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A problem I have heard female friends speculate about is with promoting women in higher positions. If the female population is too low, and you try to get them

by rocqua 5y ago

A problem I have heard female friends speculate about is with promoting women in higher positions. If the female population is too low, and you try to get them into higher positions, two effects occur according to this theory. First of all, with a low female population there probably aren't enough proven and qualified women to fill the desired number of slots. This leads to imposter syndrome / worry about people thinking "she only has this position because of gender". It also leads to these women sometimes doing poorer jobs, just because there aren't enough qualified women in the company to fill those positions. Secondly, you drain the lower rungs of the company from women. This leads to under-representation in the lower rungs. Meaning fewer women getting the training time one needs to properly move up the ladder. It also means a dearth of female perspective on the lower rungs. Hurting both diversity of views, and the culture. That second point makes the company less attractive to women trying to enter the company, which perpetuates the problem.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
You assume that all applicants are of equal attainment, ability, and motivation. However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us. Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point. I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. So it's not surprising that female programmers tend (on average) to be better; they're more motivated, they really want this, and that's usually because they're good at it (if they weren't they'd have given up earlier).
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. As a male growing up in the 80ies and 90ies in Europe I must say this must be somewhere else. If this was the case then there would be some merit to the idea of "male privilege". From what I saw encouragement came in two forms: - generally for everyone - and in addition, specifically for girls I.e. I've seen activities for "kids who code" or "girls who code" but never for "boys who code". I also have some personal experience regarding encouragement: from I was a young boy and until I had almost finished my Bachelors degree I was more than once discouraged from IT and encouraged to get a "real job" so either I was very special or the idea that boys get "nothing but encouragement" is plain false
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Do you mean I should have quit my Bachelors degree in IT?
      - pyuser583 5y ago
        Sorry, but I don’t understand what you are seeking with this question. Did your BA in IT limit your access to good advice? Did it contradict the good advice you received? I don’t see the conflict between a BA in IT and good advice. Could you maybe ask the question again in a different way?
        skinkestek 5y ago
        I'll try: I wrote about being a boy and getting what I think is bad advice. You comment "The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice." I wonder if you think that what I got is good advice. (BTW: BSc, not BA :-)
- ectopod 5y ago
  In the UK there is an often-repeated statistic: the 20% of girls who take A-level physics outperform the 40% of boys who take it. And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions. The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typically outperform the larger cohort of (necessarily) more average men. You don't need tales of struggle or diversity to explain this. Minority groups will tend to perform better.
  - ttt0 5y ago
    You say you don't need discrimination to explain it, but your explanation assumes discrimination ie. you have to be really damn good in order to even have a chance as a woman. There is another explanation, the distribution of IQ between men and women: > Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom. https://www.newsweek.com/men-women-and-iq-87117 https://www.newsweek.com/men-women-and-iq-87117
    - Zababa 5y ago
      You also see a similar situation with "places in society". The majority of billionaires are men, but the majority of people in prison are men too. Women in general seem to have a more "stable" place in society compared to men. It seems harder for them to climb higher but also harder for them to fall completly at the bottom. If I wanted to sum it up, it would be something like "the glass ceiling comes with a glass floor". This is just my speculation though, and not in any way a judgment of value.
      - rowanG077 5y ago
        An important point here is that this glass ceiling or glass floor is only relevant to talk about on the level of all women. It has no bearing on an individual.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us. I’m very skeptical about this. Firstly, the popular studies that purport to show bias against females are variously flawed (including using old data from other fields) but also because women have done very well in other fields at other times which were much more hostile to them (medicine and law, for example) than tech. Similarly, women do well in tech in countries that have much more gender inequality than we have in the West (indeed, there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s gender equality and its female representation in technology). All of this suggests that discrimination isn’t responsible for as much of the gender gap in tech as we suspect.
- rocqua 5y ago
  > Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point. This is very much the case if promotions are done without considering gender diversity. This can be compensated for by considering gender diversity when looking at applicants. However, that compensation can overshoot. This is especially likely if, for internal promotions, a goal of diversity is set that is too high compared to the total number of women already in the company. That specific overshoot, caused by having diversity goals that are too ambitious given the number of women in the company, is what my comment was about. I raised the issue because women have raised it to me. Specifically when discussing blanket boardroom diversity quotas that were being considered by politicians in the Netherlands. Such quotas are more likely to cause this specific scenario, because they are made without consideration for the fraction of women working in the company, or even industry.
- gedy 5y ago
  > while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.
  - otto2 5y ago
    Me too. I suffered few years being called "Clive" and "Sinclair" by bullish peers.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Yep. In elementary school I was called a computer nerd every day. Want to know who usually flung that insult? Girls. Typically ones that would say "ew, math is gross." Now they're the ones posting the 70 cents on the dollar misinformation to their FB feed.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Exactly. The narrative changed when iPhone / Smartphone took over the world. Now everyone knows what is an "App". And somehow Silicon Valley took over the world. Mainstream Media has all sort of Tech reporting in their front page. Stock investment are also dominated by tech. All of a sudden software programming is cool and you get some sort of social status with it. But in the 80s/ 90s picking up a Pascal or Delphi book was about the dumbest thing you do in social circle.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    I get that. But talk to a female colleague about her experience with it. They get not only the "nerd" label but also the whole "choose something that's feminine, no boy wants to marry a girl smarter than him" thing. It's fucked up.
nradov 5y ago
Women were well represented in the early days of computing. The gender imbalance only started in about 1984. Some researchers think that was because home computers started to become affordable at about that time and were mainly marketed to men. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
- caeril 5y ago
  Women are also currently well-represented in computing in Eastern Europe, Iran, China, and somewhat in Russia. None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech", and most of them are certifiably more patriarchal than any of the Western countries currently suffering from under-representation of women. One can conclude from facts on the ground that neither gender equality nor pro-diversity movements correlate with desirable representation outcomes. Yet, those appear to be the only approaches attempted here in the West. We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.
  - tester756 5y ago
    >Eastern Europe >None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech" there are initiatives of promoting IT among women in Poland, afaik.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work. Could it be that women tend to care about stuff like a healthy work-life balance, and things like the 996.ICU working week can discourage them from applying? Whoops no, we've been told that's sexist wrongthink.
    - postsantum 5y ago
      Could it be that computers are boring af and most of these people who genuinely care about computing are somewhere on the autism spectrum (which is mostly populated by males)

by rocqua 5y ago

marcus_holmes 5y ago

You assume that all applicants are of equal attainment, ability, and motivation. However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us. Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point. I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. So it's not surprising that female programmers tend (on average) to be better; they're more motivated, they really want this, and that's usually because they're good at it (if they weren't they'd have given up earlier).

skinkestek 5y ago
> I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. As a male growing up in the 80ies and 90ies in Europe I must say this must be somewhere else. If this was the case then there would be some merit to the idea of "male privilege". From what I saw encouragement came in two forms: - generally for everyone - and in addition, specifically for girls I.e. I've seen activities for "kids who code" or "girls who code" but never for "boys who code". I also have some personal experience regarding encouragement: from I was a young boy and until I had almost finished my Bachelors degree I was more than once discouraged from IT and encouraged to get a "real job" so either I was very special or the idea that boys get "nothing but encouragement" is plain false
- pyuser583 5y ago
  The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Do you mean I should have quit my Bachelors degree in IT?
    - pyuser583 5y ago
      Sorry, but I don’t understand what you are seeking with this question. Did your BA in IT limit your access to good advice? Did it contradict the good advice you received? I don’t see the conflict between a BA in IT and good advice. Could you maybe ask the question again in a different way?
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        I'll try: I wrote about being a boy and getting what I think is bad advice. You comment "The most powerful type of privilege a person can have is access to good advice." I wonder if you think that what I got is good advice. (BTW: BSc, not BA :-)
ectopod 5y ago
In the UK there is an often-repeated statistic: the 20% of girls who take A-level physics outperform the 40% of boys who take it. And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions. The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typically outperform the larger cohort of (necessarily) more average men. You don't need tales of struggle or diversity to explain this. Minority groups will tend to perform better.
- ttt0 5y ago
  You say you don't need discrimination to explain it, but your explanation assumes discrimination ie. you have to be really damn good in order to even have a chance as a woman. There is another explanation, the distribution of IQ between men and women: > Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom. https://www.newsweek.com/men-women-and-iq-87117 https://www.newsweek.com/men-women-and-iq-87117
  - Zababa 5y ago
    You also see a similar situation with "places in society". The majority of billionaires are men, but the majority of people in prison are men too. Women in general seem to have a more "stable" place in society compared to men. It seems harder for them to climb higher but also harder for them to fall completly at the bottom. If I wanted to sum it up, it would be something like "the glass ceiling comes with a glass floor". This is just my speculation though, and not in any way a judgment of value.
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      An important point here is that this glass ceiling or glass floor is only relevant to talk about on the level of all women. It has no bearing on an individual.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us. I’m very skeptical about this. Firstly, the popular studies that purport to show bias against females are variously flawed (including using old data from other fields) but also because women have done very well in other fields at other times which were much more hostile to them (medicine and law, for example) than tech. Similarly, women do well in tech in countries that have much more gender inequality than we have in the West (indeed, there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s gender equality and its female representation in technology). All of this suggests that discrimination isn’t responsible for as much of the gender gap in tech as we suspect.
rocqua 5y ago
> Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point. This is very much the case if promotions are done without considering gender diversity. This can be compensated for by considering gender diversity when looking at applicants. However, that compensation can overshoot. This is especially likely if, for internal promotions, a goal of diversity is set that is too high compared to the total number of women already in the company. That specific overshoot, caused by having diversity goals that are too ambitious given the number of women in the company, is what my comment was about. I raised the issue because women have raised it to me. Specifically when discussing blanket boardroom diversity quotas that were being considered by politicians in the Netherlands. Such quotas are more likely to cause this specific scenario, because they are made without consideration for the fraction of women working in the company, or even industry.
gedy 5y ago
> while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.
- otto2 5y ago
  Me too. I suffered few years being called "Clive" and "Sinclair" by bullish peers.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Yep. In elementary school I was called a computer nerd every day. Want to know who usually flung that insult? Girls. Typically ones that would say "ew, math is gross." Now they're the ones posting the 70 cents on the dollar misinformation to their FB feed.
- ksec 5y ago
  Exactly. The narrative changed when iPhone / Smartphone took over the world. Now everyone knows what is an "App". And somehow Silicon Valley took over the world. Mainstream Media has all sort of Tech reporting in their front page. Stock investment are also dominated by tech. All of a sudden software programming is cool and you get some sort of social status with it. But in the 80s/ 90s picking up a Pascal or Delphi book was about the dumbest thing you do in social circle.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I get that. But talk to a female colleague about her experience with it. They get not only the "nerd" label but also the whole "choose something that's feminine, no boy wants to marry a girl smarter than him" thing. It's fucked up.

nradov 5y ago

Women were well represented in the early days of computing. The gender imbalance only started in about 1984. Some researchers think that was because home computers started to become affordable at about that time and were mainly marketed to men. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

caeril 5y ago
Women are also currently well-represented in computing in Eastern Europe, Iran, China, and somewhat in Russia. None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech", and most of them are certifiably more patriarchal than any of the Western countries currently suffering from under-representation of women. One can conclude from facts on the ground that neither gender equality nor pro-diversity movements correlate with desirable representation outcomes. Yet, those appear to be the only approaches attempted here in the West. We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.
- tester756 5y ago
  >Eastern Europe >None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech" there are initiatives of promoting IT among women in Poland, afaik.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work. Could it be that women tend to care about stuff like a healthy work-life balance, and things like the 996.ICU working week can discourage them from applying? Whoops no, we've been told that's sexist wrongthink.
  - postsantum 5y ago
    Could it be that computers are boring af and most of these people who genuinely care about computing are somewhere on the autism spectrum (which is mostly populated by males)