In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. STEM fields in general range from ~30-55% women, and those fields include things like Mathematics --- anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room --- which are strong proxies for CS ability. And, of course, among the professions in general, the difference is even more stark; compared to law, we're stuck in the 1960's.
>anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room
As someone who has spent a lot of time in academic security conferences, I have to wonder what you are comparing them to. The only field with a worse female participation rate in my experience is networking (e.g. SIGCOMM). Check out this picture from EuroCrypt in 97 and count the ratio of women to men. It looks like under 1 in 10 which is worse than general CS enrollment numbers: http://www.crypto-uni.lu/jscoron/misc/euro_97.jpg
Anyway, back to the main point.
>CS is almost uniquely imbalanced.
I agree. However, a 1/4 female/male ratio coming out of CS programs is going to be reflected in the industry and attempting to bring the balance on the industry side to 50/50 is folly while the enrollment balance stays the same.
Clearly something is discouraging women from enrolling at the college level, but I can't fathom how 50/50 quotas are supposed to help solve that problem. Implementing things like Google's "extra interview retries" for minorities just seems to cause division and make it worse for minorities because some people assume they are there for the wrong reason.
Are you aware of programs focusing on getting more women enrolled at the high-school and college level? It seems like it would be significantly more productive as a community to put a significant focus there in terms of resources (money, advocacy, etc).
I know almost nobody that has a problem with improving enrollment numbers of women in CS (equality of opportunity). However, there is a significant chunk of people that have problems with the "white males are over-represented and we need to give everyone else an advantage" approach (equality of outcomes).
What am I missing here? Why are so many resources being poured into something as fundamentally flawed as trying to get equal representation with a supply that doesn't have equal representation?
> Clearly something is discouraging women from enrolling at the college level,
Have you ever been in a 100-level CS course? Granted, it's been a while for me, but they're generally full of 18-year-olds who lack a certain amount of social grace. IME, most people are pretty okay, but there was a notable minority of people you just don't want to spend time with: annoying, obnoxious kids who feel the constant need to correct everyone around them (including the instructors) to demonstrate how frickin' smart they are, and who don't realize they're also surrounded by other smart people who aren't as annoying and obnoxious. And, IME, many of these people actively make young women uncomfortable with their advances and behavior.
There are still lots of liberal arts schools that are very much gender-segregated (Wellesley, Smith); I can't think of any "women's" tech schools. I wonder what the CS classes and enrollment is like at places that are more-or-less women-only.
If that's a cause of the disparity, would it show as large numbers dropping their first course after meeting their classmates, or not enrolling in the course in the first place?
Of course it also starts before college enrollment. AP computer science courses in high school have about the same gender ratio (19%). [0] Those would probably contain the same minority you mentioned, a few years younger.
I don't have much to say about most of this (in either direction) but I will point out that academic cryptography is not the same as academic (Usenix-style) security; cryptography is a junction between mathematics (as in, "the math department") and CS, where security is entirely a subtopic of CS.
I don't know what was going on at EuroCrypt in 1997, but I've been to workshops within the last 5 years, and the number of women involved was startling. Which, of course, squares with the statistics for gender parity in CS (bad) vs. mathematics (better).
I'm not sure where you got the impression that this is like USENIX. Eurocrypt is theory and application of cryptography. A significant chunk of publications have nothing to do with application and discuss interesting theoretical math. Eurocrypt is one of the best academic cryptography destinations for theoretical crypto research. See an example of the proceedings: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-56620-7
It could be argued that the “pull” from top companies will entice members of underrepresented groups to get into tech on the college level.
It is also not necessarily the case that picking 50:50 out of a 75:25 distribution will lead to a competence imbalance. Even if the skill distribution is the same for both populations, maybe only certain baselines matter for doing good work, and maybe any skill gaps could be corrected via on-the-job training. Maybe having that kind of diversity is worth the extra effort for the company.
The irony is that there were probably significantly more female computer scientists and programmers in the 1960s than there are now. The industry has regressed severely from the early days.
The extra irony is that's because computer programming was considered "women's work" in those early days, as basically a form of clerical work, like being a secretary. So it was one of the few occupations that was traditionally socially acceptable for women to be in.
In that breakdown, "web developer" very likely includes a large number of designers and marketing specialists. We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%.
Is Google's process for women different than their one for white men? I only have direct experience of the latter, but the 2017 and 2011 versions were pretty similar. Their hiring process, as I saw it, was dominated by algorithmic college-course-type questions (as if nothing else I'd done in the last 6 years mattered at all) and years-of-experience type stuff (e.g. the message I got was good luck getting a manager job there unless you've got 5-10 years already doing it - don't try it if you're an up-and-comer with less than that). And apparently I was good enough to pass it in 2011 but not in 2017 :|.
All of that is stuff that I think is highly tilted towards a certain profile of devs, and going to be hostile towards anyone who didn't follow the typical CS undergrad route. And that undergrad route is very unbalanced, as is the profile of e.g. established tech managers.
If you're not willing to do much more training than most big companies, I don't see good steps to fix it outside of fixing the high school and college pipelines.
>All of that is stuff that I think is highly tilted towards a certain profile of devs, and going to be hostile towards anyone who didn't follow the typical CS undergrad route.
Having gone through one of these processes (not with Google, but another big 4 company), I'm quite sure this happens. The CS fundamentals might be easy to test for, but they've had very little impact on real world problems I needed to solve in my career. For someone who's a bit farther away from college and doesn't come from a rote memorization culture (which IMHO is inherently bad for problem solving), this serves as a screening mechanism without actually testing for what's useful on the job.
I've been quite successful at interviews where they ask me to solve a little take-home project. In that case the rote memorizers who get through the Google process usually don't shine, because they're not able to put these things together properly. Recent CS grads still do well on those if they're competent.
> We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%.
Is it possible that a "concerted effort to recruit and retain women" perhaps does more harm than good? Med schools in this country are now very nearly 50/50[1] and law schools are very slightly over 50% female[2]. Did medicine and law achieve this by the same type of concerted effort we've seen in tech? I honestly don't know the answer to that but I think it's an interesting question.
I do feel though that we treat females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors whereas in tech we have a habit of treating them like female developers instead of developers (and I'm referring to when that's done with the best intentions such as female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups).
>females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors whereas in tech we have a habit of treating them like female developers instead of developers (and I'm referring to when that's done with the best intentions such as female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups).
Female-only hackathons are what's wrong though. It implies that women cannot compete at the adult table, which is untrue, but if you treat people separately this is what registers in the collective subconscious. Similar to affirmative action making a lot of people think less of academic achievements depending on race, because it was handed to someone. This becomes a problem for those who don't need AA to be competitive, but have to face the stereotypes of the group they're in. Something like affirmative action should be about poverty, not race, because poverty is the underlying reason why people start at a disadvantage. Similarly with hackathons (I'll admit, I'm a guy who never went to one) the problem isn't that women can't compete, but that they're not attracted to these events for some reason. This has more to do with social dynamics. If you're male and a lot of males are going they will advertise it to their friends. So what we need would be more advertisement of these events geared toward women, with no effect on who gets selected.
I don't think the makeup and construction of hackathons has really any bearing on whether "women can compete at the adult table". No serious developer uses "hackathons" to establish their professional reputation anyways --- but many participate for fun, or to network.
(We're reading a blog post written by a woman kernel developer, for what it's worth).
Yes, that is what law firms did. Use the search bar at the bottom of the page to search author:rayiner for more information. Rayiner is an appellate lawyer (married to a corporate lawyer) and former/part-time compiler hacker, and he's written at length about how law fixed this problem deliberately.
Law and medicine are more people-oriented, while tech is more things-oriented, so that could account for the differences between the industries. There have been studies on the gender differences in interests along the Things-versus-People dimension [0], including one that linked them to prenatal androgen. [1]
Medicine and Law is lots of "memorizing" work... In my experience women to "like" that better. At least most girls in middle and high school were better at those kinda tasks than boys.
There are couple of differences between law/medicine and tech which makes attracting women to tech jobs more challenging. I will do here some generalisations, I know there are exceptions.
The traditional job of women in the household was care taking and value transference, meaning the husband brought the money and the woman distribute it and used it. That's why it was only natural for women to work in care taking jobs like medicine, teachers, social worker and such. Jobs like law or banking are value transference, they move money from one person to another without creating any real physical value. Tech generates value so it is subtly but determinately different from what women used to do before going into the work force, it was always the men domain, at least conceptually.
Medicine and Law are very certificate oriented jobs, they are safe jobs. The moment you got the certificate and got into the system you can practice and the experience you accumulate usually path your way to a better position.
Tech is something that is valued by your results and innovation, you can be a programmer without any certificate, you must learn new things endlessly and your experience amount to almost nothing when your specific knowledge become obsolete.
Women are not innovators in any fields, even in art and music, they hardly create new companies in any field. Law and Medicine doesn't require you to create anything new, you just slot in to the system, the tech world is all about innovation and new value creation.
In the western world women have options and they can do whatever they want. If they are smart and has good intuition, they would rather be lawyers or doctors, if they are not smart they would rather be a teacher and have a stable job for life with benefits.
In non western countries like India, Russia or even Israel you will find more women in tech roles because there are not too many other options to earn decently and government jobs like teaching don't pay much. If you give women the options they will go after their hurt, which is not in tech.
Women are attracted to doctors and lawyers and want to be in this environment. That's why you had countless of shows about law and medicine featuring the George Clooneys of the world. Compare it to the IT Crowd and you got a very solid reason why those jobs attracted women in the first place. Women want to be around the highly valued guys of their high school and the same go for society in general. An average white woman will never date an Indian software engineer, that's the sad reality. Women started to look at the tech world only after its status was elevated a bit, they will still rather have a doctor husband over some geeky tech guy, all else being equal.
Bottom line, tech people are not different to any other industry in the way they treat women or minorities or any other group in society. If anything bankers, lawyers, movie producers and to less extent doctors are much more status and class oriented. They invented sniffing coke from strippers butt cracks long before Mark Zuckerberg got his first kiss from his average looking wife. Still a woman will rather work in those environments than in tech from the reasons mentioned above and it is not going to change.
We definitely do NOT treat female doctors as just doctors. Women are the big spenders for medical care. Women greatly outspend men in medical care and women have a strong statistical preference for same gender care, especially for areas like gynecology where 90% of residents in training are female. It's quite easy to find a women's clinic, and while it's fairly easy for a man to find a male GP there are basically no men's clinics whatsoever.
Further, for more "general care" men basically have no option but to have a female nurse, since 90% of nurses are female. On the off-chance that a male nurse needs to do something like insert a catheter for a female patient, they will almost always ask if the patient would prefer a female nurse. This option of a same gendered caregiver is not offered to male patients.
When a woman goes to a gynecologist to talk about potentially embarrassing issues related to her reproductive system, basically everyone she sees is going to be a woman, including the front staff. Compare that to a man's experience going to a Urologist. Sure, most urologists are men, but the man will still have to tell the front staff person or nurse, who is almost certainly female, that he has ED, or some other problem.
> We definitely do NOT treat female doctors as just doctors
I'm not sure if I wasn't very clear by what I meant by that in my original comment or if I just failed to understand your response - while I don't dispute the accuracy of anything you said following this line I don't quite understand how any of it is relevant (at least not regarding what I was trying to say).
When I said "we treat females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors" I mean:
* I've often heard people being discussed as e.g. "a female dev" but don't often (never that I recall) hear anyone say "female doctor" (I'm referring to casual conversation, not discussions about who's gonna work the catheter on a patient)
* We have female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups, etc, do similar things exist in the medical field and if such things do exist are they as common? Are there many medical conferences open only to female doctors?
* There are often articles/lists of prominent/powerful/etc "women in tech"[1][2][3]. Are similar such articles published in the same quantity for medicine? A quick google yields almost entirely historical results, where's the list of "30 Inspirational Women to Watch in Medicine in 2018"?
* Is it a common practice for hospitals to make reports publicly available that detail what percentage of their doctors are female and how they plan to increase that number?
* Do hospitals generally do anything to recruit (and/or retain) female doctors specifically or are their recruiting and retention efforts just focused on doctors?
>I've often heard people being discussed as e.g. "a female dev" but don't often (never that I recall) hear anyone say "female doctor" (I'm referring to casual conversation, not discussions about who's gonna work the catheter on a patient)
You don't have to specify the gender in most cases. It's assumed that nurses are women. You'd only ever specify the gender for men, so you'd say "male nurse" but never "female nurse." I generally don't hear people say anything about their GP, but I've definitely heard women qualify the gender of their male gynecologist. I've never heard of a woman specifically call out the gender of a female gynecologist though.
>* We have female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups, etc, do similar things exist in the medical field and if such things do exist are they as common? Are there many medical conferences open only to female doctors?
Depending on what you mean by conferences, yes. Here's the official list, provided by the Bar itself, of women's legal associations: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/directory.... Though admittedly, I have no ability to provide a sense of scale in comparison to the IT field.
>There are often articles/lists of prominent/powerful/etc "women in tech"[1][2][3]. Are similar such articles published in the same quantity for medicine? A quick google yields almost entirely historical results, where's the list of "30 Inspirational Women to Watch in Medicine in 2018"?
Medicine moves much slower than tech, so it will never lend itself to having a list of top movers and shakers in a particular year, regardless of gender. And it particularly won't be the case because medical breakthroughs aren't in the public sphere the way FB or Tesla is. However, there are definitely awards/medals/prizes that are gendered. A quick google search will find many examples, though you'd likely never hear of them outside the industry.
>Is it a common practice for hospitals to make reports publicly available that detail what percentage of their doctors are female and how they plan to increase that number?
No, not publicly, because openly favoring women or other minorities could open them up to lawsuits.
>Do hospitals generally do anything to recruit (and/or retain) female doctors specifically or are their recruiting and retention efforts just focused on doctors?
Yes, but again not publicly. It's worth mentioning that part of the infamous DaMore memo was pointing out the potential illegality of Google's hiring practices. There's an open secret among HR pros that race and gender-conscious hiring practices are the rule rather than the exception. Since the 1971 Griggs ruling you basically have to have a prejudicial hiring practice in favor of minorities. But speaking openly about it will put you at risk of reverse discrimination lawsuits.
For example here https://wpengine-careers.com — seems way more representative of the “average developer” job than Google. Getting in to Google is elite, like making the NBA, and they have extreme barriers to entry.
I don’t think I could get a job at Google, for example; I would not pass their intensive multi-week screening process. I wouldn’t even try.
>includes a large number of designers and marketing specialists
Oh man!! OMG, you just reminded me of something. During the last dot com bubble I was entering college. I was planning on going into the field so I job shadowed a woman at one of the biggest companies in the world at the time. Her title was "e-business" or something like that. It was "e-[something]" like that and the prefix "e" was super popular at the time. Yeah, it was cool at the time...
Anyway,
The entire time I was job shadowing her (which I admit, was only about 4 hours, they gave us presentations and stuff too) she couldn't answer me the question of what she actually does. What her job was. She was kinda like "oh yeah, I work on this program" and showed it to me. I ask "so you built this? Neat!" and she'd answer "oh no, that's not me, that's the guys upstairs did." The entire time she danced around the question of what her job actually is other than "using a computer."
Looking back, holy shit, that was a big sign we we're in a bubble and that bubble was so close to bursting!! I mean, wow, it was like "we are branching into e-business, look at us [smoke and mirrors]"
It was just a really, really bizarre experience at the time - "Job shadow someone who can't tell you what their job is." I'm sure she got laid off 6-12 months later.
She eventually took me to meet the guys upstairs who build the stuff, I wish I got to job shadow them instead. They were polite, humble, friendly, and down to earth. Oh yeah, and they knew what their job was!
Anyway, I feel we're getting the same way here again - a ton of "staff" in the "tech/web business" who are totally superfluous. That's what it seems like to me anyways.
To be clear, I'm not trying to dis women in tech, after all, I am one myself. I'm not saying all women in tech so no work - I'm saying bubbles bring in a lot of smoke and mirrors.
This is wrong on so many levels. Where are you getting your data that CS is almost uniquely imbalanced?
Sweden has a complete record for what every citizen here work, their education and their gender. The data is gathered as part of tax collection and as a matter of policy they also make this information public so anyone can see what the gender distribution is for any industry or profession. 70%/30% distribution is extremely average, and the wast majority of the working population (equal amount women and men) work in such professions.
If you want the most uniquely imbalanced fields, look at the professions and industries that has over 99% of a single gender. From a few years back, that covers around 5 different professions. If the the professions from the CS field is stuck in the 1960, what should we call the psychology profession with 90% women and 10% men? Nearer the 99% bracket we have professions such as mechanics, midwifes and tile installers. If we again take a look around 90% we see professions such as veterinarians, dentists, construction worker, kindergarten teachers, secretary, truck driver, and the list just goes on and on if we were to list every profession with worse gender distribution that those from CS.
93% of the working population work in a industry that the government classified as having imbalanced gender distribution, ie professions that has above 60% of a single gender. 93% is a very huge number and without a question the norm. A fair distribution is the exception, one which hopefully will grow but where the trend has been in the opposite direction since 1960~1970 and just hopefully have now reached the peak.
The only uniqueness about CS+Mathematics as academic fields is that they have more men and women rather than the opposite.
_Science_, "Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines", Vol 347 Issue 6219, 2011.
Note also that you've unsubtly moved the goalposts. I'm comparing STEM fields, you're comparing all occupations (and: in Sweden, but that's less important to my point). I mean, whatever, make whatever argument you'd like, but modulate your stridency. With some satisfaction, I'll also observe that you're only able to marshal evidence (unsuccessfully, I think?) for _one_ level, not "so many".
Uniquely imbalanced is not a very good description with such small sample size of fields, but to be clear I was not the one to first bringing in non-stem fields. When you compared CS to law you was first to move the goal post.
Among the professions in general, you said, the difference is supposed to be stark. This is false since there is no general difference between the average profession and CS. Second thing is that we're stuck in the 1960. This is also false since all professions has on average a worse gender segregation in 2018 than in 1960, which includes the STEM fields. The third would be the conclusion that toxic culture causing segregated work environment is a tech-specific problem. Every report (including government issued ones) that I have read describe similar problems in profession with similar or greater gender imbalance than CS. The service industry especially has many horror stories being printed in news with rather regular intervals.
How about gender distribution in positions of power? Yes there are lots of actresses, but how many women directors, producers, or studio executives are there? Not many.
Depend on what movies you include when counting. Many studies prefer to only look at the top 10 or 100 highest gross earning movies and those only cover a tiny portion of the female audience. Selection bias.
Looking at the gender distribution of the movies that a sample of 10000 women and 10000 men has seen, you get very different numbers.
I recall that last time I went looking I took imbd, located movies with large difference in approval rating of one gender compared to the other, and then looked at the cast. Its not perfect proxy for identifying what the targeted/intended audience is, and there is also top lists of so called "chick flicks" if one permits those.
Every study however that I have seen has only looked at the highest gross films, be that the top 5 or top 100. Of those only a few will specifically target a female audience like the 2008 Sex and the City that only had women in star roles.
It should not be hard to find a matching movie with the genders reversed where all the star roles are men, the target audience are male, and the ratings flipped.
Where did you get this idea that all professions need to be 50%/50%? Just for example 90% of nurses are female but we are as a society are OK with that right?
That is the flagship cliché of offtopicness for this argument. We've been through it countless times, and nothing new ever comes of it. Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
Nursing is an interesting example. In places right now in the U.S. with high unemployment among men, there are a lot of nursing jobs, however men are not taking them because said nursing job doesn't satisfy the traditional requirements of masculinity (not knocking it) with which those guys were raised.
The article actually cites other potential issues such as the quality of the job itself, but traditional gender roles is a big part of it:
> "It seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up. The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are often held by women. Why not get men to do them?
> The problem is that notions of masculinity die hard, in women as well as men. It’s not just that men consider some of the jobs that will be most in demand — in health care, education and administration — to be unmanly or demeaning, or worry that they require emotional skills they don’t have. So do some of their wives, prospective employers and women in these same professions."
...
> “Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?”
> That may be, he said, because other sociologists have found that while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity,” he said.
So at the moment society is trying to figure out if it is OK with nursing being a "woman's" profession.
I think the difference is that when a man does want to be a nurse, he isn't treated like shit by female nurses to the point where he wants to leave the profession.
The main reason for the lack of men in nursing is because it's viewed by most men as not being a masculine profession, not because of discrimination.
> when a man does want to be a nurse, he isn't treated like shit by female nurses to the point where he wants to leave the profession
Yes. They do.
Source: Was a male nursing student, changed degrees because every lecturer, student and nurse was clearly biased against men being nurses. This happened to multiple men in my year.
No I didn't, I rewrote it to make it sound less inflammatory because I though that was the reason it got flagged. I still believe its a valid point, you may think otherwise of course.
>In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced.
sounds like you equate the toxic environment definition as given by the article with the issue of low representation of women. Well, do you really think that the environment isnt' toxic (as defined by the article) in the industries where women are over-represented? I mean do you really think that the employees aren't treated like replaceable cogs or companies don't pursue profit and growth as the first and foremost priority in hospitality or in the clothing sewing industry ?
