500% more female engineers = 500% more risk of sexual harassment lawsuits. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.
Progress will be when this kind of thinking doesn't occur
How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
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Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#32The article doesn't really say why they wanted more female engineers, other than "it was vital to the product." I'd like to see more women engineers, and I applaud Etsy's initiative, but it seems unlikely that adding a few more super-junior (freshly-trained) women developers to their staff is going to meaningfully change the product in the near term. I suppose (hope) that these women could help prevent anti-female pr…
I didn't know which company was accused of this, but the version I heard was that "female" was translated as "hembra". It does mean that, but you usually hear it applied to animals.[1] Probably an easy mistake for someone to make if they're told to translate a string without being made aware of the context.
[1] The DRAE, considered the "dictionary of record" in Spain, says that female animal is definition 1, and female human is definition 2. http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=hembra
Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#33Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#34Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#35Recently I watched a documentary in which a researcher told of how he was ridiculed for studying happiness, even though nobody saw anything wrong with studying depression. Then I saw a documentary where a handful of really skinny people were put on a ridiculous diet and their physiological changes were tracked. Instead of trying to figure out why there aren't MORE women in science, math and engineering disciplines, p…
What's different for you about being compared to other women instead of being compared to men, when they were considering who to offer the job?
Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#36Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#37Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Progress will be when this kind of thinking doesn't occur
Is this kind of thinking incorrect?
Probably incorrect.
And I could just as easily posit the reverse. Say we have one woman and nine men. If we add a woman, does it really double the likelihood of a harassment suit? Why would it? Either one of the nine men harasses women, or he doesn't, why would adding a second women change his behaviour?
On the other hand, if we halve the proportion of women by hiring ten more men, I'd say you may have doubled the chances of having a harasser on your staff.
I guess it all comes down to whether you walk around thinking that women cause sexual harassment lawsuits or men cause sexual harassment lawsuits. I think it's the men doing the harassing, but whoo-boy are there a lot of apologists out there who believe that women are making this stuff up.
Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes.
In what way?
Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theory: the fields you mention, law and medicine, (historically and still) convey a higher social status on the member. There's also a relatively well trodden path through apprenticeship, successful practitioner, and eventual transition into other stable/respectable paths (politics, judiciary, hospital administration) as your career winds down. Software engineering doesn't have that (yet?)
People haven't aspired to become software engineers for generations. Only the past few years. In 1990, no one told their daughters that they could be software engineers. They told their daughters they could be lawyers and doctors, or maybe Senators, or business executives. Software engineering? Who wanted to do that?
Out of 150 students that graduated my year of high school (2003), an all boys school, I was the only one who chose to follow a computing career.
All my friends, even those with a similar (or more advanced) aptitude and interest in computers, chose different paths. Chemistry. Theoretical Physics. History. Politics. Economics.
Nobody wanted to be doing computing professionally. Men were/are afforded to be outcasts or underdogs, socially; there's some romanticism to it. I'm not sure the same has applied for women, but maybe that's changing.