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Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

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Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#11

Post by bottompair »

I wonder just how long this discussion is going to go on. To me looking at who has jobs in tech broken down by gender is flawed from the beginning.

The more interesting sociological question is whether there is a nurture thing happening here, or just a natural tendency for women to not be as interested in computers and technology at a young age.

Boxing and MMX have way more men than women - why isn't there a "we can do better" campaign for these disciplines?

By the way my co-founder CEO is a woman and she's an amazing technologist and leader.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#12

Post by bmelton »

Jugurtha wrote: post #5

"We can do better" translated to: Let us join the feminist bandwagon please. What's funny is that, even using infographics and stats to show how "unfair" it is, stats don't lie: The companies that have more than 18% women are mostly chick stuff: Fashion, blogging, etc. Hard core tech companies still employ mostly dudes, and they will continue to employ dudes. If they change that, they'll get into Gawker club. I am se…

You're not wrong, but I detail in another comment on here why it is indeed beneficial to hire women.

My wife started the Baltimore and DC chapters of "Girl Develop It", which aims to solve your first and second bullet points.

The irony, of course, being that whether or not you believe in the gender pay gap, the gap definitely seems to be smaller in tech. Perhaps that's due to the relatively small amount women in tech currently (meaning the gap would grow as diversity increased), or perhaps that's because tech companies tend to be run more analytically (at least at early states) and less on negotiated value, but either way, it's surprising to me that more women aren't flocking to tech, as it likely holds higher relative wages for them, both because of the field, and because of the lessened gender gap.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#13

Post by ameister14 »

bmelton wrote: post #6
mynameisasdf wrote: post #4

Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?

I have a hard time imagining that there are many companies who benefit from a monoculture. Diversity equals truth, or more accurately, increases the likelihood of finding truth. If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor. Unless your product aims to solve a pro…

I don't think that is necessarily true; it implies that we cannot empathize with people that do not share at least racial and location characteristics with us.

I think a white man can make a product for black women, and I think a black woman can make products for white men. For me, it's more about acknowledging that the world exists outside of white men in the city and less about making sure your team is made up of every racial and socio-economic variable you aim to market to.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#14

Post by vezzy-fnord »

bmelton wrote: post #6
mynameisasdf wrote: post #4

Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?

I have a hard time imagining that there are many companies who benefit from a monoculture. Diversity equals truth, or more accurately, increases the likelihood of finding truth. If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor. Unless your product aims to solve a pro…

My main problem with the way many people handle the diversity issue has been exactly this: their major insistence on phenotypes as the pinnacle of diversity.

It turns out that "white guys" are not a homogenous group. In fact, chances are that white guys from (e.g.) Finland, Serbia and Nebraska will have little in common besides their skin color and sex. Their opinions and worldviews will differ greatly.

Diversity of opinion is just as important, if not more so. Sure, on the outside everyone looks like a pasty-faced white dude, but jumping to conclusions based solely on that, is... misguided, to put it euphemistically.

I'm not saying we can't benefit from having a wide variety of phenotypes as well, after all different phenotypes equal different experiences. But not every white guy is a Bay Area caricature.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#15

Post by Jugurtha »

epistasis wrote: post #10
Jugurtha wrote: post #5

"We can do better" translated to: Let us join the feminist bandwagon please. What's funny is that, even using infographics and stats to show how "unfair" it is, stats don't lie: The companies that have more than 18% women are mostly chick stuff: Fashion, blogging, etc. Hard core tech companies still employ mostly dudes, and they will continue to employ dudes. If they change that, they'll get into Gawker club. I am se…

I'm tired of tech missing out on so much potential from those with two X chromosomes. If tech was more inclusive, there would be far more great engineers to hire from. >It is a bit phony that these companies try to "promote" this. I love women. I've been intimate with more women in a couple of months than the average dude in a lifetime. Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we…

>I'm tired of tech missing out on so much potential from those with two X chromosomes. If tech was more inclusive, there would be far more great engineers to hire from.

I trust female engineers who rock will not have difficulty finding a job, and if they do, I'm sure they have the drive to start their own company.

>Look at that last sentence. You're young. That's fine. We were all stupid when we were young. I'm still stupid in many ways. But be careful about the stupid things that you record for posterity.

I'm 26, quote me on a marble rock if you wish.

PS: I don't like your idea implying that being intimate with women is stupid and reckless. It's insulting to me, and to the female gender.

Oh, and I upvoted you. Because you voiced your opinion.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#16

Post by bmelton »

ameister14 wrote: post #13
bmelton wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time imagining that there are many companies who benefit from a monoculture. Diversity equals truth, or more accurately, increases the likelihood of finding truth. If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor. Unless your product aims to solve a pro…

I don't think that is necessarily true; it implies that we cannot empathize with people that do not share at least racial and location characteristics with us. I think a white man can make a product for black women, and I think a black woman can make products for white men. For me, it's more about acknowledging that the world exists outside of white men in the city and less about making sure your team is made up of e…

I do not disagree with that at all, and clearly, we've seen monocultures succeed at doing exactly that. I wasn't attempting to decry the methodology of every company with a monoculture, as much as to point out that it's just easier with actual diversity.

As Vezzy-Fnord points out, a single individual is able to empathize with other types of people, but that empathy is finite, and also, empathy does not equal understanding.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#17

Post by Dirlewanger »

mynameisasdf wrote: post #4

Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?

This was only made for us to feel guilty about the status quo. People need to stop focusing intra-industry and look at the larger symptoms: this is a societal problem. This is how families at large are raising their children. If we want more women developers/entrepreneurs, we need to take a serious look at the gender roles we're setting up for girls as early as preschool. We need to stop the incessant "We need to fix the software industry blah blah blah" crap.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#18

Post by bjeanes »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #9

No idea where the 37Signals number came from... this is the Basecamp team today: https://basecamp.com/team The Basecamp team is 8/43 women - NONE of whom are accounted for here. That's a huge factual miss on the very first company I recognized & fact-checked. Doesn't fill me with confidence.

The data is crowd-sourced. Anybody can correct the numbers here https://github.com/triketora/women-in-software-eng

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#19

Post by Jugurtha »

bmelton wrote: post #12
Jugurtha wrote: post #5

"We can do better" translated to: Let us join the feminist bandwagon please. What's funny is that, even using infographics and stats to show how "unfair" it is, stats don't lie: The companies that have more than 18% women are mostly chick stuff: Fashion, blogging, etc. Hard core tech companies still employ mostly dudes, and they will continue to employ dudes. If they change that, they'll get into Gawker club. I am se…

You're not wrong, but I detail in another comment on here why it is indeed beneficial to hire women. My wife started the Baltimore and DC chapters of "Girl Develop It", which aims to solve your first and second bullet points. The irony, of course, being that whether or not you believe in the gender pay gap, the gap definitely seems to be smaller in tech. Perhaps that's due to the relatively small amount women in tech…

Yes. Well, where I live men and women are paid the same.

Though what intrigues me is the fact people turn a blind eye and go "Oh, why on Earth there are so few women in Tech". Well, I'm an Engineer and every Engineering year, the ratio dudes/girls is as high as Burj Al Arab.

It's not for nothing there are clichés like "Girls don't do tech and if they do, they do Biology". Stereotypes, maybe. But "60% of the time, it works every time". You ask a girl in a Sci&Tech University what she does, most of the time it's Biology.

There aren't that many girls programmers. And then there are fewer female programmers who are good (that's natural, being good is rarer than being average. Valid for men, too) who have to compete with a more important number of men programmers.

Just probabilities, yet people want to make an exclusively political/segregation/unfair matter.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#20

Post by bjeanes »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #17
mynameisasdf wrote: post #4

Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?

This was only made for us to feel guilty about the status quo. People need to stop focusing intra-industry and look at the larger symptoms: this is a societal problem. This is how families at large are raising their children. If we want more women developers/entrepreneurs, we need to take a serious look at the gender roles we're setting up for girls as early as preschool. We need to stop the incessant "We need to fix…

You aren't wrong, but this viewpoint is incomplete. That approach does nothing to stem the well-documented repelling forces that exist in the industry today and the anecdotal yet overwhelming accounts of women who are interested in these things feeling unwelcome and leaving. Asking someone who feels unwelcome to suck it up instead of introspecting on how we can do better now is ridiculous and morally questionable.
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