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What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

nytimes.com

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Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#141

Post by tptacek »

zamalek wrote: post #5

We've known this for a while, it boils down to: barbies. Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what th…

What about Barbie doll ownership makes it harder to understand pointer math?

Exactly how are Barbie dolls in conflict with chemistry sets?

Even boys who own chemistry sets play with them far less often than they do with action figures. Is there some connection between chemistry sets and action figures that advantage them over Barbie dolls?

Is it just Barbie dolls? I hope my 14 year old daughter's American Girl dolls haven't ruined her for STEM; that's her current planned field. The boy, 16, played with legos and video games. I'm guessing he's going to be history major, or a writer. Did we do something else right? Or are we doomed and just don't know it yet?

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#142

Post by DanBC »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #137
Mz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call myself a technologist. I do have a Certicate in GIS. But I intended to be an urban planner before life got in the way and I have failed, so far, to get a job in tech. However, I also know of a man high on the leader board who is a school teacher. Being a technologist seems to not be required to have status here. Being male does seem to be a requirement. There do not appear to be any women currently on…

If the vast majority of HN participants are male, the leaderboard composition is a function of demographics, not some kind of "man filter" you've had to overcome. If your username is so generic that people frequently misgender you, how can it also be the case that you're simultaneously held to a higher standard on account of being a woman? (Well, you might imagine that commentators here are _deliberately_ misgenderin…

> Well, you might imagine that commentators here are _deliberately_ misgendering you, which is a suggestion so preposterous that I can't entertain it.

There are a bunch of people who chose to misgender others, even when they know the preferred terms.

Whether they get flagged or not seems random.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896908

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896788 etc.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#143

Post by tptacek »

omegaham wrote: post #62
zamalek wrote: post #5

We've known this for a while, it boils down to: barbies. Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what th…

I'll confirm this anecdotally. My sister was extremely good at math and science... until the end of middle school, when she started hanging out in earnest with her friends. Her friends thought that any intellectual interest was nerdy and stupid, and my sister acted accordingly. Now, the girl who was easily learning algebra in elementary school "just can't do math." I think that the big difference in STEM is that nerd…

There are hundreds of thousands of boys who excel at math and science until their bodies mature to the point where they become competitive at track or football.

Unlike "hanging out with friends", a universal activity, extracurricular sports actually do conflict with early computer science exploration (they're a huge time sink, as any parent of a kid in a sport will attest).

Meanwhile, sports draws in more boys than girls.

Why are we so quick to accept the notion that after-school activities that girls participate in isolate them from STEM, but after-school activities dominated by boys don't?

As a nerdy teenager, I never had a problem with any girl in any clique or social group at my school. But I sure as shit had problems with the boys in sports.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#144

Post by Mz »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #137
Mz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call myself a technologist. I do have a Certicate in GIS. But I intended to be an urban planner before life got in the way and I have failed, so far, to get a job in tech. However, I also know of a man high on the leader board who is a school teacher. Being a technologist seems to not be required to have status here. Being male does seem to be a requirement. There do not appear to be any women currently on…

If the vast majority of HN participants are male, the leaderboard composition is a function of demographics, not some kind of "man filter" you've had to overcome. If your username is so generic that people frequently misgender you, how can it also be the case that you're simultaneously held to a higher standard on account of being a woman? (Well, you might imagine that commentators here are _deliberately_ misgenderin…

Have an upvote.

I agree with some of your points. It took me a very long time to conclude my gender was a factor on HN. Compared to other male dominated environments I have spent time in, my treatment here has been spectacularly good. It is one of the reasons I worked my ass off to resolve some of the problems I had here.

I went through a period where I was getting a helluva lot of flack, where it was clear to me that men on the leaderboard were closing ranks to shut me out. But my karma was so far below what qualifies one for the leaderboard, I was baffled by social evidence that I was "prominent -- for a woman." After managing to gather objective data that fit with that fact, I handled things differently here.

Here is a summary, with supporting links, to the data I gathered: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat...

I don't think anyone is consciously, intentionally trying to exclude women. I do think the apparent lack of women on the leaderboard is not a mere happenstance of numbers.

It is possible for your experiences and views to have validity and for mine to also. I have written about this issue previously. I think you and I might agree more than it seems had we not gotten off on the wrong foot. I also think you are bringing personal baggage and frustrations to the discussion that biases your interpretation of my position. You "heard" me accusing you of dismissing it as coincidence because of my gender when that wasn't my intent. That kind of thing does wind up being a problem for women. It ends up being a kind of de facto sexism.

I also did not say I was held to a higher standard. That isn't how I would frame the problem space. But, given that you are not sympathetic to my views or testimony concerning my firsthand experience, I see little point at this time in trying to figure out how to communicate more on that piece of what you said.

Edit:

FYI: You can take my continued engagement as evidence that, while I think you are wrong about a lot of things, I don't think you are simply and intentionally being an asshole. I don't debate people that I think are not engaging in good faith to at least some degree. I stop replying when I think it is straight up assholery.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#145

Post by vacri »

tptacek wrote: post #135
vacri wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers have their own 'uniforms' - they certainly don't tend to wear the normal day-to-day clothing of the general public.

A telling remark. So far as I can see, lawyers dress pretty much identically to every other professional --- except computer professionals, who actually do have an idiosyncratic dress code.

I don't see that at all. Lawyers in general dress better than most other professions except finance. I've worked in hospitals and never saw the doctors dressing as well as lawyers[1] - some consultants do, but far from the majority doctors. Friends of mine are in architecture, and I don't see that there either. Same with engineering in general - neat casual seems much more par for the course. Academics also don't often fit the bill.

In contrast, the 'neckbeard and star wars t-shirt' is something I've never personally seen working in tech. Neckbeard, yes. I've worked in one waterfall shop and four agile shops, and liaised with techies in enterprise from time to time (zero t-shirts there) - the 'sci-fi geek visible at 100 yards' is a trope, a stereotype. The techies I've worked with have been overwhelmingly male (only one female developer in all that time) and about half of them were family men. That's something the 'computer professional' stereotype actively opposes, instead painting people that are into computers as social losers who can't get a girl.

IT is more accepting of shabbiness in dress than other professions, but I simply don't see the sloganed t-shirt as being the actual standard attire of computer professionals. Instead it seems more to be a shorthand stereotype, just like a white coat and stethoscope signals 'doctor' in the collective mind.

[1] I do have bias here - when I say 'lawyers', I mean ones in business. I haven't had interaction with lawyers dealing in personal matters. I imagine they dress to suit.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#146

Post by tptacek »

vacri wrote: post #145
tptacek wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A telling remark. So far as I can see, lawyers dress pretty much identically to every other professional --- except computer professionals, who actually do have an idiosyncratic dress code.

I don't see that at all. Lawyers in general dress better than most other professions except finance. I've worked in hospitals and never saw the doctors dressing as well as lawyers[1] - some consultants do, but far from the majority doctors. Friends of mine are in architecture, and I don't see that there either. Same with engineering in general - neat casual seems much more par for the course. Academics also don't oft…

I think you're making observations from a biased selection of lawyers. BigLaw corporate lawyers wear suits and ties. But most lawyers aren't that, and most of them wear business casual just like everybody else.

Meanwhile: if you select down to consulting software developers, particularly those working at major (500+ headcount) firms selling to Fortune 500 companies, you're going to find that they don't dress like the stereotypical software developer either. Those consultants are the CS equivalent of BigLaw lawyers.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#147

Post by DanBC »

bjornstjerne wrote: post #43

> In fact, Dr. Cheryan’s research shows that young men tend not to major in English for the same reasons women don’t pick computer science: They compare their notions of who they are to their stereotypes of English majors and decide they won’t fit in. I wonder how long it will take for humanities departments to adopt a more inclusive culture? Why must our obsessive hand-wringing be be reserved exclusively for compute…

Not sure about universities but both nursing and teaching have several campaigning groups to get more men in.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#148

Post by astaraeli123 »

zamalek wrote: post #5

We've known this for a while, it boils down to: barbies. Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what th…

Honestly, as a girl who was actually given access to both, I chose both. I still have my barbies, I still have my lego sets, I still have my electronics kits. I don't think I was ostracized (or at least I found my own tinkerer community), and I played with everything I was given with. I think what made this cooler was that my dad was supportive of what I wanted to do (e.g. make houses, make lights for barbies, make websites to describe what I was working on), even though he didn't understand some of how it worked.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, today I'm a software engineer.

I know this is purely anecdotal, but I think we forget that if you give kids access to everything, they will figure out their own playtime and communities.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#149

Post by [deleted] »

JesperRavn wrote: post #20

This was a very well written and balanced article. I want to contribute a reason why I think that many men in tech hold back from fully endorsing this viewpoint. The reason is that there is a very fine line between saying that you don't have to be nerdy to be in tech, and failing to acknowledge that in general being nerdy is a disadvantage in society, and many people found a refuge in tech where they were mocked and…

[deleted]

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#150

Post by tptacek »

gozo wrote: post #132
zamalek wrote: post #5

We've known this for a while, it boils down to: barbies. Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what th…

While a agree with the problems people mention in this subthread there are also, at least in some parts of the world, plenty of women in "life sciences" (biology/chemistry/medicine) and other fields like economics.

Yes. I sometimes feel like most of the people in these threads don't enter the discussion with the understanding that computer science, and software development in particular, are a topic of discussion because they have a uniquely bad gender gap.
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