311–320 of 520 posts
Judging by current distribution of interns, coding is becoming a female dominated field. I think this has more to do with pragmatic mindset of asian parents and less with any DEI efforts. How many other fields: - Are not dangerous or unreasonably physically strenuous - Pay good money - Keep you surrounded by respectable, educated people - Can be mastered in 4-6 years rather than running risk of getting old while stil…
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This chart isn't lumping them, it has never been close to single digit percent for the past 50 years. Any class with sub 10% women is a big outlier. And as you can see from the graph, things hasn't really improved, classes used to have way more women, the single digit percent examples are low outliers at a time when things had already gotten really bad from where they used to. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2…
That graph (which is from here: [1]) lists [2] as its data source; none of the tables under "326 Completion and…" match the data they're graphing; it never breaks it out by degree+sex, AFAICT; there are a lot of tables, and I did not exhaustively search them, nor did the article include enough information on their methodology. The phrasing of "Over the weekend, I…" implies some exogenous data source, but it's not sha…
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It is important to understand the reasons for that negative correlation. If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite - sex imbalance is not something to accept, but rather to fix. Many authoritarian regimes are expanding their economic base by enabling women to pursue professional careers. In some developed countries there’s no such pressure, so they are simply stuck in the past. They are not doing better…
> It is important to understand the reasons for that negative correlation. Agreed 100% > If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite This is where you lose me. Your statement here suggests the following: 1. That you know, for a conclusive fact, what those reasons are 2. That the reasons suggest something ominous Furthermore, you haven't explained what you consider to be the reasons, let alone offered expl…
Individual free choices are valid and as a father you did a good job showing the opportunities you know about and then not pushing towards certain career. A woman absolutely can and should be able to choose to be an engineer, a nurse or a fulltime mother and housekeeper, as long as this is free choice. All those jobs are important and respected.
However I’m not talking about them or diminishing them. I’m talking about the society as a whole and sexism so deeply rooted in the culture that even with proper education it is still not easy to uncover and combat all biases. Gender discrimination starts very early when metaphorically speaking boys get cars and girls get dolls. Children are programmed by the society to have certain interests and play certain gender roles. The share of girls who will choose a profession traditionally dominated by men is already lower because of that. Then it extends to university and first career steps. Women too often have to deal with sexism and harassment in academia or on workplace. Too often they are told (still!) that men can do better. Choosing a more traditional role they avoid it, but is it really a freedom of choice? And we even have not started talking about childcare where exists institutional disparity forcing to make a choice between the family and career. For example, how long was your parental leave compared to your wife? Freedom for all but white men in countries like America is only theoretical. On practice the circumstances of life do not leave many women a choice. The outcomes are speaking for themselves. There are many women who are perfectly fit for the most sophisticated jobs, yet there are only few who make it there. In Germany we at least had Merkel. America, the so-called leader of the free world, never had a woman as a president. Fortune 500 CEOs? Startup founders? Billionaires? Nobel prize winners? You can easily find those numbers. There’s no genetic predisposition for women to not being able to get there. There’s only ignorance of people like you who think that they have done enough and it’s the matter of choice.
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Isn't imposter syndrome just... pretty common in any STEM field? Maybe especially in anyone who isn't a neurotypical cishet white man.
You don't think affirmative action has anything to do with that? Affirmative action means you and everyone else there knows you had to pass a lower bar, of course that makes impostor syndrome worse.
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When I look around my peers, not a lot has changed in the last 10 years for woman in tech
I don't feel the same. The last decade or so has seen an explosion of women show interest in joining the tech community. Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career. I've been on several teams now where women have outnumbered men. In my experience, the ratio is now flipped when you look at the team as a whole (XFN, etc). I may be biased though as I've only worked at "premier" large tech c…
But yes, it's definitely a large company thing. I could count the number of female programmers at my first job (~150 staff, maybe 80 programmers) on one hand. 2nd was a huge conglomerate and a better mix, even if older personell skewed male. 3rd was a ~150 startup (more like 100 programmers) and back to the "on one hand" situation. I completely agree with more of a shift to management and design for women compared to being "in the field" as programmers.
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More money. Smaller companies can't compete with FAANG salaries. So when FAANG prioritizes hiring women, and there are still many fewer women than men in tech overall, smaller and poorer companies can't compete with the offers women are getting from FAANG.
... sure, on the other hand way less competition, and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training.
I chuckled. I yearn for these days, but this isn't the experience I had (late millenial/early Gen Z). No one trains, you get maybe a week to adjust, expected to go full steam ahead, and leave or are laid off 2-3 years later.
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It is important to understand the reasons for that negative correlation. If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite - sex imbalance is not something to accept, but rather to fix. Many authoritarian regimes are expanding their economic base by enabling women to pursue professional careers. In some developed countries there’s no such pressure, so they are simply stuck in the past. They are not doing better…
My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I spend close to eight chained to my computer. If one of us is a slave, it's not her. She's not attending daily stand-ups to report how teaching our daughter the alphabet is going; she chooses how to spend each day with no external pressures at all. Her work taking care of the kids is still more exhausting than mine, but it's also obviously more fulfilling and engag…
I don’t want to jump to conclusions about your life, but cooking meals for the whole family usually takes more than an hour a day if you are not just putting frozen pizza in the oven. I often spend twice as much. Maybe she’s very efficient. Maybe you don’t really know her.
> As it is now, I make more than enough for her to take care of the kids full time and still make progress toward our goals. Why wouldn't she take that deal?
I have already spent one year on parental leave and I can say with confidence that if you have passion for work and enjoy what you do, it is not a “deal”. It is sacrifice for your children and for your partner. All families are different. Maybe your wife enjoys working as housekeeper and fulltime mother and doesn’t really care if several years are taken from her career path elsewhere. Not everyone wants life like that. You say it yourself that the circumstances of your life pushed you into this split of responsibilities. Would you do it differently if your wife wanted to get back to work even if that meant less money? Would you let her pursue her passion?
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When I look around my peers, not a lot has changed in the last 10 years for woman in tech
The only place I see/hear a lot of female devs is in India. In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.
Interesting, in Korea it's not nearly as bad. CS students are about 1/3 women, and the large majority of them does end up in tech. Of course still overrepresented in front-related roles and underrepresented in back-related roles but I don't think that's different anywhere really.
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https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/inclusion-equity-dive... https://www.axios.com/2024/04/02/dei-backlash-diversity etc. There is a backlash underway against any effort to expand workplace diversity beyond the representative fractions circa 1990.
There is a backlash to the heavy handedness of DEI. You can’t freeze out white males simple because they are white males. You need to remove barriers to entry based on sexism and such, but you can’t exclude a whole large class of people because that class had it good in the past. That gets you South Africa.
I agree with this. However, I have been working in tech for quite some time now, and I have not seen any place where white males have been frozen out of employment or funding. More typically, in my personal experience, they represent most of the staff and leadership and materially all of institutional funding recipients.
Perhaps my experience is atypical, or my definition of "frozen out" is different.