And our evidence that software has more sexism than other fields is...? People tend to simply point to the lower than average female representation, but I don't find that convincing. 80/20 gender split is actually about average. Furthermore, studies measuring callbacks and recruiter interest show preference for women: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
Honestly…I’m happy to operate under the assumption that tech has a sexism issue purely based on my personal experience with coworkers, superiors, peers online and at conferences, etc. I’ve never even worked in Big Tech! The stories I hear from friends that do, sound ridiculous. I’ve seldom seen a study that meets the standards of objective-ish academic rigour that I feel could even remotely capture all the nuanced ways in which women are (in my experience) screwed by our shitty culture.
If I applied the same line of thinking, I'd be operating on under the assumption that tech has a sexism issue against men based on my experience of being explicitly directed to discriminate against men, and being given gender quotas vastly different from industry representation - often demanding as much as 2x the representation of women. Most of my co-workers, men and women both, have similar stories . That's a lot more concrete to than a hand-wavy "it's nuanced" explanation.
But rather than listening to anecdotes, I'll listen to evidence, which also indicates that tech at best does not discriminate against women and likely discriminates in favor of them.
> 74% of women in software development have experienced gender discrimination
Wrong. 74% of women say they have experienced gender discrimination. This is not measuring discrimination, this is measuring perceptions of discrimination - which is a substantially different thing than actually measuring discrimination through things like anonymized applications, or sending identical applications with different genders. Imagine I had an orchestra. I poll them about gender discrimination, and loads more men say they experienced gender discrimination in hiring. But when we switch to blind auditions, men actually fared worse than women. Which is more compelling evidence?
Perceptions of discrimination could be caused by all sorts of things, like a media ecosystem fiercely promoting the idea that women are being discriminated against in tech - which doesn't always match reality. For instance, Google was constantly said to have been paying women less than men, until they actually studied their salary disparities and found men were underpaid: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
However, you do raise a good point. The fact that so many women believe they are being discriminated against could very well be part of suppressed representation of women in STEM. The fact that perceptions of discrimination are so strong could dissuade women from entering the field, even though there's little evidence for actual discrimination in tech.
