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A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

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Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#191

Post by amch »

truth123588 wrote: post #53

I think women avoid tech because they think tech guys are unattractive. Women go for professions where they believe they will be around attractive guys. Although, women are also interested in money, especially as they get older. When women realize tech leads to money, there are many dilemmas, and hence the "women in tech" movement.

If you're going to take that stance, you should do a better job of qualifying your opinions. You think women "avoid tech because they think tech guys are unattractive" - simply asserting this to be true doesn't do much for your argument. Likewise with the whole "women are also interested in money."

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#192

Post by bmarquez »

sp332 wrote: post #125
bmarquez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> men don't want to even get close to the line of doing something that could be perceived as inappropriate Yeah I am wondering why someone would stick their neck out, especially if they have below-average social skills. Lots of personal liability for little personal gain, and #MeToo just publicized the existing uneasiness with professional interactions. It's not like any women helped when I was evaluating a career in…

Because social skills can be practiced and learned. #MeToo is about physical abuse and abuse of power, not some peer who has a hard time making eye contact.

I agree that social skills can be practiced and learned. But I think something like Toastmasters, improv classes, or Meetup groups are a much safer way, instead of the corporate environment.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#193

Post by thucydidesofusa »

sp332 wrote: post #125
bmarquez wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> men don't want to even get close to the line of doing something that could be perceived as inappropriate Yeah I am wondering why someone would stick their neck out, especially if they have below-average social skills. Lots of personal liability for little personal gain, and #MeToo just publicized the existing uneasiness with professional interactions. It's not like any women helped when I was evaluating a career in…

Because social skills can be practiced and learned. #MeToo is about physical abuse and abuse of power, not some peer who has a hard time making eye contact.

Not yet. But there's clearly some trend towards making smaller and smaller transgressions into #metoo issues. I'd hate to find out that I rolled the dice on ostracism (or worse) just to be friendly to someone who doesn't care enough to reach out to me.

In fact, it's much riskier for me to reach out to them than for them to reach out to me. If they're too stupid to realize that, I'm not interested in being their friend. And if they're perceptive of my risk and they still expect me to submit myself to it for their convenience or whatever then I'm not interested in being their friend.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#194

Post by walshemj »

ghaff wrote: post #59
walshemj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit if you only started programming after you went to University your going to struggle with the course and afterwards work. You would not expect to do a Degree in English lit and have done no reading of the cannon before getting to university.

I’m honestly not so sure about that. The number of Western classics the average incoming English major has read is probably pretty small. And it really isn’t true of just about any other branch of engineering or science. How many bridges do you think someone majoring in civil engineering has designed? The fact that a lot of CS curricula only address those who have been programming as a hobby is a bug not a feature.

Many other countries mandate that you study at school the subject (or direct precursors) you take at Uni.

You not going to study Physics at Oxbridge if you don't have GCSE and A levels in the Subject why is EE and CS considered different.

Some lists of the "English" cannon are 200+ texts and that's not counting some of the classical authors you should have read - and that's not counting any BAME texts you might want to look at for diversity.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#195

Post by peoplewindow »

cbradshaw wrote: post #48

Is CS really “lauded as a haven for antisocial people?” Ouch. Some of the evidence in this article is anecdotal (female friend at a hackathon gets excluded by males, etc.). Has no one else seen the plethora of “Women in Tech” meet ups, events and hiring fairs? Anecdotally, I have several female friends that have interviewed and been hired at companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. I understand this isn’t statisti…

"Women in tech" events are a good example of how women exclude themselves. A typical event has the following attributes:

- Men strongly discouraged or banned from participating.

- Many of the attendees are "women in tech" but not "technical women", it's common to see women who describe themselves as co-founders, activists, HR staff and so on but relatively rare to find someone who actually spends all day banging out code.

- As a consequence of the above most of the talk at these events revolves around gender politics, not tech.

Source: girlfriend has learned to code and attended one or two meetup events advertised as being for women in tech, also from reading agendas or blog posts about such events.

Meanwhile the men are creating inclusive events that focus on knowledge sharing about hard tech topics. They use what they learn to build new things, they scope out each others talent and form professional relationships that can be used to build companies. True geek girls go to these events and are in the minority. The rest self-select out and create the exclusion they then blame men for. I have no sympathy.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#196

Post by jared_katz »

truth123588 wrote: post #53

I think women avoid tech because they think tech guys are unattractive. Women go for professions where they believe they will be around attractive guys. Although, women are also interested in money, especially as they get older. When women realize tech leads to money, there are many dilemmas, and hence the "women in tech" movement.

this guy fucks

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#197

Post by stcredzero »

yosito wrote: post #162
as1mov wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You must have missed all the comments of men complaining that they can't be friendly to women because they're an unattractive man. Not sure where you got the word "hate" from. I'm not saying anything about hate.

You must have missed all the comments of men complaining that they can't be friendly to women because they're an unattractive man.

I've missed them. Can you aggregate links? I honestly find this interesting. (You can "cheat" this using the reply links.)

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#198

Post by jm__87 »

jd75 wrote: post #122

I personally love me some alone time, but yeah, as a lady, tech is a little too lonely even for me. Something that I think would help is if the social types in the engineering department (often men!) would post interesting tech events in Slack. Maybe I don't enjoy sports or poker; maybe you don't enjoy sci-fi book readings or craft nights, but chances are we both want learn some new tricks (with free beer and snacks)…

actually had a boss accuse me of networking for my next job by going to tech events.

Someone who works in tech who is interested in tech and goes to tech events. I don't buy it :).

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#199

Post by d1zzy »

ajkjk wrote: post #23

Most 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…

Actually that's one possible explanation for why boys tend to grow more interested into tech today, that they become interested in videogames at early age, videogames that are mostly targeted for boys, so in order to "fix" this we'd have to have more diversity in videogames target market.

https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#200

Post by ploxiln »

tptacek wrote: post #50

Are 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 agree, Math and Physics are in many ways similar to CS, and yet have more women. And I can think of a pretty good reason to explain it: Math and Physics are more classically respected and authoritarian. CS is the wild-west by comparison.

In Math and Physics in high school and college, you can just study what you're supposed to study, do the problems you're supposed to do. You can mostly do that in CS too, of course, but that's not ubiquitous. In CS you're programming, and when programming you're running into bugs and devising work-arounds. Some stuff does not work like it's supposed to. Sometimes the best implementation for a purpose is a clever but not-quite-correct shortcut that's way faster. Some of my CS classes had automated code submissions testing and grading systems, and some students managed to hack the system in novel ways, and were given full points for doing so. My experience in school is that the smartest girls studied a lot more, and the smartest guys messed around a lot more. CS is programming and programming is a lot of messing around.

My dangerous 2c ;)

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