5 ms·

I for one only actually care about women in tech to improve my dating pool. Not sure what more minorities would do for me.

by coor 14y ago

rdl 14y ago
I care about the "people in tech" pool containing as high a percentage of the "qualified people who could be in tech" as possible, as both a hirer and a buyer/user of tech. If there are qualified women or minorities who aren't working in tech for artificial reasons (their early-childhood education deterring them, racism or sexism in the workplace, etc.), that affects me as a white man. I don't have as much self-interest in whether people from Ohio, Eskimos, or women are proportionally represented. (I sort of care in an abstract way, because tech jobs are great and a good way to live a happy life, but if there were some innate reason why gingers were comparatively far better at medicine than at tech, I wouldn't cry that there were few gingers in tech.) The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this.
- rayiner 14y ago
  > The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this. It really doesn't, for two reasons. 1) the rational actor model is a bad abstraction, and irrational prejudice can be an important factor; 2) there are various "bootstrap" problems in any given field that can keep unbalanced equillibria even in situations where discriminatory forces aren't actively pushing things towards those equillibria. Women in tech is actually a striking example of this phenomenon. If you look at "qualified" in terms of something measurable like Math SAT scores above 600 (typical for a decent engineering program), women are dramatically underrepresented relative to their qualifications. You would think there would be strong pressures to get more women into the field, given the ostensible shortage of engineers, but companies make no such attempts (partly because the self-selection happens long before they can really influence things, and partly because of "boostrap" issues).
  - rdl 14y ago
    My experience (MIT, late 1990s) was that there were about 45% females to 55% males (+/- 5%), and in some programs (Biology, Earth Science) there were more females than males. CS undergrad was maybe 65:35, and Physics/Math were more skewed. I'm assuming everyone was approximately the same level of qualified coming in. I think "med school leads to a great career" was a major factor. Among people hiring, it's pretty common to actively search out new sources of candidates -- "Australia", x new education program, prior military service hires, etc. I agree the early stage problems need to be solved by someone other than those hiring in the short term, but it's absolutely the case that a qualified (female, black, whatever) candidate will get a fair shot at many (most?) companies today. In large organizations, there is still some pressure to hire those candidates preferentially, and even in a small startup, hiring female technical employees early is preferred because it makes it a lot easier to hire even 20-30% female employees later, vs. an all-male 20 person company trying to hire its first female technical employee. (Sorry, but I don't count employees as a single class -- if 100% of your engineers are male and you have a female office manager, that's not really the same thing as a company like Quora where the first hire was a great designer and front-end developer who happened to be both from Facebook and female.) So, hopefully solving the "demand side" also helps people solve the "supply side".
    - rayiner 14y ago
      There was an MIT study in the 1980s and 1990s that found that females were outperforming their SAT Math relative to males when it game to college GPA. So they adjusted the admissions process. As a result, females come in with roughly a 30-point lower SAT Math, but ultimately end up having similar GPAs once in school. So to get that 45/55 mix, the school did have to take affirmative measures. That said, MIT is way ahead of the industry on this. Only 18% of engineering graduates last year were women. This is despite the fact that about 45% of all high school seniors who score 600+ on the SAT Math, and 40% of all high school seniors who score 700+ on the SAT Math, are girls. Even at the perfect 800 level, it's 33% girls. And this isn't directed at you, but whenever I see "aptitude" in these discussions I get skeptical. A lot of people don't agree with the findings in the "Bell Curve", but even if we take those results to be completely true, the fact of the matter is that the differences don't really matter that much in the range we're talking about. It's an explanation for why there are so many fewer female Einsteins, not why there are so many fewer female Cisco engineers. And it's not even the math and tedium. I was pretty shocked to find that half of Big-4 accountants are women. About 30% of one major Big-4 firm's partners are women. These numbers blow away anything you see in engineering, in a field that is arguably much more numerically-intensive and boring. The fact is that the other professions are leaving engineering in the dust when it comes to making representation in the field equal to aptitude. Accounting firms and law firms are dealing with the next issue--which is how to have a strong representation of female partners while dealing with the fact that the partnership push coincides with women's prime reproductive years. And they're making progress on that issue. Engineering is in the rearview mirror, hanging with the neanderthals in banking.
joenathan 14y ago
What about minority women? that's a two for one.
- flexxaeon 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619

I for one only actually care about women in tech to improve my dating pool. Not sure what more minorities would do for me.

by coor 14y ago

I for one only actually care about women in tech to improve my dating pool. Not sure what more minorities would do for me.

rdl 14y ago

I care about the "people in tech" pool containing as high a percentage of the "qualified people who could be in tech" as possible, as both a hirer and a buyer/user of tech. If there are qualified women or minorities who aren't working in tech for artificial reasons (their early-childhood education deterring them, racism or sexism in the workplace, etc.), that affects me as a white man. I don't have as much self-interest in whether people from Ohio, Eskimos, or women are proportionally represented. (I sort of care in an abstract way, because tech jobs are great and a good way to live a happy life, but if there were some innate reason why gingers were comparatively far better at medicine than at tech, I wouldn't cry that there were few gingers in tech.) The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this.

rayiner 14y ago
> The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this. It really doesn't, for two reasons. 1) the rational actor model is a bad abstraction, and irrational prejudice can be an important factor; 2) there are various "bootstrap" problems in any given field that can keep unbalanced equillibria even in situations where discriminatory forces aren't actively pushing things towards those equillibria. Women in tech is actually a striking example of this phenomenon. If you look at "qualified" in terms of something measurable like Math SAT scores above 600 (typical for a decent engineering program), women are dramatically underrepresented relative to their qualifications. You would think there would be strong pressures to get more women into the field, given the ostensible shortage of engineers, but companies make no such attempts (partly because the self-selection happens long before they can really influence things, and partly because of "boostrap" issues).
- rdl 14y ago
  My experience (MIT, late 1990s) was that there were about 45% females to 55% males (+/- 5%), and in some programs (Biology, Earth Science) there were more females than males. CS undergrad was maybe 65:35, and Physics/Math were more skewed. I'm assuming everyone was approximately the same level of qualified coming in. I think "med school leads to a great career" was a major factor. Among people hiring, it's pretty common to actively search out new sources of candidates -- "Australia", x new education program, prior military service hires, etc. I agree the early stage problems need to be solved by someone other than those hiring in the short term, but it's absolutely the case that a qualified (female, black, whatever) candidate will get a fair shot at many (most?) companies today. In large organizations, there is still some pressure to hire those candidates preferentially, and even in a small startup, hiring female technical employees early is preferred because it makes it a lot easier to hire even 20-30% female employees later, vs. an all-male 20 person company trying to hire its first female technical employee. (Sorry, but I don't count employees as a single class -- if 100% of your engineers are male and you have a female office manager, that's not really the same thing as a company like Quora where the first hire was a great designer and front-end developer who happened to be both from Facebook and female.) So, hopefully solving the "demand side" also helps people solve the "supply side".
  - rayiner 14y ago
    There was an MIT study in the 1980s and 1990s that found that females were outperforming their SAT Math relative to males when it game to college GPA. So they adjusted the admissions process. As a result, females come in with roughly a 30-point lower SAT Math, but ultimately end up having similar GPAs once in school. So to get that 45/55 mix, the school did have to take affirmative measures. That said, MIT is way ahead of the industry on this. Only 18% of engineering graduates last year were women. This is despite the fact that about 45% of all high school seniors who score 600+ on the SAT Math, and 40% of all high school seniors who score 700+ on the SAT Math, are girls. Even at the perfect 800 level, it's 33% girls. And this isn't directed at you, but whenever I see "aptitude" in these discussions I get skeptical. A lot of people don't agree with the findings in the "Bell Curve", but even if we take those results to be completely true, the fact of the matter is that the differences don't really matter that much in the range we're talking about. It's an explanation for why there are so many fewer female Einsteins, not why there are so many fewer female Cisco engineers. And it's not even the math and tedium. I was pretty shocked to find that half of Big-4 accountants are women. About 30% of one major Big-4 firm's partners are women. These numbers blow away anything you see in engineering, in a field that is arguably much more numerically-intensive and boring. The fact is that the other professions are leaving engineering in the dust when it comes to making representation in the field equal to aptitude. Accounting firms and law firms are dealing with the next issue--which is how to have a strong representation of female partners while dealing with the fact that the partnership push coincides with women's prime reproductive years. And they're making progress on that issue. Engineering is in the rearview mirror, hanging with the neanderthals in banking.

joenathan 14y ago

What about minority women? that's a two for one.

flexxaeon 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619