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Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

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Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#21

Post by forgottenpass »

Sorry for being so blunt, but I think I'm missing the message here. What exactly is the purpose of naming and shaming employers for exhibiting symptoms of such a lopsided talent pool?

Presumably the target audience is not unfamiliar with the gender disparity in tech. If they are unfamiliar there exists data about the industry in general that would be better suited to making a point to them. So, this is aimed at some subset of the industry, but it seems a bit nebulous because...

Is it a call to action? "We Can Do Better"? OK, so who are the "we"? What are the actions to take towards doing better? (I mean, more specific the obvious end goal of gender equality in our industry.)

With or without specific calls to actions, why is this broken down on a per-employer basis? Should deviations from industry average be celebrated and booed? Is it an attempt to put pressure on the employers, if so to what end? Or is this just a novel way of reiterating a statistic that the target audience already knows?

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#22

Post by mathattack »

I don't follow this chart. If the right (male) side is further to the right of 50%, shouldn't the left (female) side be proportionally to the left of the 50% too? The average line doesn't line up either.

It's a real issue, but the chart doesn't work well on my browser.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#23

Post by arbutus »

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.

It sounds like this is specifically regarding the engineering teams. The graphic shows only twenty people at all at 37Signals.

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#24

Post by jack-r-abbit »

mathattack wrote: post #22

I don't follow this chart. If the right (male) side is further to the right of 50%, shouldn't the left (female) side be proportionally to the left of the 50% too? The average line doesn't line up either. It's a real issue, but the chart doesn't work well on my browser.

The center point of the chart is 0%. As a dot moves to either the left or the right, it shows some number greater than 0% until it reaches 100%. No company is going to have a dot at each of the edges... as you can not be both 100% male AND 100% female. The chart made more sense to me when I selected the "Sort By: Most Equal" option. The top few companies have a 50/50 split by gender. As you scroll down you will see those shift to the right for a more male-heavy company (mostly... some are female-heavy as well).

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#25

Post by cheez »

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…

Except even feminist societies are finding that the women and men prefer the gender roles.

Maybe "we" should feel guilty about socially engineering something that is proven to make people unhappy. Ironically, the happiness index in women is down in Western societies whereas the same measure for men, is up! And we can hardly argue that women are treated as less equal than they were in the 70s.

People have a knee jerk reaction and say "oh yeah, that's because women have to do even more work now" where that isn't actually the case. Married women with traditional gender roles are actually happier than their married and equal counterparts.

Now, I know I'm not providing any statistics or references but I would urge you to be on the lookout. They show up quite regularly and are easy to find once you are open to the concept. One good place to start is "Brainwash", a "documentary" by a comedian that actually resulted in a loss of funds to a gender studies institute.

All this being said, I do not think a single one of us would say that a woman should not be encouraged to be a programmer. But to deny the joy that a woman can get from being a "traditional" mother as well as a programmer is unfair to an entire gender and unfairly creates a generation of latchkey children. I do not know a single mother or father who says "Yeah, I wish I spent less time with my kids."

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#26

Post by babyturtle »

Lets not be "sector-ists". We need more women garbage collectors, oil rig workers, soldiers, MMA fighters, night time security, bouncers, factory workers, miners, sewerage plant workers, construction workers.

We need more men in cushy jobs like HR, PR, teaching primary schools, secretaries, modelling, etc

Re: Visualization of Gender Disparity in Tech

#27

Post by xbryanx »

acangiano wrote: post #2

It would be interesting to see if a similar visualization for nurses and primary education teachers would show a similar pattern (with the gender reversed, of course) or if the gap would have different characteristics and distribution.

I agree. We would benefit from improved gender parity in these industries as well.
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