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Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

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Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#291

Post by tptacek »

tnecniv wrote: post #259
tptacek wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. Plenty of STEM fields have much better gender parity than tech. Tech is singularly bad among the STEM fields; only physics is competitively bad. Mathematics, molecular biology, stat --- all have strong female participation. Worth noting: all these other STEM fields are also heavily dependent on software and computer technology, and women do fine in them.

Are you sure math is doing much better than tech? The others I know are much more balanced but I thought that women were underrepresented in math as well.

Yes. You can look up the stats yourself; they're not hard to find.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#292

Post by anothercomment »

draw_down wrote: post #286
shawn-furyan wrote: post #278

It is a continual frustration to me that the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues. Predictably, the top comment on this post that tries to move forward on a very real problem that has been empirically established is an appeal to stick with the status quo. I'm sorry, but companies have always focused on making money. Saying that the way to handle this very specific problem is to focus on making mo…

Yeah. These issues get talked about so much in our industry, but I don't understand how they're supposed to change if the way we're expecting to fix it is just "business as usual, but uh, don't do discrimination". Obviously there is something wrong with how we got here.

There is not "obviously" something wrong.

Would you say there is obviously something wrong with the plumbing industry that keeps women away? Or is it just that the smell of shit is too unpleasant? Likewise, some aspects of tech could simply be unpleasant to women, and there are reasons why men are more likely to put up with unpleasant work (like the need to feed a family). I have personally experienced a lot of unpleasant aspects of the tech industry (let's just say the movie "Office Space" is not far off the mark), unrelated to gender.

Mind you, I am not claiming nothing is wrong (although personally I consider it unlikely), just that it is not obvious, because there are other explanations for the gender ratio that don't involve "wrongness".

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#293

Post by draw_down »

anothercomment wrote: post #292
draw_down wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. These issues get talked about so much in our industry, but I don't understand how they're supposed to change if the way we're expecting to fix it is just "business as usual, but uh, don't do discrimination". Obviously there is something wrong with how we got here.

There is not "obviously" something wrong. Would you say there is obviously something wrong with the plumbing industry that keeps women away? Or is it just that the smell of shit is too unpleasant? Likewise, some aspects of tech could simply be unpleasant to women, and there are reasons why men are more likely to put up with unpleasant work (like the need to feed a family). I have personally experienced a lot of unple…

Oh, OK.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#294

Post by shawn-furyan »

anothercomment wrote: post #288
shawn-furyan wrote: post #278

It is a continual frustration to me that the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues. Predictably, the top comment on this post that tries to move forward on a very real problem that has been empirically established is an appeal to stick with the status quo. I'm sorry, but companies have always focused on making money. Saying that the way to handle this very specific problem is to focus on making mo…

Actually the title and the interview didn't mention "women's difficulties with the masculine tech culture", and none of the women who were interviewed brought it up, either. It seems to be kind of implied by the approach (why ask only women), which is exactly what annoys people because it is such a sweeping accusation. I wonder in discussions like this, how many people who bemoan the masculine tech culture consider t…

14 day old anonymous troll account intentionally distorting several claims I made.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#295

Post by emodendroket »

mantas wrote: post #279
emodendroket wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Maybe you just offer competitive salaries for everyone and everyone wants to work for you. Maybe your superstars actually get a different title and responsibilities and you're just more upfront about how you decide. I think there are plenty of companies out there with a pretty narrow band for any given position and this way of doing things eliminates the anxiety about whether you negotiated well or not.…

There will always be some companies paying more and some paying less. People who are not as good at getting a better salary in current system, would probably fail to get into better paying companies then. And we're back at square 1.

How do you figure? If they're able to pass whatever company's interview and negotiation is no longer a factor it seems more likely that salaries will become more equitable. I'd guess the correlation between negotiating skill and technical skill is small at best.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#296

Post by briandear »

xienze wrote: post #266
DanBC wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each of those professions have considerable effort to increase the numbers of men working in them. This is a tedious point, and it gets made every single fucking time there's a thread like this. Use a search engine. You'd find, within a few moments, programmes across all of these industries to correct the gender imbalance.

> Each of those professions have considerable effort to increase the numbers of men working in them. And yet the number never budges, and we don't hear the president and the media blasting said industries over their shameful employment ratios day after day. Instead it's just "hmm yes, that's curious. Well we're working on the problem. Carry on..." Whereas in tech if the ratio isn't 50/50 there's hell to pay. In compa…

The American Counseling Association membership is 80% women. Only 10% of all social workers under the age of 34 are men. 70% of all psychology PhDs go to women. Minority representation is also very tiny. The vast, vast majority of mental health practitioners are white women.

Yet those are professions where sex-diversity has a real impact on society. It's far more serious than the sex of the person writing the code for a fucking social network.

There has been about 1 story in the NY Times about this issue in the past 10 years.

And tech sex-disparity? A near constant stream of articles.

By the way, 1% of carpenters are women and 98% of dental hygienists are women.[1] Is that catastrophic? Does it warrant NY Times articles or endless pontification?

[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#297

Post by rarec »

probablybanned wrote: post #241
jredwards wrote: post #176

My dev organization had, at one point, a fairly respectable gender ratio (relative to other orgs, which isn't saying much). Over time, the women in our dev org have had a much higher attrition rate, because they've moved on to other opportunities. I've never heard a complaint from any of them that women were treated differently here. I have a suspicion that women who get into tech tend to be more self-assured than th…

It's very likely to be down to differences in temperament, although I don't think it's self-assurance precisely. Typically, men are more driven to compete for status and place their career at the center of their lives, while women evaluate their situation more holistically. This means they're less likely to put up with bullshit, and are more likely to be lured away to places that are less prestigious/competitive but…

It's also those who are willing to put up with the bullshit and play the political game that tend to rise to the top in a business, tech or otherwise. True, optimising a career for a healthier work-life balance is a valid strategy and arguably the best one, but the fact of the business world today is that those who deal with the dog and pony show tend to get further than those who don't.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#298

Post by Arizhel »

>Female leaders: Founders, CEOs, CTOs receive far more public criticism AND HOSTILITY than male CEOs and CTOs ie.e Ellen Pao as leader of reddit, Marissa Meyer, Sheryl Sandberg * The things that have been said about these women and their bodies and how evil they are I have never ever heard with male CEOs no matter how evil, nor have I seen criticism as harsh, unrelated to the business issue, cruel and emotionally punishing as these women have faced.

Oh please, there's no shortage of horrible male CEOs out there. Jack Welsh, Bob Nardelli, Travis Kalanick (Uber), Steve Ballmer, etc. The female tech CEOs who run companies into the ground might get more attention because they're female, but running a high-profile company like HP straight into the ground (right after ruining another one like Lucent) really should earn you infamy, as it has for Carly Fiorina. Marissa Meyer didn't exactly run Yahoo into the ground (it was already on that trajectory), but she certainly didn't help, and probably made it worse with her lavish parties. The Pao/Gamergate case is somewhat special though; that whole thing was just a mess.

Anyway, I don't hear that many complaints about Ebay's ex-CEO Meg Whitman (now current CEO of HP Enterprise). Maybe nothing great, but that's normal for most CEOs, who seem to be a bunch of crappy sociopaths anyway, but you can't claim she ran Ebay into the ground, and HPE seems to be doing OK.

>Dear god, how could any women aspire to be a leader when the women who aspire to

Why would anyone who isn't a sociopath aspire to be a CEO of a large company? They're all sociopaths. I'm not sure why I should really care about people who aspire to this position, or to any position in politics. You want me to care about why women aren't going into rank-and-file engineering positions? Great, this sounds like a valid problem to me. You want me to worry about sociopathic women getting into positions where they can get golden parachutes worth tens of millions or more after running companies into the ground? Sorry, I have no sympathy at all.

Finally, as to your opinion about who to blame for the gender disparity, I do agree: the problem starts far earlier than college, and I think it's endemic to our culture and how we raise kids. However, I do have to point out that even in the US, women used to go into tech fields much more in the 80s and earlier, so what changed?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#299

Post by hajile »

emodendroket wrote: post #237
hajile wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. That's not the problem of anybody except the person who does not negotiate aggressively. 2. People respond differently to men and women (a fact that seems to be true across all species). We don't have a clear, testable model for why this happens. 3. Implicit bias is not scientific and not relevant. Sorry for the lengthy write-up, but this should be called out for being farcical and/or psychologically dangerous. Im…

Well I suggested a handful of measures that don't involve "implicit bias training," which I agree is unlikely to work, but I question your claim that there isn't any evidence for implicit bias. If you want to conclude that either women are just inherently inferior or else that they aren't but it's ok to systematically underpay them then I guess that's your prerogative but I'm not really interested in going down such…

I would argue that women and men are different both physically and psychologically and have different interests arising from these differences.

I would further argue that negotiation is a skill that some people have and others do not. Should we refuse to reward someone for their skill in negotiation? Should we even try?

On the first count, the brains of men and women are structurally different (women have drastically more white matter and men have drastically more gray matter). The observation that men and women view the world very differently is universal. When looking at the big five personality traits, men and women consistently show far different norms. If all observations both casual and professional tend to indicate significant differences, the possibility should be seriously entertained.

If men and women are identical, why do we need women in STEM? The men we have would work just as well. If one is making the case for more people overall in STEM, then they are making an economic argument (and one that doesn't favor STEM workers -- only employers of STEM workers). If one makes a case for different life experience, then there is an acknowledgement of difference. If men and women are different, then there is a distinct possibility that one group is better or more interested in a particular field than the other. In either situation, there seems to be little case for drastic change (except for employers suppressing wages by increasing the supply of workers).

As to the second count, let's say we put two people (of the same gender for sake of limiting differences) with the same qualifications into the same job with the exception that one is more skilled at negotiation. We then force both to work for the same pay. Will that end the advantages of the more skilled negotiator? The better negotiator will still be better at getting the good projects or a faster promotion.

In the long term, the negotiation skillset will simply turn into more profit in other ways and the level of control required to prevent this from happening is so draconian as to be unthinkable.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#300

Post by emodendroket »

briandear wrote: post #285
emodendroket wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially as a woman, I worry about being labeled hyper-sensitive, or that my gender will influence a person’s reaction to my feedback (e.g. the perception that women are hysterical). [...] > The final straw has typically been something like my manager making an off-hand remark that is thoughtless and rude, or perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise, or someone I care about at work is…

"perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise... or gets fired" Women more likely to encounter this? This stuff happens all the time to everyone. I'm not sure how this is something a woman is more likely to encounter.

I assumed everyone could use their wits and understand what part of that very short except was salient. In fact, I think you have, since you've gone ahead and elided it.
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