> It’s a theme he returned to in his fireside chat, sharing a concern that the number of women participating in programming has decreased over the last 10 or 20 years. “There’s definitely something wrong there, and it’s definitely something that really can’t be explained just by personal preference or anything like that.”
Ugh, this is a really painfully uninformative platitude.
First, how do we actually know it's not just personal preference? Obviously other factors are likely to contribute. But with no suggestions as to what those factors are or evidence demonstrating they are likely causes, this claim has no information content.
And then second, what are the concrete steps for change? Is it the internship process he describes? Maybe it's clearer in the full talk than in the quotes pulled for this article.
> "The fact that you just assume any change from the all-male status quo must be a step down is amazingly sexist and insulting."
I never said anything of the sort and it's quite interesting that you read that into what I wrote. It's very clear what I meant: I don't consider the gender makeup of the people presenting to have any value, as long as the people presenting are the best people available.
> "The problem is that men greatly outnumber women for no discernible good reason"
The reason is simple: there's a lot more men in tech. For instance, StackOverflow found that 92% of devs are male. So one would expect that ~90% of presenters on software dev topics would be male.
http://fusion.net/story/115998/survey-says-92-percent-of-sof...
Even today, women only receive ~20% of engineering and CompSci degrees. So, unless things change dramatically, you're still going to be looking at a pool of candidates that's significantly more male than female.
>Programming literally started as a female career path because it had wasn't a highly regarded profession and seen as similar to being a secretary or office manager.
Yes, it was a hyperbole. The point is that it stopped being a "female career path" at some point, and wasn't for a long time, thus there's many more men in the industry and that will take many generations to offset.
>Did you look at the polls that were linked?
Yes, the polls show that there aren't many women here, but you cannot infer the reason for that from the polls. You're being biased or omitting the information that led you to this conclusion.
>Why do you ask someone on HN instead of looking at what people are saying about HN outside of HN? Of course calling it an issue requires you to actually agree that it is bad or a problem.
Because we're having a discussion here right now and if you know that information, it's helpful for everyone if you shared. A debate is not about winning or losing, but for everyone to learn and improve from them.
>If you don't agree that something is a problem, that's literally an unwillingness to change, no matter how justified you think that unwillingness is or how much you disagree with the thing being a problem.
This is wrong. Things can still change for the better despite the lack of a problem.
The lack of women is concerning, depending on the -reason- why they're not here. I still don't see any clear reasoning that HN's culture is the problem, and I'm not just going to blindly agree.
> But what if sitting in a cubicle inverting binary trees all day, mostly in isolation, doesn't appeal to others, and maybe those other are more likely to be women.
It is hard to buy this as the cause when we've seen the percentage of women grow and shrink dramatically over time. Is this work lifestyle so different from software engineering in the 80s when representation in cs programs was far better?
>Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?
Because the observation is inaccurate. There is no evidence that it is true.
>However, your gripe is with the under-representation of women at tech companies. So that claim doesn't really help you, you would need to show that women perform as well as men on average. Can you?
We have no evidence they can't, why would we assume that to be the case?
> That's a wholly uncharitable reading of what he's saying.
I'm sorry, what?
> A way more good faith interpretation would be the very simple equation of "working with just computer - more thing oriented, working with computer + partner - more people oriented".
Except that women entering the field now have no such expectations but he is still complaining about special treatment.
> If the percentage of female computer science graduates [is] a strong proxy for the available candidate population
I doubt it is. You’re writing off all the self-taught coders. You’re also writing off all the non-coders.
Most companies seem to think they want a 10:1:1 ratio of engineers:designers:product managers, etc.
I think 3:3:3 would be better, and makes your issue go away.
But we have this worship of “engineering” as some sort of magical thing that happens in a vacuum and requires no cross-discipline input.
Meanwhile every tech company I’ve ever worked for is pathologically rewriting the same code over and over, bashing their heads against the same tech debt over and over, and regularly wasting millions of dollars Building The Wrong Thing.
Heck we should probably have 10:1 masseuses and 10:1 psychotherapists on staff. Productivity would strictly increase.
> I can only really think of two ways of understanding the extreme gender imbalance in these jobs. Either there are systemic discriminatory forces at work, or women are somehow inherently ill-suited for programming jobs (ie. because of cognitive deficiency).
A third alternative is that they are not on average as interested in this kind of profession as the average man. That is a perfectly reasonable theory. But of course that doesn't put you between a rock and a hard place by having to choose between a society-is-sexist or a women-are-inferior theory, so I guess it's not a very fun theory if you want to stirr up a lot of emotions...
> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
Seriously? Why does it even matter if women don't want to work in CS? Why do we software "engineers" have the ego to think that we work in some great occupation and it's a "travesty" that women largely don't have any interest in working sitting in front of a computer all day.
We are glorified mechanics. Glorified by ourselves. We mostly build intellectually draining CRUD apps mostly and earn shit wages in super expensive cities like SF. Half of us are indentured servants via the H1b system. I think women are smart that they want absolutely nothing to do with this field.
We really need to get off of our high horses and stop believing we are "changing the world" via JavaScript.
>> that actually leads to the data, which actually not says that woman can't program better or worse, it just says it's harder to find a good woman, because there are overall less woman in tech.
The frustrating thing is most of the analysis completely leaves this part out.
I would be interested to hear from women about ways they have been discriminated against, and how the industry can improve to make that less likely to happen.
But most analysis I see on line is just "Most programmers are men! That is sexist!" With no analysis going beyond that.
>> It's my opinion that most women don't want to be programmers/ICs deep down
> Why is this your opinion?
It is my opinion as well, and I'll explain why. I suspected it based on anecdotal evidence from women I talked to (small sample), but in the recent discussions, I found this very convincing (as you can see from my comment there): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15025724
>This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different
I don't see why it's the crux. It's really only necessary that men and women be socialized differently for this to be true - to grow up surrounded by people telling you that you need to be more "agreeable" and "not too pushy".
I think whether it is true or not is rather beside the point. Toxic working environments are anti-meritocratic and anti productive. Even if we didn't give a fuck how many women entered the profession we should fix them. Intellectual dick waving leads to worse code, not better.
> the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years
What are you talking about? The numbers have varied wildly in the last 50 years. In the US it was almost 40% women in CS in 1984. Now it’s 18%. Why? The numbers also vary wildly from country to country, and in India some years have seen greater than 50% women in CS. Why?
Cherry picking numbers to make it seem like it’s not changing and make it seem like today’s numbers are the natural order of things, when that’s very very far from the truth, is a way to ensure people who think will interpret your argument as sexist.
> It's just a fact that there's far more men in the industry, it's been like this forever.
It's been like this forever, for very small values of "forever". Programming literally started as a female career path because it had wasn't a highly regarded profession and seen as similar to being a secretary or office manager. Not to mention needing the men in other professions because we were coming off the tail end of two world wars (and the US was sending its young men to the meat grinder of Vietnam).
That said, this is also very much a cultural phenomenon rather than a global one. Percentages look very different in other countries than the US and Europe. But this is tangential because I'm not talking about HN needing a "50/50 split" and you're claiming HN merely has parity with the industry overall:
> You're assuming there's less women because "HN is as it is", but isn't it far more likely to be because there's just less women in the industry? It could be either, but we can't just assume and take drastic action. It's not that there's zero women here.
Did you look at the polls that were linked?
2008: 17.5%
2009: 0.54%
2013: 0.57%
That 2008 number is somewhat similar to a random number I could find about SV in particular but still well below the 25%-ish figures I'm seeing for tech overall in most other statistics. And that figure came from a poll with an order of magnitude fewer participants. The other two aren't "zero women" but they're a rounding error away from that.
> But in this community, what are the issues that makes women -allegedly- not feeling welcome?
Why do you ask someone on HN instead of looking at what people are saying about HN outside of HN? Of course calling it an issue requires you to actually agree that it is bad or a problem.
If you don't agree that something is a problem, that's literally an unwillingness to change, no matter how justified you think that unwillingness is or how much you disagree with the thing being a problem.
> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender.
I can tell you why. In part, it's explicit sexism and goal keeping from men, sure. But a far bigger reason there are less women in tech?
Step into any engineering course at a 4 year university. Come back and tell me how many women where in your class. Get the picture?
Of COURSE there are less women in engineering jobs. They are less women in engineering classes! So while there are definitely sexism problems, far BIGGER issues exist with reforming gender roles CULTURALLY.
Women should be encouraged from a young age to pursue science if it interests them. They should not be given artificial leg ups to help balance a problem which will never go away without addressing the root cause.
> I've tried to think of a good argument against this, but I haven't been able to come up with one.
Why are you spending so much time trying to think of an argument against it? Is it really so hard to consider that women are now leaving programming in droves (particularly in the few years after college), in no small part due to the overwhelming number of men who tell them, day in and day out, that they need to accept the fact that they're "psychologically different" and that's "just reality"?
We encourage women to go into STEM fields and then make them feel like freaks a few years later when they actually try to make a career of it. Especially as they start doing more advanced work in the company, being promoted (and especially in specific IT fields), it becomes much easier to just throw their hands up and say "I'm so done with this shit. Peace." than to be BOTH a great programmer and a constant target/poster child of gender politics (both well-intentioned and otherwise). It's a positive feedback loop.
> Attempts to break down aptitude by gender tend to imagine computer science in terms of compiler theory and algorithm design, when in reality 90% of all software development is repeated iterations of "wire this database column into this UI table".
I think computer scientists tend to apply the same skills and techniques to social issues that they do to compiler theory and algorithm design. And that's how you end up with these 'manifestos'. I don't think that many people are offended by the science. They are offended that he has turned women in tech into a technical problem that he can solve with his logical reasoning.
It appears that he thinks he's the only one who's read the studies. It's arrogant. Everyone interested in the issue has already read those studies. They also have enough interpersonal skills to know that you can't just apply studies to your coworkers.
Ugh, this is a really painfully uninformative platitude.
First, how do we actually know it's not just personal preference? Obviously other factors are likely to contribute. But with no suggestions as to what those factors are or evidence demonstrating they are likely causes, this claim has no information content.
And then second, what are the concrete steps for change? Is it the internship process he describes? Maybe it's clearer in the full talk than in the quotes pulled for this article.
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