4 ms·

> What does it mean to "leave the field"? You can read it in the linked article: http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/ http://fortune.com/201

• malandrew 11y ago
  How do they make a living if they aren't working at all? That seems like a shockingly high figure of people who have the means to avoid any sort of labor productivity. I can only conclude that "are not working today" is loosely defined or that these people were unfit for working at all, since someone that has the means to quit work and not have to look for other work elsewhere probably hasn't lead a very rigorous labor existence. Also, this appears to be study of only the ones that left. I'm certain I could find 716 men that left the tech industry too, and come up with a set of reasons why they left. Looks like a classic case of selection bias. There doesn't appear to be one women who stayed in the industry in that study. Does that mean I should conclude from this study that 100% of women leave tech? Simply put, you need to survey more than just those that left. That study comes across as far more biased than the biases it's trying to combat. It's far more interesting to discuss base rates. Start with a sample of women in tech, follow them over n-years (you can get a good representative sample by choosing different cohorts like those that are recent grads to those with 5-10 years industry experience) and do the same with men. After 2-3 years check out how many from from each gender from that sample have left the industry. Interview them to find out why. My ex was a documentary filmmaker interested in social causes and whatnot and I've seen how the sausage is made firsthand and know how data and statistics are twisted to support an agenda. Good statistics that strive to be impartial almost never produces numbers as "story-worthy" as the ones from that study, which means you need to question the numbers presented and also ask which figures were conveniently omitted.
  • rmc 11y ago
    You're right the whole "sexism in tech" is probably not a problem at all. It's all totally made up. It can't possibly be that bad. /s
    • malandrew 11y ago
      I never said such a thing, nor did I imply that. lawnchair_larry nailed it with his comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960327 "I agree there is a problem, but is it ever frustrating having to tolerate completely fallacious statistics and bogus metrics. That sets the conversation back." The statistics you cite are quite frankly bad statistics. You could have written the following and it would have been just as meaningless: * "716 humans who left industry X" * "I have collected stories from 716 other humans who have left industry X" * "Of the 716 humans surveyed, 465 are not working today." * "Two-hundred-fifty-one are employed in non-Industry X jobs, and 45 of those are running their own companies. A whopping 625 humans say they have no plans to return to Industry X Which strongly implies "left the industry", not "moving to this job" or "that job". 2/3s of them aren't working at all, not "promoted to something else" When you eliminate the nouns that allow our own biases to fill in the blanks and arrive at our own strong implications, it's quickly obvious that those statistics mean absolutely diddly-squat without additional related figures (like base rates) that allow us to perform an informed comparison.
  • atrophying 11y ago
    > How do they make a living if they aren't working at all? I'm one of those women who left the field after a 10 year career, and then returned several years late. The answer is, our quality of life drops. We end up in alternate careers that usually don't pay as well as tech, but come without the headaches. I worked as a private chef after I left tech. Some of the women I know have become academics in other fields, some pursue completely different careers in non-technical fields, some drop out completely to embrace a SAHM role or some other traditional gender role. I'm not going to argue about whether this study is right or that one is wrong; but I can tell you from my own anecdotal experience that every year I see less and less women my age in tech. I rejoined IT after that hiatus and there's not a single woman I work with who has the kind of technical expertise I do. The women who have that expertise have all left for greener pastures; for most of them, tech is an uphill battle against ignorance and bias that just gets to be too stressful to deal with.
• lawnchair_larry 11y ago
  What's the point of asking only the ones who left? That's about the worst sampling method I can think of.
  • rmc 11y ago
    It can tell you why people left. Which might tell you the problems in it. Update: Imagine a company has many people leaving, and they ask why. If everyone says "Got paid better elsewhere" it means you have a problem with salary. If "Sick of commuting out to the sticks", maybe look at relocation. If "Tech is old fashioned and boring", maybe look at what your employees are working on. If "Manager is an asshole", maybe fire/retrain that manager. etc.
    • malandrew 11y ago
      So for the 716 people who left, every single one of them only had sexist reasons for leaving? None of them found out the work wasn't that appealing? None had family issues that forced them to leave to care for a sick or ailing parent? None had a medical issue of their own that meant they could no longer work? None simply found something else they were more passionate about? None simply earned their FU money at a successful company and decided maybe they want to dedicate themselves to philanthropic pursuits or just lounging around? None decided that they prefer a job with more social interaction over one where you spend many hours at a desk solving problems quietly? All the above are reasons that I've heard as reasons for people leaving our industry and other industries. They apply to both men and women. Where are these other reasons in the conclusions of this study? Where are the opinions of women like Susan Sons and Meredith Patterson who quite like nerd culture and feel it's misunderstood by many of those writing about what's wrong with tech culture? [0]. This study is so incredibly one-sided in its conclusions that I can only conclude that it went out of its way to cherry-pick the study participants. Or its possible that it was subject to an unconscious bias of its own. Perhaps the author is so thoroughly in her own echo chamber with regard to these issues that when she reached out through her network to find people willing to talk to her about why they left, she ended up recruiting largely from a population that is biased towards confirming the conclusions she wanted to demonstrate because that's what her social network experiences disproportionately. When examining the biases of others, it's important to examine your own and not commit the same mistakes as those you are are trying to correct. Any "study" without a discussion of sampling methodology to control for biases and identifying those biases is typically not constructive. [0] https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c