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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

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...
      - twic 5y ago
        The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating a computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a secretary, so ideally suited to women. Then we got 8-bit microcomputers in every home, and operating a computer became a technical hobby, so ideally suited to boys. The generation of boys growing up playing with computers, and girls not playing with computers, swamped any existing biases in the industry. I wonder if the communist countries had the former phase, but because not so many homes had computers, not the latter.
        notanzaiiswear 5y ago
        How many women were in electronics? I think the 8 Bit Homecomputer thing grew out of the electronics hobby, not office computers.
    - oldsecondhand 5y ago
      It's a legacy of socialist systems where you can have 2 years of paid maternity leave and then go back to your previous job.
      - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
        Also I guess you HAVE to go back to your job. Everybody has to do their part for society.
        Aerroon 5y ago
        The Soviet Union also tried to encourage having children. Not only did they have maternity leave, there was even a 6% income tax on childlessness.
        burntoutfire 5y ago
        Not true, at least not in Communist Poland. Jobless single men were sometimes prosecuted, but a stay-at-home-mom was something completely normal in families which could afford it (which there weren't that many of).
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      I was born in USSR and I don't recall any aspect there that would amount to "enforcing gender ratios". The way I recall the "gender politics" of the communist 1980s was that formally, gender was effectively ignored; in practice there were quite some prejudices; but the notion of discrimination wasn't even discussed much so anything similar to "affirmative action" or even caring about gender ratio would be quite alien to that regime. And yes, there were proportionally quite many female engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls with good STEM results would go to math and computer science fields instead of all the programs with a focus on heavy industry - but even those had a decent proportion of female engineers.
  - mpweiher 5y ago
    That's the gender-equality paradox, STEM version: the more gender-equal a society, the more the genders self-segregate occupationally. It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution. The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative. This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly. And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced. These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
- 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).

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...
    - twic 5y ago
      The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating a computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a secretary, so ideally suited to women. Then we got 8-bit microcomputers in every home, and operating a computer became a technical hobby, so ideally suited to boys. The generation of boys growing up playing with computers, and girls not playing with computers, swamped any existing biases in the industry. I wonder if the communist countries had the former phase, but because not so many homes had computers, not the latter.
      - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
        How many women were in electronics? I think the 8 Bit Homecomputer thing grew out of the electronics hobby, not office computers.
  - oldsecondhand 5y ago
    It's a legacy of socialist systems where you can have 2 years of paid maternity leave and then go back to your previous job.
    - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
      Also I guess you HAVE to go back to your job. Everybody has to do their part for society.
      - Aerroon 5y ago
        The Soviet Union also tried to encourage having children. Not only did they have maternity leave, there was even a 6% income tax on childlessness.
      - burntoutfire 5y ago
        Not true, at least not in Communist Poland. Jobless single men were sometimes prosecuted, but a stay-at-home-mom was something completely normal in families which could afford it (which there weren't that many of).
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    I was born in USSR and I don't recall any aspect there that would amount to "enforcing gender ratios". The way I recall the "gender politics" of the communist 1980s was that formally, gender was effectively ignored; in practice there were quite some prejudices; but the notion of discrimination wasn't even discussed much so anything similar to "affirmative action" or even caring about gender ratio would be quite alien to that regime. And yes, there were proportionally quite many female engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls with good STEM results would go to math and computer science fields instead of all the programs with a focus on heavy industry - but even those had a decent proportion of female engineers.
- mpweiher 5y ago
  That's the gender-equality paradox, STEM version: the more gender-equal a society, the more the genders self-segregate occupationally. It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution. The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative. This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly. And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced. These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
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).