Take two groups of people. We'll call group A the "Bears", and group B the "Foxes".
The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They were tinkering and playing with them despite society's mockery that they were pathetic nerds. When they found out you could make great money, well, that was just a bonus.
The Foxes joined because they were told the industry was super rad and it paid really well. The Foxes were given advantages like additional Fox-only scholarships, special Fox-quotas in good engineering colleges, and lots of blogs praising Foxes and telling them how special they are, how they bring unique Fox-only insights to the table, and that The Bears have a conscious/unconscious agenda against them.
Now ask yourself, which group would you expect to have more longevity in the industry, the Foxes or the Bears? What would a company have to do to keep more Foxes? Maybe special privileges, like conferences the companies could send the Foxes to that would tell the Foxes how great they are, promotion programs to ensure more Fox visibility, quotas for Foxes in senior management, etc. But the Foxes are still leaving in higher numbers so clearly the industry has a bias against Foxes, so funding for Fox-only programs must increase, until the number of Foxes is equal to Bears (and if eventually there are more Foxes then Bears, that's just great!) What about the Bears? Well, the Bears better sit down, shut up, and remember that they are just Bears and there is nothing unique about a Bear. Some Bears internalize this and start advocating for the Foxes themselves.
You lost me at "strong natural interest and affinity." That could've been said for law or medicine or accounting or any of a large number of professions that were male-only until they weren't.
It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher. Regardless of whether it's more or less than women, the fact is that most men don't have an affinity for computers.
This is a good point worth keeping in mind. We're talking about a statistical property of groups of people, and one that is relatively uncommon in both groups.
>It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher.
I disagree, and think that adults who grew up before computers were commonplace are skewing your perception. I was a teenager not too long ago, and as I remember it, personal computer ownership was about even between the sexes in middle class youth, perhaps even biased towards girls a bit because "a boy will just use it for porn." In spite of this, pretty almost every young boy I knew that had a computer, whether or not they were really a "computer person" or grew up to do anything related to technology, was interested in tinkering with their computers in some way. From playing games for long hours, tweaking their configs or even making maps or modding the game, running their own game servers from their desktop (Minecraft is especially popular for this today), to having the spiffiest desktop and theme, to building their own PCs, hanging out on forums/irc channels/etc. and the good ol' fashioned standby of amassing a huge collection of pirated music, movies, and pornography, there were a lot of opportunities for otherwise "normal" boys to get experience in playing with computers and learning something about them along the way. Being good with computers could even be somewhat cool, in a "you're a fucking wizard, dude" kind of way. And to be clear, this is the perception I got from hanging out with kids on all levels of the social spectrum, not just super computer dorks like myself.
In contrast, most of the girls I knew used them mostly for IMing friends. The most "hardcore" girls I knew were involved in communities themselves like Deviantart or the various MMOs, which gave them plenty of their own opportunities to play and learn (for instance, Photoshop is a very complicated program, and sites like Neopets and MySpace taught basic HTML to a lot more girls than boys), but in general a larger proportion of the girls seemed more interested in study, their personal lives, relationships, and "drama" (the "dickhead teenaged boys" I mentioned in another post ITT would blush at the shit that girls do to each other), than in the computer itself or the internet outside of their "small world." I'm not a girl, though, so obviously I don't have the whole story.
With the younger generations, the situation looks similar to me, but with smart phones. It's common and "cool" for a guy to have a rooted/jailbroken phone, get a buttload of apps for free, and customize the crap out of his phone. But while I obviously don't have much contact with teenaged girls nowadays outside of family, the ones I have talked with are more interested in instagramming and snapchatting with their friends than the phones themselves.
People often say that women naturally have more emotional and social intelligence on average than men, so I don't really get why those same people get offended by the idea that men could naturally have more more "systems intelligence" or general interest in tinkering than women on average.
I agree that it seems more boys than girls do things like write mods for games. My point is that just looking at boys alone, ignoring girls completely, the proportion of them that do write mods for games and similar is still well in the minority. Hence my point that males, looked at as a group independently of females, don't actually have a strong affinity for computers.
And no, I don't agree that "all the young people today know heaps about computers". I just left a job where I was the 41-year-old sysadmin and there were a dozen or so twentysomethings. Apart from one or two self-starters, I was the go-to guy whenever there was a problem requiring a bit of computer nous. I'm talking about simple stuff that a power user would be able to do. In the same vein, just because you drive a lot doesn't mean you have an affinity for vehicles. Plenty of people that have driven for decades can barely change their own fluids, for example. Mass usage != mass affinity.
>I agree that it seems more boys than girls do things like write mods for games.
That was a bad example on my part. I wasn't trying to suggest that "most boys mod games" or anything like that, but rather that more "normal" boys than girls are interested in and capable of basic internet/computer-related things like installing a torrent client and grabbing some stuff off of The Pirate Bay, or following a "how 2 jailbreak your iPhone" tutorial.
I'll trust your experience, I'm probably overestimating the competence of the average middle-class twentysomething. To be clear, however, I had even younger kids in mind, early 20s at the latest, that you may not have ever worked with before (being ambiguous about my age is a habit I picked up as a kid pretending to be an adult on the internet, sorry about that). If you consider that PCs and the internet really took off in the middle class in the late 90s/early 2000s, then it's much more likely that someone around 20 now would have had an internet-connected personal computer all to their lonesome since elementary school, while those from in their later 20s probably would not have had one until high school or even college. Likewise, I didn't have a feature phone, let alone a smartphone, until I was in high school, so I just don't really give much of a damn about them, whereas they mean the world to kids that have had them since elementary school.
It's interesting you brought up gaming in your earlier post, as I was just talking about this with my brother.
Most of my programming friends and I (many of whom are women, by the way) first learned to use the command line for PC games. Same reason I first took apart a computer and put it back together. Most kids, then and now, don't play pc games. Back then, most kids didn't play video games at all. If they did, it was a console. That hasn't changed.
You can have an internet connected computer your whole life and never open it up. I'd say the vast majority of people fall into this category. Things work, and when they break, you take them to someone that can fix them for you. The people that aren't like that are usually in my experience people that want to boost performance on their machine, whether it's a car or a computer.
Script kiddies aren't hackers. What you've just described, using a jailbroken phone, downloading tons of apps - that's using a product another person developed.
While I disagree with GP, I think there is a difference here. As GP mentioned, nerds tinkered with computers growing up, despite a stigma. There isn't such a social phenomenon for accounting or medicine, those are things that almost everyone gets into in college or later.
Yet, as I said, I disagree with GP. The word "natural" is misleading, it sounds like he or she is suggesting a natural inborn aptitude, and we don't have evidence to support that. Unless all that "natural" meant here was "commonly occurring, happening without prompting", in which case I would agree.
I'm pretty sure there are females and males who have more natural aptitude or preference for one or another kind of technical work. And they typically are stigmatized as nerds when this is publicly known. We just don't have to suppose that nerds are more commonly male.
It's too bad that it's not socially acceptable just to support nerds regardless of their gender. But that is just more of the same stigma which never really ended.
The interesting thing about medicine and law is that they are professions that deal with human needs and social relationships. As formal barriers were removed, the percentage of law and medical degrees awarded to women steadily increased to parity:
The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50% women now.
Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period:
(NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale.
I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among lawyers. Maybe I'm wrong about that?
In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more questions than they answer.
At some level of scale medicine and law are about human and social needs, but at that same level of scale, programming is about social and consumer needs. Yet by that chart you posted, the level of CS degrees awarded to women in the era of Twitter is half of what it was in the era of Lotus 123. And what about accounting? Big 4 accounting firms are close to parity. And I'm not sure how different the professions are at the lowest levels. Poring through a spreadsheet trying to tie-up a number that's off isn't much different than poring over a core dump. Yet half the people who do the former are women.
Your first point is a non-explanation. If the conjecture is that the preference for CS is based on inherent factors, that doesn't explain why the preference ratio would change over time. Did the nature of programming change in 1985 and 2003 to make it more attractive to men?
Disclaimer: the sources below are controversial. The below is not necessarily an endorsement of these conclusions, but an attempt to address them on their own terms.
Regarding your second point. At the ranges in question, the male-female disparity is not enough to explain the observed results. I'm going to rely on SAT Math data, because that's more rigorously studied than what you posted. The male-female disparity among people with perfect SAT Math scores is less than 2-1: http://www.aei.org/publication/2013-sat-test-results-show-th.... So that might explain why only 40%+ of math majors are women. It doesn't explain why less than 20% of CS majors are women, or why that ratio has fallen by half even as the field has become less mathematically rigorous.
Also, there is quite a lot of evidence that women outperform their SAT Math scores relative to men: http://esd.mit.edu/Headline/widnall_presentation.html ("He found that women outperform their predictions. That is, that women perform better as students than their math SAT scores would predict. The effective predictive gap is about 30 points.") It is interesting to note that men also outperform women at the upper range of MCAT and LSAT scores, by similar margins. Yet, differences in observed performance in medical and law school by gender are slim to non-existant, and those professions have an even number of men and women, at least at the degree and entry level.
medicine is over 50% women now (everyone at every level) or doctors are over 50% women now? If it's the former, I'm wondering if it has more to do with the industry becoming more equal or if the demand for nurses has gone up much faster than the demand for doctors.
This is not to say that doctors are more likely to be men than women (I happen to think it's roughly equal based on my own experiences), but that nurses are far more likely to be women because nursing is a profession that has been overwhelmingly female, and one in which men are discouraged from participating.
Worldwide, it varies from country to country, but the are more male physicians than female physicians in every country except Algeria, Cabo Verde, Czech Republic, Estonia, Guinea and Mongolia.
All jobs require some dealing with people and some dealing with things. Does that imply no difference between the fractions of the day that software engineers and social workers spend systematizing vs. empathizing?
But let's examine the point more closely: what is the name for the department that is explicitly in charge of managing human needs and social relationships at a large software development company? Who tends to prefer those jobs?
You said in other comments that you didn't intend "bears vs. foxes" to be "men vs. women," but it still reads that way a bit, so let me take a stab at being more explicit:
The bears are the kids that grew up fascinated by computers, and just knew they were going to do something with them when they grew up. Maybe they didn't always get the best grades in school, but as early as middle or high school they could blow you away with the knowledge they gained purely out of self interest. This group is mostly (though not entirely) male. Most (not all, though things are a lot better today than the used to be) of the bear's earliest experiences with computers were solitary endeavors free of gender bias; if you're the elementary school kid picking out computer books from the library and pouring over them at home, you aren't even aware of a gender bias or skew in tech, you're in your own little world. Sure, when you grow up a bit and start meeting i.e. dickhead teenaged boys in IRC channels, the skew makes itself known, but if you made it to that point in the first place, a few jerks aren't going to be enough to scare you out of your passion. Given that there seems to be a lot more male bears than female bears, this and other anecdotal evidence suggests to me that there could be some kind of unavoidable neurological difference that makes men on average more likely to be innately interested in this sort of thing from a young age. We can make things more welcoming for the female bears and attempt to insulate them from the aforementioned dickhead teenagers (though I don't think that is great idea either), but you can't just force any girl into becoming a programmer any more than you can guarantee that every boy with a computer will use it for programming instead "wasting" it on video games and porn.
The foxes are the honor roll students that worked their asses off in school so that they could get into good colleges, get a good degree, get a good job, and continue their family's upward mobility. Whether it's business, medicine, law, or today computer programming, they didn't really care so much about what they did and didn't really worry too much about it as children (though of course they probably developed genuine interests in their field of choice during study and employment), but whatever they decided to do, they were willing to work hard to become good at it. They are at a bit of a disadvantage in tech vs. other fields that mostly lack a group of self-interested bears, but their strong work ethic helps to make up for it. This group pretty much already has gender parity (when you look at college graduates as a whole, not just in tech-related fields), so while the programming foxes may be made up of less women today, it will surely reach gender parity in time.
(Yes, this is a false dichotomy; many people can be described by both the bear and the fox. Ignore it for now, or treat it as a suggestion that the foxes may come close to but never reach true gender parity either.)
Any tech company is going to be made up of both bears and foxes. The proportions of these groups will vary, and the gender ratio within both groups will slowly shift closer to gender parity over time as barriers are torn down. However, if you accept that there may be a natural reason for the bears to be made up of more men than women, then it becomes clear that due to the bears tipping the scales, there will never be perfect gender parity in tech candidates, and that there can only be perfect gender parity in employed tech workers if the male bears are actively discriminated against by all potential employers. Sadly this philosophy does not seem to be very far off from what many employers and prominent figures here seem to actually believe and practice, but on the bright side for the male bears, it is almost impossible for them to be completely excluded; for as long as tech is a competitive field, ignoring a male worker because of his gender will just result in him being snatched up by someone else.
So while I do support initiatives to reduce gender bias and punish blatant harassment in tech, I think that some amount of gender skew is unavoidable and not worth worrying about. The people that push for a perfect 50/50 split strike me as misguided at best (if you disagree with the idea that men could be "better" or more interested on average at tinkering as a whole, while simultaneously believing that women are "better" on average with emotional and social skills, then while I see where you're coming from, I think you have some cognitive dissonance to work through), and at worst, far left radicals and those they dupe, more interested in raging a never-ending culture war than in making any real progress.
What about the male foxes? A big problem with the analogy is that there were always female bears and male foxes. That makes the picture more complicated.
I think you've missed the point of the use of bears and foxes in the analogy. It was supposed to remove any hint of gender. Notice he didn't mention the bears were male and the foxes were female.
The analogy mentioned quota programs, special scholarships, etc. But in reality there is not even allegedly any such thing aimed only at people who are non-nerds, so unfortunately these things have to be interpreted as being about gender.
Which causes the whole analogy to be interpreted as being about gender, and causes a lot of controversy, because it sounds like it's saying that women can't take the role of the "bear" in the story. In fact there have been many women (like Rear Admiral Grace Hopper) who took that role without special scholarships or quotas or whatever. They were bears. So it feels unfair for the analogy to apparently imply that these women didn't have any innate talent and just came into the field to be called special.
So if I am charitable, the analogy has a significant imperfection which is encouraging a negative response that misses any more constructive point which might have been there.
It's a story. For a minute try to take it as it is; a story about bears and foxes and let's try to distinguish if the bears are treated justly.
The point is to establish common ground. If we can't agree about what is just within the boundaries of our fictitious little story we'll have little hope to agree of what is just in the real world.
Great point. I think a story involving red/blue colors to the foxes/bears could make the analogy more accurate. You are absolutely right there are female bears and male foxes.
Just a short time before they got internet in the woods, the Bears and the Foxes had a different arrangement -
Everyone thought the Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity in working, and the Foxes had a strong natural inclination in cooking and babysitting. Then after some laws, changed policies, and social adjustments, Foxes must have changed their nature and started doing what the Bears did - often better. Within 20 years, the Foxes and the Bears reverted a few millennia worth of prejudice and assumptions, and everyone benefited immensely.
Is it really necessary to say that women are better than men at making software? I think this kind of inflammatory claim just stokes the flamewar that erupts around here every time the topic comes up. No one would stand for saying that men are better than women at making software. These generalizations are ridiculous.
Based on what? Where does this idea come from? Can you imagine if we all just accepted this as fact about men?
I know plenty of female programmers who absolutely hate this idea that women are "more organized." The result is almost always that they get pigeonholed into the "secretary" role on a team.
This idea needs to die. It does no one any good, and it's probably just false.
"There’s more empathy" also bothers me. I'm not sure we're doing anyone any favors by generalizing large swaths of people, by gender or anything else. This is pure prejudice, even if it's good-natured and well-intentioned.
Prejudice isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a society, we're fighting over where the line is between "bad prejudice" and "good prejudice", and the tech gender gap is just one of many battlegrounds in that fight.
> There’s more empathy, which makes for a better work environment.
Which is also the same thing said when they were pigeonholing women as nurses and never doctors (not to bash nursing at all, but watch a couple episodes of Masters of Sex and you see the superiority complex). Gender roles are crap.
So it is okay for a woman to say that women are better organized, that they have more empathy, but as a man I cannot claim that men are better hackers?
I'm all for equality, but every single time I read one of these articles, I seem to read everything but equality. Being a programmer is a job, a male dominated job, at least in 2014. There are a lot of fields where men work which are female dominated, like a chef, or interior design, or fashion, or a nanny, or a nurse. You don't see men throwing tantrums like this. And neither do great female programmers, they are busy making us feel stupid.
Most chefs are male - people don't care because its a low status job. Programming is now high status, so now this gender gap is an issue. As many feminists have "misogynistic conspiracy" as their default explanation for any differnces in outcome among genders, they're not in a very good epistemic position to judge these things. Unjust discrimination is economically counterproductive, I don't expect ruthless corporations to support such a conspiracy when defection is more profitable. Aside from blinded applications and maybe interviews, not much needs to be done. We are building businesses here, not collecting data for a census.
Being rich, being a VC, being Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is a lot of status, but despite popular assumptions, that doesn't really rub off on the programming equivalent of a line cook or plumber.
No, I don't think it's okay to say that kind of generalisation and I think it's fine to object, but you should object in a straightfoward manner rather than a tit-for-tat whine.
You don't see men throwing tantrums like this.
I constantly see men throwing tantrums, whenever the vaguest whiff of even moderate feminism can be smelled. Also, where did you get the idea that chefs are predominantly women? Not to mention that chefs are famously reknowned for throwing tanties. Same with fashion/interior designers, male or female.
"If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a collaborative culture. And a result, things get done faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy, which makes for a better work environment. It’s just better all around."
If the genders are equal any combination of them are also equal.
It's shocking that so many people fighting the good fight for the equality of women in the workforce also attribute special qualities to women that men just don't have - the common ones being that they're more organized, and can more easily think outside the box.
This is sexist, counterproductive, and false.
Women should be represented in a profession because they're fungible with men and make up half of the general population.
Period.
Once you start saying a team needs women, because they have some special insight or ability, you have to logically accept that a team that is 100% women is not as good as that same team plus a man - which is simply not true.
Most certainly, however you can't say whether that that impact produces a more equal or more unequal ratio.
Citing a racial example, the greater equality (read: more meritocratic) of admissions practiced by CalTech results in a disproportionately Asian composition (~40% Asian whereas Asians are just 4.4% of the population and only like 2% of the students are African American, which African Americans are make up like 17% of the US population.
The usual use sense in which the genders are claimed to be equal is more about being worthy of equal treatment than about being strictly equivalent (the latter of which is self-evidently false).
Hence seeking to hire females/women "cause diversity" is pretty demeaning. And sex/gender is a pretty poor way to introduce diversity in the first place. You want to seek out people that have vastly different experiences and/or personalities.
You're being downvoted heavily but I actually agree with you - diversity shouldn't be pigeonholed into just physical diversity. Diversity for the sake of diversity smells funny to me too but it's also near impossible to know when you need diversity for the injection of different points of view.
Worse yet, in such "cause diversity" workplaces, those females that are hired because they as good if not better than the men get hurt by this mentality because it creates an environment where the men question the legitimacy of their female colleagues.
Not really, since "equal" is poorly defined. A blue shirt and red shirt are equally nice, but a closet of assorted shirts is more valuable than a closet of just blue shirts.
A portfolio of diverse stocks, each with an equal risk/reward profile, has equal reward to an individual stock but far lower risk.
That doesn't mean that I should aim for an even blend of the various things though: in the case of your investment example, it makes sense to preferentially select for certain kinds of financial instruments and only have a minority portion of others, because that's where I get optimum contribution from their respective traits.
I think the phrase that deserves a lot of consideration is "better work environment."
To me, the question isn't about whether men and women are equals in the workplace. The question is whether the workplace provides an equal opportunity for men, women, and people with diverse backgrounds to succeed.
Anyone can miss quote someone this was a comment about education, and how boys cannot be taught in the same way as girls, evident in the declining academic outcomes for small boys.
He attacked what you were saying, calling it a ridiculous reductive perspective, and then attacked you. Would you reject the idea that you perspective was reductive, even ridiculously so?
> Sanghvi - "I don’t like being called aggressive. And that reputation has stuck with me. Any company that I go to, any VC firm that I talk to, everybody thinks of me as the aggressive person who can get shit done, at all costs."
This is a bad thing?
>Sanghvi -"Men are just more comfortable with men than they are with women."
Aren't women more comfortable with women than they are with men?
>Sanghvi - "The first thing I would say is you need to live life with no regrets. Always ask yourself—when you’re doubting something or you’re afraid of something—ask yourself the question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid and do that?” I say this because every decision in my life, everybody told me that I was a fool."
That's some of the best advice to ever come out of a Wired article.
>>Sanghvi -"Men are just more comfortable with men than they are with women."
> Aren't women more comfortable with women than they are with men?
Exactly. Men are generally more friendly with men and women are more friendly with men, where the ratio is, 70-30 men to women, 50-50 men to women or 30-70 men to women.
Go look at the fashion industry and you'll see that the women are more friendly with the women and the men are more friendly with the men. The fact that men or women are the majority and in power is orthogonal to the issue of same gender affinity insofar are fraternization is concerned.
> Aren't women more comfortable with women than they are with men?
Sure, why not. She also gave the example of having a drink with her CTO - the point was more about people who are more alike are more comfortable with each other.
I am a bisexual male programmer. I don’t give a damn what sex you have, and I would prefer not to think about it at all in a work environment, since it’s not relevant. But the skewed gender ratio affects interactions amongst my mostly heterosexual colleagues, and I find it disruptive. This is also true of race.
Anything we can do to remove bias and create a non-hostile work environment for everyone is a win not just for our ability to function as a field, but also to serve as a benchmark of social equality for other fields.
"If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to
bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a
collaborative culture. And a result, things get done
faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy,
which makes for a better work environment. It’s just
better all around." - Sanghvi
I don't understand why it's okay for a woman to make generalizations like this about the things they think women are better at, but it's totally not okay for a man to openly voice their opinions on what they think men are better at.
If it's not acceptable for men to voice similar opinions, why do we not call out women when they do the same?
Anonymous message boards truly are an ugly place. One very accomplished woman speaks out about her mostly positive but colored with some negative experiences in the tech world and the top comment is an anti-affirmative action rant (bears and foxes) that brings out a bunch of old tropes while completely ignoring the history of our industry.
The change in gender ratios in our industry are very closely related to the rise of the mini-computer.
Back when only companies like IBM and their customers owned computers, there was a much more equal gender ratio. When the mini-computer came about, the bears took interest in mini-computers. There were male bears and female bears. Disruptive innovation also disrupted the gender ratio.
For example, here's a Google Image Search for Homebrew Computer Club:
As you can see from the group images, the ratio of men to women in the Homebrew Computer Club was much skewed in having more men than women than was observed in the computing industry at the time (mainframes and whatnot).
Go back and watch Triumph of the Nerds, narrated by Cringely and you'll see a completely different industry today. That documentary was created right at the beginning of tech becoming mainstream and money becoming the focus.
Look at the people in that video. Not a fox in sight, male (brogrammers) or female. These are people who were pursing their interest in computing despite being at the bottom of the social ladder. Woz even describes the PDP-8 manual as a being like a bible. Show me anyone who would have been envious of this lifestyle back in the 80s and 90s and I'll show you someone that is a nerd through and through and probably oblivious to gender or possibly even the opposite sex.
I don't know about others here, but when I got involved with programming (~12 y.o.) in 94 or so, I was as alone as you could get. There were no other boys or girls. I had no role models. Neither of my parents were in tech. Prior to learning to program, I spend hours in my basement taking junk electronics apart that I found in the high school dumpster. None of my friends did this. When I decided I wanted to learn to program, I had to find out on my own about HS courses and courses at the local computer shop. I took a short visual basic course at the local computer shop (IIRC only 3 other people took the class with me) before I took a summer programming course at the local high school, where I was 12 years old and IIRC everyone else in the class was a sophomore or older and I don't even know what the gender ratio was in the class. It was irrelevant to me at the time. Unfortunately my relationship with programming took a 10+ hiatus when my family moved and I was no longer at a school that had support for programming when I first arrived and when AP computer science was added, the teacher was so bad that it killed my decision to go to school for CS (I went into physics instead).
Anyone who is a bear cub today, boy or girl, white or black, enjoys several orders of magnitude more privilege in becoming involved with computers and programming that I could ever have dreamed of growing up interested in computers in the mid-90s. If I could be the same precocious 12 y.o. as I was in the mid-90s but instead in 2014, I would jump at the opportunity. There are no no real barriers to getting involved in programming today relative to two decades ago. If someone is truly a bear, then their gender or race are a insignificant relative to the privilege of being able to involve yourself in programming in 2014, with the many resources out there to help you learn that didn't exist when I was a kid.
Foxes, male or female, only care about being included in tech now because there is a lot of money and job growth in this industry. No one was making a big deal about being included when being a nerd was socially undesirable.
Furthermore, it's worth nothing that some of the female bears now resent the female foxes because they have made their life worse [0].
The expectation that things work on merit and that you should be able to just work hard and succeed, seems to hit many people.
Unfortunately, real merit seems to go beyond one's official role. You are better if you can move stuff forward and facilitate projects succeeding overall. If you can make things happen.
Schools never taught us to think about life that way.
Or what was meant was that the outcome was overall better; the outcome of a more diverse set of people, with different set of strengths and weaknesses etc. Maybe something that was implicit is that men in general bring other strengths to the table, but that was for whatever reason not mentioned (maybe because the article was about women in tech).
Of course it was flagged killed, if you present a dissenting opinion on this site instead of engaging in meaningful discussion the cultural kafka fascists just hide you away. It is very interesting because I believe that the genders are equal which means I dont believe this sexist assertion that women somehow bring different strengths to engineering.
Equal in value does not imply equal in thought, experience, or skill. I think that is the major flaw in your argument and why you are misconstruing breaking down barriers for women as "sexist".
I am all for breaking down barriers I just dont think it will result in better outcomes, because different men have different thoughts, experiences and skills, it is just the nature of being human. To suggest though that somehow it will result in the things mentioned in the article is sexist because it attributes those qualities to a gender.
The surface level analysis you've done seems correct at first glance, and if that were all there was to it, it would indeed be absurd.
The reality is that these are manufactured issues (pay-gap, rape epidemic, etc.) in order to create voter blocks which can then be counted upon in an election. Women are 50% of the population. If you can somehow convince them to vote as a group, you've won the game of democracy forever. This has been an open strategy of the Obama campaign since '08.
What's fascinating is how insane statements such as "1 in 4 women have been raped" get touted as fact. It is mass dementia, much worse than any religion or mass delusion. If 1 in 4 women were raped, the US would be equivalent to the Congo where rape was used as a weapon of war. Women wouldn't be doing "Slut Walks" and "Take Back The Nights". They'd be fearing for their lives and staying indoors.
We've had democracies collapse in upon themselves quite often in the past due to corruption and vote rigging. It may be an inevitable consequence of this form of governance. For reference, I don't live in the US, but I find the militant electioneering fascinating.
EDIT: It appears the parent was flagkilled. Although his delivery may have been slightly uncouth, his argument was valid. For those interested, the parent was expressing his opinion that sex is irrelevant as a determinant of engineering ability and economic success, and asserting that sex ratios in tech companies must be precisely 50/50 is nonsensical because it ignores individual preferences and biological reality.
As there's no logical reason for there to be such a huge disparity it seems obvious that women are a resource that is under utilised. It is likely that there are women out there not working in startups/engineering/tech/etc. who could be - who would be if they were male. That's the problem.
That's like saying there are a lot of men not working as florists who could be - who would be if they were female. Your comment is completely senseless. A butterfly would be catching salmon if it was a bear. But it's not, and so be it and let's accept it because it's doing what it can do and what it likes to do.
Before you can use that argument, you have to be darn sure that we're talking butterflies and bears and not a river full of salmon to catch with only half of the bears down at the water catching them.
I don't know for certain how to figure that out definitively but I expect (and hope for) the latter because hey, who doesn't want more salmon?
JohnE007, your original comment is now flag-killed, so I have to reply here. As I understood that comment, you mentioned that the gender shouldn't be a talking point because we are all human. -
The position that "we are all the same humans" can be naturally extended to imply "we should be treated essentially equally and fairly". Equality is different to sameness, and it does not deny differences between men and women.
And the idea that "we are all human" matters, then it touches on why talking about gender matters - there is overwhelming and consistent evidence across many industries that some humans are systematically mistreated. If it were clearly observable mistreatment, such as slavery or physical bullying, the rest of us would eventually notice and ideally stop it. But the mistreatment is more subtle, like talking to a subtly racist uncle or a subtly condescending acquaintance. Chinese water torture was very subtle too - no single drop had any significance, but collectively and over time many drops together drove the subjects insane. Some of our fellow humans live with that never-ending drip of subtle pressure. The rest of us are just learning about the scale of the problem, but we can try to understand it and eliminate our occasional contributions to those drips of pressure. Large sweeping actions like federal laws or HR policies are necessary but insufficient - the real work of helping mistreated fellow humans can be done only by people like you and me when we change how we play our parts on a day to day basis.
One big challenge for any well-treated majority is that they often genuinely don't know they are the well-treated majority, or that discrimination even exists. A foreign exchange student is more aware of language discrimination, a person who lost an arm is more aware of discrimination on physical ability, and people approaching retirement are more aware of age discrimination. This is why giving a voice to the mistreated group matters so much - most of us are not mistreated, and we cannot understand the problem unless we hear it firsthand again and again. In that context, the voice and experience of the first female engineer matters more than the experience of the first male engineer, and why we should encourage more mistreated people to share their stories with us. So that we all can learn and get better from it, both for "their" sake and "ours" (minority vs majority).
You also mentioned that this is a problem for those who live in first world countries, and to a significant extent I understand where you are coming from. I spent most of my childhood in a Soviet state where there was zero consideration or thought given to any minorities or exceptions to the "norm". There are dozens plausible explanations or excuses on why, but some of that had to do with the poor economic reality around us. There just wasn't enough stuff to splurge on culture, or morality, or pondering the philosophy of humanity. People just focused on surviving. However, over the decades then the wellbeing of an average citizen has improved drastically, and now topics like equality, recognition of differences, social support etc are getting significant attention (and causing significant conflicts). Over the last 40 years people in the first world countries have experienced unprecedented economic growth - there is now so much stuff, so much affluence, and so many people that some people take a step back to make sure everyone is enjoying the ride. Turns out that this is not a levelled playing field, and some humans are significantly disadvantaged - and we have the means to rebalance the game for our children. Because we are all just human, our kids should have the same choices and options in life regardless of whether they were born a boy or a girl.
There are 10% women studying computer science at uni. When I ask any woman, literally any woman, why they didn't study computer science, they tell me "Oh I am not interested in that". There are no barriers. None at all. Nobody says "Oh I tried, but the environment at uni was hostile to women". Nobody ever. It's a free and deliberate choice. And so they should deal with it. Give me one good reason why I should care about the so-called "gender gap" that is apparently a problem? Why does this fraction of people deserve special attention? Why do they receive the permission to make blanket statements about how they enrich the work environment because they're so special? Don't just claim that the mistreatment is so subtle that I can't see it. I don't buy your snake oil.
The most significant "barriers" probably have to do with social norms and gender roles. Gender roles have a real affect on preference. So while it might not, though it might, be that biology plays a significant role in whether or not females show interest in CS gender roles certainly DO.
It's very backwards to me to be focusing so much on the work environment and employers themselves for ways to attract female CS employees when those people don't even exist in the work force in the numbers desired. Or the pipeline for that matter.
The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They were tinkering and playing with them despite society's mockery that they were pathetic nerds. When they found out you could make great money, well, that was just a bonus.
The Foxes joined because they were told the industry was super rad and it paid really well. The Foxes were given advantages like additional Fox-only scholarships, special Fox-quotas in good engineering colleges, and lots of blogs praising Foxes and telling them how special they are, how they bring unique Fox-only insights to the table, and that The Bears have a conscious/unconscious agenda against them.
Now ask yourself, which group would you expect to have more longevity in the industry, the Foxes or the Bears? What would a company have to do to keep more Foxes? Maybe special privileges, like conferences the companies could send the Foxes to that would tell the Foxes how great they are, promotion programs to ensure more Fox visibility, quotas for Foxes in senior management, etc. But the Foxes are still leaving in higher numbers so clearly the industry has a bias against Foxes, so funding for Fox-only programs must increase, until the number of Foxes is equal to Bears (and if eventually there are more Foxes then Bears, that's just great!) What about the Bears? Well, the Bears better sit down, shut up, and remember that they are just Bears and there is nothing unique about a Bear. Some Bears internalize this and start advocating for the Foxes themselves.
And so it goes.