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Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

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Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#101

Post by InclinedPlane »

einhverfr wrote: post #90
InclinedPlane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But how many decades of unfair treatment and exclusionary culture are we willing to tolerate? Especially when you consider that tech is one of the most lucrative industries at present. How much money are people missing out on because of the exclusionary culture of tech? How much is the industry itself being held back?

Ok, so how about we offer a deal like this: 1) Put in 130 hours of work every week except for 3 weeks vacation per year, and 2 months parental leave, and medical leave as required by law. Start when you are 20. When you are 40 we will give you a retirement bonus of 30 million dollars. Is this exclusionary to women? I ask because I think the very clear answer is yes. I don't think the key issues are in terms of an exc…

This is just an illustration of the problem.

Look, working crazy hours is absolutely, positively NOT in any way a requirement for success in the tech industry. It's not even a very good way to get work done. But it is commonplace. And it is taken as a shibboleth within this industry. And it does exclude people, especially women but others as well.

What do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking about starting a family? What do you tell a 28 year old man who is thinking about starting a family? I'd say that if you do your homework, concentrate on learning, and work in a smart way then you can manage to make an excellent living working from home, which is fantastic for supporting a family, whether you're a guy or a gal.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#102

Post by [deleted] »

tomwalker wrote: post #97
InclinedPlane wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hairdressing were a multi-billion dollar global industry and the foundation of almost the entirety of the future economy that would be more of a problem. Tech, however, is big, important, and getting bigger.

Medicine is a huge industry. Where I am from, women are 70 percent of entrants. They still get help with applications (women in medicine career days etc). They are more likely to take long career breaks and work part time. In the UK, where the tax payer pays for education + all treatment this is not cost efficient. I don't have a link but a recent bmj article showed over a career, 1.7 women cover the same hours as me…

[deleted]

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#104

Post by einhverfr »

saraid216 wrote: post #100
einhverfr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. And anyone who doesn't believe that needs to read "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. What she covers will boggle the mind and challenge what folks think about gender issues generally. > But it does mean there aren't the same level of opportunities. If someone whacks your shin with a crowbar before you do your figure skating, that just ain't a meritocracy, no matter how fair the…

> The bigger question in my mind is how we solve that structural problem. Agreed. But I don't think that's a battle worth fighting just in the tech industry. There are rights for women that can be fought for in general: better protections against sexual harassment, better requirements for maternity (and paternity) leaves, etc. (Google found me this: http://www.now.org/issues/wfw/empledge.html ) Tech could strive to b…

What about a basic shift from a company-as-machine model to a company-as-ecosystem model? It seems to me that a standard company is a bit like a standard vegetable garden, highly ordered to the detriment of long- and even short-term productivity. A better approach might be to create companies where family life and work life don't have to be separate, where you can still put in that 130 hour work week from home, taking your 15 min coffee breaks to play with the kids? Maybe ensure that new parents back from maternity or paternity leave can bring their kids to work for the first year or two?

Those things you mention strike me as band-aids. Sure they'd help but wouldn't it be better to rethink the way we emphasize the separation of work and family and the separation of work and home?

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#105

Post by rachelbythebay »

Locke1689 wrote: post #99
rachelbythebay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm interested in building something useful for a reasonable amount of money. That's what I do: a simple exchange of currency for services rendered. Is this about women in tech, or is this some nebulous thing about startups? Because I'm all for the former, and don't really worry so much about the latter.

Is this about women in tech, or is this some nebulous thing about startups? Because I'm all for the former, and don't really worry so much about the latter. Why don't you read the article?

I did. What you quoted is what's known as a reply to the person above me.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#106

Post by einhverfr »

tomwalker wrote: post #97
InclinedPlane wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hairdressing were a multi-billion dollar global industry and the foundation of almost the entirety of the future economy that would be more of a problem. Tech, however, is big, important, and getting bigger.

Medicine is a huge industry. Where I am from, women are 70 percent of entrants. They still get help with applications (women in medicine career days etc). They are more likely to take long career breaks and work part time. In the UK, where the tax payer pays for education + all treatment this is not cost efficient. I don't have a link but a recent bmj article showed over a career, 1.7 women cover the same hours as me…

At the same time it is interesting to see this statistic and it is evidence that women will enter an industry despite cultural barriers in that industry. There are subtle anti-woman biases in medicine which are far more pervasive than anything I have seen in the software industry.

For example, if you look at gender in diagrams in medical textbooks, male figures are more likely to represent healthy, normal body functioning while female figures are more likely to be used where the figure represents disease.[1] Self-degrading Real Men(tm) jokes[2] aside I don't see anything similar to that in the software industry.

The big difference is that medicine is a relatively stable industry and you don't have the huge pushes to release a product that you do in the tech industry. Physicians often are better able to set their own hours and decide how much to work than can software engineers working for Marissa Mayer. So for a woman wanting to have a stable, secure career which is friendly towards starting a family will find medicine very appealing and high tech startups rather threatening. On the other hand if Google was having trouble recruiting women now, I would suggest they have a problem.

[1] See "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" by Robbie Davis-Floyd. This is also a wonderful critique of systemic sexism in modern obstetrics of a sort that does not go away with more women entering the field.

[2] such as Linus Torvald's "Real men don't use backups. They upload their work on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror them." Or things like "Real men use cat to write their source files." Obviously this is not suggesting these are normal models of operation.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#107

Post by spindritf »

saraid216 wrote: post #96
gms wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually my intention was neither; I simply asked a question I am curious about the answer to. Why is it a problem that nursing is dominated by women?

That's not a problem. The problem is that people believe nursing is supposed to be a woman's job, and that a male nurse is thus unmanly for freely choosing to become one. These beliefs are wrong. They are sexist. Full stop. An indicator of the prevalence of these beliefs is the dominance of women in the nursing profession. This is hard, factual, statistical data that we can point to; it's easier to parse than qualita…

> These beliefs are wrong.

Those are value judgements, they cannot be "wrong". You can judge them as wrong, but that's just one value judgement on top of another. There is no way to even hold a discussion between them on that ground.

> An indicator of the prevalence of these beliefs is the dominance of women in the nursing profession. This is hard, factual, statistical data that we can point to

This is hard, factual, statistical data that doesn't support your conclusion. Maybe women really do have a stronger preference for nursing jobs, or they are socialized that way, or those jobs fit their schedule better, or they like working with other women so they congregate in jobs already dominated by other women, or..., or some combination of the above.

Why take one piece of data and jump to the least charitable explanation? Sexism is just one of very many possible causes.

> Are blacks more likely to be criminals, or does the expectation that blacks become criminals increase the number of blacks being investigated for crime, leading to a higher rate of discovery?

Again, or both, or neither. Or both but maybe some other factor completely dwarfs those two you mention, rates of single motherhood come to mind.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#108

Post by einhverfr »

vorg wrote: post #58
kvnn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.?

> What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.? It's pervasive in everything, even in the names of stuff. E.g. there's a recent programming language that calls its interpolated strings "G-Strings". That's the class name in the code. A method for finding out the length of the "G-String" was added, called "size", in addition to the existing one called "length". So... ass…

Where do you draw the line though?

We often say in the Perl world that objects that are ported to Moose "grow antlers." Arguably this is at least as female-hostile statement since only male moose grow antlers and therefore it establishes a male-normal perspective.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#109

Post by einhverfr »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #101
einhverfr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so how about we offer a deal like this: 1) Put in 130 hours of work every week except for 3 weeks vacation per year, and 2 months parental leave, and medical leave as required by law. Start when you are 20. When you are 40 we will give you a retirement bonus of 30 million dollars. Is this exclusionary to women? I ask because I think the very clear answer is yes. I don't think the key issues are in terms of an exc…

This is just an illustration of the problem. Look, working crazy hours is absolutely, positively NOT in any way a requirement for success in the tech industry. It's not even a very good way to get work done. But it is commonplace. And it is taken as a shibboleth within this industry. And it does exclude people, especially women but others as well. What do you tell a talented 28 year old woman who is thinking about st…

It's a requirement for an engineering position in a technology start-up, which is a prerequisite for the top-tier success.

As for what to tell a 28 year old man. Most of them recognize that they may have to take their paternity leave late, or only take the minimum. But the fact that this is an option places the 28 year old man in a very different position than the 28 year old woman.

As for the crazy hours deal, I can't imagine many women taking that deal. I can imagine many women pressuring their husbands to take that deal though.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#110

Post by spindritf »

darren wrote: post #38
mangodrunk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence for increasing diversity helps?

The Impact of Gender Composition on Team Performance and Decision-Making: Evidence from the Field http://www.econ.upf.edu/~apesteguia/Gender_Teams.pdf "Looking across the performance distribution, we find that for undergraduates, three women teams are outperformed throughout... For MBA students, at the top, the best performing group is two men and one woman." http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-t…

Moreover, companies which have more female execs report higher earnings. They literally make more money as the number of women in senior management increases.[1][2]

However "if many stock speculators believed Kay and Shipman, firm stock prices would jump upon hiring more female execs, making most CEOS quite eager to hire more women execs. There would be a boom in female execs and Kay and Shipman would not have bothered to write their oped. Since that didn’t happen, I’ve gotta believe most speculators don’t believe those studies, and so I shouldn’t believe them either. If you think otherwise, go speculate."[3]

Here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is and rake in the returns, laughing at the sexists all the way to the bank.

[1]This oped mentions sources http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07... for example.

[2] http://www.catalyst.org/press-release/73/companies-with-more...

[3] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/femfirmfinance.html

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