workplace conditions. But what if their daughter really likes software/tech? You don't want to push her to some other career just because of how you feel about it, she can decide for herself. Software work isn't a lost cause either, it just needs some sanity injected into it, it isn't coal mining or fracking after all.
• pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  So her claim is that going to t top tier university is a complete waste of time and money, because boot camp graduates end up being just as capable? What are top tier universities doing to keep being competitive with those low cost boot camps? It seems to me for the additional money, they should be able to provide some additional value?
  • orthoxerox 7y ago
    They signal to the employers, "our alumni are more likely to be either smart or well-connected than boot camp survivors". Hiring people is expensive, so interviewing people that have been preselected to be likely to show potential is cheaper in the long run.
  • ummonk 7y ago
    No, it isn’t a waste, since many companies only hire from the narrow pool of top tier universities, as she pointed out.
  • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > What are top tier universities doing to keep being competitive with those low cost boot camps? Students from top tier universities go on to jobs where their education is actually useful. (Usually; there are always a number that don't quite make it.) Somebody has to write all the system software, database engines, compilers, and frameworks that the boot camp graduates use to do their jobs.
• pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  HN is not the right place to ask beginner coding questions. There are other forums for that (reddit, stackoverflow...). Here they want stuff that sparks "intellectual curiosity", which usually doesn't apply to beginner coding questions. Also calling men assholes, that is, being sexist, is unlikely to lead to favorable responses.
• sakoht 7y ago
  The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won't lose female talent you find later when they refuse to join a team of all guys. But you have to be careful too, to not hire someone just because they fit a social profile you want more of on the team. Talented women don't want to be on a team where all of the women there were "tossed a softball". It's not only condescending, but it fosters the bias it intends to combat. Whoever is at fault, it is that there is a gender imbalance is worthy of debate. But addressing it is best viewed as opportunity, not an act of charity, if seen through the right lens.
  • snowwrestler 7y ago
    This is exactly right and why corporate leaders are increasingly focused on diversity as a metric they manage to. Essentially they have realized that many recruiting and hiring functions are underperforming, in that they are rejecting, or allowing others to reject, talented candidates who they should have hired. And what they are realizing is that it is much harder than it seems to avoid this kind of error. Which means that even though they can see the opportunity you mention, they're finding that their companies can't seem to seize it. Generally speaking, everyone involved in hiring is doing their jobs in good faith; there are very few mustache-twirling villains to be found and defeated. But every single person has preferences and biases which, even if essentially harmless on a personal level, can still create significant effects in the aggregate. So leaders are trying to boot-strap more diverse cultures by managing to the outcome. It's far easier to reward a hiring function for increasing certain metrics of diversity, than tell them something like "be less racist and sexist when hiring." I mean, the vast majority of people would rightly take offense at that kind of guidance from their boss. The hope is that in the long run, increasing staff diversity produces a broader mix of preferences and biases, which in aggregate reduces the skew against certain talented candidates. As you say: a compounding effect.
  • zanny 7y ago
    The irony of this thinking is that if you do the whole "teams must be gender balanced" routine early on where you are getting the 5-1 or worse ratio of men to women applying for a software position you can often be the one passing over way more talent than the company with the toxic white-male dominated culture lacking diversity. If men and women are equally good at the job (and in programming there is no reason to think otherwise) and you have 1,000 men and 200 women applying and there is a uniform distribution of talent there are going to be 200 men and 40 women in the top quintile, and if you are hiring 200 overall that means you are passing over 100 top tier men for 40 second and 20 third tier women. And by trying to discriminate to correct discrimination you leave the ~66 men you would have on average hired instead if you went purely based off choosing the "best" candidates for the job in the same position as minorities historically rejected from work due to the inverse bias - they get declined from the position because of facets of their being they have no control over, not on their own merit for the job. Avoiding bias in hiring can never be as hamfisted as "hire equal numbers of X always" without causing a ton of harm in the process. Especially when you start trying to always hire an equal number of men and women, every ethnicity, every religion, every spoken language, every sexual orientation, every country of origin, etc. There has to be a balance between being inhospitable to diversity and using discrimination to force arbitrary amounts of diversity.
• supernova87a 7y ago
  With such politically charged issues, it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible. If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representation? A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them. Look at these percentages and you can see unsentimentally that this must be true. Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints? If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.
  • nl 7y ago
    it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible. I'm not sure if you realize this, but change always seems impossible until it happens. 10 years ago it seemed completely impossible that Facebook would have 1B users, let alone the ~3B it has now. The same 10 years ago it seemed impossible to that gay people would be able to marry, and even 4 years ago the idea of a Trump presidency was considered a joke. Change is and will remain hard. That doesn't mean it isn't desirable nor does it mean that people shouldn't bang their heads against walls to make it happen.
    • mffnbs 7y ago
      It’s ridiculous you were down voted for this. These people don’t want to change their behavior or admit there’s bias. They would rather remain ignorant and pretend that it’s a problem caused by someone else rather than reflect on what might not be working.
      • nl 7y ago
        I don't like to complain about it, but since you raised it... I was shocked by how quickly this was downvoted. It went to -4 in minutes! I didn't even think anything I said there was particularly controversial. I think it's pretty well established that social change is hard.
• mcguire 7y ago
  Is it just me or is this an advertisement for interviewing.io?
• HeroOfAges 7y ago
  One thing I've found very interesting is that even though the majority of software developers in an enterprise or organization are male, with the ratio being as high as 80/20, the ratio of male to female managers directly managing software developers is closer to 50/50. I would say this is evidence of bias in favor of women. edited for clarity
  • purple-again 7y ago
    Doesn’t have to be bias. Could just be that a higher percentage of women in engineering are here for the big money and not for the love of spending 14 hours with their head down coding. If that’s the case you would naturally expect a significantly higher percentage of them to jump on that management pay raise when offered instead of turning it down for a pay raise. Not in anyway stating I believe this is true or is what is happening, just offering a counter point for how it could happen with no bias on anyone’s part.
  • sukilot 7y ago
    I'm curious where you got that measurement from. It's quite common to overestimate small fractions, do see 3/10 and believe it's half, because one stops noticing the multiplicity of the majority.
    • HeroOfAges 7y ago
      Here's a link to an article by the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are-there-so-few-women-in-tech-the-truth-behind-the-google-memo https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are.... It was published in 2017. The third paragraph points out that 20% of Google engineers are women, and they further go on to claim that statistic is roughly matched among big tech companies. I work for a large employer (30K+ employees), and 4 of the 5 software developer managers I interact with on a daily basis are women. I work on a team of 8 developers. We have one female developer. Two of our sibling teams of about the same size have three female developers between them.
• age_bronze 7y ago
  I find it extremely ironic that those opposing discrimination and racism are now the ones to view people as just statistics. The whole reason why racism and sexism is bad is because it doesn't look at people as individuals. Behind every person who goes to an interview there's whole life, and every interviewer has so much more information about that person than just her being a female or black. Pretending that by knowing only 1 piece of information, you know they made a mistake, when they clearly have so much more information than you, calling it bias or whatever, is insult to their intelligence. Who the hell are you to know they made a mistake, when you literally know nothing except one little piece of a giant puzzle?! It also goes for women / black people who didn't choose a career in tech. There are people behind these decisions. They have freedom and free will. You can't just pretend that they are all stupid and don't know what's good for them. Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in the first place for this to even be a problem. The whole diversity conversation reeks of so many self-contradictions and fighting windmills, but the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. and a deep need to excuse their failure with someone else.
  • TimTheTinker 7y ago
    > the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. Unfortunately, that describes human nature in general.
    • age_bronze 7y ago
      I've gotten used to the reeking smell of envy all my life. I was always encouraged by everyone to 'still be nice to them', to try to appease them, etc. It never, ever, and will never, work. I've had enough of that and decided and realized that the best way to deal with envy, is to stick it to them. Hit them as hard as you can with the reality. Even when it hurts them. Hurt them with the facts of how much you're better and they suck. You can't ever be accepted by those that envy you, the most you can get is that they stop using you to cope with their insecurities. EDIT: It's not about me thinking I'm successful, because I don't. It's about not giving envious people the positive feedback they desire so much from their corrupt behavior. It's about getting them so hurt they will never again consider coping with their insecurities by transference. If you've never felt like you need to justify your 'success' (even tho you never felt like it is a big deal) to envious people in disguise you'll never understand. It is the most frustratingly impossible task. They can't and will never separate you as an individual from the negative emotion of envy they feel. Unlike what it might sound, this isn't about me at all. I usually try to stay humble around normal non-envious people. But the best way to deal with envious people is to break their positive feedback loop. They need a strong negative feedback for their behavior so they don't repeat it. I realize I will be hated by them. I also realize from so many different experiences being loved by them was never a possibility, and I am content with the small success of them dealing with their issues elsewhere.
• uwuhn 7y ago
  I'm going to preface this post by saying that I don't have a problem with most of my coworkers (male and female) being Asian. In fact, I prefer it. I'm not Asian, but the majority of my friends, classmates, and coworkers throughout my life have been, and that continues even now during my career in tech. Whenever I see anything related to affirmative action being discussed nowadays, I think that it's only a matter of time until Asian women are treated the same way as Asian men. Once you've managed to close the gender gap in engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class. A continued pursuit of diversity will require discrimination similar to that exhibited by prestigious American universities. My coworkers (past and former) and friends who are women SWEs overwhelmingly fall into two buckets: American-born Chinese with parents who are middle-class or higher, and PRC-born Chinese with wealthy parents. I get the strong impression that gender diversity is viewed as more important than race and class. I'm a male of color who has been in the industry for more than four years now, so I no longer have to worry about breaking in. If I were applying to CS programs or looking for my first job right now, I would feel some resentment. I've convinced and helped three of my friends to do a career switch because there's just so much assistance (financial, educational, and otherwise) available for women. From what I've seen, there is just so much more provided to help women get into the field. I commend the big tech companies for lumping male URMs and all women together when it comes to prioritization, but this isn't the case for most companies, who are expending great effort on balancing the gender ratio while treating men of color as second-class URMs, or even ignoring their status completely. It's fortunate that the best jobs are the most fair, but even if a place sucks, a first SWE job is still a first SWE job. What I predict will happen is the gender gap will begin to close, but the aforementioned diversity issues not related to gender will remain. This will be due to a combination of various factors, with the most significant being fatigue with affirmative action practices, and that discussing socio-economic and race is much more sensitive than discussing gender, Saying "stop hiring men" or "only hire women" is easy, even if you are asking people to discriminate against candidates similar to themselves. "Stop hiring Asian women" is not. And if you are willing to make that request, why would anyone listen?
  • fennecfoxen 7y ago
    > I think that it's only a matter of time until Asian women are treated the same way as Asian men. Once you've managed to close the gender gap in engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class. The blanket catch-all term "Asian" is not doing this conversation any favors. You assert a monoculture, but Asia is a huge region with many cultures, not a monolith. South Korea is unlike India is unlike the Philippines is unlike Vietnam is unlike Iran is unlike China. Can you narrow this down so we understand what kind of monoculture you're actually talking about?
• gjmacd 7y ago
  Not one mention of age as being a factor as passing over good talent because of ageism. I'm 54, I walk through the door to interview and people run the other way before I even sit down with them because I probably look like their Dad -- meanwhile, i'm not only as current on skills than anybody I'm talking to, I'm probably the best option at a startup since I've seen it all (three and four times over). It's ridiculous that you age out of this industry at 45.
  • downerending 7y ago
    I'm about your age, and it is indeed depressing. On my last hunt, after passing the all-day at a FAANG, I was declined at the executive review because of my "career trajectory". Guess who doesn't have career trajectories. (Spoiler: It's young people.)
• scythe 7y ago
  To me the question is not why this statistic looks a certain way, but what is the actual experience of women in software engineering. And if you ask women, the problem doesn’t usually seem to be getting hired. It’s the work environment that is alienating. So if you want a number to target, it’s not a proportion of female employees, it’s the retention rate. And that’s not affected by pipeline problems.
  • belorn 7y ago
    This is a pretty old and well established research fact: For most people being a minority in any environment feels alienating. The problem look very similar if you want male employees in a female dominate work place or female employees in a male dominated work place. Retention rate is going to be problem, and it is going to be a consistent problem from the first year as a student to 30 years later into the career. The common result is that people move into local groups where they can be part of a majority. Male teachers going into physical education where most the other physical education teachers are also male. In IT we see female programmers go into design or team leader, where most other designers and team leaders are female. It is a very hard problem to solve.
• mcguire 7y ago
  Hmm. https://nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-14.html https://nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-14.html "Science and engineering" bachelors degrees have been about 50% male and 50% female since 2000, growing from about 400,000 degrees in 2000 to 589,000 in 2012. From 2000 to 2004, women's share of computer science degrees were between 25% and 28%. From 2007 to 2012, they stabilized at about 18%. Now, the question is, did men preferentially enter computer science, or did women preferentially leave? Hint: the latter. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp [Edit: more recent.] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_325.35.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_325.35.a... In 2004-2008, degrees granted to men decreased by 6%, 10%, 9% and 8%. Degrees granted to women decreased by 20%, 18%, 20%, and 13%. (The other big drop in degrees, from 1986 to 1993-6, shows the same pattern and is when degrees granted to women went from 35-37% of the total to 27%.) Whence comes this pipeline difference? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_222.10.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_222.10.a... According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics scale score, the difference between boys and girls up to grade 12 has been stable for years and doesn't really amount to a hill of beans. Same with science. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.70.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.70.a... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74b.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74b.... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74a.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74a.... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.73.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.73.a... The Technology and Engineering Literacy scores for 8th graders don't have any difference to write home about.
  • JimboOmega 7y ago
    It's also worth remembering that the problem continues in the workforce; there's fewer women reaching senior roles, fewer taking EM positions, etc. Those steps are entirely under the control of employers - women drop out of tech faster than men even when they get jobs in it.
• TimTheTinker 7y ago
  In software development in particular, the "pipeline problem" has only existed since the 1980s in Western nations. Prior to that, I've heard it said that women were over-represented in software development compared to men (which wouldn't have been a bad thing), or at least that there was much less of a gender gap. I have a theory about why this changed in the 1980's in particular. - The 1980's saw the dawn of personal computers, and many people either bought them or brought them home from work. - Personal computers, especially the inner workings and programmability appeal very much to people with Asperger's and high-functioning autism, as they present a highly complex but perfectly logical and predictable user interface. Because of this appeal, a much higher proportion of young people on the Autism spectrum learned to program computers (that their parents had at home) long before they went to college. - Autism and Asperger's occur more frequently among boys than girls. - Because so many "geeky" (i.e. autism spectrum) kids, mostly boys, got into computers during their high school years. This in turn likely caused neurotypical people (of whom more are girls than boys - remember autism occurs more frequently in boys) to associate computers with "geekiness" and caused them to gravitate towards less "geeky" hobbies and interests. The key, I think, to making computers more appealing to girls is to dis-associate computers with social "uncoolness", and a lot has been done towards this end in the last 10 years. EDIT: I'm getting some downvotes and I'm curious - do people disagree with or not like my theory about the connection between male representation in software and autism? I really don't think it's sexist to observe that autism occurs more frequently in men...
  • baked_ziti 7y ago
    > women were over-represented in software development compared to men This is a narrative I see taking hold in the past few years but I'm not convinced that prior to the 1980s women were the majority of software developers. My impression was that this has to do with how a job was defined, and that many data entry type positions were considered to fall beneath the rubric of computer science. Having no evidence to offer of my own for or against, I wonder if anyone else can link anything germane to the discussion.
  • oh_sigh 7y ago
    Can you provide a source that women outnumbered men in 'software development' before the 80s? I hear it thrown around a lot, and it usually revolves around counting human computers as software developers, which is akin to counting a CPU a software developer.
• musicale 7y ago
  Regarding the enrollment chart, as recently as 2015 CS was the most popular undergraduate major among women at Stanford University: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/10/12/computer-science-now-most-popular-major-for-women/ https://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/10/12/computer-science-no...
  • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    One year later: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/11/08/graphic-gender-ratio-in-select-stanford-majors-2015-2016/ https://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/11/08/graphic-gender-rati... It would seem declared majors aren't following through to the end of their programs.
    • musicale 7y ago
      The percentage of undergrad women CS majors didn't change significantly between 2015 and 2016. It appears to be slightly lower (26% vs. 30%) on the 2016 chart because that chart includes grad students. However, even if the percentage of undergrad majors had dropped from 2015 to 2016, that by itself wouldn't tell us anything about the retention or graduation rate over time, since we don't know what the breakdown was for 2015 graduates, CS majors declared or dropped in 2016, etc..
• luckydata 7y ago
  You can see how toxic the discourse has gotten around this kind of issues if you get 20% of the article dedicated to disclaimers.
• yarg 7y ago
  (Politically inconvenient differences across various human subgroups aside) if you're trying to deal with this situation as late as hiring, you already fucked up. There are unresolved social issues in terms of racial disparity in America (and this comes with an inherent inter-generational cycling). The place to start dealing with this is per-capita equality of resourcing for primary and secondary schools (and make sure the kids are fed). Even if that weren't a political no-go from the initialisation perspective, the 20 year latency on emergent benefits means that any progress will be demolished at the next swing of the political pendulum. Short of the extinction of regressive political ideologies in America, this is an intractable problem.
• stevev 7y ago
  Sure, 50% of boot camp graduates are women. What’s the ratio if we include actual university undergrads gender ratios? If I’m not mistaken, there are more men going into cs than women here in the US. I don’t think a parity can happen unless equal number of women pursues cs degrees. I believe the disparity is more inline with career choice/goals. Unfortunately factoring in case studies involving the technical aptitude’s of women versus men in technical hiring, the results are bleak for women; hopefully this changes and I am not saying women are not able to compete; it could be a cultural issue and the low numbers of women entering the field makes it even harder to achieve gender parity. I find relevance when discussing gender disparity represented in the trucking industry.
• vinceguidry 7y ago
  It's important to give the right answers to questions, answers that signal the right intentions. Giving the wrong answers means you don't really understand the situation, and aren't really invested in solving the problem. So when a young female applicant asks you a question that might not precisely be worded as "why is your company all men with only the white ones in positions of power," it's important to not frame the reason why this is as a pipeline problem. She's not dumb. She knows that. Because she's not actually asking for the reason. She wants to know if your company has the wherewithal to overcome the diversity problem in spite of the fact that there just aren't a whole lot of women looking for tech careers at present compared to men. Everyone already knows there aren't that many applicants. Everyone knows you can't just hire a woman just because of her gender. That's not the point. The way you answer this question is to, without right out stating there's a pipeline problem, make sure you've put into place all the other pieces that will cause women to not run screaming to all their friends what insensitive clods you are. Talk about your code of conduct. Talk about your contributions to the cause of diversity. Talk about any issue you had in the past relating to you not understanding people that have very very different life circumstances than you and what your failings were in obtaining a resolution satisfactory to all parties. It's hard to talk about but well, diversity is a hard topic. Anything but passing the buck.
• xupybd 7y ago
  From my experience many women are put off by the way they see the average computer science student. The geeky weird stereotype scares many off. There does seems to be more socially awkward people that choose computer science (myself included). I'm not sure how you can address that.
• austincheney 7y ago
  These selective biases are far more pervasive than just sex parity at all stages of the pipeline and result in all kinds of malformed decisions. > And even if we could meaningfully increase the number of women enrolling in CS programs overall, top companies have historically tended to favor candidates from elite universities (based on some targeted LinkedIn Recruiter searches, 60% of software engineers at FAAMNG hold a degree from a top 20 school). That is a hiring bias offering very little to qualify a candidate's potential longevity in the field or their potential innovation performance. If employers really wanted to fix this sex parity problem (without sacrificing applicant quality) they could, but they would have to be willing to abandon certain premises they hold dear about hiring, candidate sourcing, and qualification criteria. --- One example of a naive selective bias is the notion of the standard 4-year computer science degree as the path to excellent in corporate software. The 4-year degree exists to take a person off the street make them a credible hire as an entry level developer in the most generic way possible. That's it. You don't need any formal education to be an incredible developer might result in a far wider distribution of skills from self-education. If your goal in life is to do something other than write C++ or Java, the most commonly taught languages in most 4-year degree programs, you need to find experience or training elsewhere. The inherent bias is that a person with a degree from an excellent school is well prepared for any aspect of software development, because its all just software. This is why so many entry-level front-end developers want their front-end technology to behave like Java or impose frameworks to make it so. Its also why many software developers are over confident in their understanding of security when in reality they are grossly ignorant of it with a severely misplaced understanding of what security actually is. As an example many software developers might believe security is limited to something like intrusion prevention. Information security is actually: confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA). If you cannot keep your application from crashing or cannot keep it online that is classified as a priority security failure without regard for intrusion. --- Another example, the one that convinced me to delete my Reddit account after being flamed multiple times by impassioned echo chambers, is the notion that Web Assembly will free the front-end from JavaScript. The most interesting thing about that conversation is that people most supportive of the idea that Web Assembly will replace JavaScript is that the DOM is a fantastic technology that will be the key to ultimate salvation without any understanding of or experience with the DOM. As an aside most JavaScript developers dreadfully HATE the DOM and also have a poor understanding of its mechanics. Even still injecting the page's DOM directly into a Web Assembly instance was seen as ultimate salvation to replace JavaScript despite all evidence to the contrary merely because some developers hate JavaScript more than many JavaScript developers hate the DOM. This was 3 years ago, and this fantasy still has not come to pass, because its based on a dillusion of wishful thinking opposed to an investigation of technologies available or any consideration of data. There is a technology that has made great strides in, at least superficially, replacing JavaScript: TypeScript. This is the opposite line of thinking of abandoning JavaScript for some drop in alternative. Instead TypeScript is a superset that requires embracing JavaScript. --- The pitfalls of selective bias are personality failures rather than anything related to education or intelligence. Bias is formed either out of intellectual laziness or out of reinforcing some deeply held personal belief, but both are an absence of objectivity. When a bias is formed to reinforce some personal opinion it is done so emotionally, often non-cognitively, and often for a perceived security motive. Because a bias can be deeply rooted, non-cognitive, emotionally-based, and defensively focused in can result in really bad decisions resulting in subjective positioning to maintain a poorly-formed belief at hand (digging in). This is a cultural problem and education alone will not fix it.
• mlboss 7y ago
  In the article they talk about more women in tech in India than in US. India is a highly sexist society having a male child is preferred over having a female child. Still more females are in CS than in a more egalitarian society like US. I think it is because there are less economic choices in India. So if you are going to college in India you will choose a subject that makes more economic sense. Even if that means studying a subject that you don't like that much. When there is freedom to choose profession without economic constraints people will choose subject that interests them the most. Edit: I might be downvoted for last sentence.
  • mberning 7y ago
    It is a curious phenomenon. https://womenintheworld.com/2018/02/27/study-finds-women-in-countries-with-better-gender-equality-are-less-likely-to-pursue-stem-careers/ https://womenintheworld.com/2018/02/27/study-finds-women-in-...
  • perl4ever 7y ago
    People often make reference to a time when programmers were predominantly women, say roughly the 50s-70s but I don't get the impression most younger people personally know someone whose career was largely during that era. I do/did, and the reason she ended up as a programmer was because she wasn't considered for an engineering program (because they already had a woman studying engineering) and had to take a math scholarship instead. If we want to continue to live in a world where women can become engineers, and managers, and CEOs, then some of the talented people who were forced to become programmers in earlier days are going to be diverted.
• crawfordcomeaux 7y ago
  There's also a cultural issue driving this that starts with programming gender and biases into kids at or before birth. It is driven, in part, by common confusions between gender, biological sex, and genitals. My partner and I didn't know what our child's genitalia was until 20+ minutes after birth. We witnessed so much unconscious (and conscious!) gendering from people throughout pregnancy and labor we decided to not share what's between our kid's legs with people. They only just turned one, so we're not sure about how this will affect them. We're doing a considerable amount of work to counter cultural programming in the hopes of raising an empowered person in such a traumatizing and disempowering world. We're planning on homeschooling them in order to focus on learning how to learn what they choose in an environment without bonds to capitalism to limit the impact of that hot mess of programming, too. This is a collective issue and will generate pipeline issues until we collectively get our cultural programming shit together. I think we need to collectively focus on modeling culture through the lenses of category theory and computer science, ie. maths of relationships and programming.
• mesozoic 7y ago
  Hmm I'll say agian. DUH
• unishark 7y ago
  "If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires)." Am I the only one who thought this was some kind of double entendre at first?
• whinythepooh 7y ago
  > STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented backgrounds > hostile university culture in male-dominated CS programs > biased hiring practices > non-inclusive work environments Is there any actual proof of any of this rather than some bogus numbers from noname Kapor Center who admit they are just evangelists? https://www.kaporcenter.org/our-work/ https://www.kaporcenter.org/our-work/ > Our pioneering work ranges from education programs and community building to evangelism and investing.
• avgeek23 7y ago
  The bit where she says 39% of Hires from india are women.Thats because parents decide what major their kids take which is completely opposite of the west. Thus the more no of female grads.The college i go to has a 50:50 ratio. Majority of the people there both men and women have no idea why they picked cs,they just are there because it pays ways and their parents told them to rather forced them into cs.
• 29athrowaway 7y ago
  A funnel representation would be clearer. If you start with 50% women at age 0, which steps are leaking the most? High school, university, company interviews, people leaving companies/switching careers? I think the answer is that many of these steps are losing women in the process. But in my opinion, companies are only responsible for: hiring fairly, retaining fairly, promoting fairly.
• spicyramen 7y ago
  Jordan Peterson and James Damore explained this as well...but we'll yeah the narrative of SJW and Google don't like science all the time
• DoctorMckay 7y ago
  Spanish guy here. Just to give ya'll some context of why bootcamp hiring does not work here. I had to go through the "do I go to a bootcamp or get a CS degree" conundrum 5 years ago. The answer was quite clear for me. All the serious and stable jobs that were offered in the entire nation except for the capital city, Madrid, required you to have a CS degree + bootcamps/X years of experience for a specific language. Either that or they outright asked for a Master's degree or a PHD in a specific field.
• davidf18 7y ago
  It is grey matter and not skin color or gender that should be the relevant indicator for fields that require a great deal of competence be it airline pilot or airliner designer or nuclear power plant (NPP) operator or engineer, etc. I'm all for being color blind and gender blind when it comes to hiring. What is wrong with hiring people in critical fields of STEM based on competence and ability?
• thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  I have a 4 year old daughter who I'm trying to get interested in programming. The first step is to teach her reading/writing and math. Every time we start with basic counting, after just 2 minutes, she's constantly telling me "daddy, I don't want to count anymore". I'm not giving up yet. But, we have to accept the fact that certain genders don't like math and don't like programming. Sometimes, I see the same thing playing out at older ages. We once hired a female intern and our PM was like "ok everyone, now do your best to make programming seem as fun as possible so we can get this person to go into CS". I'm thinking, at that age, I would have killed for an internship, you wouldn't have had to convince me to "think it was fun", I already knew it was. There's so much focus on gender equality in programming but where is the gender equality talk in other industries like: cosmetics, football, ballet dancing, etc
  • jeromebaek 7y ago
    No offense, but you sound like a terrible parent. Keep your unconscious bias in check while you teach your daughter to count. Better yet, don't teach your daughter to count. Get a tutor.
    • thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
      it's not a bias, it's a fact. you may not like it but that doesn't make it any less true.
      • claudiawerner 7y ago
        This "fact" seems to be derived from your observation that your daughter doesn't have an appreciation for counting. From that observation, you've concluded that "she mustn't like it because she's a girl". Please tell me you know how lazy this reasoning is. I'm a woman, and I never liked counting or arithmetic. Now I study electronic engineering.
        • thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
          the point is not a sweeping generalization about all women. the point is: statistically, a higher percentage of men like computer science/programming than women. My experience as a parent and as a person who has learned about parenting is that these types of interests are often innate: i've seen this over and over again. For example, our daughter loved shiny things (before age 2) before any kind of social conditioning could take place.
• ghjyui 7y ago
  Am I the only one who sees the elephant in the room? 15-30 is the prime time when women make relationships and men make money. Software engineering needs full time commitmentent and no personal life is a part of the deal. Someone who learns programming only in college will be mediocre at best and FANG doesn't want to hire mediocricy. so women have a choice: go into programming and forget about personal life, because the money they earn by 35 won't help them, or choose personal life and have no time for programming.
• noparity 7y ago
  This is more than the equivalent of a well-written “the emperor has no clothes” based on facts - it offers a pragmatic path forward for his majesty’s deluded nudity.