5 ms·

Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

29 points by bjeanes 13y ago

acangiano 13y ago
It would be interesting to see if a similar visualization for nurses and primary education teachers would show a similar pattern (with the gender reversed, of course) or if the gap would have different characteristics and distribution.
- bjeanes 13y ago
  Indeed. That would be interesting. I haven't looked, but I wonder if the data is readily available...
- xbryanx 12y ago
  I agree. We would benefit from improved gender parity in these industries as well.
mynameisasdf 13y ago
Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?
- bmelton 13y ago
  I have a hard time imagining that there are many companies who benefit from a monoculture. Diversity equals truth, or more accurately, increases the likelihood of finding truth. If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor. Unless your product aims to solve a problem that only affects white guys in the city (which, to be fair, is certainly a non-negligible number of products), then you're going to have a hard time expanding your base beyond white guys in the city if your team consists of only white guys in the city.
  - ameister14 13y ago
    I don't think that is necessarily true; it implies that we cannot empathize with people that do not share at least racial and location characteristics with us. I think a white man can make a product for black women, and I think a black woman can make products for white men. For me, it's more about acknowledging that the world exists outside of white men in the city and less about making sure your team is made up of every racial and socio-economic variable you aim to market to.
    - bmelton 13y ago
      I do not disagree with that at all, and clearly, we've seen monocultures succeed at doing exactly that. I wasn't attempting to decry the methodology of every company with a monoculture, as much as to point out that it's just easier with actual diversity. As Vezzy-Fnord points out, a single individual is able to empathize with other types of people, but that empathy is finite, and also, empathy does not equal understanding.
  - vezzy-fnord 13y ago
    My main problem with the way many people handle the diversity issue has been exactly this: their major insistence on phenotypes as the pinnacle of diversity. It turns out that "white guys" are not a homogenous group. In fact, chances are that white guys from (e.g.) Finland, Serbia and Nebraska will have little in common besides their skin color and sex. Their opinions and worldviews will differ greatly. Diversity of opinion is just as important, if not more so. Sure, on the outside everyone looks like a pasty-faced white dude, but jumping to conclusions based solely on that, is... misguided, to put it euphemistically. I'm not saying we can't benefit from having a wide variety of phenotypes as well, after all different phenotypes equal different experiences. But not every white guy is a Bay Area caricature.
- Jugurtha 13y ago
  Exactly. This is stupid. There was some bogus Gallup "study" that says that companies performed 15% better when there were more women, and I call bullshit on this. They didn't say which companies, and in which fields these companies activate in.
- tg3 13y ago
  I can't tell if you're being serious, so I'll assume that you are. One google search led me to this study: "gender diversity generates significant gains in high-tech/ knowledge intensive sectors". http://ftp.iza.org/dp7350.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp7350.pdf
- Dirlewanger 13y ago
  This was only made for us to feel guilty about the status quo. People need to stop focusing intra-industry and look at the larger symptoms: this is a societal problem. This is how families at large are raising their children. If we want more women developers/entrepreneurs, we need to take a serious look at the gender roles we're setting up for girls as early as preschool. We need to stop the incessant "We need to fix the software industry blah blah blah" crap.
  - bjeanes 13y ago
    You aren't wrong, but this viewpoint is incomplete. That approach does nothing to stem the well-documented repelling forces that exist in the industry today and the anecdotal yet overwhelming accounts of women who are interested in these things feeling unwelcome and leaving. Asking someone who feels unwelcome to suck it up instead of introspecting on how we can do better now is ridiculous and morally questionable.
  - cheez 13y ago
    Except even feminist societies are finding that the women and men prefer the gender roles. Maybe "we" should feel guilty about socially engineering something that is proven to make people unhappy. Ironically, the happiness index in women is down in Western societies whereas the same measure for men, is up! And we can hardly argue that women are treated as less equal than they were in the 70s. People have a knee jerk reaction and say "oh yeah, that's because women have to do even more work now" where that isn't actually the case. Married women with traditional gender roles are actually happier than their married and equal counterparts. Now, I know I'm not providing any statistics or references but I would urge you to be on the lookout. They show up quite regularly and are easy to find once you are open to the concept. One good place to start is "Brainwash", a "documentary" by a comedian that actually resulted in a loss of funds to a gender studies institute. All this being said, I do not think a single one of us would say that a woman should not be encouraged to be a programmer. But to deny the joy that a woman can get from being a "traditional" mother as well as a programmer is unfair to an entire gender and unfairly creates a generation of latchkey children. I do not know a single mother or father who says "Yeah, I wish I spent less time with my kids."
Jugurtha 13y ago
"We can do better" translated to: Let us join the feminist bandwagon please. What's funny is that, even using infographics and stats to show how "unfair" it is, stats don't lie: The companies that have more than 18% women are mostly chick stuff: Fashion, blogging, etc. Hard core tech companies still employ mostly dudes, and they will continue to employ dudes. If they change that, they'll get into Gawker club. I am seeing this stupid trend recently. GE shared an article on their LinkedIn page, to which I replied with this [0]. Some company is paying teachers to teach girls to code, but they're not paid when they teach boys. This is absurd. This is stupid. There's a reason most jobs in tech are taken by men: - Most tech students are male. (So women start to get filtered out way before there's even a job involved - They pursue other stuff like marketing, arts, design, etc). There are few girls in Engineering. That's why Engineering students frequent girls who are not in Engineering. - Once they graduate, there are still more men than women applying for jobs in tech. A lot of women will do something else. There is less an urge for a woman to achieve something, and less drive, than there is for a man. If you disagree with me, you are dellusional since you are basically contradictin History and Biology and Now: How many Fortune 500 companies were started and are run by women. Thank you. It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime. However, let's not start writing crap. Heroku ? James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, Orion Henry. Three guys. Why isn't there a woman with you ? Is it that maybe you didn't know any woman who could fill in ? I ask those guys: When you were in Engineering ? How many girls were there, and from those girls, how many could hack it. I'm tired of this stupidity. I'm tired of this leveling from bottom. Soldiering isn't for everyone. Soon I'll make a petition asking the special forces to let me in: Why is it a problem for you to let me in, even if I can't lift a dude and run with him, even if I need a pillow to sleep !? Intolerant bastards ! Make a rule to lower your standards to suit me. And soon, people who don't bear the sight of blood will lobby to take blood out of surgery. Would you trust such a surgeon with your life ! Eww, blood ! [0]http://bitly.com/1oKeYZJ http://bitly.com/1oKeYZJ
- epistasis 13y ago
  I'm tired of tech missing out on so much potential from those with two X chromosomes. If tech was more inclusive, there would be far more great engineers to hire from. >It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime. Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we were young. I'm still stupid in many ways. But be careful about the stupid things that you record for posterity.
didgeoridoo 13y ago
No idea where the 37Signals number came from... this is the Basecamp team today: https://basecamp.com/team https://basecamp.com/team The Basecamp team is 8/43 women - NONE of whom are accounted for here. That's a huge factual miss on the very first company I recognized & fact-checked. Doesn't fill me with confidence.
- bjeanes 13y ago
  The data is crowd-sourced. Anybody can correct the numbers here https://github.com/triketora/women-in-software-eng https://github.com/triketora/women-in-software-eng
- arbutus 13y ago
  It sounds like this is specifically regarding the engineering teams. The graphic shows only twenty people at all at 37Signals.
bottompair 13y ago
I wonder just how long this discussion is going to go on. To me looking at who has jobs in tech broken down by gender is flawed from the beginning. The more interesting sociological question is whether there is a nurture thing happening here, or just a natural tendency for women to not be as interested in computers and technology at a young age. Boxing and MMX have way more men than women - why isn't there a "we can do better" campaign for these disciplines? By the way my co-founder CEO is a woman and she's an amazing technologist and leader.
forgottenpass 13y ago
Sorry for being so blunt, but I think I'm missing the message here. What exactly is the purpose of naming and shaming employers for exhibiting symptoms of such a lopsided talent pool? Presumably the target audience is not unfamiliar with the gender disparity in tech. If they are unfamiliar there exists data about the industry in general that would be better suited to making a point to them. So, this is aimed at some subset of the industry, but it seems a bit nebulous because... Is it a call to action? "We Can Do Better"? OK, so who are the "we"? What are the actions to take towards doing better? (I mean, more specific the obvious end goal of gender equality in our industry.) With or without specific calls to actions, why is this broken down on a per-employer basis? Should deviations from industry average be celebrated and booed? Is it an attempt to put pressure on the employers, if so to what end? Or is this just a novel way of reiterating a statistic that the target audience already knows?
mathattack 13y ago
I don't follow this chart. If the right (male) side is further to the right of 50%, shouldn't the left (female) side be proportionally to the left of the 50% too? The average line doesn't line up either. It's a real issue, but the chart doesn't work well on my browser.
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  The center point of the chart is 0%. As a dot moves to either the left or the right, it shows some number greater than 0% until it reaches 100%. No company is going to have a dot at each of the edges... as you can not be both 100% male AND 100% female. The chart made more sense to me when I selected the "Sort By: Most Equal" option. The top few companies have a 50/50 split by gender. As you scroll down you will see those shift to the right for a more male-heavy company (mostly... some are female-heavy as well).
babyturtle 13y ago
Lets not be "sector-ists". We need more women garbage collectors, oil rig workers, soldiers, MMA fighters, night time security, bouncers, factory workers, miners, sewerage plant workers, construction workers. We need more men in cushy jobs like HR, PR, teaching primary schools, secretaries, modelling, etc

29 points by bjeanes 13y ago

It would be interesting to see if a similar visualization for nurses and primary education teachers would show a similar pattern (with the gender reversed, of course) or if the gap would have different characteristics and distribution.

bjeanes 13y ago
Indeed. That would be interesting. I haven't looked, but I wonder if the data is readily available...
xbryanx 12y ago
I agree. We would benefit from improved gender parity in these industries as well.

mynameisasdf 13y ago

Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?

bmelton 13y ago
I have a hard time imagining that there are many companies who benefit from a monoculture. Diversity equals truth, or more accurately, increases the likelihood of finding truth. If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor. Unless your product aims to solve a problem that only affects white guys in the city (which, to be fair, is certainly a non-negligible number of products), then you're going to have a hard time expanding your base beyond white guys in the city if your team consists of only white guys in the city.
- ameister14 13y ago
  I don't think that is necessarily true; it implies that we cannot empathize with people that do not share at least racial and location characteristics with us. I think a white man can make a product for black women, and I think a black woman can make products for white men. For me, it's more about acknowledging that the world exists outside of white men in the city and less about making sure your team is made up of every racial and socio-economic variable you aim to market to.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    I do not disagree with that at all, and clearly, we've seen monocultures succeed at doing exactly that. I wasn't attempting to decry the methodology of every company with a monoculture, as much as to point out that it's just easier with actual diversity. As Vezzy-Fnord points out, a single individual is able to empathize with other types of people, but that empathy is finite, and also, empathy does not equal understanding.
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  My main problem with the way many people handle the diversity issue has been exactly this: their major insistence on phenotypes as the pinnacle of diversity. It turns out that "white guys" are not a homogenous group. In fact, chances are that white guys from (e.g.) Finland, Serbia and Nebraska will have little in common besides their skin color and sex. Their opinions and worldviews will differ greatly. Diversity of opinion is just as important, if not more so. Sure, on the outside everyone looks like a pasty-faced white dude, but jumping to conclusions based solely on that, is... misguided, to put it euphemistically. I'm not saying we can't benefit from having a wide variety of phenotypes as well, after all different phenotypes equal different experiences. But not every white guy is a Bay Area caricature.
Jugurtha 13y ago
Exactly. This is stupid. There was some bogus Gallup "study" that says that companies performed 15% better when there were more women, and I call bullshit on this. They didn't say which companies, and in which fields these companies activate in.
tg3 13y ago
I can't tell if you're being serious, so I'll assume that you are. One google search led me to this study: "gender diversity generates significant gains in high-tech/ knowledge intensive sectors". http://ftp.iza.org/dp7350.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp7350.pdf
Dirlewanger 13y ago
This was only made for us to feel guilty about the status quo. People need to stop focusing intra-industry and look at the larger symptoms: this is a societal problem. This is how families at large are raising their children. If we want more women developers/entrepreneurs, we need to take a serious look at the gender roles we're setting up for girls as early as preschool. We need to stop the incessant "We need to fix the software industry blah blah blah" crap.
- bjeanes 13y ago
  You aren't wrong, but this viewpoint is incomplete. That approach does nothing to stem the well-documented repelling forces that exist in the industry today and the anecdotal yet overwhelming accounts of women who are interested in these things feeling unwelcome and leaving. Asking someone who feels unwelcome to suck it up instead of introspecting on how we can do better now is ridiculous and morally questionable.
- cheez 13y ago
  Except even feminist societies are finding that the women and men prefer the gender roles. Maybe "we" should feel guilty about socially engineering something that is proven to make people unhappy. Ironically, the happiness index in women is down in Western societies whereas the same measure for men, is up! And we can hardly argue that women are treated as less equal than they were in the 70s. People have a knee jerk reaction and say "oh yeah, that's because women have to do even more work now" where that isn't actually the case. Married women with traditional gender roles are actually happier than their married and equal counterparts. Now, I know I'm not providing any statistics or references but I would urge you to be on the lookout. They show up quite regularly and are easy to find once you are open to the concept. One good place to start is "Brainwash", a "documentary" by a comedian that actually resulted in a loss of funds to a gender studies institute. All this being said, I do not think a single one of us would say that a woman should not be encouraged to be a programmer. But to deny the joy that a woman can get from being a "traditional" mother as well as a programmer is unfair to an entire gender and unfairly creates a generation of latchkey children. I do not know a single mother or father who says "Yeah, I wish I spent less time with my kids."

Jugurtha 13y ago

"We can do better" translated to: Let us join the feminist bandwagon please. What's funny is that, even using infographics and stats to show how "unfair" it is, stats don't lie: The companies that have more than 18% women are mostly chick stuff: Fashion, blogging, etc. Hard core tech companies still employ mostly dudes, and they will continue to employ dudes. If they change that, they'll get into Gawker club. I am seeing this stupid trend recently. GE shared an article on their LinkedIn page, to which I replied with this [0]. Some company is paying teachers to teach girls to code, but they're not paid when they teach boys. This is absurd. This is stupid. There's a reason most jobs in tech are taken by men: - Most tech students are male. (So women start to get filtered out way before there's even a job involved - They pursue other stuff like marketing, arts, design, etc). There are few girls in Engineering. That's why Engineering students frequent girls who are not in Engineering. - Once they graduate, there are still more men than women applying for jobs in tech. A lot of women will do something else. There is less an urge for a woman to achieve something, and less drive, than there is for a man. If you disagree with me, you are dellusional since you are basically contradictin History and Biology and Now: How many Fortune 500 companies were started and are run by women. Thank you. It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime. However, let's not start writing crap. Heroku ? James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, Orion Henry. Three guys. Why isn't there a woman with you ? Is it that maybe you didn't know any woman who could fill in ? I ask those guys: When you were in Engineering ? How many girls were there, and from those girls, how many could hack it. I'm tired of this stupidity. I'm tired of this leveling from bottom. Soldiering isn't for everyone. Soon I'll make a petition asking the special forces to let me in: Why is it a problem for you to let me in, even if I can't lift a dude and run with him, even if I need a pillow to sleep !? Intolerant bastards ! Make a rule to lower your standards to suit me. And soon, people who don't bear the sight of blood will lobby to take blood out of surgery. Would you trust such a surgeon with your life ! Eww, blood ! [0]http://bitly.com/1oKeYZJ http://bitly.com/1oKeYZJ

epistasis 13y ago
I'm tired of tech missing out on so much potential from those with two X chromosomes. If tech was more inclusive, there would be far more great engineers to hire from. >It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime. Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we were young. I'm still stupid in many ways. But be careful about the stupid things that you record for posterity.

didgeoridoo 13y ago

No idea where the 37Signals number came from... this is the Basecamp team today: https://basecamp.com/team https://basecamp.com/team The Basecamp team is 8/43 women - NONE of whom are accounted for here. That's a huge factual miss on the very first company I recognized & fact-checked. Doesn't fill me with confidence.

bjeanes 13y ago
The data is crowd-sourced. Anybody can correct the numbers here https://github.com/triketora/women-in-software-eng https://github.com/triketora/women-in-software-eng
arbutus 13y ago
It sounds like this is specifically regarding the engineering teams. The graphic shows only twenty people at all at 37Signals.

bottompair 13y ago

I wonder just how long this discussion is going to go on. To me looking at who has jobs in tech broken down by gender is flawed from the beginning. The more interesting sociological question is whether there is a nurture thing happening here, or just a natural tendency for women to not be as interested in computers and technology at a young age. Boxing and MMX have way more men than women - why isn't there a "we can do better" campaign for these disciplines? By the way my co-founder CEO is a woman and she's an amazing technologist and leader.

forgottenpass 13y ago

Sorry for being so blunt, but I think I'm missing the message here. What exactly is the purpose of naming and shaming employers for exhibiting symptoms of such a lopsided talent pool? Presumably the target audience is not unfamiliar with the gender disparity in tech. If they are unfamiliar there exists data about the industry in general that would be better suited to making a point to them. So, this is aimed at some subset of the industry, but it seems a bit nebulous because... Is it a call to action? "We Can Do Better"? OK, so who are the "we"? What are the actions to take towards doing better? (I mean, more specific the obvious end goal of gender equality in our industry.) With or without specific calls to actions, why is this broken down on a per-employer basis? Should deviations from industry average be celebrated and booed? Is it an attempt to put pressure on the employers, if so to what end? Or is this just a novel way of reiterating a statistic that the target audience already knows?

mathattack 13y ago

I don't follow this chart. If the right (male) side is further to the right of 50%, shouldn't the left (female) side be proportionally to the left of the 50% too? The average line doesn't line up either. It's a real issue, but the chart doesn't work well on my browser.

jack-r-abbit 13y ago
The center point of the chart is 0%. As a dot moves to either the left or the right, it shows some number greater than 0% until it reaches 100%. No company is going to have a dot at each of the edges... as you can not be both 100% male AND 100% female. The chart made more sense to me when I selected the "Sort By: Most Equal" option. The top few companies have a 50/50 split by gender. As you scroll down you will see those shift to the right for a more male-heavy company (mostly... some are female-heavy as well).

babyturtle 13y ago

Lets not be "sector-ists". We need more women garbage collectors, oil rig workers, soldiers, MMA fighters, night time security, bouncers, factory workers, miners, sewerage plant workers, construction workers. We need more men in cushy jobs like HR, PR, teaching primary schools, secretaries, modelling, etc