7 ms·

On the other side: A stat shared at my most recent tech companies meeting, they are trying to hire more women. 5000 people applied for a single position and 15

On the other side: A stat shared at my most recent tech companies meeting, they are trying to hire more women. 5000 people applied for a single position and 15 of them were women. This was for a high paying tech job.

finiteseries 5y ago
What proportion are American raised/educated? Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree -> money that any middle class+ guy can walk. Sad the article doesn’t go into specifics though, it’s all just “degrees”.
pwthornton 5y ago
One thing I am starting to wonder about is if there is a systematic guidance counseling failing in high schools and colleges. There are so many well paying tech jobs that we just aren't getting that many candidates for. Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of candidates for my openings. If I can't offer sponsorship, it can take awhile There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  You’ll actually find similar gender disparities in China and India. Maybe not as pronounced as the USA, but it’s still there. Somehow there is something going on throughout the industry that crosses cultural boundaries.
  - pharmakom 5y ago
    From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced. In Eastern Europe software engineering was a female dominated field.
    - Bayart 5y ago
      It's a legacy of socialist regimes enforcing gender ratios. Gender disparity is usually proportional to freedom of choice. ie. countries where there's less pressure to choose a particular field are more disparate in their gender ratios across disciplines.
      - orwin 5y ago
        I'm not sure about that, i've hear Professor Emeritus Mallard talk about his youth in the genetical field and the first use of computers to assist geneticists, he told me that he basically never saw men doing computer work, and that changed in the 80s, along with the culture.
        TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        There were a lot of women in computing in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and they've mostly been forgotten by the "Women don't really like this stuff" crowd.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        I never encountered any in the 70s.
        OJFord 5y ago
        Were they 'into' it though, or did the nature of the secretarial work they were doing change? At least as I understand it, that was predominantly (of course there were exceptions, and female scientists, etc.!) the reason for the rise and fall of it. I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing this stuff.
        wheelinsupial 5y ago
        Apparently the amount of women in computer science majors peaked in the early-80s around 36-37%: 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...
  - pwthornton 5y ago
    I'm not commenting on gender disparities in other countries, although I have seen first hand what you are saying about China and India. What I am saying is that when I hire for various tech jobs, I get a ton of non-American candidates. It can be hard to find good American candidates at times. The demand for the jobs is there, but it's clearly not be communicated to American high school and college kids enough.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      I have come to realize that most people have no idea how much freaking money people are making in the corporate world...especially in tech. They simply have no exposure except to opportuities or jobs that take a decade or more to work up to the salary that barely-graduated college kids are being pushed to in tech. We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  > Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of candidates for my openings. Is your company paying a reasonable rate? I know a few people looking for entry level jobs in tech and they have trouble getting callbacks
  - pwthornton 5y ago
    We pay well, but not Google or Apple well. Not being a huge tech shop, we don't have a lot of H1-B opportunities laying around, which means I mostly deal with domestic candidates. I'll get candidates, for sure, but it can take awhile to fill roles. These are well paying jobs, but they do require a certain amount of skills. A lot of kids are getting college degrees, but coming out without enough skills to land a lot of in-demand jobs.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers The knowledge is there and completely trivial to obtain. Google "starting salaries for XXXX major".
- aogaili 5y ago
  When I was studying software engineering, I met a girl who switched major after the first year. I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back." I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
  - aogaili 5y ago
    Why the downvote? I don't share her opinion, I'm just sharing an encounter I had. I was really surprised by her response, coming from different culture to the west, both of my parents are engineers. I met several great women developers in my career and I personally think the field will benefit a lot by having more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.
    - watwut 5y ago
      > I met several great women developers in my career Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met guys who dropped out of college, because they could not keep grades due to regular whole night gaming. I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not pass exams despite trying. In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible, disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too many mental issues to finish any school.
      - aogaili 5y ago
        Agreed,I don't want generalize. But that incident stuck in my head because I expected many answers but not the one she gave! Anyway, it was a light hearted conversation not to be taken seriously.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  It's also a failure on schools to prepare their top students for the useless signalling rituals necessary to get the job in the first place. Either it's a life skills class in high school teaching you how to fill out paper applications for a part-time job and an interview that will take anyone with a pulse who doesn't mouth off to the interviewer or it's a career development department that is optimized for getting business majors management internships but either clueless or 15 years old advice for getting started in STEM fields. Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception (and no single person can possibly create a properly comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).
tchaffee 5y ago
What does your job description say? What are your company reviews on Glassdoor? What does the whisper network say about what it's like to work as a woman in tech at your company? Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying. What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?
- tarsinge 5y ago
  > Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying. High paying usually means senior, seniority is usually 5-10 years, so you would need 15% 10 years ago.
  - tchaffee 5y ago
    Yep, that's why I used 15% because over the past 20 years it never dipped that low. Here's one source that shows 10 years ago it would have been about 18%. https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...
- OJFord 5y ago
  > Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying. There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago. And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs. not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect that's roughly true though.)
  - tchaffee 5y ago
    > for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back Sure. They have never dipped as low as 15% which is why I used it as very safe and generous number. Here's one source. https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor... > if not what happens to people once in industry Indeed. What happens to people after they get a job is a relevant factor. It would be interesting to see both dropout rates over a career lifetime and if senior level women in tech are concentrated in a group of companies known to be good to work at via the whisper network. Even age is a factor. Most folks don't stick with their CS job until retirement age, although some are smart enough to save and retire before that age. Age discrimination is not exactly rare though. I have no idea where I'd get that kind of data or if it even exists, but maybe someone else does. Given that kind of data, an industry with a constant deficit of qualified senior level candidates would do well to improve that situation by figuring out how to reduce the dropouts.
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
They left out actual subjects chosen by students in the article. Still, doesn't that story also point to a surplus of engineers?
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Computer science is the 3rd most popular subject for men but 18th for women. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-bachelors-degrees-awarded-gender-subject-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-bachelors-... Women really really like to study subjects related to people - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting" is more popular among women than computer science.

finiteseries 5y ago

What proportion are American raised/educated? Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree -> money that any middle class+ guy can walk. Sad the article doesn’t go into specifics though, it’s all just “degrees”.

pwthornton 5y ago

One thing I am starting to wonder about is if there is a systematic guidance counseling failing in high schools and colleges. There are so many well paying tech jobs that we just aren't getting that many candidates for. Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of candidates for my openings. If I can't offer sponsorship, it can take awhile There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
You’ll actually find similar gender disparities in China and India. Maybe not as pronounced as the USA, but it’s still there. Somehow there is something going on throughout the industry that crosses cultural boundaries.
- pharmakom 5y ago
  From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced. In Eastern Europe software engineering was a female dominated field.
  - Bayart 5y ago
    It's a legacy of socialist regimes enforcing gender ratios. Gender disparity is usually proportional to freedom of choice. ie. countries where there's less pressure to choose a particular field are more disparate in their gender ratios across disciplines.
    - orwin 5y ago
      I'm not sure about that, i've hear Professor Emeritus Mallard talk about his youth in the genetical field and the first use of computers to assist geneticists, he told me that he basically never saw men doing computer work, and that changed in the 80s, along with the culture.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        There were a lot of women in computing in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and they've mostly been forgotten by the "Women don't really like this stuff" crowd.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        I never encountered any in the 70s.
        OJFord 5y ago
        Were they 'into' it though, or did the nature of the secretarial work they were doing change? At least as I understand it, that was predominantly (of course there were exceptions, and female scientists, etc.!) the reason for the rise and fall of it. I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing this stuff.
        wheelinsupial 5y ago
        Apparently the amount of women in computer science majors peaked in the early-80s around 36-37%: 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...
- pwthornton 5y ago
  I'm not commenting on gender disparities in other countries, although I have seen first hand what you are saying about China and India. What I am saying is that when I hire for various tech jobs, I get a ton of non-American candidates. It can be hard to find good American candidates at times. The demand for the jobs is there, but it's clearly not be communicated to American high school and college kids enough.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    I have come to realize that most people have no idea how much freaking money people are making in the corporate world...especially in tech. They simply have no exposure except to opportuities or jobs that take a decade or more to work up to the salary that barely-graduated college kids are being pushed to in tech. We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
throwaway6734 5y ago
> Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of candidates for my openings. Is your company paying a reasonable rate? I know a few people looking for entry level jobs in tech and they have trouble getting callbacks
- pwthornton 5y ago
  We pay well, but not Google or Apple well. Not being a huge tech shop, we don't have a lot of H1-B opportunities laying around, which means I mostly deal with domestic candidates. I'll get candidates, for sure, but it can take awhile to fill roles. These are well paying jobs, but they do require a certain amount of skills. A lot of kids are getting college degrees, but coming out without enough skills to land a lot of in-demand jobs.
WalterBright 5y ago
> a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers The knowledge is there and completely trivial to obtain. Google "starting salaries for XXXX major".
aogaili 5y ago
When I was studying software engineering, I met a girl who switched major after the first year. I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back." I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
- aogaili 5y ago
  Why the downvote? I don't share her opinion, I'm just sharing an encounter I had. I was really surprised by her response, coming from different culture to the west, both of my parents are engineers. I met several great women developers in my career and I personally think the field will benefit a lot by having more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.
  - watwut 5y ago
    > I met several great women developers in my career Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met guys who dropped out of college, because they could not keep grades due to regular whole night gaming. I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not pass exams despite trying. In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible, disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too many mental issues to finish any school.
    - aogaili 5y ago
      Agreed,I don't want generalize. But that incident stuck in my head because I expected many answers but not the one she gave! Anyway, it was a light hearted conversation not to be taken seriously.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
It's also a failure on schools to prepare their top students for the useless signalling rituals necessary to get the job in the first place. Either it's a life skills class in high school teaching you how to fill out paper applications for a part-time job and an interview that will take anyone with a pulse who doesn't mouth off to the interviewer or it's a career development department that is optimized for getting business majors management internships but either clueless or 15 years old advice for getting started in STEM fields. Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception (and no single person can possibly create a properly comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).

tchaffee 5y ago

What does your job description say? What are your company reviews on Glassdoor? What does the whisper network say about what it's like to work as a woman in tech at your company? Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying. What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?

tarsinge 5y ago
> Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying. High paying usually means senior, seniority is usually 5-10 years, so you would need 15% 10 years ago.
- tchaffee 5y ago
  Yep, that's why I used 15% because over the past 20 years it never dipped that low. Here's one source that shows 10 years ago it would have been about 18%. https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...
OJFord 5y ago
> Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying. There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago. And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs. not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect that's roughly true though.)
- tchaffee 5y ago
  > for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back Sure. They have never dipped as low as 15% which is why I used it as very safe and generous number. Here's one source. https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor... > if not what happens to people once in industry Indeed. What happens to people after they get a job is a relevant factor. It would be interesting to see both dropout rates over a career lifetime and if senior level women in tech are concentrated in a group of companies known to be good to work at via the whisper network. Even age is a factor. Most folks don't stick with their CS job until retirement age, although some are smart enough to save and retire before that age. Age discrimination is not exactly rare though. I have no idea where I'd get that kind of data or if it even exists, but maybe someone else does. Given that kind of data, an industry with a constant deficit of qualified senior level candidates would do well to improve that situation by figuring out how to reduce the dropouts.

notanzaiiswear 5y ago

They left out actual subjects chosen by students in the article. Still, doesn't that story also point to a surplus of engineers?

exporectomy 5y ago
Computer science is the 3rd most popular subject for men but 18th for women. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-bachelors-degrees-awarded-gender-subject-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-bachelors-... Women really really like to study subjects related to people - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting" is more popular among women than computer science.