Pretend you're a woman and then read the comments on this post. That makes it pretty obvious that one of the reasons women have a hard time feeling welcome in tech is because men don't listen to or empathize with them when they speak about their opinions or perspectives.
A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
81–90 of 482 posts
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interesting data point here ia that girls at all-girls schools tend to take much more interest in STEM subjects, which suggests that he issue might be more to do with social percpetions of what is for girls and boys rather than inherent interest differing between genders.
Maybe, but there is selection bias when looking at just girls who go to all-girls schools. Assuming they are mostly private, this would likely select for wealthier families, which may have a correlation with STEM careers. Furthermore, girls from all-girls schools have parents that are willing to enroll them in all-girls schools, which likely correlates with a certain personality type, whatever that may be.
Not sure why this is getting downvotes. The point that all girls schools are not even close to a random sample seems pretty uncontroversial.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a talented, and wonderful, female dev on my team. One thing though:. She has described to me some of the male coders as being "creepers". When I asked for specifics, she couldn't provide them. She simply stated it was a "feeling". The one commonality I found with the creepers is that they are pretty clearly below average in looks. The question is whether this is a correlation or a casual factor. But definitely…
It's funny how that works. I heard one man say to a woman that he didn't schedule a meeting for a particular time because he saw that she had a conflicting meeting. Later that same woman described (to another woman) that the man had been "creeping on her calendar". If it weren't for society's deference to women's feelings, that would probably be read as a hostile comment.
There's definitely a bit of a double standard here. I overhear comments like this fairly regularly. It's just normal and accepted behavior. (I wouldn't go as far as to say society generally has "deference to women's feelings", though.)
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#84> [If you’re a dude and you’re reading this article] Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy. Include her, ask her for advice, introduce her, learn about her work and her life in the same way you would with any male friend or coworker. If you’re an investor, professor, journalist, or manager, take it on yourself to sponsor a young woman’s career. While I totally agree with this advice, I think th…
I agree with your first (non-quoted) paragraph. Please don't blame this on #metoo. it just happened, and I think the first point you made was just as legitimate before #metoo
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#85The cited statistic "Women make up 57% of the workforce" is very misleading. Chasing down the chain of citations, this number appears to be the percentage of "Professional and related occupations" jobs occupied by women according to the BLS (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm). But by far the largest sub-category of this is "Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations" which is heavily female--outside of this sub-group the gender ratio is roughly 50/50.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#86Is CS really “lauded as a haven for antisocial people?” Ouch. Some of the evidence in this article is anecdotal (female friend at a hackathon gets excluded by males, etc.). Has no one else seen the plethora of “Women in Tech” meet ups, events and hiring fairs? Anecdotally, I have several female friends that have interviewed and been hired at companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. I understand this isn’t statisti…
Anecdotally as well, of the (few) women in the graduating class of my CS department all of them were hired almost instantly from a "Women in Tech" conference..Furthermore, I see anytime something become "glamorous" liking the idea of living in Marin and programming all day, there will be those who use any tactic into something they didn't start.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#87> Compared to almost any other industry, women are underrepresented in technology. Except for the many industries where women dominate like: Preschool and kindergarten education Nursing Accounting Social Work Psychology
Your quote agrees with you. Women are underrepresented in tech compared to other industries.
I think the point is there are only so many women to go around, so to have more women in tech we need to pull women out of fields where they are overrepresented like nursing, teaching etc.
Maximum diversity is not "100% women in every field". It's 50% women in every field. Women should be underrepresented relative to nursing, because they're vastly overrepresented in nursing.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#88> Part 1: Young women are more pro-social then young men.
That's just another gender stereotype.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#89Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? Is mathematics more social than CS? Because CS is almost (not quite: physics is almost as bad) unique among STEM specializations for its gender disparity. I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technolo…
> Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? This guy actually put some pretty decent work into researching this - he found that women dominate "sociable" STEM fields like veterinary sciences and obstetrics, while men dominate the "cold" STEM branches like surgery and computer science. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Alexander believes a lot of things. But you can just look up the stats on STEM fields yourself; they're not hard to find. There are STEM fields that approach parity, there are a couple in which women slightly lead men, and there are a bunch with more men than women. But CS is, by what to a casual glance looks like multiple stddevs, worse than the rest.
Unless math is "warmer" than CS --- it isn't --- this explanation doesn't hold much water.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#90> [If you’re a dude and you’re reading this article] Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy. Include her, ask her for advice, introduce her, learn about her work and her life in the same way you would with any male friend or coworker. If you’re an investor, professor, journalist, or manager, take it on yourself to sponsor a young woman’s career. While I totally agree with this advice, I think th…
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