Anecdote: My niece was on a female floor in her dormitory. Supposed to foster a supportive environment for the women to pursue STEM. What happened? A few gave in, turned to Liberal Arts. They began to chatter to the rest about "why bother". After 1 semester, only my niece was still in a STEM field (ChemE).
A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
101–110 of 482 posts
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#102I like to compare STEM to Harry Potter when it first came out. I remember being one of those dorks in middle school who couldn’t get enough of it, and I thought not many people enjoyed it as much as I did. Only a handful of people mentioned it, and I was pretty social back then. Then the movies came out followed by the “cool kids” going crazy over them. Suddenly you have to like Harry Potter in order to fit in!
The only difference is that STEM isn’t labeled as cool by “cool people” yet.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#103Most of the theories I've seen about the women-in-tech gap don't resonate with my experience because there was a very obvious 'women-in-tech' gap in about... 5th grade? in my (typical, I think) American elementary school. It was nerdy boys, almost entirely (I remember one exception), who wanted to stay after school playing games on the iMacs in our classroom, and I am pretty sure that it would only be the boys in my…
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Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#104Pretend you're a woman and then read the comments on this post. That makes it pretty obvious that one of the reasons women have a hard time feeling welcome in tech is because men don't listen to or empathize with them when they speak about their opinions or perspectives.
I've been browsing this thread for about 45 minutes. Not a single comment is rude, most of the comments are trying to debate about the issue.
If you post a submission on a forum and expect everyone to blindly agree with you or you else you consider it as "hate", then the problem is perhaps with you.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#105Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? Is mathematics more social than CS? Because CS is almost (not quite: physics is almost as bad) unique among STEM specializations for its gender disparity. I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technolo…
The math majors in my upper-level math classes had significantly better social skills than the people in the CS classes I took. This is only an anecdote, but it's not obvious to me that mathematics isn't more social than CS.
I don't know how true this is; I've also had the experience of sitting around a restaurant table with academic math nerds and other times with computer programmers, and the differences there was pretty stark as well.
But another point: pay attention to the distinctions we're drawing, because "computer science is less social than other STEM fields" is not the same argument as "computer science is more forgiving of antisocial behavior".
The latter statement is one I could easily be convinced of! We all know about dev cultures that thrive on toxic behavior, and a lot of us have seen firsthand how homogenized groups of developers have mistreated people from outside their narrow social experience. A lot of this is well-studied human behavior: you pay a different kind of attention to the only woman on your team, or the only black person, than you do to the nth 20-something male nerd from central casting, and that can cause people to falsely attribute things to the outsiders.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#106I am just confused.
I think we might agree that how social women vs men are in the certain age group are relatively constant through time. IE in 60s men is about as social as they are now, but the number of women in STEM decreased through the same time period.
I think it is just market forces in play plus gender roles in childhood. Women get discriminated in tech(study and jobs), resulting in subpar outcomes for women. This information propagates through the market so women choose not to participate in that kind of work because opportunity costs are too high and they choose to do something else.
Very similar situation growing up where gender roles and parents push girls away from STEM.
If companies and educational institution in STEM treated men and women the same, we would get much better distribution.
Not rocket science here. Education plus equal treatment.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#107> Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy. "Honey, there is this random blogger who thinks I should befriend a girl in my company. It's supposedly not creepy or anything. What do you think?" If I didn't care what my wife thinks, I'd still have to think twice and consider the gender-political climate of the modern age. The mere perception of having some intention of wrongdoing can harm you. In all…
Here's your simple rule: https://medium.com/@annevictoriaclark/the-rock-test-a-hack-f...
Quoting: "It’s as clear cut as this: Treat all women like you would treat Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson." and "But definitely don’t hit on her. It looks like she could kill you with the chair you’re sitting on."
It's really that simple.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#108Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? Is mathematics more social than CS? Because CS is almost (not quite: physics is almost as bad) unique among STEM specializations for its gender disparity. I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technolo…
I think part of the programmer stereotype is that you basically have to be socially handicapped to fit in. Which may draw more people like that in and keep more well adjusted (or socially conscious) people out. In general, it seems that from a relatively young age women are given the impression that "nerds" are to be avoided at all costs -- we're stereotypically "weird" (meaning creepy perverts). Even though I haven'…
I feel like if you talked to code conference runners, you might have a different opinion - being one of the few women at a social event really brings out the socially awkward or aggressive advances.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#109The first part of this had great citations to cite that women are more social. Where the data was lacking is that 1) software is perceived as anti-social and 2) that other anti-social careers face similar problems to software engineering. For example if socialization was such a critical decider, why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socializat…
Pedantic, but
> why are some many women maids or professional housekeepers? Most people in this career don't get much on-the-job socialization.
is this actually true? I've gotten the impression that housekeeping services often send multiple people to the site.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#110> Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy. As an unattractive computer nerd, I've been regularly reminded my entire life that I am creepy. Skipping.
I have a talented, and wonderful, female dev on my team. One thing though:. She has described to me some of the male coders as being "creepers". When I asked for specifics, she couldn't provide them. She simply stated it was a "feeling". The one commonality I found with the creepers is that they are pretty clearly below average in looks. The question is whether this is a correlation or a casual factor. But definitely…
There was a study done on creepiness awhile back. Pretty interesting read: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.20...