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Maybe men don't care about working at a beautify salon? More likely though Real Men(TM) don't want to be hairdressers! That's only for flaming homosexuals! N

Maybe men don't care about working at a beautify salon? More likely though Real Men(TM) don't want to be hairdressers! That's only for flaming homosexuals! Never underestimate the power of a good social taboo. Now, given that there aren't a lot of gender taboos against women working on Wikipedia or in technology startups, then it seems to me that at least the latter has to be a career choice issue. I think there are very strong reasons to think that men value security and stability of employment less than women, and so are going to be overrepresented in environments which are more risky and less stable than women are. If this is a problem the question is what we do to compensate. Would Marissa Mayer have been able to put in 130 hour work weeks as a new mom? Of course not. That our industry demands such may in fact be the problem.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
If hairdressing were a multi-billion dollar global industry and the foundation of almost the entirety of the future economy that would be more of a problem. Tech, however, is big, important, and getting bigger.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  However, if other industries and businesses are indications, as the industry matures, women will come. The internet used to have a 50:1 male to female ratio. Open source software engineering today has a similar ratio (compared to a 2:1 ratio in commercial software houses). Maybe the issue is that women don't want to work in a risky and immature industry. Especially when that involves potentially deferring or even giving up on plans to have a family (something men do not have to do to participate in it). You can't be a new mother and try to raise your kid naturally (breastfeeding etc) and work 130 hours a week. It doesn't work.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Sure. But how many decades of unfair treatment and exclusionary culture are we willing to tolerate? Especially when you consider that tech is one of the most lucrative industries at present. How much money are people missing out on because of the exclusionary culture of tech? How much is the industry itself being held back?
    - einhverfr 14y ago
      Ok, so how about we offer a deal like this: 1) Put in 130 hours of work every week except for 3 weeks vacation per year, and 2 months parental leave, and medical leave as required by law. Start when you are 20. When you are 40 we will give you a retirement bonus of 30 million dollars. Is this exclusionary to women? I ask because I think the very clear answer is yes. I don't think the key issues are in terms of an exclusionary culture. I think the key issues regarding startups are structural and expectation-based. I don't think it's any coincidence that Marissa Mayer waited until Google was a big mainstream company to get pregnant. So what do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking maybe about starting a family?
      - InclinedPlane 14y ago
        This is just an illustration of the problem. Look, working crazy hours is absolutely, positively NOT in any way a requirement for success in the tech industry. It's not even a very good way to get work done. But it is commonplace. And it is taken as a shibboleth within this industry. And it does exclude people, especially women but others as well. What do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking about starting a family? What do you tell a 28 year old man who is thinking about starting a family? I'd say that if you do your homework, concentrate on learning, and work in a smart way then you can manage to make an excellent living working from home, which is fantastic for supporting a family, whether you're a guy or a gal.
        einhverfr 14y ago
        It's a requirement for an engineering position in a technology start-up, which is a prerequisite for the top-tier success. As for what to tell a 28 year old man. Most of them recognize that they may have to take their paternity leave late, or only take the minimum. But the fact that this is an option places the 28 year old man in a very different position than the 28 year old woman. As for the crazy hours deal, I can't imagine many women taking that deal. I can imagine many women pressuring their husbands to take that deal though.
- tomwalker 14y ago
  Medicine is a huge industry. Where I am from, women are 70 percent of entrants. They still get help with applications (women in medicine career days etc). They are more likely to take long career breaks and work part time. In the UK, where the tax payer pays for education + all treatment this is not cost efficient. I don't have a link but a recent bmj article showed over a career, 1.7 women cover the same hours as men excluding time off for illness. If I was to suggest a "men in medicine" society I would be shunned for trying to make a new generation of 'the old boys club'. In fact, my club would probably be considered illegal due to discrimination. If I was to suggest that moves were made to make medical school 50:50 admission then I would be laughed at despite decades of pushing for increased female intake. Men are often told we have the best of it but we also have the worst. Homelessness, drug abuse, assault, suicide, car accidents, alcoholism etc are all higher in men. When I did some time doing general practice (primary care) I realised that the amount of men aged 40-80 that live by themselves and are alone is huge in comparison to the amount of females. Let's keep things simple. Stop the social engineering. If more men go to school to be engineers then so be it. If a female is in your engineering class then she shouldn't be treated differently- she shouldn't have more chance of getting a job either if she gets the same grades. If we "need" to push more women into tech then why shouldn't we push them out of other careers in the name of equality. Edit: For clarity, I don't believe that we should 'rebalance' medicine, I was being sarcastic.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    At the same time it is interesting to see this statistic and it is evidence that women will enter an industry despite cultural barriers in that industry. There are subtle anti-woman biases in medicine which are far more pervasive than anything I have seen in the software industry. For example, if you look at gender in diagrams in medical textbooks, male figures are more likely to represent healthy, normal body functioning while female figures are more likely to be used where the figure represents disease.[1] Self-degrading Real Men(tm) jokes[2] aside I don't see anything similar to that in the software industry. The big difference is that medicine is a relatively stable industry and you don't have the huge pushes to release a product that you do in the tech industry. Physicians often are better able to set their own hours and decide how much to work than can software engineers working for Marissa Mayer. So for a woman wanting to have a stable, secure career which is friendly towards starting a family will find medicine very appealing and high tech startups rather threatening. On the other hand if Google was having trouble recruiting women now, I would suggest they have a problem. [1] See "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. This is also a wonderful critique of systemic sexism in modern obstetrics of a sort that does not go away with more women entering the field. [2] such as Linus Torvald's "Real men don't use backups. They upload their work on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror them." Or things like "Real men use cat to write their source files." Obviously this is not suggesting these are normal models of operation.
deleted 14y ago
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InclinedPlane 14y ago

If hairdressing were a multi-billion dollar global industry and the foundation of almost the entirety of the future economy that would be more of a problem. Tech, however, is big, important, and getting bigger.

einhverfr 14y ago
However, if other industries and businesses are indications, as the industry matures, women will come. The internet used to have a 50:1 male to female ratio. Open source software engineering today has a similar ratio (compared to a 2:1 ratio in commercial software houses). Maybe the issue is that women don't want to work in a risky and immature industry. Especially when that involves potentially deferring or even giving up on plans to have a family (something men do not have to do to participate in it). You can't be a new mother and try to raise your kid naturally (breastfeeding etc) and work 130 hours a week. It doesn't work.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Sure. But how many decades of unfair treatment and exclusionary culture are we willing to tolerate? Especially when you consider that tech is one of the most lucrative industries at present. How much money are people missing out on because of the exclusionary culture of tech? How much is the industry itself being held back?
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    Ok, so how about we offer a deal like this: 1) Put in 130 hours of work every week except for 3 weeks vacation per year, and 2 months parental leave, and medical leave as required by law. Start when you are 20. When you are 40 we will give you a retirement bonus of 30 million dollars. Is this exclusionary to women? I ask because I think the very clear answer is yes. I don't think the key issues are in terms of an exclusionary culture. I think the key issues regarding startups are structural and expectation-based. I don't think it's any coincidence that Marissa Mayer waited until Google was a big mainstream company to get pregnant. So what do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking maybe about starting a family?
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      This is just an illustration of the problem. Look, working crazy hours is absolutely, positively NOT in any way a requirement for success in the tech industry. It's not even a very good way to get work done. But it is commonplace. And it is taken as a shibboleth within this industry. And it does exclude people, especially women but others as well. What do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking about starting a family? What do you tell a 28 year old man who is thinking about starting a family? I'd say that if you do your homework, concentrate on learning, and work in a smart way then you can manage to make an excellent living working from home, which is fantastic for supporting a family, whether you're a guy or a gal.
      - einhverfr 14y ago
        It's a requirement for an engineering position in a technology start-up, which is a prerequisite for the top-tier success. As for what to tell a 28 year old man. Most of them recognize that they may have to take their paternity leave late, or only take the minimum. But the fact that this is an option places the 28 year old man in a very different position than the 28 year old woman. As for the crazy hours deal, I can't imagine many women taking that deal. I can imagine many women pressuring their husbands to take that deal though.
tomwalker 14y ago
Medicine is a huge industry. Where I am from, women are 70 percent of entrants. They still get help with applications (women in medicine career days etc). They are more likely to take long career breaks and work part time. In the UK, where the tax payer pays for education + all treatment this is not cost efficient. I don't have a link but a recent bmj article showed over a career, 1.7 women cover the same hours as men excluding time off for illness. If I was to suggest a "men in medicine" society I would be shunned for trying to make a new generation of 'the old boys club'. In fact, my club would probably be considered illegal due to discrimination. If I was to suggest that moves were made to make medical school 50:50 admission then I would be laughed at despite decades of pushing for increased female intake. Men are often told we have the best of it but we also have the worst. Homelessness, drug abuse, assault, suicide, car accidents, alcoholism etc are all higher in men. When I did some time doing general practice (primary care) I realised that the amount of men aged 40-80 that live by themselves and are alone is huge in comparison to the amount of females. Let's keep things simple. Stop the social engineering. If more men go to school to be engineers then so be it. If a female is in your engineering class then she shouldn't be treated differently- she shouldn't have more chance of getting a job either if she gets the same grades. If we "need" to push more women into tech then why shouldn't we push them out of other careers in the name of equality. Edit: For clarity, I don't believe that we should 'rebalance' medicine, I was being sarcastic.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- einhverfr 14y ago
  At the same time it is interesting to see this statistic and it is evidence that women will enter an industry despite cultural barriers in that industry. There are subtle anti-woman biases in medicine which are far more pervasive than anything I have seen in the software industry. For example, if you look at gender in diagrams in medical textbooks, male figures are more likely to represent healthy, normal body functioning while female figures are more likely to be used where the figure represents disease.[1] Self-degrading Real Men(tm) jokes[2] aside I don't see anything similar to that in the software industry. The big difference is that medicine is a relatively stable industry and you don't have the huge pushes to release a product that you do in the tech industry. Physicians often are better able to set their own hours and decide how much to work than can software engineers working for Marissa Mayer. So for a woman wanting to have a stable, secure career which is friendly towards starting a family will find medicine very appealing and high tech startups rather threatening. On the other hand if Google was having trouble recruiting women now, I would suggest they have a problem. [1] See "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. This is also a wonderful critique of systemic sexism in modern obstetrics of a sort that does not go away with more women entering the field. [2] such as Linus Torvald's "Real men don't use backups. They upload their work on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror them." Or things like "Real men use cat to write their source files." Obviously this is not suggesting these are normal models of operation.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]