10 ms·

Can we learn from other industries that are facing similar challenges? I'm certainly impressed with the medical and legal professions for dramatically improving

Can we learn from other industries that are facing similar challenges? I'm certainly impressed with the medical and legal professions for dramatically improving the gender balance in the past 30 years[1]. Can we adopt some of the strategies learned there? Google's changes in maternity leave [2] dramatically increased their retention of new mothers but retention is different than attraction and promotion. The "sexual harassment" training at my old fortune 500 job certainly didn't have any helpful information about encouraging diversity aside from don't do anything that could you sued... [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women-are-doctors-and-lawyers-than-ever-but-progress-is-stalling/266115/ http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women-... [2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/28/google_maternity_leave_key_to_keeping_women_.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/28/google_mater...

rayiner 12y ago
The cold reality is that the way to increase the gender ratio is to hire more women. That's what happened in the legal profession: law schools made it a point to get gender-balanced classes, and law firms supported that by hiring gender-balanced classes of new associates. I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. You can say that people shouldn't care about same-gender mentors and co-workers, etc, but at the end of the day, people care about fitting in and they don't want to have to ride against the current their whole career. A bright young woman considering law school, where she'll be in a 50-50 environment, or engineering school, where she'll be in a 20-80 environment, has a natural disinclination to choose the latter.
- apsec112 12y ago
  At almost every tech company, the applicant pool is mostly men. To get a 50/50 employee ratio, you'd have to vastly lower hiring standards for women. In most countries that's illegal (discrimination in hiring on the basis of sex), but even ignoring that, you'd be creating a work environment where the average woman was much less capable than the average man. Is that really what you want? (And likewise for universities.)
  - jolux 12y ago
    No, you wouldn't have to lower your standards. There are plenty of capable women out there. The issue is hiring them and hiring less men as a result, which is what you're not comfortable with doing.
    - harryh 12y ago
      This is wrong. Most tech companies find it difficult or impossible to meet their current hiring needs. There are already slots left empty.
      - jolux 12y ago
        Does it not occur to you that they find it difficult because they are subconsciously ignoring worthy female candidates?
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        cheepin 12y ago
        This seems a bit naive. In my time at university, I have never seen a female computer science major have trouble finding opportunities, even if they were miserable coders. The fact that they bring "balance and diversity" to a team apparently is already enough of a qualification for some companies.
        harryh 12y ago
        That definitely has occurred to me! I would even broaden it to say that I (or my company or my industry) might be subconsciously undervaluing lots of candidates that don't fit the white (or asian) male nerd stereotype. That being said, I think the undersupply of programmers is so severe that even if this subconscious bias was corrected it wouldn't increase the supply of people enough that it would necessitate "hiring less men as a result."
      - UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession I agree, but law and medicine weren't always ~50% male/female and the comment you're replying to was suggesting we [tech] learn from them. So you can't dismiss it as an unsolvable problem that feeds itself (there aren't many female developers so it deters women to become developers) since this has been solved in law and medicine.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    Medicine had female nurses before it had female doctors, so maybe that helped?
    - e12e 12y ago
      I don't think so. It's (almost) like saying law firms had female secretaries. AFAIK most places have trouble recruiting enough male nurses (and probably secretaries?) -- so it's not like the gender balance is uniform across "legal" or "health".
      - jiggy2011 12y ago
        I'm thinking of the case where for example a female nurse encourages her daughter to become a doctor because it is a more aspirational career in the same field. OTOH a male doctor is probably not as likely to encourage his son to become a nurse because that is generally perceived as a step down in terms of prestige and pay.
- belorn 12y ago
  We can see the same problems in the psychology profession, with a 80-20 distribution in the work environment, and classrooms that often has over 90% female students. To quote nytimes: Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair. It seems eerily familiar, and the reports from male student feeling excluded seems to echo the exact same statement we can find in the tech profession from female students. What is not similar in the article is how the tech profession look at the result from gender distribution. The nytime article states that: the impact on the value of therapy is negligible. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one.
  - mrcarlosrendon 12y ago
    " A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one." - I disagree. As a male, I would prefer to see a male if possible as I would feel they could better understand and relate to men's issues. It's similar to how my wife prefers to see a female doctor.
  - njr123 12y ago
    This attitude makes me crazy. Women dominate PR, Nursing, Child care and Therapy? No problem, women are better at these jobs anyway Men dominate engineering? Patriarchy!
    - pron 12y ago
      An unequal gender ratio in, say, therapy is a problem, but it's much less of a problem than the one in engineering. The reason that's the case -- and should by no means make you crazy -- is that not all inequalities are equal. When people study gender and race biases, the first thing you should consider is the question of power: is there a group that is under-represented in certain seats of power? The tech industry is considered a much more significant source of power than psychotherapy (this is probably objectively true, but even if it weren't, being considered to hold more power makes it so), and so the underrepresentation of women in blacks in that industry is much more concerning and much more important. It's also the reason why the under-representation of whites in basketball is less concerning than that of blacks in Congress. Whites aren't marginalized away from power by being mostly absent from basketball, but the same cannot be said about blacks in politics.
- yarou 12y ago
  Or, the labor market in both tech and law is working perfectly rationally. Tech labor market barrier to entry > law industry labor market barrier to entry.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Can you concretely state what actions the legal and medical professions have taken that engineering/computing has not, and why you believe they made the difference? I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. It is indeed hard for activists/SJWs to admit that women's choices and intolerance of difference are partly the cause for women being underrepresented. But I suspect activists aren't the group you were referring to. Anecdotally I also don't think you statement "people care about" is correct, at least w.r.t. gender/race. Most of the white and asian men I know are far more likely to have a problem joining a group of Windows users or IDE users than a demographically different group.
johnny99 12y ago
Retention is directly related to promotion imo. You can't promote someone you can't keep. Very much agree that learning from other industries should happen, and I've asked myself the same question. Why is computer science moving backwards, when other traditionally male fields have become much more gender balanced?
- yarou 12y ago
  Retention is directly correlated with promotion, but I'd argue it's pretty weak. The counter-examples here are people who have been pigeonholed into a position for decades, and I could see that happening to a woman not only in tech, but in other industries as well. You also have to take into consideration that some people simply don't have ambition for anything beyond their current job. As for "computer science" moving backwards, I suspect the gender distribution would be similar in any other STEM related major. Nowadays, I question the validity of a CS major entirely. Yes, you will formalize your knowledge, but I think actually coding on your own will teach you more practical knowledge. Women historically tend not to be very well represented in disciplines with formal domains of knowledge, though this trend is changing, albeit slowly. People also tend to forget the pioneers of AI and formal CS theory had women who made great strides in the fields. So I'm not sure the industry is necessarily moving backwards. Perhaps it's not moving as fast as you want it to :)
  - rayiner 12y ago
    > As for "computer science" moving backwards, I suspect the gender distribution would be similar in any other STEM related major. You'd be wrong: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012 http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor.... The percentage of degrees conferred to women in CS is down from 35% in the mid-1980's to under 20% today. The field is in fact moving backwards. Meanwhile, over 40% of the degrees conferred in math & statistics and physical sciences (the "S" and "M" in "STEM") go to women.
    - seanflyon 12y ago
frostmatthew 12y ago
> I'm certainly impressed with the medical and legal professions for dramatically improving the gender balance in the past 30 years I'm equally impressed but do we a) know what they did and b) is their solution transferable to other professions?
pinkyand 12y ago
The gender balance is equal for law/medicine mostly at the school level[1]. And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles." And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning. Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently. And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ? [1]http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/ http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/ [2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seeing-the-world-in-black-and-white/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seei...

rayiner 12y ago

The cold reality is that the way to increase the gender ratio is to hire more women. That's what happened in the legal profession: law schools made it a point to get gender-balanced classes, and law firms supported that by hiring gender-balanced classes of new associates. I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. You can say that people shouldn't care about same-gender mentors and co-workers, etc, but at the end of the day, people care about fitting in and they don't want to have to ride against the current their whole career. A bright young woman considering law school, where she'll be in a 50-50 environment, or engineering school, where she'll be in a 20-80 environment, has a natural disinclination to choose the latter.

apsec112 12y ago
At almost every tech company, the applicant pool is mostly men. To get a 50/50 employee ratio, you'd have to vastly lower hiring standards for women. In most countries that's illegal (discrimination in hiring on the basis of sex), but even ignoring that, you'd be creating a work environment where the average woman was much less capable than the average man. Is that really what you want? (And likewise for universities.)
- jolux 12y ago
  No, you wouldn't have to lower your standards. There are plenty of capable women out there. The issue is hiring them and hiring less men as a result, which is what you're not comfortable with doing.
  - harryh 12y ago
    This is wrong. Most tech companies find it difficult or impossible to meet their current hiring needs. There are already slots left empty.
    - jolux 12y ago
      Does it not occur to you that they find it difficult because they are subconsciously ignoring worthy female candidates?
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - cheepin 12y ago
        This seems a bit naive. In my time at university, I have never seen a female computer science major have trouble finding opportunities, even if they were miserable coders. The fact that they bring "balance and diversity" to a team apparently is already enough of a qualification for some companies.
      - harryh 12y ago
        That definitely has occurred to me! I would even broaden it to say that I (or my company or my industry) might be subconsciously undervaluing lots of candidates that don't fit the white (or asian) male nerd stereotype. That being said, I think the undersupply of programmers is so severe that even if this subconscious bias was corrected it wouldn't increase the supply of people enough that it would necessitate "hiring less men as a result."
    - UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
frostmatthew 12y ago
> an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession I agree, but law and medicine weren't always ~50% male/female and the comment you're replying to was suggesting we [tech] learn from them. So you can't dismiss it as an unsolvable problem that feeds itself (there aren't many female developers so it deters women to become developers) since this has been solved in law and medicine.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  Medicine had female nurses before it had female doctors, so maybe that helped?
  - e12e 12y ago
    I don't think so. It's (almost) like saying law firms had female secretaries. AFAIK most places have trouble recruiting enough male nurses (and probably secretaries?) -- so it's not like the gender balance is uniform across "legal" or "health".
    - jiggy2011 12y ago
      I'm thinking of the case where for example a female nurse encourages her daughter to become a doctor because it is a more aspirational career in the same field. OTOH a male doctor is probably not as likely to encourage his son to become a nurse because that is generally perceived as a step down in terms of prestige and pay.
belorn 12y ago
We can see the same problems in the psychology profession, with a 80-20 distribution in the work environment, and classrooms that often has over 90% female students. To quote nytimes: Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair. It seems eerily familiar, and the reports from male student feeling excluded seems to echo the exact same statement we can find in the tech profession from female students. What is not similar in the article is how the tech profession look at the result from gender distribution. The nytime article states that: the impact on the value of therapy is negligible. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one.
- mrcarlosrendon 12y ago
  " A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one." - I disagree. As a male, I would prefer to see a male if possible as I would feel they could better understand and relate to men's issues. It's similar to how my wife prefers to see a female doctor.
- njr123 12y ago
  This attitude makes me crazy. Women dominate PR, Nursing, Child care and Therapy? No problem, women are better at these jobs anyway Men dominate engineering? Patriarchy!
  - pron 12y ago
    An unequal gender ratio in, say, therapy is a problem, but it's much less of a problem than the one in engineering. The reason that's the case -- and should by no means make you crazy -- is that not all inequalities are equal. When people study gender and race biases, the first thing you should consider is the question of power: is there a group that is under-represented in certain seats of power? The tech industry is considered a much more significant source of power than psychotherapy (this is probably objectively true, but even if it weren't, being considered to hold more power makes it so), and so the underrepresentation of women in blacks in that industry is much more concerning and much more important. It's also the reason why the under-representation of whites in basketball is less concerning than that of blacks in Congress. Whites aren't marginalized away from power by being mostly absent from basketball, but the same cannot be said about blacks in politics.
yarou 12y ago
Or, the labor market in both tech and law is working perfectly rationally. Tech labor market barrier to entry > law industry labor market barrier to entry.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Can you concretely state what actions the legal and medical professions have taken that engineering/computing has not, and why you believe they made the difference? I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. It is indeed hard for activists/SJWs to admit that women's choices and intolerance of difference are partly the cause for women being underrepresented. But I suspect activists aren't the group you were referring to. Anecdotally I also don't think you statement "people care about" is correct, at least w.r.t. gender/race. Most of the white and asian men I know are far more likely to have a problem joining a group of Windows users or IDE users than a demographically different group.

johnny99 12y ago

Retention is directly related to promotion imo. You can't promote someone you can't keep. Very much agree that learning from other industries should happen, and I've asked myself the same question. Why is computer science moving backwards, when other traditionally male fields have become much more gender balanced?

yarou 12y ago
Retention is directly correlated with promotion, but I'd argue it's pretty weak. The counter-examples here are people who have been pigeonholed into a position for decades, and I could see that happening to a woman not only in tech, but in other industries as well. You also have to take into consideration that some people simply don't have ambition for anything beyond their current job. As for "computer science" moving backwards, I suspect the gender distribution would be similar in any other STEM related major. Nowadays, I question the validity of a CS major entirely. Yes, you will formalize your knowledge, but I think actually coding on your own will teach you more practical knowledge. Women historically tend not to be very well represented in disciplines with formal domains of knowledge, though this trend is changing, albeit slowly. People also tend to forget the pioneers of AI and formal CS theory had women who made great strides in the fields. So I'm not sure the industry is necessarily moving backwards. Perhaps it's not moving as fast as you want it to :)
- rayiner 12y ago
  > As for "computer science" moving backwards, I suspect the gender distribution would be similar in any other STEM related major. You'd be wrong: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012 http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor.... The percentage of degrees conferred to women in CS is down from 35% in the mid-1980's to under 20% today. The field is in fact moving backwards. Meanwhile, over 40% of the degrees conferred in math & statistics and physical sciences (the "S" and "M" in "STEM") go to women.
  - seanflyon 12y ago

frostmatthew 12y ago

> I'm certainly impressed with the medical and legal professions for dramatically improving the gender balance in the past 30 years I'm equally impressed but do we a) know what they did and b) is their solution transferable to other professions?

pinkyand 12y ago

The gender balance is equal for law/medicine mostly at the school level[1]. And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles." And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning. Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently. And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ? [1]http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/ http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/ [2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seeing-the-world-in-black-and-white/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seei...