It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in.
And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental level I personally prefer equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.
As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people. Personally I've seen bad behavior from both sides. I've also seen exceptional talent, skill, empathy etc. come from both groups. Many corporate cultures are toxic to everybody, irregardless of your gender.
I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.
I think its a lot more complicated than this. Yes, men and women can be jerks. The bigger issues seem to be when a team is 80%+ one gender or another, and the issues aren't about "being mean" the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.
A huge problem is that we have a lot of 6 person tech teams with 5 guys and 1 women and the women naturally feel alienated and either aren't actually able to do well or are at least perceived as not doing well due to their situation. This holds back women's career development as a group and reduces the numbers of women in higher ranks in corporate life.
> the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.
I do not think that is the problem of 80%+ one gender groups.
Imagine going into a store and see that 80%+ is the opposite gender. Before anyone has a chance of accommodating your need, what emotions pops up? Now compared that to going into the same store with the 80%+ being your own gender.
Going into an environment where you feel like a part of a dominating group give most people a feeling of security. They feel safe and what ever choice everyone else does is a safe choice to adapt. Entering a group where you are a minority has not just the absence of that, but can also induce a sense of insecurity.
This is one theory why countries like Sweden have a very extreme gender segregation of around 90% of men and 90% of women working in a gender segregated profession. From student to senior employee, every step is impacted in how secure the person feel in continuing with their career path, and the above effect influence how leaky the pipe get.
> And lots of people are investing lots of time and effort into trying to fix that problem
Are they? I worked in the mental health space for over 10 years and almost 80% of therapists are women -- and a vast majority of those are white women. There hasn't been any significant movement to "fix" that despite a very compelling argument that finding a therapist who is a good match to a patient is fundamental to the success of treatment -- there's actually a scientific case to be made that more diversity in mental health care is beneficial to outcomes. However, there's little evidence that "more women" designing silicon chips has any measurable benefit (or harm.) Having more women (and old people, and people from different cultural backgrounds) involved in UX design is definitely valuable -- but more women writing back-end server code or designing airplane wings has little effect either good or bad.
Women vastly outnumber men in the social sciences and in education however, "We need more men kindergarten teachers" has never been a serious initiative. Getting more women into commercial fishing, oil field work, plumbing, or over-the-road trucking has never been seriously pursued. But "computer science" -- it's a damned obsession with people of certain politics.
It's a fact that men and women are different, both biologically and socially. Women can certainly be exceptional computer workers and men could be great therapists or kindergarten teachers -- but that doesn't mean they necessarily want those things nor are they necessarily pre-disposed with the characteristics necessary for success in those fields. It's a fact, for example, that there are gender differences in spatial reasoning. That doesn't mean all men are better than all women at spatial reasoning, but it does mean that men have a statistically higher success with spatial reasoning than do women as a group. Women have their own advantages over men as well. There is nothing wrong with differences and it has gotten stupid how people insist on claiming that everyone is equal. They're not. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
This insistence that we have to "fix" the "problem" is just woke nonsense. We should absolutely, 100% end discrimination in the professions -- no question or debate there. But we should stop trying to force equality as an outcome. Let people gravitate towards the things they're good at or care about instead of trying to social engineer everything to please some imaginary ideal. If a girl wants to hack on compilers -- we should get out of her way (i.e. removing bias and discrimination) and let her do it. But we shouldn't be focused on going into third-grade classrooms and trying to convince girls that they should care about hacking on compilers. We should be focused on exposing every student to vast possibilities, but we don't need to force it down people's throats as a social imperative.
I think it comes from how software has become a financially lucrative profession in nice office environment with semi-flexible hours relatively recently. An overall attractive package with the corresponding political attention it gets as a result.
While all the other things you mentioned other than maybe oil field work are not as financially lucrative.
> I think it comes from how software has become a financially lucrative profession in nice office environment with semi-flexible hours relatively recently.
In short, the goal is to put people of a certain group in positions of power and influence.
People of a certain group are already in positions of power and influence. The goal is to ensure that people from all groups get a slice of the power and influence. Why would you (or anybody?) not want that?
No one expressed any opinion or judgement, so please don't impose your prejudice on others. The point is that the first step to fix a problem is to correctly identify it. If you misrepresent the problem them obviously you cannot succeed at fixing it.
This is generally a great summary. We have near full employment right now, so that means in order to pull more women into engineering, you'd have to fill those industries the women are coming from with equally talented men.
In other words, you'd effectively be taking would-be male engineers and converting them into nurses and teachers. And vice versa. The number of people that consider those fields a toss up is vanishingly small. They require completely different skill sets.
It's a matter of power. There extremely few women CEOs, or millionaires, in positions of power. Legally they have all the same rights, sure, but all these power structures are men's clubs. IT is one of those, it's a matter of power, but much less ambitious.
It’s a sad reflection of the current world that you were downvoted. It is a matter of power. If it wasn’t professions typicalLy associated with care taking , I.e. women, would not be lower paid than professions associated with men. People in power, mainly men, decide which should be more valued and guess what they tend to value more? Historically software engineering started more a women dominated field (men were in the more valued hardware field then) and as software became more important it became increasingly defined as a men’s field and theories then prop up that it’s the natural way, men are simply more inclined than women. Bollocks!
The power structures are sociopaths' club. If anything, I'd rather say that it's powerful people prefer to be men, than being a man gives one any power. Most of the men are clueless powerless people.
I have managed delivery teams and this all fits my experience. One sex can have 100% best intentions but can nonetheless dominate. My best performing, and funnest, teams have been nearly equally split.
Keep in mind that if I am in a team of 5, then 80% of the group is in the dominant "not-me group" and 20% is in the minority "me group". We often (and reasonably) choose to prioritise the needs of the dominant group over the non-dominant group. If I want to use Elm, but the rest of the team wants to use JS and React, I'd actually be a bit of a jerk to force them all to accommodate my wishes.
While contrived, I'm convinced this is precisely the problem. If I am a woman on a team of men, am I a bit of a jerk for demanding that the rest of the team accommodates me? Perhaps they all have a communication style that suits them that is born from their upbringing as male children while I have a communication style that equally suits me, but is different from theirs. Must I adapt to their system, or should they adapt to mine?
When we talk about programming style, or preferences for tools the answer is seemingly easy. We go with the majority so that we please the most people. When we talk about gender, sexual orientation, race, etc the answer is much more complex. We can divide our groups in infinite ways and yet some categorisations are chosen to be significant while others are not.
Because of this, I feel that it is actually really important that we recognise that we will not and can not accommodate everyone. Being different, having a different opinion, having a different set of experiences is not actually enough to warrant special treatment. In many cases we choose to discriminate: no matter how good a Java programmer you are, we will not write our frontend in GWT! (Real story: I maintain a frontend written in Java and GWT, so I'm taking some liberties ;-) ).
As I said, there are some special cases where we have decided that we wish to provide special accommodation. We do this because, on balance, we believe that doing so enriches our societies. It will always be a tradeoff, though, and it's important to understand that.
Consider the word "discrimination". Without that word, we can not discriminate between "good" and "bad". We do not want to live in a world without discrimination. We should always strive to discriminate in such a way as it makes the world a better place. We wish to avoid behaviour that works against our interests and encourage behaviour that works for our interests.
To that end, we specifically discriminate in certain situations so that we accommodate minority groups in a way that we feel enhances our society. It should not be a surprise if we occasionally get this wrong and I strongly discourage people from assuming that the "right" answer is easy to determine. It is important that we think very carefully about which things we wish accommodate (minority representation of gender, sexual orientation, race) and things which we do not wish to accommodate (hate speech, violent behaviour, and GWT :-D).
P.S. I hereby apologise for my horrible characterisation of Java and GWT. I actually don't mind it that much...
Valid points. I have used the example of a lone vegetarian joining a team with a tradition of eating together at a steak house. In my mind, it would be a reasonable accommodation to stop doing that once a vegetarian is hired -- low cost to switch, highly obnoxious not to.
I find your example of communication style to be trickier. It feels in-between to me. I would agree that some elements of communication style should not be changed to accommodate an inflexible newcomer. On the other hand, when people talk about the benefits of diversity, communication style is a really large element! You know what you enjoy about your current boys' club style -- but it might very well be better if you switched to something more professional even in the absence of onboarding someone new. You won't know until forced to by the introduction of diversity, and that's true in many different subtle areas, not all of which you're going to have any chance of spotting in advance.
The same argument could be applied to just about anything. Perhaps GWT would be a really great fit for what you're working on, but you won't know until you try it. That's far less likely than a communication style change, though, so it's probably one of the costlier and less likely things to try to accommodate.
I agree that the question of whether or not to accommodate a difference is not always answered with "yes!" It depends on the accommodation required.
I don't understand why modern society doesn't understand/want to believe that men and women have different career interests than men. Men and women value things differently, and it's not all because of society.
What I don’t understand is the obsession to draw conclusions as soon as possible. We just don’t have the data yet. From my experience developers are still seen as black magicians by other roles. Being initiated is having been a weird unpopular boy which used computer since he was young. It’s slowly starting to change, and maybe real trends will emerge in 20 years, but why the hurry?
Our only responsibility is that we provide welcoming environment and equality of opportunity. But I may be missing some US context on the obsession here.
There's a whole lot of people who have studied fields that are irrelevant to today's industry needs and have ended up with no real marketable skill. Various forms of activist movements have money in it.
Modern developed societies have solved most of the serious, basic problems making it easier for a group of people to capitalise on solving more lofty problems. I have seen someone who did a degree in communication studies or something like that going after video games for sexism and raise millions for the cause.
This trend will probably continue until we have more serious things to worry about. This is very eloquently described in "Fate of empires" by Sir John Glubbs.
Wasn't beating about the bush. I just forgot her name. Either way, her name wasn't important enough for me to look it up. The point was, someone who has no credentials about gender equality, video games or psychology were raising millions to fix a "problem" outside her expertise.
Animals have behavioral differences between males and females, I also don't understand why it's so hard to believe that humans will have differences between the genders as well.
i hate this argument so much! it has been thrown in my face soooooooo many times...
it's the go-to excuse managers and sales people use to tell a woman in IT that she's weird for doing what she does.
even in teams with 90% men, it was almost never the men in the team that were the problem, but almost always those looking in on the team: managers, sales people, marketeers, project managers, journalists, ...
please, stop telling women they are weird for wanting to work in IT or for enjoying their IT job.
Saying that the disparate representation between genders in technology industries is due to innate differences is not telling women they're weird for working in tech. It is not a statement about those women who go into tech, it's a statement about the aggregate choices of women in society as a whole.
I don't know what your intent was in writing this comment, but trying to frame any attribution of career choices to gender as a personal attack is a common tactic to try and shut down discussion on the topic.
Woah there, the person you're replying to didn't once use the word "weird" or any synonyms thereof.
They said that men and women tend to have different broad interests. But that doesn't preclude women from having an interest in tech. He's making a statement on statistics, not making a value judgement about anybody.
I never said that, or claimed women have no place in IT or don't belong in IT or anything of the sort. I said men and women value things differently, so you will naturally get disparities in career paths. That doesn't make a male teacher weird because he's vastly outnumbered, nor does it make a woman weird for wanting to get into STEM or IT... It just means on the whole....men and women are different and -most- men and -most- women like different things than each other, completely detached from any societal norm, and there's nothing wrong with that.
We should tackle sexism where it exists, but we can't tackle it properly if we're trying to say everyone is the same...because they aren't.
I don't think that the comment above was speaking in hard and fast rules. They were more making the point that men and women may generally have different interests and that those interests will impact career choices. There wasn't any value judgement about women getting into IT being weird, but more a statement that a 50/50 split may not be feasible if the incoming pipeline is 70/30 due to the interests of those respective individuals.
If you have people telling you that you're weird for your interests, then they're likely either self-conscious or an ass. That goes for most generalizations that evaluate skill or ideas based on the attributes of the person vs. the merit of the idea itself... but that is a different discussion :)
I think it's the people in power are applying the usual divide and conquer technique: they add more women to tech, alienate men and women and keep them busy fighting each other. How to alienate them? By giving special preferences to only one group. This is a textbook technique.
I'm all for equality of opportunity, remove unconscious bias and creating a welcoming environment for all groups, including women. But equality of outcome I think pretty quickly breaks down. If we force 50% of software engineers to be women, we'd pretty quickly run out of women. This cascades as well, as we're not getting gender balance for CS enrollment in colleges either.
I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine.
But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.
That anecdote tells you precisely nothing; women who prefer working in all-female teams, etc, etc, have already been weeded out. Talking to people in the industry is sampling from a population of people who probably don't see a problem regardless of the actual situation.
It tells you that the men in the team weren't treating her like crap. And this is exactly what is always discussed, that being a lone woman in a group of men is toxic, discriminating, etc. The women I work with didn't have this issue.
Sure, I read some horror stories, mainly from US. But that doesn't mean that as a women you can't work pleasantly in an all male environment, as my experience clearly shows.
> 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.
It's not comparing all-male to all-female teams, but all-male to teams with any women. As you say, There are roughly zero all-female teams in tech[1], but the proportion of any-female teams is much much higher.
[1] Yes, I know there are teams who have explicitly sought after this for ideological reasons, but theyre a rounding error.
> I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.
There are far more male bosses than female bosses. Accordingly, assuming bad bosses are relatively rare, it's far more likely every female boss you've ever had is awful than every male boss you've ever had is awful. This is just probability.
Let's take an example. Suppose 10% of bosses are awful, regardless of gender. Further suppose that due historical societal reasons, only 20% of bosses are female. If you've had 3 different bosses in your career, there's a far likelier chance that every female boss you've had is awful (3.94%) than every male boss you've had is awful (1.4%). (I'll leave it as an exercise to derive these numbers).
So, even if men and women are just as likely to be awful, you're nearly 3 times as likely for all of your female bosses to be awful than all of your male bosses to be awful simply due to the fact that women are under-represented.
This probability may explain at least some of this common and sad bias against female bosses.
No, it doesn't. It would require all-male teams to be substantially more common than teams with 1 or more women. It's not clear to me that this is the case (it's very much not my experience: 1/6 teams I've worked on have been women-free).
If your average team size is 5 people, then on average, the gender breakdown in your company is 72% male/28% female. I assumed 80/20, so yeah, it's still pretty accurate.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny, since the opposite situation would also occur. People are also nearly 3 times as like for all of your female bosses to have been good, and exclusively had bad male bosses.
If fact, if 10% of bosses are awful then there will be far more people who have exclusively had good female bosses than bad female bosses.
P(all your female bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of female bosses)
P(all your male bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of male bosses)
The lower the number of male/female bosses, the greater the probability of all of them being awful. The opposite (probability of all of them being not awful) increasing is also true.
This is generally known as a small numbers fallacy[1]
Being in groups of the opposite gender has the benefit that you can opt out of inter-sex competition. Men compete with men. Women with women. A woman working in a otherwise all men team have no other woman to compete with which can be a great freedom. If a person explicitly talked about "jealous and backstabbing" I would interpret it as terminology of inter-sex competition.
More than one baby-boomer woman I know has said that every time she has a male boss, things are okay, and every time she has a female boss, the whole office gradually goes insane. I'm in particular thinking of my aunt, working in banks (all of her peers were women), but I've heard it elsewhere too.
But then again, it's anecdata. I try not to take it seriously (I mean, I take it seriously about the individual's experience, but not as a description of large-scale patterns). But also when people have just-so stories about how male bosses are toxic to female underlings, I have the same "maybe that was true for you, but I don't see any reason to generalize" reaction.
I am from Europe. I keep hearing the same things. Although it is anecdotal and from other people. At times it seems women have it constantly against each other focusing a lot of their time on social power plays. Myself I work in an environment with 97 percent male ratio so I do not have enough experience to comment on it myself. I would rather have it 50/50 at this point though. I think it would be less boring.
Women are unbelievably toxic if they achieve critical mass in a department. I cannot believe the level of petty conflict that my wife endures in her female-dominated PM team; my male-exclusive band of semi-autistic programmers seems like fiddler's green in comparison.
Not totally related but being the one socially adept developer on a team of semi-autistic devs is the absolute worst. I was also the only woman but it wasn't the gender ratio that bothered me as I've been on great all-male teams in the past. But my god is it hard to enjoy your workday when you're the only person on the team with social skills and nobody ever wants to talk to you or go out for lunch occasionally!
Are you sure it's the lack of social skills? Lot of my male colleagues don't socialize with women at work. They are completely normal outside of work. They just don't want to take risks in today's socio-political climate where any interaction is looked through hyper-deconstructed sexism lens.
> I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.
I totally agree with you but I hate that you had to end with that line. It's pointless and simply shuts down any useful discussion and implies that 'you disagree/downvote with me because I'm right'.
That was my thought as well. I read a good post, then my dominant thought was changed to a negative slant because of an entirely unecessary -- and probably very inaccurate -- note of paranoid self-defense.
I am a woman, and this pervasive opinion that women are leaving STEM fields because of toxic behavior feels more sexist to me than anything else. It seems to me that if you have a genuine passion for STEM stuff, it takes a lot more than a bad environment to completely redirect your career path.
Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.
It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with. That's not a bad thing, it just means that they misjudged the interest:difficulty ratio.
Of the cases I know of personally, most of these women ended up in a job working fairly close with STEM stuff, writing manuals, doing graphic design, etc, and are perfectly fine with those jobs.
To be clear, I'm not accounting for cases where an entire university or business or whatever is made up of toxic sexism, but that's been pretty uncommon in my experience in the US.
Women of STEM: if you've got a bad environment, do something about it! Tell your higher-ups, talk to people directly, seek a different position, endure what you can, and for God's sake stand up for yourself.
tl;dr the implication that most women in STEM can't handle a toxic work environment without giving up entirely doesn't seem that progressive at all
NB disclaimer, most people I know are computer scientists, plus a few mathematicians, so maybe engineering is different
> Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.
I grew up in an era when kids interested in STEM were "nerds" and were harassed, denigrated, and had lower social status. This changed when Bill Gates made his first billion. Suddenly, people realized that STEM was a ticket to the good life.
The title of the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" was no accident.
A Seattle local comedy show "Almost Live" regularly ran skits about Microsoft engineers being socially inept and unable to get dates. (Of course, the joke turned out to be on Almost Live, as the super wealthy Microsoft engineers transformed the city.)
I suppose my point is that men who liked STEM had persevered in spite of the negative image of it.
Yes! Thank you, I failed to touch on this in my comment at all, it's not a gender-specific phenomena to have to push back against negative social aspects in order to pursue the things that truly capture your interest. I agree wholeheartedly.
Good point. As a male, I was heavily socialized not to go near computers. That was nerd shit. Everyone in my peer group came to know that I was into computers, but this interest was always something that I remember bringing a sense of shame, and something I had to downplay. It was a conscious effort to present myself as a normal guy who just happened to be good at using those things.
I recall a well-meaning teacher once publicly recognizing me as a “computer expert”, and the ensuing giggles and ridicule from my friends and peers for being a computer nerd.
While I would not say I was bullied, the “computer nerd”/“spending all your time in front of a computer” was somewhat of an expedient wildcard insult to be used whenever somebody needed to take me down a peg. In terms of group identities, I think the only labels that were lower on the social status ladder were being gay or being obese (exception if you could pull off “the funny fat guy”).
Maybe the millenials had it easier, but I think most people who are well established in their career by now came out of that environment.
Along those lines, it’s no wonder that many men in the field who emerged from that did not develop adequate social skills, and frequently demonstrate their lack of experience in interacting with women. Unfortunately, the social protocol errors are often either lumped in with sexism, or the dreaded “being a creep”, and it’s now fashionable for other (likely traumatized) people to publicly shame them, get them fired, and ensure that their infraction is part of the permanent record of the internet.
Was Almost Live the source of the skit "Studs from Microsoft"? Microsoft used to ship that skit as a demonstration video on their Microsoft Video API MSDN CDs.
EDIT: Found a Raymond Chen blog entry confirming that the skit was indeed from Almost Live -- and it featured Bill Nye.
My favorite is the 425 area code skit, with a snobby lady (in character) complaining about Renton being in the same area code as Bellevue. No one outside of the Seattle area would ever get that joke, however.
> this pervasive opinion that women are leaving STEM fields because of toxic behavior feels more sexist to me than anything else
I don't think it is sexist at all to claim that some people would not want to be in a field because of its hostile work environment. I sure wouldn't. Factually debatable? Sure. But sexist?
> It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with
I'm not a woman, but I am a person of color. And if anyone expressed those exact sentiments about people of color, I would never want to be around that person again. "I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping displaced minorities in my field. If they aren't interested enough to put up with racism, they shouldn't be here to begin with. It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in". Can you even imagine someone saying that? And yet, I hear the same sentiments being directed towards women constantly.
Ironically enough, you and I probably agree on most things. I don't think the STEM field is "toxic" or any worse than any other profession. At most companies I've worked, both management and other engineers made great efforts to be welcoming and friendly to women. That said, misogyny and hostile work environments do exist, and when it happens, we need to make sure we blame the culprits and not the victims.
To further complicate the matter, the idea of a "bad" environment is relative.
I've been on many all-male programming teams. Played football in high school.
From my experiences, those men tend to make fun of, poke, prod, and occasionally fight their way to agreement.
Comments were very direct. Abrasive at times. But usually got straight to the point.
I don't think I ever thought of any of it as needing "fixing". Quite the contrary, I think those men loved those other men.
But I could see someone of a different disposition being shocked at the crudeness, the brashness of it all and possibly thinking "it's toxic". It could be conflicting if someone wanted to participate in the team activity, but their approach didn't align with the existing members.
> To further complicate the matter, the idea of a "bad" environment is relative.
I see no relativism here.
As a description of your past experiences it was ostensibly a productive, functioning environment where every single member of every single group was comfortable communicating in that style.
As a general prescription for the most productive behavior for groups it's a poor model. As you point out, adding a single member with a different disposition can quickly turn the thing into a toxic environment.
Also, that model suffers from the same issue FLOSS projects do-- namely, it's hard to get any numbers at all on how many people never join up because the communication style isn't welcoming to outsiders.
Anyhow, if you posted this on Twitter I'm sure your description would quickly become transformed into an ostensible prescription by its algorithm as it got distributed for maximum outrage. But that's a problem with anti-human digital platforms, not a sign of ambiguity in what constitutes a productive work environment.
I’ve seen fist fights on sports teams when I was younger or blow out arguments in my marriage finally clear the air where a hundred previous logical, empathetic discussions only let the feelings fester.
There is something liberating about finally embracing the anger, rage and resentment that you feel and just letting it all out. Unfiltered.
And strangely, as I get older, I take it less personally if I’m on the receiving end. Sometimes people are overwhelmed and tired of doing mental gymnastics to keep things “nice”. I sorta get that now.
I’ve never seen a fist fight in an office. Probably not a good idea from a legal or liability standpoint.
But if two consenting adults want to physically fight in a controlled, fair environment, zero problems with that. And I could see how it could be therapeutic to release the resentment towards the other.
Having technical decisions made on the basis of who can punch the hardest doesn't seem sensible. But I don't think you are being serious at this point.
> If they aren't interested enough to put up with racism, they shouldn't be here to begin with
I did not say "put up with", I said "deal with", which includes many options other than accepting what you're given. If your workplace discriminates on the basis of race, you could report them for violation of anti-discrimination laws, lobby for stronger laws, leave the workplace for a better one, etc.
> It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in
Exactly what I just discussed, maybe in an ideal world such things shouldn't be your responsibility, but the only way to guarantee action is to take it. If someone pushes you into a puddle, you might be right to say that it shouldn't be your responsibility to remove yourself from that situation, as you did not put yourself into it, but I think most would agree that the right course of action is to deal with it yourself anyways.
I am not suggesting that the responsibility falls solely on women or minorities to deal with their own problems at all, but I am suggesting that they should take some agency of their own.
Do you have thoughts on whether or not the current discourse is socializing certain group identities to prematurely internalize a victim mindset?
My niece expressed an interest in taking CS, and two of the women present immediately launched into third-hand accounts of how toxic and sexist they have heard that the industry is. It pisses me off a bit that they are convincing an otherwise neutral and open mind that they are both unwelcome and that they’re already a victim in the making. If the goal is truly to get more women in the field, I think the twitter mobs and one-sided viral medium.com posts are doing way more to scare them away than anything else.
>I am not suggesting that the responsibility falls solely on women or minorities to deal with their own problems at all, but I am suggesting that they should take some agency of their own.
Great idea! Perhaps following your comment, women and minority groups will start to organize to protest against unfair and illegal treatment.
Practically no one endorses "equality of outcome" in itself. It's a question of whether disparate outcomes evidence disparate opportunities (findings like those in question suggest that they may not).
Gender quotas are basically enforcing equality of outcome. If the reason for disparity in some trades isn't discrimination but preferences (as this article strongly suggests) - gender quotas make both man and women less happy to satisfy statistics and ideology. It's insane.
BTW I wonder if people proposing gender quotas because of pay gap would also support gender quotas in hospitals to fight life expectance gap, and gender quotas in psychiatry to fight suicide percentage gap.
> As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks
I'd say the bigger point against the idea that women aren't in CS purely* because of men being sexist, is that this implies that male doctors and lawyers in the 60's and 70's were less sexist than male engineers of today. Does anyone actually believe this?
In the sense that if sexism is the major force that prevented women from going into IT, then the much higher sexism of doctors and lawyers in the 60s and 70s would have prevented women from going into those fields too. But women were far more in those fields then, than they are in IT now.
>I don't follow this argument. Levels of sexism in the 60s and 70s are irrelevant to decisions that women are making in the present.
The argument is not about that.
It's that "Those very sexist 60s/70s fields still had a lot of women going in, more than women in IT today. If women could go into those very sexist fields then, it's not sexism that keeps them out of IT today".
This is ridiculous, changes in the 60's led to a more gender balanced field, which obviously made for less sexism. Pretending that root causes don't matter isn't helping your case.
Aren't you then acknowledging that as a result, tech now is more sexist than law and medicine?
If so, I can't see where we substantially disagree. As I've repeatedly said, I make no claims about why the gender balance shifted in law and medicine in the 60s. You appeared to suggest that this had nothing to do with levels of sexism. I'm skeptical of that claim (broader societal attitudes are important too, not just the sexism level of lawyers and doctors vs. the sexism level of scientists and engineers), but it's not as if either of us has actually researched this in detail.
The key point is that tech now is disproportionately sexist, as you appear to acknowledge.
the highest levels of sexism I have personally seen are in Finance, followed by construction workers; the highest levels of complaining I have personally seen are in FOSS UnConferences and PhD level academia.
Could be more the other way around: in a really Xist field, there are fewer complaints because a) there are probably fewer [minority group] to complain, b) complaining feels riskier and less likely to achieve anything, c) complaints that do get made are more likely to be quickly shut down rather than amplified.
Gender disparity fell in those professions, while in roughly the same time frame, gender disparity dramatically increased in STEM. If women could put up with the sexism in those two professions, is it really plausible that sexism is the reason they didn't similarly push into STEM?
Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data.
>Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data.
I think in general among engineers there is a lot of awareness about sexism and diversity issues but that doesn't always extend to people on the periphery of the engineering world (I'm from non-software engineering world).
Tradespeople such a boilermakers, fitters and welders as well as suppliers, technicians etc don't always have the same attitudes. These are people you have to work closely with on engineering projects which are often in remote locations like mines, construction sites etc where management is not typically present (or visible). Attitudes are improving, for example its not common these days to see pornography in site sheds and similar out on construction sites, 10 years ago this was rife, but I still feel culture out on sites is maybe 5 to 10 years behind where it is in the office.
My sister and I are both engineers (I'm Chem/materials and she is a mech. eng) the way she gets treated and I am treated there is a noticeable difference. People visiting her office have done things like assume she is a secretary and ask her to fix them a coffee this has happened in last 5 years so I think there are still some strides to be made in the engineering world.
> People visiting her office have done things like assume she is a secretary and ask her to fix them a coffee this has happened in last 5 years so I think there are still some strides to be made in the engineering world.
Absolutely, but the question being debated is whether this is worse in STEM than other professions. Every profession still has strides to make for true equality.
How could it not imply it? That's when women started entering those fields en masse and really increasing their numbers. Going by the "the problem is men being sexist" reasoning, that they were able to do this successfully implies that the lawyers and doctors in charge then were less sexist than engineers today.
I don't think the field is sexist. I think fewer women choose to study and excel at it. The field is open to whomever wants to have a go at it. Due to "corporate diversity policy" I think (as a man) have less of a chance of actually breaking into software engineering than, say, 10 years ago.
I mean, that doctors and lawyers were substantially less sexist compared to engineers in the 60's and 70's also strikes me as less than plausible, though I'll grant that'd be a closer competition than comparing them to engineers now. Do you have any evidence of an advantage there?
But the 60's and 70's are when the representation levels started really diverging. That's the key part.
That they may be less sexist now, after having achieved gender parity or something close to it, is hardly unexpected. Of course a field with roughly even numbers is usually going to be less sexist than one dominated by one gender or another.
You'll have to spell the argument out. My claim is that relative sexism in STEM puts women off now. This does not require me to commit to the claim that relative sexism was a dominant factor in women's career choices in the 60s. Note, however, that the issue is sexist attitudes in society as a whole, not just engineers being sexist. Even if 60s lawyers are just as sexist as 60s engineers, the idea of a female lawyer (especially a junior one) may still be more socially acceptable.
Asserting that a gender balanced field is less sexist than a gender imbalanced one isn't very interesting. The interesting part is that law and medicine used to be just as gender imbalanced, and then steadily became less so.
This is the crux of the issue that you're avoiding grappling with. Saying "well I don't care about the history" is irrelevant, it's still the most important part whether you personally care or not.
It's like looking at which countries are desirable to immigrate to without grappling with patterns of development, despite the obvious fact that the biggest thing that makes countries more desirable is being rich/developed.
Measuring these things by outcomes is always wrought with errors. For example, how do you compare women's interest in medicine 50 years ago to their interest in comp sci today? If raw interest is low even a trivial scale issue might dissuade you.
It's also dangerous to treat all software development the same. I'm my experience women tend to be more interested in human facing parts of software like web and ui development, but less interested in the back end parts. Is this the result of sexism? Maybe, but regardless I bet the gender stats are very different if you consider front end as different than back end development.
I (and others from looking at some sibling comments) didn't see your comment as being about gatekeepers, but rather about the environment being perceived as unfriendly towards, so women seeking out different fields.
This article implies that the correlation between gender-opportunity and representation in STEM is a causation.
Look at the chart in the article, look at the countries on each end of the opportunity spectrum. There are many obvious economic, societal, and cultural differences between the countries on one side and the other of that spectrum.
To take this correlation and use it to forward a sexist idea (that women PREFER
different, often worse-paying, fields and that's why there's less women, and thus we don't need to change anything in our industry's culture) is the reason I would downvote this article and the OP's comment.
Please don’t spread moral panic by labeling other people’s worldviews sexist. It does not sell your argument but only serves to polarize the debate.
I know a lot of women in tech who feel uncomfortable with all the special treatment they get — entire conferences dedicated to “women in tech.” I find the idea so patronizing, just like I would a “men in daycare” conference. It is an extension of coddling the incapable and meek servile woman. Get out of here.
It's not patronizing. We have, e.g., men in nursing conferences (https://www.aamn.org/2019-annual-conference). I don't find that patronizing as a man. It makes sense for a field where men are a minority.
I don't find the concept of a women in tech conference inherently patronizing, but having attended several of them I wish they had more technical talks and less focus on fluffier topics. I swear half the talks at the Grace Hopper conference (which is about women in COMPUTING, not just tech) in NYC this year were about diversity and inclusion, which is a worthy goal but not something I find particularly interesting in a conference lecture. There were probably 1/3 tech talks, 1/3 diversity and inclusion and 1/3 business-related when it's supposed to be a conference about computing. It just felt it was feeding into the negative stereotypes about women being unsuited for technical roles or not caring about tech itself but just the more social aspects. I came for the cool tech talks!
An earlier partner of mine went to such a conference. “Women in computing.” There was a show of hands who wanted to be a programmer etc; basically none did except my partner. She left feeling more of an outsider.
To take a perfectly rational conclusion and call it sexist is quite a deriding trick, isn’t it?
You’d need to try really hard to disprove different interest of men and women, as literature suggests differences from a very young age, even before those children have chances to meet their peers.
You’re just giving alternative explanations, which given the left side of the chart are much, much less likely. The economic argument also doesn’t make sense. STEM jobs may be among the highest paying ones, but certainly are not THE highest (not to mention the amount of effort compared to different high pay jobs).
You're taking an idea, that there are differences in preference between men and women and calling it sexist. Why is it sexist? Do you not think there are difference in preference between men and women? That perhaps the different levels of hormones would result in a difference in temperament? For example higher levels of testosterone leads to more risky and aggressive behavior.
Implicit bias also guides interests and choice. Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career, not that they were forced out of it.
We look to outcome equality to gain some kind of insight into this.
> Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career
And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a career in female dominated professions, like nursing or elementary education. I think there's certainly something to the idea that we internalize stereotypes and that can restrict our options, but I'm skeptical that it generally explains large differences in career preference today.
For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?
Well it's certainly an open question, although here's something that's just struck me. Careers that were dominated by women were in the orbit of doctors and lawyers, those being nurses, paralegals and secretaries. If you're thinking about being a nurse, why not consider being a doctor? I'm not sure STEM professions had these associated careers.
Media representation? Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Female engineers, not so much, and definitely not in a context where the women are not deviating from social norms (you need to be a tomboy, you need to be geeky, you need to be "not like those other girls" etc.)
Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only black educated woman in a leadership position on television.
How big a hit?
Halt and Catch Fire fictionalized a lot but two of the four leads were software and hardware engineers, The Expanse has the primary hardware/software hacker on the ship as one of the four main characters but it's a woman, Person of Interest had two of the four main characters be software programmers, one a man and one a woman, Mr Robot has software developers for most roles besides gangster and law enforcement, one of the four or five primary characters on 12 Monkeys was a scientist/engineer but a woman, Westworld has the scientist as the main human character for the first season and a different one for the second, most of what they do looks like software programming, Chernobyl showed a lot of engineers in the nuclear control room, trying to fix things afterwards.
There's also McGyver, Neo & Trinity, Rey also doesn't seem to have her thumb in the middle of her hand, David Lightman, Tony Stark--in fact, Marvel is chock full of male engineering types; Beast, Hulk, Reed Richards, Peter Parker.
There are plenty of female lawyers and doctors who aren't main characters in television shows, and where being a lawyer or doctor is not a defining characteristic of how feminine they are.
The same cannot be said for the legion "quirky female hacker" characters that exist in many TV shows.
Big bang theory, for example, has mostly male nerds. The core Silicon Valley engineering team is male. There are of course exceptions but male and female engineers are not represented equally in media.
>For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?
The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. STEM hasn't, yet.
STEM hasn't made serious efforts to counter sexism? That starkly contrasts with my observations. For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25) that I can remember I've encountered programs and initiatives working towards getting women into STEM. All of the companies I've worked at instituted hiring policies that favor women (e.g. giving women 2 chances to pass a technical phone screen instead of one). And we're not alone in this. Microsoft and Intel have both instituted policies of witholding bonuses unless diversity quotas are met, and Facebook gives recruiters more points - which count towards performance reviews - for recruiting diverse candidates[1].
These kinds of top-down initiatives are well and good, but the real problem is cultural. You only have to read this discussion to see why women don't want to work in STEM.
> What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed?
More than that, what "cultural changes" did they enact? From what I've read of the history, culture only shifted after women achieved rough gender parity. Cultural shifts follow demographic shifts, not vice versa.
And even now, gender disparities exist that can't be explained by sexist theories. For instance, why is surgery dominated by men and pediatrics dominated by women?
Sexist theories have a lot of holes like these gender disparities within fields and the gender equality paradox that's the subject of this article. And yet, there's a theory that explains all of the data we see:
Medicine and Law have made serious efforts to counter sexism? Like what?
Law is essentially the definition of the "Old Boys Club" and as for Medicine... I used to work in the medical field for a while. Go ask any (female) surgical nurse about the supposed efforts to counter sexism in the OR.
Woman lawyer from Wall Street here. That’s about as “Old Boys Club” as it gets. When I left law to pursue tech I figured it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what I was leaving behind. I was so wrong. Silicon Valley is infinitely more difficult to navigate and less welcoming.
The major difference (in my opinion) is that the Old Boys Club owns it. They know they’re not welcoming to women and for the most part they don’t care. But Silicon Valley, for whatever reason, absolutely insists that they’re welcoming and that it’s all in our heads. The Old Boys Club was frustrating but Tech is infuriating.
Would you care to give some examples, what behaviour is so unwelcoming in the tech world?
Did you consider other reasons than sexism for the environment that you perceive as unwelcoming? E.g., I guess the ratio of introverts vs. extroverts is pretty different between Wall Street law firms and software developers.
Given the rampant discrimination against men that exists in the modern tech sector and that even stating "maybe women naturally prefer to do other jobs than tech" gets you fired, what exactly do you have in mind that would make it even more welcoming?
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Your comment here broke several of the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here?
What it means to be "welcoming" is rather subjective. But there has been widespread adoption of discriminatory policies designed to make women get offers more frequently than men as I have shared in a previous comment [1]. I think this is what was being referred to when the above commenter talked about companies being more welcoming to women.
The extent to which discrimination makes tech more welcoming is debatable. It does have the immediate effect of increasing the number of women in tech roles, but it does so at the expense of putting them in an environment where they know that their male co-workers were held to a different standard and vice versa.
Edit: your comment history shows a lot of political and ideological flamewar comments, and we've already had to warn you about not taking HN threads into gender war. If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you, so please don't.
I'm not saying that law and medicine are perfect. But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Now a majority of attorneys in the US are women, and more women are enrolling in medical school than men.
> But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance.
You say this as if the fields themselves decided, but it could just as easily be that women pushed in harder.
> Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors.
Again, what was the difference? You've suggested a relative difference in sexism at the time, but I've seen no data suggesting this. It just looks like a guess on your part.
I think you are reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I don't know exactly why women fifty years ago made the decisions that they did. You don't, either.
You're being vague and deflecting here. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist, and here you just say, "well, we don't know why they did what they did." Well, which is it? What basis do you have for your earlier point?
> You don't, either.
Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a strawman.
>. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist
I claimed that this is the case today. You are the only one of us making any assertions whatsoever about levels of sexism in the 1960s and 1970s, which are irrelevant to choices women make now.
So you're suggesting the lawyers and doctors in charge back in the 60's and 70's were more progressive and less sexist than engineers in 2019? Really? That's what you're going with?
TulliusCicero is saying that the 60s and 70s were the period when women entered those fields en masse. Hence you should compare the state of those fields in the 60s/70s to the CS field now if you wanna determine sexism as the cause of entering/not-entering a given field.
It's implied by saying that those other fields made serious efforts to combat sexism back then, but CS hasn't made an equivalent effort now. What other reason would there be for such a discrepancy, other than being motivated by sexism?
I've served multiple times at SheTech (an event where we invite thousands of highschool girls to come learn about tech and jobs), and I've helped host at least five Hour of Code events at Adobe where we make sure half of those invited are female where we teach robotics. I've also spent a couple years teaching refugees how to code, and we make sure half of those students are female, as well.
I've never attended personally, but we also host an event yearly called "Girls Who Code."
Adobe has also partnered with a local dev bootcamp to hire intern graduates-- I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that there's an emphasis on female graduates.
It sounds like informing everyone that these options exist is part of creating a more equal opportunity. If two people didn't have the same information for available options then there wasn't an equal opportunity.
I just hate that the emphasis seems to be strictly based on careers with high income. There is no focus spreading equality or equity or informing everyone when the career is about social good, life satisfaction, or blunt quality of life.
Yes, don't forget all the shitty careers, with long hours, danger, and significant health hazards. Not much equality of outcome on those either. Somehow no one is claiming sexism is the cause of disparity for those.
Actually, a lot of people are saying that sexism is the cause of disparity in those cases. It's a commonplace observation that sexism harms men as well as women.
Historically, the professions you're alluding to have been closed to women by men. So for example, the reason that women couldn't serve in the military until relatively recently is not that women used their power and influence within society to get a pass on military service. Rather, it's that men didn't want to let women serve.
I'd hope if women had thought about the serving example they would have made the same choice out of a sensible respect for setting up the future. A society that keeps their women from dying needless deaths has a reproductive advantage over societies that send them into the meat grinder - the protective society can produce more children after the conflict. From a quick and lazy glance at some statistics [0] losing a young man in 1945 is statistically losing a man, losing a young women is more like statistically losing 6 people (1 now, 5 next generation). The baby boom doesn't work out as well as it did if a big group of women just died off.
Equality of opportunity to die serving a country is all very well, but until men figure out how to operate wombs without women there are practical differences when deciding who is risks probable death. The situation has probably changed now that growing populations no longer looks like an easy win but the calculus goes a bit beyond 'men just didn't like the idea'. Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered. The women probably agreed with that one on the whole.
Wow, extremely insightful point, and did not realize that! But it makes sense when we consider it from a biological standpoint: men are needed "temporarily" in the reproductive process to put it mildly. Perhaps this explains the slow growth of the soviet union after ww2 (# of women killed serving in the military)?
>Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered.
This is an argument that's rarely if ever been used against allowing women to serve in the military. I think it's the argument that you'd like people to make rather than an argument that people have actually historically made.
More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
Well it is is pretty obvious to me that in day to day practice women were kept out of the army because (as sibling poster) they are physically worse fighters than men by raw strength. But it is also pretty obvious to me that over the centuries brilliant military planners would have regularly thought about using women on the front lines and then rejected the idea for much better reasons than 'I'm a sexist'. The stereotypes here aren't arbitrary, an unbiased thinker would have reasonably reached the same practices.
And we can't really say for certain that what everybody thought was controlling what happened. What everybody thinks and what actually happens in, eg, banking and finance are completely different. The people in control are not the people talking on the street.
> More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
On your actual point; the fact that there are other things to think about doesn't stop people thinking about this specific thing. The US lost 400,000 servicemen in WWII without really even seeing a foreign invasion; those sort of numbers absolutely should involve someone asking the question 'who can we most and least afford to lose?'. The militaries of the world are not warm and happy-go-lucky organisations. They ask quite unpleasant questions all the time.
I think you are just advancing your own arguments against allowing women to serve in the military here, not actually giving any evidence that these arguments were widely used in opposition to women's military service. That's a tangent.
Incidentally, in the broader context of this thread, this is exactly the kind of fringe content that just might give women the impression that the tech community has a sexism problem.
>Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
I think you misread. I said "if you see women primarily as baby machines", not "if you see women as the primary baby machines".
Really? Below is a list of the top 8 most dangerous jobs in the US. Which ones do you think would have equal gender representation if there was no sexism?
Is that really that obvious? Given that nursing and nursing assitant jobs are amoung the most dangerous and the fact that the vast majority of those jobs are filled with women, your willingness to erase an important aspect of a headline is a good example of the bias that this entire discussion is centered around.
Yes, it is obvious. I did not try to erase anything, I posted the source without being asked for, and pointed out the discrepancy and my interpretation of it, which was correct, as you can see in this other article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangero...
I said "erase" meaning "erase from your attention as an important aspect of the headline", but ok, poor word. You still chose to ignore that important point because you've chosen it was unimportant. Why? It helps you reach a conclusion because you want that conclusion. I provided you with two professions that run contrary to your view and you're ignoring that as well.
Fair enough. I believe those stats are skewed by a small number of pilots doing relatively dangerous kinds of flying. In any case, yes, more women would be doing these jobs if sexism were eliminated.
You are talking about a hypothetical scenario where all sexist stereotypes are eliminated. It’s obviously silly to guess at what the numbers would be. I see no reason to expect a precise 50/50 gender balance in every one of the listed fields. Conversely, I would also not expect to see the massive disparities that we see currently.
The problem in STEM isn’t that the gender balance isn’t exactly 50/50. It’s that substantial numbers of women are discouraged from STEM careers by sexism.
First of all, note that this argument works both ways. You also can’t put exact numbers on how many women we’d expect there to be in the industry in the absence of any sexism whatever. So how do you know that there’s no problem?
But actually, the question is quite easy to answer for me. I am more interested in sexism per se than in the gender distribution. When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem. The current gender imbalance is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
> When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem.
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. There is no incentive for women to ever stop crying "sexism!" if this is the criterion in use.
I think you're being overly literal, not to mention suspicious. I'm not suggesting that we turn off our critical faculties and reflexively believe everything that we hear. At the moment, we'd have to reflexively disbelieve everything women tell us to conclude that there's no sexism problem in tech.
And now that women can serve in the military, it's time to update the Select Service law so it requires both men _and_ women to register on their 18th birthday.
Sure. Do you think that there are many people who both (a) agree with the registration requirement in the first place and (b) think that it should apply to men only?
I doubt that many 18 y/o males are fine with it since that doubles the chances that they'll be forced to enroll in the military for very little pay. I'm sure most other people would prefer that 18 y/o males continue to be the selectively signed up and have no problem with females not doing the same. Imho though, either everyone should be forced to enroll or no one should - most military workers are support staff anyway.
Speculate as you please. This is an extremely obscure issue, and I suspect that very few people have a strong opinion on it. (If I'm wrong about this, it should be easy to point to a counterexample.)
It is an extremely obscure issue because the vast majority consider women signing up for the draft to be ludicrous, and dismiss the conversation thereafter.
Historically, the military mostly drafted people, especially if we look at the last 100 years. Conscription has very little to do with choices, and male only conscription has a long history.
There is a good discussion to be had over why conscription has mostly been male only. Is it powerful men wanting to get rid of young expendable men in some form of evolutionary benefit to themselves? It it because of historical benefit of muscle differences? Did women use their power and influence within society to get a pass on conscription?
Men did not choose to be forced into the military. People do not generally chose to be forced to the front line and die. It is also worth mentioning that in the US, black males were proportionally drafted in higher rates than white males during the Vietnam war. Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
Maybe the first question to discuss is if being drafted is a benefit or disadvantage in term of power and influence.
Voluntary military service was also male only, so I'm not sure why you are focusing so much on conscription.
As you point out, the people in charge were all men. It was up to them to make the rules about who could or couldn't volunteer and who would or wouldn't be conscripted.
>Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
This perfectly illustrates my point. That is exactly not how women got a pass on military service. Thus, it misses the point to complain that men disproportionately do certain dangerous jobs. Women have been kept out of those jobs by men, and by sexist attitudes more broadly, not by some kind of inverse sexism that favors women over men.
> Voluntary military service was also male only, so I'm not sure why you are focusing so much on conscription.
Most worlds armies are conscription, and even the US army had conscription during the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It culturally defines the military.
> This perfectly illustrates my point.
No it does not. Men as a group did not keep women out of conscription so men alone could get the privilege of being conscripted. It not a privilege. A better claim is that society pick which ever demographic is most expendable and force them to pick up arms during major conflicts. Young men, especially men of color, is consistently seen as expendable. It is racism, sexism, ageism, and a bunch more isms, and part of it favor women over young men.
During world war 2 almost all nations involved used prison population for conscription purposes. It is the most obvious place to find a lot of expendable people.
Voluntary military service still carries with it that culture and non-expendable people tend to not be near the front line.
Yes, but so what? The gender requirement on front-line service has never been limited to conscription.
>It not a privilege.
This is a well-worn argument. When women wanted to vote and join the workplace, they also got told that these things were terrible burdens that they ought to be glad not to have to bear.
Clearly, there are women who do want to join the military, just as there have always been men who want to join the military.
In a modern context, in the US and Europe, the question is not about whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will, but whether they should have the same right to volunteer for service as men, and the same range of opportunities subsequently.
Until recently, the men in charge thought that they should not.
> Until recently, the men in charge thought that they should not.
Not men as a group. Rich old men thought that poor young men, disproportionately African Americans, should be forced into the military.
In modern context we still have remnant views that military is a punishment. Popular culture often use the trope that troublesome boys who don't behave get sent to military school so the boy can redeem themselves in the eyes of society. The concept of military service as a punishment directed at young men is still well alive. One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
In Europe most nation still have conscription. The question has been whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will. To pick a few examples, both Sweden and Norway think they should, and thus we have conscription there for both genders. As the advertisements says, everyone has equal responsibility to server their nation. The word "responsibility" is used here to make the conscription sound nicer but it no less forced.
Of course it was men as a group. You only have to go back a few decades to get to a time when the majority of men, across social classes, found the idea of women serving in the military ridiculous.
I still don't see how the rest of your comment is relevant to this discussion. Again, the gender requirement was not specific to conscription.
>One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
Then we are at an impasse. Men as a group did not choose to force themselves at the threat of gun point to go into trench war fare and die. That is just ridiculous.
Young poor men has always been at the bottom of the social ladder.
The men who got forced into the trench war did not have a choice in who got drafted. People who society deems expendable and at the bottom of the social ladder do not have that power or influence.
The people who got excluded from military conscription were women, rich men and men with influence.
The usually social ladder puts rich men at top, women in the middle and poor men at the bottom. Sometimes described as a differences in bell curves during gender equality discussions.
Poor men, having no influence or power gets conscripted against their will.
Women, being in the middle, are exempted from conscription but can't volunteer.
Rich men, being at the top of influence and power, was exempted from conscription and also had the choice to volunteer (usually for officer or other high ranking positions).
No one denies that the small percent that makes up rich men have more influence and power with more freedom to choose during conscription. Men as a group however is both the poor and the rich. If we only look at the top then we ignore an already marginalized and vulnerable part of the population. Those at the bottom.
>Women, being in the middle [in terms of power and influence], are exempted from conscription
This is just a wrong analysis. Women didn't get our of conscription as a result of their power and influence. They were exempted from military service because almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military.
And this is the point where we disagree. Women didn't get conscription because they are not seen as expendable by rich men.
And you are wrong that almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military. Armies that are created by rich men at the top looks very different to those created by lower classes, such as resistance movements in Europe during world war 2.
Side note: it's interesting that it's these male-dominant fields that have the noble "serve" descriptor associated with them. Given that women have dominated the fields of educating children and nursing our sick, it seems that these are more deserving of the serving label rather than those who destroy.
I remember high-school guidance counsel lists being dominated by things like "actuarial" and "insurance salesman." After reading that I would have rather worked in a restaurant my whole life.
Absolutely had no clue what to go into and they didn't help much. Perhaps they were at a greater disadvantage because the internet revolution was about to hit.
If they aren't convinced it is a real option than they didn't have the same opportunity. Either way it isn't a problem that can be solved by pushing people into the field to create a more equal ratio.
How to distinguish between "I didn't know that was a feasible choice for me" and "I know what programming is like and I don't want to do that as a career"?
The majority of people fall into the first category, regardless of sex. There are a lot of people who with exposure might consider software development as a career, but didn't think of it as an option. For various historical reasons (exposure to programmable computers, video games, adults that can explain or teach programming, access in school, peers that program, role models, etc) the people that tend to realize programming is a career option and understand what that career might entail tend to be white and asian males. That isn't to say there aren't many white and asian males that also don't know programming is a career option.
Now that "tech" is so important and lucrative I'm sure this is changing to some extent, but this is a recent trend that's probably 5 years old at most. Tech wasn't viewed the same as it was now in 2012-2014 and felt like a much more risky and inaccessible field. Now it looks a lot more like any other high paying corporate job.
The Dot Net bubble in the 90s was arguably the biggest news story of the decade. Everyone knew there was tons of money to be had in tech, and stories of people landing jobs at startups after learning a little bit of HTML.
I'm aware of the dot com bubble. My point wasn't that people weren't making money, my point is tech looked risky and new, especially the web based companies that dominate now. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc were stable jobs but they were for engineers/nerds. There was money to be made back then of course but money isn't the only thing that makes jobs attractive. Social and cultural status and stability are important as well. A doctor is a safe, high paying, high status job. Tech is only just now starting to look that way to mainstream people.
I'm not sure I understand the question. As phrased I think you have a natural understanding of the difference. Are you asking how we measure that nationally?
In school way back in olden times, most of the girls in my class would say "oh, I hate computers," when the subject was brought up. Odd, because I loved them.
I don't hear this anymore from the grown-up-on-iPad generation.
Unrelated to the topic but can you even downvote in HN? I only have an upvote button. Does it have something to do with how much the HN equivalent of karma that you have?
> Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in
What?! Equality of outcome, as I've encountered it, is always downstream of individual choice. That is, it's up to the hiring committee to enforce gender parity by selecting from available applicants, and not up to educators or policy-makers to force equal amounts of women to be in STEM. No one has ever, to my knowledge, made the argument the way you represented it (except, ironically, incels calling for mandated marriage).
I'd have taken you more seriously if you hadn't straw-manned the shit out of equality of outcome.
"As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people"
This is a red herring. If you ask women they won't say their bosses were "jerks" or "toxic" (though a lot of time they are), they'll say they made them "uncomfortable", "un-accommodating".
It reminds me of a friend who got pregnant and left the STEM field because the dudes at her office made her feel like she was SUCH a huge drag on them. None of them were jerks, just not accommodating. Its a subtle but substantial difference.
"I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is."
Actually, its the top comment, the popularity of this opinion among programmers is the crux of the issue. Nobody wants to work at a company where a majority of people think you are "unnatural" or an "outlier" for being there.
> If you ask women they won't say their bosses were "jerks" or "toxic"
Most women I know do exactly that though if you speak with them in a private setting?
I'll have to take your word for the rest of your opinion, as I don't know your friend nor her colleagues.
I'm a little surprised you expect them to be totally accommodating though. It's a professional setting after all. It's nice if you can create good friendships there, but expecting it is just asking for trouble
And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental level I personally prefer equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.
As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people. Personally I've seen bad behavior from both sides. I've also seen exceptional talent, skill, empathy etc. come from both groups. Many corporate cultures are toxic to everybody, irregardless of your gender.
I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.