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I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from en

I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I think that to an extent these movements do more harm than good. Women should absolutely be made aware that tech is a viable career path for them as much as anyone else - yet it seems that as of late there's a sort of societal coercion that mimics that historically seen in gender dominated industries like welding for men or nursing for women.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.
- selestify 5y ago
  I don't disagree at all with making programming welcoming to newbies, but if Magic the Gathering were something you were really interested in picking up, wouldn't you look around for a newbie-friendly group to join instead of just giving up on the game altogether? How many of us started tinkering with programming at a young age out of pure curiosity or interest in how cool it is, without any regards for how viable of a career path it is later in life? It seems most of us who did just that were boys. At some point you have to consider that there's perhaps an innate aggregate imbalance in how interested each gender is in programming, or in how much each gender responds to financial incentives -- which would explaian both why countries that are more gender equal and more prosperous tend to have a greater degree of gender imbalance in STEM.
- fn-mote 5y ago
  > I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other > women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect Hate to say it, but 0 female engineers _is_ evidence... The assumption going in changes from "this is going to be ok" to "what is wrong with this workplace?" (Of course this depends on team size, etc., but this is my own personal read going in.)
- snarkypepperoni 5y ago
  > It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path. This was why I didn't get into STEM initially. It's not that I thought that engineering culture was toxic per se, but rather because the women I knew growing up didn't have careers, much less careers in technology.
vlovich123 5y ago
I think the general perception is that women often get turned off not by the work, but by the male-dominated environments. This can be due to subtle issues and sometimes due to non-subtle issues. You want to go out of your way to make it a friendly environment in those cases. Basically, do you want women to have the same shitty experience when they were breaking through various male-dominated fields in the past (e.g. medicine, law, business, etc) or do you want to be a welcoming host? It seems like as a profession we're still in the shitty part of the spectrum based on the horror stories I hear from my female friends in tech.
- MathCodeLove 5y ago
  The issue is the same in reverse. I've heard horrible anecdotes by male friends in female dominated industries such as teaching, nursing, etc. Why is the same societal push not happening in those industries? I never said we shouldn't strive to be welcoming and to cultivate a friendly environment for all, just that the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me. Shitty people are going to exist everywhere regardless. A twitter campaign shouting about the injustices of the industry and pushing for more women in technology isn't going to change that. The people that need to hear the message being conveyed there aren't going to listen, and the people who are listening don't need to hear the message because they likely aren't already shitty people.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Are you sure the current campaigns aren't effective? The demographics are indeed changing. I know causation correlation blah blah, but we're just speculating in this thread, supplying no data anyway.
    - MathCodeLove 5y ago
      I'm sure they're effective to some degree in terms of recruitment numbers. What I was alluding to in that comment was that the current campaigns likely won't dramatically reduce the number of "horror stories" we hear - which is the crux of the entire issue. The people that are the antagonist in those horror stories tend not to change their way's based on social media movements. Whereas, the people who are interacting with and encouraging those movements would likely never find themselves in the antagonist shoes anyway. It's a very small subset of the population that would actually see those movements and decide to change as a result, and that's better than none, but it's certainly not what I think most people supporting those movements wish to see as a result. Edit: grammar
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Perspective is valuable, and like it or not various demographics have inherently different perspectives due to a variety of factors. We need conscious effort to include more demographics because our industry is dominated by a very small number of them and therefore its culture is heavily biased towards them.
- MathCodeLove 5y ago
  This is a valid point, and I don't disagree that perspective is incredibly valuable. I just don't know if we've been going about it the right way. If someone is interested in technology, then we should make sure that it's as accessible to them as it is to anyone else. Yet, along with varying perspectives among varying demographics comes different interests and aspirations. In the process of pushing what we think other demographics should be aspiring to do are we not drowning out their own interests and aspirations? Are we not simultaneously warping the perspective we seek into one that more closely aligns with our own? It's 2021, anyone can google "well paying careers" see "software development" on the list and decide to pursue it. It should happen naturally, we should absolutely facilitate and encourage that natural convergence, but I think the artificial push is just as harmful as it is helpful.
selestify 5y ago
I think it's based on the assumption that if all cultural factors were removed, an equal number of men and women would be in software engineering. And so, by modus tollens, the current gender ratio of the industry is a damning indicator of how much cultural bias still needs to be fought against. Personally I think that's a flawed assumption. While there are certainly cultural biases at play still, there are also aggregate differences between the genders that most likely means the "natural" gender ratio will still be skewed towards men. This is unfortunately a taboo topic to make note of, and is absolutely not up for discussion in most workplaces (see the Damore scandal), and so the fetishism you note persists.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  It’s definitely a fraught topic, but if you go in using loaded language like “fetishism” to describe a position that many people have rationally arrived at in good faith, then yeah people are going to call you a jerk. Part of the reason that I don’t think your paragraph 1 assumption is flawed is that there is evidence that men and women were equally interested in programming before the 80’s, but that a combination of cultural and societal factors came into play in that decade that branded computers as a “boy thing” and resulted in women being pressured out of the pipeline from a young age. But even if you can find some sort of counterargument for that, my overriding reason why I stick with this assumption is as follows: decade after decade, people insisted that women weren’t into $career. And one by one, women have found their way into those careers (factory work in WWII, the executive suite more recently, plenty of other examples in between). In each case, the people saying women weren’t into $career had an argument that seemed to make sense, often relying on some combination of status quo statistics and hand-wavy conclusions drawn from psychology. And they were wrong. So when I see those same arguments brought out again for this career (often with some exhortation that “this time is different”) I generally dismiss them, as the epistemology they’re based on has a bad track record. With all that being said, when it comes to actions, I’ll be more likely to encourage women to get into programming if I get a sense they might be interested in it. However, when it comes to interviewing candidates, I will not grade people on a curve based on their identity, as it is my belief that men and women can in fact be equally good at programming and should be held to the same standard.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago

It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.

selestify 5y ago
I don't disagree at all with making programming welcoming to newbies, but if Magic the Gathering were something you were really interested in picking up, wouldn't you look around for a newbie-friendly group to join instead of just giving up on the game altogether? How many of us started tinkering with programming at a young age out of pure curiosity or interest in how cool it is, without any regards for how viable of a career path it is later in life? It seems most of us who did just that were boys. At some point you have to consider that there's perhaps an innate aggregate imbalance in how interested each gender is in programming, or in how much each gender responds to financial incentives -- which would explaian both why countries that are more gender equal and more prosperous tend to have a greater degree of gender imbalance in STEM.
fn-mote 5y ago
> I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other > women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect Hate to say it, but 0 female engineers _is_ evidence... The assumption going in changes from "this is going to be ok" to "what is wrong with this workplace?" (Of course this depends on team size, etc., but this is my own personal read going in.)
snarkypepperoni 5y ago
> It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path. This was why I didn't get into STEM initially. It's not that I thought that engineering culture was toxic per se, but rather because the women I knew growing up didn't have careers, much less careers in technology.

vlovich123 5y ago

I think the general perception is that women often get turned off not by the work, but by the male-dominated environments. This can be due to subtle issues and sometimes due to non-subtle issues. You want to go out of your way to make it a friendly environment in those cases. Basically, do you want women to have the same shitty experience when they were breaking through various male-dominated fields in the past (e.g. medicine, law, business, etc) or do you want to be a welcoming host? It seems like as a profession we're still in the shitty part of the spectrum based on the horror stories I hear from my female friends in tech.

MathCodeLove 5y ago
The issue is the same in reverse. I've heard horrible anecdotes by male friends in female dominated industries such as teaching, nursing, etc. Why is the same societal push not happening in those industries? I never said we shouldn't strive to be welcoming and to cultivate a friendly environment for all, just that the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me. Shitty people are going to exist everywhere regardless. A twitter campaign shouting about the injustices of the industry and pushing for more women in technology isn't going to change that. The people that need to hear the message being conveyed there aren't going to listen, and the people who are listening don't need to hear the message because they likely aren't already shitty people.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Are you sure the current campaigns aren't effective? The demographics are indeed changing. I know causation correlation blah blah, but we're just speculating in this thread, supplying no data anyway.
  - MathCodeLove 5y ago
    I'm sure they're effective to some degree in terms of recruitment numbers. What I was alluding to in that comment was that the current campaigns likely won't dramatically reduce the number of "horror stories" we hear - which is the crux of the entire issue. The people that are the antagonist in those horror stories tend not to change their way's based on social media movements. Whereas, the people who are interacting with and encouraging those movements would likely never find themselves in the antagonist shoes anyway. It's a very small subset of the population that would actually see those movements and decide to change as a result, and that's better than none, but it's certainly not what I think most people supporting those movements wish to see as a result. Edit: grammar

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Perspective is valuable, and like it or not various demographics have inherently different perspectives due to a variety of factors. We need conscious effort to include more demographics because our industry is dominated by a very small number of them and therefore its culture is heavily biased towards them.

MathCodeLove 5y ago
This is a valid point, and I don't disagree that perspective is incredibly valuable. I just don't know if we've been going about it the right way. If someone is interested in technology, then we should make sure that it's as accessible to them as it is to anyone else. Yet, along with varying perspectives among varying demographics comes different interests and aspirations. In the process of pushing what we think other demographics should be aspiring to do are we not drowning out their own interests and aspirations? Are we not simultaneously warping the perspective we seek into one that more closely aligns with our own? It's 2021, anyone can google "well paying careers" see "software development" on the list and decide to pursue it. It should happen naturally, we should absolutely facilitate and encourage that natural convergence, but I think the artificial push is just as harmful as it is helpful.

selestify 5y ago

I think it's based on the assumption that if all cultural factors were removed, an equal number of men and women would be in software engineering. And so, by modus tollens, the current gender ratio of the industry is a damning indicator of how much cultural bias still needs to be fought against. Personally I think that's a flawed assumption. While there are certainly cultural biases at play still, there are also aggregate differences between the genders that most likely means the "natural" gender ratio will still be skewed towards men. This is unfortunately a taboo topic to make note of, and is absolutely not up for discussion in most workplaces (see the Damore scandal), and so the fetishism you note persists.

Uehreka 5y ago
It’s definitely a fraught topic, but if you go in using loaded language like “fetishism” to describe a position that many people have rationally arrived at in good faith, then yeah people are going to call you a jerk. Part of the reason that I don’t think your paragraph 1 assumption is flawed is that there is evidence that men and women were equally interested in programming before the 80’s, but that a combination of cultural and societal factors came into play in that decade that branded computers as a “boy thing” and resulted in women being pressured out of the pipeline from a young age. But even if you can find some sort of counterargument for that, my overriding reason why I stick with this assumption is as follows: decade after decade, people insisted that women weren’t into $career. And one by one, women have found their way into those careers (factory work in WWII, the executive suite more recently, plenty of other examples in between). In each case, the people saying women weren’t into $career had an argument that seemed to make sense, often relying on some combination of status quo statistics and hand-wavy conclusions drawn from psychology. And they were wrong. So when I see those same arguments brought out again for this career (often with some exhortation that “this time is different”) I generally dismiss them, as the epistemology they’re based on has a bad track record. With all that being said, when it comes to actions, I’ll be more likely to encourage women to get into programming if I get a sense they might be interested in it. However, when it comes to interviewing candidates, I will not grade people on a curve based on their identity, as it is my belief that men and women can in fact be equally good at programming and should be held to the same standard.