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But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Women have the same options to attend university as me

But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Women have the same options to attend university as men. It seems more likely to me that the proportions of applicants without a degree are similar to the ones with degrees.

hnick 7y ago
Options don't exist in a vacuum. I had the option of signing up to the military, but my upbringing, preferences, and economic/social status made it almost certain I wouldn't. I had free will to make the choice but the outcome was almost foregone. I think women in tech is a very similar situation. The article states that women graduate from bootcamps at a rate twice that of traditional CS courses. I'd say this is because there's less friction to join, so anything pushing them away is more easily overcome.
- pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  I'd like to have more data on the women graduating from bootcamps. Maybe it is a desperate move of aging single moms who find they can't make a living with their degree in English Literature? While most men who are interested took traditional degrees to begin with, so they have less need for bootcamps. Sorry for the harsh formulation, but the point is, we really don't actually know what is going on. It is not legitimate to just assume women are being pushed away from traditional career paths in IT. As for Military, I think the idea to become a Software Developer is by now a very common one, you don't have to come from a specific demographic to have heard of that option. Women come from the same backgrounds as men, the odds to have a baby girl or a baby boy are the same at all levels of society.
Spooky23 7y ago
The focus on Computer Science is a female filter. I’ve rarely run into a colleague who claimed their education truly prepared them anyway. You’d be better off being diverse in major. When I think of the smartest developers or IT people I know, one was a sociologist who learned programming as a labor department statistician, another had an MFA in Piano, and the other was in pharmacy school and dropped out after an injury.
- jki275 7y ago
  There are certainly people like this. What you generally find about them though is that they are highly motivated and deeply interested in the concepts of computing. They don't grow on trees -- they're quite rare. Oddly enough, I've never met a single one that was female, though that's only anecdotal of course. The only female devs I know have CS degrees. The focus on CS is important. Developers who don't have it are generally not educated in how to write good code. Many people do get into the field without the degree, but many of them are very bad at programming. I've had to rewrite O(n!) algorithms written by some of them, and they really didn't even understand why the algorithm was bad even when I broke it down to them. My CS education absolutely gave me many of the tools I need for a career in software engineering. It didn't give me everything to be sure -- there's a lot of learning that still goes on in the job, but having a solid foundation is crucial to being a good engineer.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    I don't think that a computer science degree is bad, just that it's a poor filter. I have one, and while the math background is critical for many things, honestly the skills learned there are pretty limited in terms of what I've do. If you have a background in any science, or even a good analysis ability in a liberal arts field, you can be trained pretty quickly to be a functional developer. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more given the absurd salaries people are getting paid these days!
    - jki275 7y ago
      Lots of people can be "trained" to be functional developers. That doesn't make them good software engineers. A CS degree is supposed to educate you in how to think, not train you to write software. Being able to properly decompose a problem and use the right data structures and algorithms to solve it is more than just training. You need education in the fundamentals to do that effectively. I don't believe that it is impossible for someone without a CS degree to be a developer -- far from it -- but in my experience most of the really good ones have CS or CE or EE degrees. YMMV of course.
  - 7y ago
8note 7y ago
The more likely case is that they have a degree that isn't in CSC.
stale2002 7y ago
> But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Well, probably because the environment in all parts of the tech pipeline, is often times toxic the entire way through, and women don't want to deal with that. So part of solving the pipeline problem means trying to solve it in many different parts of the pipeline, and recognizing that even if a previous part failed, you can still do stuff to fix it, later on.
- pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  It's certainly not "toxic all the way through". That's such an insulting assumption. I bet you for example that at engineering university women are more likely to get help than men.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    The accusations against tech have been a decades long Kafkatrap essentially for the sin of "not fitting in with their expectations and being successful" as a trial where the conclusion is guilty but they must deliberate over what sins. Look at the oldest accusations which failed to illustrate it best. I believe one howler was that "It would make cultures homogenous." At a certain point you are clearly dealing with bad actors and the default assumption stops being any attempt to accomidate them and starts being to tell them to fuck off.
    - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
      Sorry I have difficulties parsing what you wrote. What exactly do you mean? Who are the bad actors?
  - stale2002 7y ago
    Have you tried speaking to any women to get their opinion on the matter? Because basically every women in tech has many many many stories of their bad experiences, all the way through the pipeline. If you want to talk about universities, the problem with them is often the culture. Women are second guessed, every step of the way, and are often told that they don't belong there, and they have their abilities questions much more often than men. This very common toxic culture of universities, often drives women out of the industry, because they feel like they don't belong, and aren't as good as their peers, even though they might actually be getting better grades than their peers. If you speak to almost any woman in tech, they will be able to tell you this, and they will be able to give you many examples of the horrible experiences that they had to go through, every step of the way, through the pipeline. It might not be all women that have these experiences. But it is most of them. Polling and data collection supports this conclusion.
jonfw 7y ago
to build on this- among younger age groups- women are more likely to be college graduates than men. Women willingly choose different education paths because of different interests.
- axoltl 7y ago
  That's not true. Harvey Mudd made changes to their CS program to remove bias and now more than half of its computer science majors are women. There is some very insidious bias in the pipeline that isn't explained away with "but different interests". https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bias-and-now-more-than-half-its-computer-science-majors-are-women/ https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...
  - jki275 7y ago
    Basically everyone at Harvey Mudd is in STEM -- the article says this. Their results are not really useful in the discussion, as their female student population is already heavily self-selected in favor of the hard sciences.
    - hackinthebochs 7y ago
      Adding on to this, Harvey Mudd puts forth significant effort at outreach and recruitment for their student body. Meaning they're pulling from the existing pool of STEM students to a large degree compared to creating new ones. It's very likely that Harvey Mudd's success cannot be reproduced at scale.
  - jonfw 7y ago
    Obviously with proper marketing you can target the niche. There are more than enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of a tiny school's program. There aren't nearly enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of the market.
  - simonsarris 7y ago
    A bit of "wait a minute, something else is going on here" comes with the mention that Physics has a even higher % women, yet there's no mention of curriculum changes for that major. This wouldn't happen to be a very small school with a very low acceptance rate, would it? It is: less than 900 students and less than 13%. They can have whatever gender ratio they want, more or less, with essentially no effort. I'm not sure they have cleverly solved "insidious bias", more than they are simply selecting for the gender ratio they want as they send out acceptance letters. It would be nice if a much larger school with a much higher acceptance rate adopted identical curriculum, so we could have real data on the idea. But until that happens I would be somewhat cautious about declaring success here.

hnick 7y ago

Options don't exist in a vacuum. I had the option of signing up to the military, but my upbringing, preferences, and economic/social status made it almost certain I wouldn't. I had free will to make the choice but the outcome was almost foregone. I think women in tech is a very similar situation. The article states that women graduate from bootcamps at a rate twice that of traditional CS courses. I'd say this is because there's less friction to join, so anything pushing them away is more easily overcome.

pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
I'd like to have more data on the women graduating from bootcamps. Maybe it is a desperate move of aging single moms who find they can't make a living with their degree in English Literature? While most men who are interested took traditional degrees to begin with, so they have less need for bootcamps. Sorry for the harsh formulation, but the point is, we really don't actually know what is going on. It is not legitimate to just assume women are being pushed away from traditional career paths in IT. As for Military, I think the idea to become a Software Developer is by now a very common one, you don't have to come from a specific demographic to have heard of that option. Women come from the same backgrounds as men, the odds to have a baby girl or a baby boy are the same at all levels of society.

Spooky23 7y ago

The focus on Computer Science is a female filter. I’ve rarely run into a colleague who claimed their education truly prepared them anyway. You’d be better off being diverse in major. When I think of the smartest developers or IT people I know, one was a sociologist who learned programming as a labor department statistician, another had an MFA in Piano, and the other was in pharmacy school and dropped out after an injury.

jki275 7y ago
There are certainly people like this. What you generally find about them though is that they are highly motivated and deeply interested in the concepts of computing. They don't grow on trees -- they're quite rare. Oddly enough, I've never met a single one that was female, though that's only anecdotal of course. The only female devs I know have CS degrees. The focus on CS is important. Developers who don't have it are generally not educated in how to write good code. Many people do get into the field without the degree, but many of them are very bad at programming. I've had to rewrite O(n!) algorithms written by some of them, and they really didn't even understand why the algorithm was bad even when I broke it down to them. My CS education absolutely gave me many of the tools I need for a career in software engineering. It didn't give me everything to be sure -- there's a lot of learning that still goes on in the job, but having a solid foundation is crucial to being a good engineer.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  I don't think that a computer science degree is bad, just that it's a poor filter. I have one, and while the math background is critical for many things, honestly the skills learned there are pretty limited in terms of what I've do. If you have a background in any science, or even a good analysis ability in a liberal arts field, you can be trained pretty quickly to be a functional developer. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more given the absurd salaries people are getting paid these days!
  - jki275 7y ago
    Lots of people can be "trained" to be functional developers. That doesn't make them good software engineers. A CS degree is supposed to educate you in how to think, not train you to write software. Being able to properly decompose a problem and use the right data structures and algorithms to solve it is more than just training. You need education in the fundamentals to do that effectively. I don't believe that it is impossible for someone without a CS degree to be a developer -- far from it -- but in my experience most of the really good ones have CS or CE or EE degrees. YMMV of course.
- 7y ago

8note 7y ago

The more likely case is that they have a degree that isn't in CSC.

stale2002 7y ago

> But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Well, probably because the environment in all parts of the tech pipeline, is often times toxic the entire way through, and women don't want to deal with that. So part of solving the pipeline problem means trying to solve it in many different parts of the pipeline, and recognizing that even if a previous part failed, you can still do stuff to fix it, later on.

pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
It's certainly not "toxic all the way through". That's such an insulting assumption. I bet you for example that at engineering university women are more likely to get help than men.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  The accusations against tech have been a decades long Kafkatrap essentially for the sin of "not fitting in with their expectations and being successful" as a trial where the conclusion is guilty but they must deliberate over what sins. Look at the oldest accusations which failed to illustrate it best. I believe one howler was that "It would make cultures homogenous." At a certain point you are clearly dealing with bad actors and the default assumption stops being any attempt to accomidate them and starts being to tell them to fuck off.
  - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
    Sorry I have difficulties parsing what you wrote. What exactly do you mean? Who are the bad actors?
- stale2002 7y ago
  Have you tried speaking to any women to get their opinion on the matter? Because basically every women in tech has many many many stories of their bad experiences, all the way through the pipeline. If you want to talk about universities, the problem with them is often the culture. Women are second guessed, every step of the way, and are often told that they don't belong there, and they have their abilities questions much more often than men. This very common toxic culture of universities, often drives women out of the industry, because they feel like they don't belong, and aren't as good as their peers, even though they might actually be getting better grades than their peers. If you speak to almost any woman in tech, they will be able to tell you this, and they will be able to give you many examples of the horrible experiences that they had to go through, every step of the way, through the pipeline. It might not be all women that have these experiences. But it is most of them. Polling and data collection supports this conclusion.

jonfw 7y ago

to build on this- among younger age groups- women are more likely to be college graduates than men. Women willingly choose different education paths because of different interests.

axoltl 7y ago
That's not true. Harvey Mudd made changes to their CS program to remove bias and now more than half of its computer science majors are women. There is some very insidious bias in the pipeline that isn't explained away with "but different interests". https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bias-and-now-more-than-half-its-computer-science-majors-are-women/ https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...
- jki275 7y ago
  Basically everyone at Harvey Mudd is in STEM -- the article says this. Their results are not really useful in the discussion, as their female student population is already heavily self-selected in favor of the hard sciences.
  - hackinthebochs 7y ago
    Adding on to this, Harvey Mudd puts forth significant effort at outreach and recruitment for their student body. Meaning they're pulling from the existing pool of STEM students to a large degree compared to creating new ones. It's very likely that Harvey Mudd's success cannot be reproduced at scale.
- jonfw 7y ago
  Obviously with proper marketing you can target the niche. There are more than enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of a tiny school's program. There aren't nearly enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of the market.
- simonsarris 7y ago
  A bit of "wait a minute, something else is going on here" comes with the mention that Physics has a even higher % women, yet there's no mention of curriculum changes for that major. This wouldn't happen to be a very small school with a very low acceptance rate, would it? It is: less than 900 students and less than 13%. They can have whatever gender ratio they want, more or less, with essentially no effort. I'm not sure they have cleverly solved "insidious bias", more than they are simply selecting for the gender ratio they want as they send out acceptance letters. It would be nice if a much larger school with a much higher acceptance rate adopted identical curriculum, so we could have real data on the idea. But until that happens I would be somewhat cautious about declaring success here.