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The power of role models

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Re: The power of role models

#271

Post by prodigal_erik »

mjibson wrote: post #203
tbirdz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried very hard to make sure my comment did not come across as dismissive, evidently I failed. Just to reemphasize, I am not in any way trying to deny these women's responses. I have just seen this concept of a role model bandied about before, and that is something that I have never experienced in my own life in computing. In the article, Rob mentions how in the field of astronomy, the women he has talked to consid…

I can name a handful of role models in the computing field that were important for my development: Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Patrick McKenzie, Dan Luu, Steve Yegge. However not until about 2 years ago was there a single women I could think of. More current role models would include Jess Frazelle, Julia Evans, Sara Chipps, who are all incredibly brilliant, influential, successful people who have achieved really amazi…

This must be a generational thing. I hadn't heard of any of them until years after I started and I think most of them are younger than I.

Re: The power of role models

#272

Post by grzm »

skookumchuck wrote: post #262
grzm wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. In this thread, can you provide examples of men being blamed or being held solely responsible for a solution? What percentage of the comments do so?

> The women in tech pipeline is a leaky, toxic pipeline that results in talented women being driven out of the industry. This thread is about men being the gatekeepers of financing. The parent article says: > Men have the power to help fix those things, but they also should have the courage to cede the stage to women more often, to fight the stupid bias that keeps women from excelling in the field. It may take proact…

I guess I don't read either of those as blaming men solely or saying that it's solely men's responsibility to do something about it. It's pointing out that there are things men can do, which I think is valid, but it doesn't imply that it's only up to men.

Perhaps we're talking past each other.

Re: The power of role models

#273

Post by prodigal_erik »

nickparker wrote: post #266
prodigal_erik wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error Too many acceptable candidates? Nobody I've ever worked for had this problem. If you meet the bar, you're getting an offer, even if Chuck Norris and Jeff Dean carpooled to the next session.

I think I'm discussing the upper end of the funnel while you're pointing toward the bottom. At the level of phone screens and first interviews, there should be many potentially acceptable candidates. If there aren't it's indicative of a flaw at the very top of the funnel (ie, the opening needs to be better publicized, or the org. may have a public image problem).

Our phone screen takes anyone who isn't blatantly clueless; another candidate doing better never hurts you. We'd rather interview too much than triage the top N and then start bouncing viable candidates, because we aren't going to stop wanting to hire anytime soon.

Re: The power of role models

#274

Post by geofft »

said wrote: post #101
geofft wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it means that due to existing biases, the role models, promoted people, etc. are biased towards men and women, and therefore by definition include some number of men less qualified than women who could potentially have those roles. We need to push back on these biases, which means that we need to push women into roles where they are qualified, and push out unqualified men as a result. It's harsh, but if we wa…

Do you believe the vast physical differences between men and women end at the brainstem? Do you believe the flood of sex hormones during puberty don't result in different mental tendencies, including tolerances to rejection? Do you believe the different ratios of neurotransmitters between men and women across all cultures and haplogroups are a result of culture? Before we explicitly institutionalize discrimination ag…

I certainly believe there are physical differences between (biological) men and women, in aggregate across men and women. I do think that the standard deviation is very high, though; I don't think that the vast physical differences make all men more suited to a task than all women, any more than all men are taller than all women.

And I think that defining particular "mental tendencies" as favorable or unfavorable to success in computing is a very difficult task. I do a lot of things at work; I figure out how to do a dynamic library upgrade smoothly, I work with other people to figure out what sort of capacity requirements their application needs, I Google for an answer to a problem I'm having, I report a bug when nobody else seems to have done so, I respond to a page and figure out what broke as quickly as possible, and I enter flow state and work on some algorithmic thing for an hour or so. It seems unlikely to me that I'm good at all these things, let alone that everyone of a certain gender is.

To say that men are better at programming because of some male-genetic-linked mental tendency seems as ill-reasoned as saying that men are better at cooking because we're taller and can reach the top shelf.

For 1, I believe in other people's agency. If someone says "I want to be part of this industry, but these are the reasons I'm being pushed out," I'm inclined to believe them on both fronts. If they say "I would rather join this other industry," I'm not going to try particularly hard to convince them they're wrong.

For 2, that doesn't seem plausible to me; won't it hurt disadvantaged women and girls even more?

Re: The power of role models

#275

Post by spangry »

tptacek wrote: post #144
throwaway399 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that all hard science fields are equally interesting to women?

* Molecular biology * Chemistry * Math * Evolutionary biology * Biochemistry * Statistics * Astronomy All these fields have greater than 30% participation among women. It's always possible to compose a special-pleading argument; that's why we have the term "special pleading". But to be convincing, that argument would have to come up with a compelling difference between computer science and all those other fields (it…

I don't think it's a non-factual claim that there is a significant degree of horizontal occupational gender segregation in pretty much every advanced economy. A random search using terms similar to those above yields the following: http://imgur.com/a/lcHPU

The segregation seems to follow a pretty stereotypical pattern: men cluster is occupations concerned with abstract, impersonal systems or that revolve around physical labour and women cluster in professions that involve a relatively greater degree of social interaction. I am not making any claim as to why this is the case, merely that it is.

A good paper (IMHO) that does a thorough analysis of the data on vertical and horizontal segregation can be found here: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0038038511435063

One finding I thought particularly interesting was that the countries with the highest levels of horizontal segregation are Finland, Denmark and Sweden. This seems counter-intuitive to me, though I cannot explain why...

Re: The power of role models

#276

Post by SwellJoe »

skookumchuck wrote: post #254
SwellJoe wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why do you believe most tech founders are men?

I'll make a general comment not specific to any group. When I hear a person produce a long list of excuses, blaming others or circumstance, never once taking responsibility for any decisions, adamantly denying that they had any hand in their fate, I know where the problem lies. Just remember the story of Douglas Bader, who had both legs amputated, and was told he was going to die of his wounds, then told he'd never w…

> I'll make a general comment not specific to any group. When I hear a person produce a long list of excuses, blaming others or circumstance, never once taking responsibility for any decisions, adamantly denying that they had any hand in their fate, I know where the problem lies.

So, you believe that assertion applies to women in tech, since that is who we're talking about?

Re: The power of role models

#277

Post by DelaneyM »

Oxitendwe wrote: post #243
DelaneyM wrote: post #237

To those expressing concern that this proposal represents "reverse sexism" or is anti-meritocratic: Merit is equal parts nature and nurture. "Pushing women into positions of influence" can also be interpreted as identifying high-performers capable of filling senior roles and then helping them get there. This does mean giving them an unfair advantage, but only in the sense that life is unfair in general. Ultimately th…

>To those expressing concern that this proposal represents "reverse sexism" or is anti-meritocratic: Nobody is arguing that this is "reverse sexism", merely sexism. If you don't think disadvantaging men in particular is sexism, then I don't think it's possible for us to have meaningful discourse on this if we can't even agree on what words mean. >"Pushing women into positions of influence" can also be interpreted as…

I'll just cut to the only relevant question in your reply:

> So, unfairly discriminating against people makes them "the most capable individuals for the roles they assume"?

Yes, it does. If you find a woman with ambition and potential, then train and mentor her to succeed, you'll create in that nurturing the manager you need.

Choosing a high-potential candidate based on gender is no more "wrong" than choosing someone for their school affiliation, their shared hobbies or how they "remind one of themselves at that age"; all of which are common, and all of which privilege the status quo (men).

Re: The power of role models

#278

Post by ArkyBeagle »

grzm wrote: post #256
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those things are much easier to use as values than profit, since profit may include some fairly innocent or some fairly egregious rent-seeking. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that - but with one caution - one must still be "competitive". The problem is that what we mark down on the books as profit may or may not actually reflect any social benefit to the larger society through the mechanism of cons…

Thanks for taking the time to put all this down. I'm having a hard time figuring out if you're disagreeing with what I've said above or adding additional context. In particular, I think I've been clear that one must still be "competitive" is something that needs to be taken into account. (That said, I can imagine a company put together with the explicit goal of "going out of business" when it's other, non-profit goal…

And thank you for your thoughts as well. Your last sentence caps it; what I am saying is that there is a broken tool in the toolbox - we should be able to make profit an ethical value - as an estimator of how much good we do on the world - but because accounting practices don't isolate rents ( SFAIK ) from consumer surplus, then that makes profitability a shakier ethical metric.

But yes - the ethics of a company are a serious part of the architecture. Good ethics are of self-interest even more than they are a collective good.

Re: The power of role models

#279

Post by tptacek »

spangry wrote: post #275
tptacek wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Molecular biology * Chemistry * Math * Evolutionary biology * Biochemistry * Statistics * Astronomy All these fields have greater than 30% participation among women. It's always possible to compose a special-pleading argument; that's why we have the term "special pleading". But to be convincing, that argument would have to come up with a compelling difference between computer science and all those other fields (it…

I don't think it's a non-factual claim that there is a significant degree of horizontal occupational gender segregation in pretty much every advanced economy. A random search using terms similar to those above yields the following: http://imgur.com/a/lcHPU The segregation seems to follow a pretty stereotypical pattern: men cluster is occupations concerned with abstract, impersonal systems or that revolve around physi…

Three responses.

1. I'm not sure it's surprising, let alone a rebuttal, to observe that there's significant gender disparity in most industrialized economies. In fact, it can be the case that the US leads the world in gender parity (in fact: I think this might be likely) and still simultaneously be the case that there are structural biases against women. Why would we expect to see wildly diverging outcomes in different countries? All these countries (note the exclusion of China!) employ essentially the same pipeline of children to the same set of Professions.

2. As has been repeatedly stated here and in the post we're responding to (which is premised on this observation): pretty much all the other high-status Professions have markedly better gender parity than technology. It may be the case that gender disparity in compensation is broadly the same in societies and that men and women generally cluster into similar compensation bands and occupations, but that could also primarily be a phenomenon of the (majority) of people who don't work in high-status Professions --- because in medicine, law, accounting, actuary, even sales, we have 40-55% female participation.

3. The notion that a study like this rebuts the argument I just made is a sort of flight to abstraction. We can look at women in science (where there is broadly equal representation between men and women in awarded degrees, and markedly better parity among postgraduates and practitioners) and see that CS (and EE) are outliers. I don't need to look at GINI coefficients and treat pay equity as a vector in R^2 to observe the problem, nor does it make sense for me to concede that the debate should shift into this mathematical abstraction. We have the actual facts here; no need for the models.

Re: The power of role models

#280

Post by throwaway399 »

tptacek wrote: post #134
throwaway399 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men There are a bunch of other professions where women are under/over-represented. CS is one of them. Others include: Mechanical Engineering Construction Electrical Engineering Physics Aerospace Engi Geography Finance On the other hand, in Biology things are a lot more balanced. So maybe it is the field of interest as opposed t…

Neuroscience, molecular biology, chem, stat, even pure math all have saner gender balance than computer science; some, like molecular biology, even have slightly more women than men. I think it's going to be difficult to compose an argument for how computer science could be intrinsically better suited to men in a way that didn't also apply to other popular hard-science fields.

The nature of the work in all of these fields is different. My point is that women are not less qualified, but just less interested in a career of doing the kind of work software engineers do. It is very very different from applied math and statistics.

Neuro/molecular/chem ~= biology and is similar to each other for the most part.

women are underrepresented in almost all major engineering fields. It's not like the math there is harder than pure maths or that it's more challenging. Just different.

stats is its own beast. Accounting is very different from computers-related fields or biology for example. Statistics classes are also pretty much evenly balanced.

pure math is also very different from everything else. It might be in some cases similar to theoretical CS/applied math but to get to theoretical CS most people have to go through undergrad CS classes that paint a completely different picture of what that work is like.

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