Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women? • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by AnkhMorporkian » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #98

helloothere wrote: post #6

is there a plan for Ask a Male Engineer series?

This breaks the HN guideline against going full flamewar with nothing new to say. The vector here is predictable and therefore uninteresting; most of us have been through it a zillion times and live in hope of being spared another. Therefore, please just don't. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13968549 and marked it off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have to say, I appreciate the explanations in this thread. It's a nice show of transparency that I didn't see in the past with removed comments.

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

#352

Post by watwut » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:25 PM UTC

shawn-furyan wrote: post #330

jknoepfler wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your frustration, but I've found the landscape to be more complex than most people are willing to give it credit for. For example, my partner and I disagree on the value of things like "Girls who Code" or "Women in Computer Science" groups. I (male) tend to think "can't hurt seems like a decent idea, I'm sure there are unique challenges faced by people with two X-chromosomes in computer science that I'm not a…

I don't want to speak for my wife, but she has been actively involved in Girls Who Code, and seems to have thought that it was worthwhile. As I understand it, it's more about letting girls know that programming is an option, rather than being about segregating female engineers. I think this is necessary because I have personally seen the assumption that men are engineers and women are support people limit the careers…

I agree about programming being full of "bullshit mythmaking". It is one of the things that annoys me the most about our industry.

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

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Post by ruleabidinguser » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #302

ruleabidinguser wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except when its disruptive, which is when i do care.

For instance?

Well I was just thinking of it interfering withwork

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

#354

Post by ruleabidinguser » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

kristineberth wrote: post #311

ruleabidinguser wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting I have an interest in suppressing women and minorities? The only reason I'd want to do that is to decrease competition, and I can guarentee you that I share the same interest regardless of gender or ethnicity My comment was out of an interest in not being lied to more than anything else.

I didn't interpret that comment as a suggestion that you have an interest in suppressing women and minorities. But you might have a subconscious interest in maintaining your own worldview, wherein you're part of a group of people that 'gets' or 'finds value in' tech, and others aren't. The subconscious forces that shape the way people think about these issues are the most pernicious.

I don't usually find subconscious arguments very convincing. They're kind of like appealing to magic, if that were a real fallacy.

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

#355

Post by angry-hacker » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:32 PM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #165

logicallee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, due to the outrageous skew in gender, I think you have to read these things more deeply. There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries and a field that is open to all (by means of a computer science undergraduate program.) Look at something that is much harder than becoming a software engineer: becom…

> There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries [...] It's entirely possible that I am extrapolating from my own naivety, but do young men really get into software development for the money? I don't think any of my friends were thinking about our future salaries when we started programming after school. It…

The majority of people I know do it for the passion. Nice salary is a bonus, but I'm 100% the men I know would do the same work even for pennies.

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

#356

Post by TheCoelacanth » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #308

scaleout1 wrote: post #195

Few things that comes to my mind - Have clarity around what time people are expected to arrive/leave. If your company offers free food, dont schedule breakfast super early and dinner super late. - Dont schedule meetings at 5:00 pm - Dont change product direction/design based on meetings you had at an after work party Basically acknowledge that people in general and women in particular have responsibilities outside wo…

"women in particular have responsibilities outside work" Yeah? And men don't?

They do, but it is treated as much more socially acceptable for men to shirk those responsibilities than for women.

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

#357

Post by watwut » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

jknoepfler wrote: post #313

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…

I share your frustration, but I've found the landscape to be more complex than most people are willing to give it credit for. For example, my partner and I disagree on the value of things like "Girls who Code" or "Women in Computer Science" groups. I (male) tend to think "can't hurt seems like a decent idea, I'm sure there are unique challenges faced by people with two X-chromosomes in computer science that I'm not a…

On one hand, I dislike the openly "only for girls" activities. It is opposite of integration.

On the other hand, programming and tech in general is already gendered in peoples minds. By people I here mean parents, children themselves, teachers and so on and so forth. Parents will refer to technical clubs as boy clubs (even if some girls participate) or mock boys doing dancing (that one surprised me), grandma will be visibly ashamed and kids themselves will argue about those activities being for boys/girls.

Kinda like with lego friends - too much pink to the point of being annoying, but the fact is that average grandpa is going to buy that toy to a girl where he would not any other lego cause even those gender neutral are clearly for boys in his mind.

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

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Post by XorNot » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:48 PM UTC

cmdrfred wrote: post #325

anothercomment wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think women don't go into plumbing because of cultural norms? Really? Ok, I wish somebody would study that and find the reasons. The baby argument doesn't hold, though, because it makes a huge difference if it is your own baby. Better comparison would perhaps be care of the elderly, which involves cleaning up shit but also has a social component.

If the argument there is so few women coders why isn't it also why are there so many male garbage collectors (I could list a great many undesirable jobs here), prisoners, homeless and combat fatalities? Is the goal to balance those out as well?

Yes.

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

#359

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

angry-hacker wrote: post #355

gurkendoktor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries [...] It's entirely possible that I am extrapolating from my own naivety, but do young men really get into software development for the money? I don't think any of my friends were thinking about our future salaries when we started programming after school. It…

The majority of people I know do it for the passion. Nice salary is a bonus, but I'm 100% the men I know would do the same work even for pennies.

I used to think, every so often, "Don't they realize that I'd do this even if they didn't pay me?"

But then I got married, had children, the kids grew up and needed braces and cars and college. I really need work that pays well right now, whether or not I like the work.

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

#360

Post by throwaway729 » Mon, Mar 27, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #265

throwaway729 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturally, these questions do get asked in each industry. Nursing [1-3]; K-5 teaching [4-6]. There are entire federal and state agencies with copious regulation dedicated to workplace safety. As a society, we spend millions upon millions each year making inherently dangerous workplaces (mostly occupied by men, as you note) a bit less dangerous. And I don't even know anything about those cultures; I'm literally "just…

You sidestepped the workplace death question. Why are we so worried about forcing women into STEM no matter what, but we don't care about forcing them into the jobs that cause all those workplace deaths? As a corollary, why do people without STEM jobs constantly complain about other people not having STEM jobs instead of leading by example? After all, as we're constantly told, we need every able-bodied STEM grad we c…

> You sidestepped the workplace death question

No, I didn't.

We have an entire legal and regulatory bureaucracy dedicated to improving working conditions in dangerous work places.

I'm pretty willing to bet that the cost of that bureaucracy -- per year -- is easily several orders of magnitude more than all the money spent to date on encouraging women to take STEM jobs.

I could Google it for you, but this is apparently an issue dear to your heart, so I'm sure you're well aware.

Are these protections perfect? No. We should strengthen them! Also, we should have less gender disparity in STEM. I'm really still missing the zero-sum relationship between these two things... could you help me out?

> Why are we so worried about forcing women into STEM no matter what, but we don't care about forcing them into the jobs that cause all those workplace deaths

1. Who said anything about "forcing"?

2. HUGE elephant in the room: because this is a tech-focused message board. Again, why is it so surprising that we're discussing the tech industry as opposed to the healthcare or education industries?

> nursing... teachers

Great. Someone should do something about that.

Still not sure why you think any of this is a reason for software engineers to refrain from discussing and addressing similar culture problems within software engineering firms.

Discussing gender disparities between different fields is not, in fact, a zero-sum game.