Fortune.com: Blame Tech Diversity On Culture, Not Pipeline 342
FrnkMit writes: Challenging a previous Code.org story on tech diversity, a Forbes.com writer interviewed 716 women who left the technology field. Her conclusion: corporate culture, and the larger social structure, is the primary cause for these women leaving the industry and never looking back. Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies, low pay which barely covers day care, "jokes" from male coworkers, and always feeling like the "odd duck." In reality, there are probably many intertwined causes: peer pressure at the high-school and college level, female-unfriendly geek culture, low pay, a lack of accommodations for pregnant/nursing mothers, the myth of "having it all," stereotype threat, and repeated assertions that women aren't biologically suited to writing software and therefore there's no problem at all.
Oh lord (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ha! Those were my exact thoughts before I came to the comments section.
Not where *I* work. (Score:4, Informative)
We have two female programmers on our team of 10 devs (total). They are paid equivalently to the males, receive the same training opportunities, and each holds expert status in some region of our offerings. The men do not joke about about them (I would know, being one of the male devs and all, I would hear it). If that kind of thing started up it would be nipped in the bud......as it was a few years ago when we hired, then shortly thereafter fired, a guy who turned out to be outright misogynistic.
I am not denying the trend in the industry, I am just pointing out that there *are* places that refuse to hire unprofessional jerks, and will treat all their employees with respect.
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Re:Not where *I* work. (Score:4, Insightful)
"...and female rejection..."
Yo, where I'm from of a guy doesn't like a gal, she's expected to grow a pair (of ovaries) and cope. Being all embittered is considered pathetic and a personal failing, not something that men have driven her to. (And, y'know, that's sad, and counselling often can help a lot.)
And women experience rejection all the time. Seriously. All the time.
This stuff is hard, make no mistake. But I'm wondering more and more how much the mythologizing the great force that is female rejection is really more about male introverts who don't interact with women, and never learn to interact with women, and create this whole mythology about women that is mostly not tempered by experiences with actual women. Because really, the girl in your eighth grade class who didn't want anything to do with you (or whatever) isn't something you should obsess about for the rest of your life. And I think it used to be that people had to deal with each other, face to face, enough, that it kind of wore the sharp edges off of the neurosis, at least for most.* And it's now a lot easier to form insular subculture where men come up with all these theories about what women are like, etc. etc. and don't actually interact with women in meaningful ways.**
Because really, I read all this stuff about what women are supposed to be like... and I am a woman. And, okay, I'm fairly atypical, but I spend time around a lot of women, of all varieties. I date both men and women. And these stories have so little in common with the actual people I know, it's pretty absurd.
* Not that I'm advocating the generic superiority of social interactions with the people who happen to live near you. You can have my internet connection when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
** Note, if this doesn't turn around and get expressed as misogyny in the workplace, or shooting sprees or whatever, go right ahead. It takes all kinds.
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I have worked with some women who are professional, competent, and respected.
I have worked with some women who are perpetually complaining that they can't have it both ways. They want to be seen as an equal in every way (one of the guys) but get hurt whenever they aren't given special treatment that they feel women deserve. That same special treatment, of course, is basically the type of chivalry that men engage in when *taking care of a weaker being*.
Everyone wants to feel valued. But some women demand
Re:Not where *I* work. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like any other hurdle that life can place in your path. You either deal with it and get past it or you whine that you are a victim. There are plenty of people that can manage the former as the latter is actively discouraged in many parts of western culture.
Tolerance of the damsel in distress mentality is far more harmful to women than "misogyny".
Re:Not where *I* work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Or how about neither? How about if a generally "misogynistic culture" among men in tech is a fabrication, and individual misogynists actually less prevalent in tech than in fields like sales or advertising which attract the more "alpha male" type (and are yet less male-dominated). How about if we're being sold the idea of a misogynistic nerd culture because those doing the selling feel that as nerds, we'll be more likely to accept that idea than the completely un-self-aware and unapologetic "bro" type?
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Perhaps no conspiracy, but I find it reasonable that the same effect could stem from a predisposition to look at "alpha male" types in a positive light, and "beta male" types in a negative light. Given identical misogynistic behavior, I feel like the "beta male" type is much more likely to be branded a creep or asshole, while the "alpha male" type is much more likely to be assessed with something like "boys will be boys".
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There is a great "College Humor" on youtube that satirizes this.
The less attractive nerdy guy says "hi" and gets hit for sexual harassment and while the attractive guy gets away with murder and gets dates.
I know from experience this happens some. It also happens that pretty females get treated better. Right now an older female friend of mine is being victimized by a younger female who is slacking, dumping her work on my friend, and then flirting with the male managers to (and this is the crazy part) agree
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We have two female programmers on our team of 10 devs (total). They are paid equivalently to the males, receive the same training opportunities, and each holds expert status in some region of our offerings. The men do not joke about about them (I would know, being one of the male devs and all, I would hear it). If that kind of thing started up it would be nipped in the bud......as it was a few years ago when we hired, then shortly thereafter fired, a guy who turned out to be outright misogynistic.
I am not denying the trend in the industry, I am just pointing out that there *are* places that refuse to hire unprofessional jerks, and will treat all their employees with respect.
I'm not really convinced it's a trend in the industry - if anything, the trend is more toward the kind of environment where you work. I've worked at many organizations, both technology organization and it IT in other types of companies, and what you describe is more the norm, while the hostile-to-women places are the outliers. In fact, I've only worked at ONE place that was like that (I'll go ahead and name names - it was Capital One), and I only worked there three days before I quit - and I'm not even a
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I don't see any active misogyny where I work. No one picks on the females for being females or makes those demeaning comments that would make Al Bundy proud. I do see some dissatisfaction however with gender culture clashes. Men have a way of getting along, while I will be the last to defend it, it's how things have been done since we first set foot in school. Women have generally another way of getting along, and I find it at least as obnoxious as male methods, but I assume they have reached the same form
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So if they are female and act like a dog they're called a bitch? What did they expect?
Men who do the macho, alpha dog thing get called ALL sorts of names by those they stepped on, usually behind their back. Do it in front of them and you'll be fired or at least humiliated. They don't care what their underlings think as long as they remains outwardly submissive; that's what being alpha is about.
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You just learn to deal with it.
Well, not if you're a woman. If you're a woman you complain about it and get laws passed so you don't get your feelings hurt.
Re:Oh lord (Score:5, Interesting)
"One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. By definition, "news" means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it's probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported -- automobile deaths, domestic violence -- when it's so common that it's not news, then you should start worrying."
That pretty much sums it up.
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-- C.S. Lewis
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I don't know your personal situation, but most likely you aren't obligated to read every article on Slashdot. Don't like this topic? Go read a different one.
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4) 3d printed guns
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Low pay? (Score:5, Interesting)
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And speaking as a murse, you can expect lower pay since there are disciplines you are verboten to work in unless you are gay, so there are gaps in your experience. Hell, there is sweet clinic position I am disallowed to work simply because I am male (oh noes, sexual impropriety, except the last three people who were fired for that have all been female). And no use complaining that it is sexual discrimination, especially when your employer is the government and sets the rules (really, you should read the ha
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Nurses make good wages, better than most entry-mid level IT pros.
Teachers are paid pretty well too, as they should be. People fed the myth of "low paid teachers" are often surprised when they see the numbers. In my county, the median annual salary for a public school teacher is $79k, plus generous benefits, and summers off.
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Comparing teacher salaries to private sector salaries is misleading. Often teachers have benefits that cannot be matched in the private sector including generous defined benefit pensions, retirement health care and time off. Total teacher compensation is heavily back-end loaded.
http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/tea... [ed.gov]
Salary != Compensation (Score:2)
Don't forget about:
1) Summers off
2) 5 hour work day
3) Layoffs and other terminations almost unheard of
4) 30 and out retirement with full pension and benefits
5) And (if you don't get caught) group sex with the students [whotv.com]
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35K a year in 95% of american is ok money, not enough to raise a family on but for a single per
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You're comparing to average household income, not average income for someone with one or two degrees, which most of the low paid rural jobs don't require.
The additional degrees have no correlation with better teaching. Teachers with a masters do not do better in any measurable way than teachers with just a bachelors. Taxpayers might be willing to give more money to schools if they see the schools stop spending it on stupid things like useless degrees.
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And they get to be respected and work in a huge hospital and have one of those upside-down watches attached to their clothes.
In tech they get to sit in a grey cube.
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No they just have to clean up various bodily fluids and watch people suffer and die. Nurses deserve to be treated well.
Not biologically suited? How does that work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Women seem just as capable of sitting at a desk pounding a keyboard as men.
I suppose I could hand-wave up an argument that men's more object oriented approach to language might be more amenable to being adapted to write code compared to womens' more personal-perspective oriented approach (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.5.1172). But I don't believe it. Male and female brains are both wonderfully adaptive and there are plenty of brilliant women out there. (Leave aside the fact that you only have to be moderately intelligent to write code.) Also, there's no evidence yet that men and women use language differently innately as opposed to having learned different uses of grammar along with their gender roles.
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Re:Not biologically suited? How does that work? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard other interesting theories for the disparity as well such as autism-spectrum disorders being more prevalent in males than females and that people who are have more mild forms of disorders along that spectrum tend to be more attracted to computers and machines than they are to occupations that involve dealing with people. This also explains the stereotype of engineers and computer scientists being socially awkward, which there is some truth to.
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If children can have such fundamental things as colour preferences influenced by societal factors why do you think that things like choice of toy or later choice of study options is somehow down to genetic differences?
The study you linked to is pretty weak, and doesn't seem to have excluded societal factors at all. Even at only a few months old a child will have been dressed in gender specific colours with gender specific styles of clothing, surrounded by gender specific toys in their home etc. Perhaps fema
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Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
But these 716 women who had made it past all that shit and were working in the tech sector found that once you get there, it sucks to be in a job where you're treated poorly because you're a woman, or you feel isolated because everybody else is a guy.
There are exceptions. My sister is a successful electronics engineer. But she works in a big company where she's not the only woman. She might have left the industry too if she had worked her first job in a smaller company where it was all men except her.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet we expect men to put up with that in female dominated professions. Teaching is just absolutely miserable for men, most teachers are women and you get the constant suspicion that your a pedophile if you take too much interest in the girls and you're a misogynist if you take too little interest in the girls. There's the feminist indoctrination that's couched as educational materials on things like sexual violence.
I like teaching, but the profession barely tolerates men.
Here's a hint, perhaps rather than obsessing over why women don't hold as many jobs in an area, perhaps we ought to realize that they are overrepresented in other areas and that if that isn't a problem, then underrepresentation shouldn't be either.
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The lack of men in teaching is a recognized and serious problem, especially at primary school level. Aside from being unfair to men, it also harms the development of the children. If it isn't a problem where you live then that in itself is a big deal, but I think most places recognize this issue now.
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Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why they left matters. Consider:
Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies, low pay which barely covers day care, "jokes" from male coworkers, and always feeling like the "odd duck."
The first two are contractual terms they freely agreed to, the third is illegal, and the fourth is inside the person's head, not the environment.
I don't doubt that there are cases of actual sexism, and they should be investigated and addressed, and maybe this anecdotal evidence by one Forbes.com writer with no clue about research methodology is something to start with. But it's not clear that the women interviewed were any more objective about their career or their former employer than any other disgruntled ex-employee.
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"Low pay which barely covers day care" is misleading, anyway. This doesn't say that the pay is lower than that of men--it just says that the pay is low. Pay being low is a problem that everyone has; the fact that women have different things to spend it on is irrelevant. It's by no means a women's problem. This is like complaining that outsourcing to India is a problem because women whose jobs are outsourced to India have a hard time paying for daycare.
(Indeed, raising women's pay because they spend more
Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being treated 'like the "odd duck."' is a legitimate grievance, but it's a completely different issue from 'feeling like the "odd duck."'
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But if you were an ENTJ working with a bunch of INTPs, you'd say it was their issue, not yours.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Informative)
This is now mostly just sour grapes on the part of women. I should know, I'm a woman who went into tech almost 40 years ago. Things have improved so vastly over those years that it's become clear to me that we women are the ones holding ourselves back now.
Why do I say this? Because it seems like all we're doing is complaining these days. We even ridicule our own kind just as much as the men apparently do. Hell, I still get exasperated looks from younger women who can't believe I would get a job with computers... and not because they're worried about sexism. I even get dirty looks from girls who think that me joking around with men diminishes me, without even realizing that I've just met the men halfway, and they've responded in turn to accommodate me (no one ever seems to care about that part of the equation).
No, the real problem is that not enough women are willing to get tech jobs. If you want to change a culture you have to change the culture, not wait for it to change for you. Men and companies have played a tremendous part in changing themselves over the years, and now it's time for women to stop blaming others and pick up the slack themselves. Come on sisters, some of us have been fighting this fight for decades. Time to join Rosie in numbers, or just drop the charade that we would, if only we could.
Girls in tech, if you think you have it bad, think about all the crap I went through back in the day in addition to what you're dealing with. And I'm not exactly the most tomboyish adrenaline junkie out there, I'm just a gal who looked past societal gender roles and decided that I'd like a decent wage working with computers, because they were actually pretty interesting. If I can do it, so can you. If you don't want to "suffer" the lowest levels of sexism in the field to date (and lots of other male-dominated fields) that's fine, but don't just pretend it's someone else's fault that the field isn't changing as quickly as you'd like it to.
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But these 716 women who had made it past all that shit and were working in the tech sector found that once you get there, it sucks to be in a job where you're treated poorly because you're a woman, or you feel isolated because everybody else is a guy.
There are exceptions. My sister is a successful electronics engineer. But she works in a big company where she's not the only woman. She might have left the industry too if she had worked her first job in a smaller company where it was all men except her.
So.... the problem is still in the pipeline? If suddenly, tomorrow, there were twice as many women as men in the tech pipeline and that continued for a decade, which of the things these 716 women identified as problems in the industry would continue? Being the only woman? Rarely. Being treated poorly because you're a woman? Unlikely when more of them are working there. Your sister is actually the counter-example to the Forbes article: put more women into play and suddenly the culture is no longer an issue.
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before modding me down here me out. I was making this argument earlier on buzzfeed on a slightly different topic (internet trolls harassing women)
How many of you guys here have been on the net for 10 + years???
Of you guys how many have been told to go kill yourself? or that your a faggot? or that you suck at life and your mom should have aborted you??
I would wager every last one of you would raise your hands.
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Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
Blaming corporate culture is bullshit because most women from birth are told to not go into tech.
This is nonsense. I see the exact opposite. Parents and schools try to push the girls into tech, and it is the girls themselves that are uninterested. I coach a Mindstorms robotic team at an elementary school. We work hard to recruit girls, but only get a few. We get way more boys applying than the classroom can accommodate. So boys are turned away, girls are not. Then when I talk to the parents, the parents of the girls say they had to cajole and convince the girls to participate. The parents of the boys say the opposite, that it was the enthusiastic boy badgering them to let him join. We do everything we can to recruit girls, and make them feel comfortable so they stay on board. We have a geek woman as a co-coach, so they have a role mode. We let them work in an all-girl group, which they prefer. Yet they still drop off the team to go try out for the school play. It is frustrating, and I don't know what else we can do. I have heard several of their parents express similar frustrations.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
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But why is it really frustrating?
Because I want to see flying cars, robotic maids, and real AI, in my lifetime. The chance of that happening is a lot lower if we waste half of humanity's brain power. If there is something we can do to get more girls interested in science and tech, then we should at least try to do it.
I don't see the same kind of frustration when people are dealing with getting more women in sewer cleaning jobs, or more men in nursing/teaching/child care.
Unlike engineers, sewer cleaners and nurses don't change the world. Teachers do, and there actually is an effort to get men, and especially black men, more interested in early childhood education. Boys, and especially blac
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But what the schools are doing isn't necessary what the culture at large is doing.
You'll have to look beyond school. What is media telling men and women about IT?
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We see similar at a university (Score:3)
I work for the engineering college and so of course getting more women is something they work at. You find a good number of women in the intro courses, 175 and that kind of stuff, but most of them vanish by graduation, off to other degrees. So one of the things they tried is having a women's only honour section taught by one of our female professors.
She is an excellent role model: She's a women who has not had to give up on either her career or family. She's a full professor with tenure, her own research la
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Ah. So the trick to increasing female participation isn't to encourage women -- it's to discourage interested men.
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This is nonsense. I see the exact opposite.
Then, frankly, you are blind as a fucking bat.
Yes there are already all these initiaves and they always meet with limited success. Must be girls, eh, right?
Well, answer this for me:
A few months ago my 4 year old neice declared that "girls can't do physics". Her dad's a physicist and clearly is not the source of the bias (her mum is not either). Certainly none of her family on my side are. And she's 4: she doesn't even know what physics is! Where did it come from?
Y
Mixed (Score:2)
Small companies often have barely enough to pay employees that are present. To be paying for employees on leave is something else, male or female. I recently had to take leave and if it wasn't for my insurance I wouldn't have gotten a dime. At the same time all the tech companies I have worked at treated everyone fairly and had policies about 'poisoned workplace'. Sure there are people who have discriminatory attitude, but in a healthy work place they shouldn't be staying long.
As for pay I don't know enough
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Small companies often have barely enough to pay employees that are present. To be paying for employees on leave is something else, male or female. I recently had to take leave and if it wasn't for my insurance I wouldn't have gotten a dime. At the same time all the tech companies I have worked at treated everyone fairly and had policies about 'poisoned workplace'. Sure there are people who have discriminatory attitude, but in a healthy work place they shouldn't be staying long.
As for pay I don't know enough about the realities and individual cases to know the truth. What I do know is companies will often give you a pay that you negotiated, which may be worse than you are worth. A good company will try give up something fair knowing that unfair salary if it becomes knowledge hurts them more. My current company makes it a fireable offence to talk salary. Other companies I have worked for have a ladder according to position.
Good colleagues come in many shapes, form, sexuality, culture and variations of gended, just as do the bad colleagues. We all screw up sometimes, but we should endeavour to treat each other fairly and with respect.
If your current company that makes it a fireable offense is in the USA, and I assume it is because your use of English seems American, it's breaking US employment law. Only managerial employees can be restricted in how they talk about pay.
Maternity Leave. (Score:3)
Re:Maternity Leave. (Score:4, Informative)
In civilized countries they already do.
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but their policies are actually rather enlightened
That's because the sun never sets on global companies!
We really must blame someone? (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll never see this kind of desperate hand-wringing over the lack of diversity in the nursing field for the last 100 years. But that's because we have a current sociological neurosis that says we have to force women into every field whether they want it or not. And we don't care what men do as long as they aren't getting in the way of women.
I know that sounds intolerably cruel and snide, but I really don't mean it that way in the slightest. It's a very accurate analysis of attitudes that I see in our current culture. And if people would be honest with themselves, I think they could see that. They have justifications for that attitude. But they still have it.
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Bad analogy time. That's like saying "I'm all for equal treatment and opportunities, but handicapped people want unequal treatment (wheelchair ramps, elevators)."
If you want equal opportunity, you can't just sit there and pretend that everyone is the same. Different groups have different needs and face different obstacles. By refusing to make appropriate accommodations, you perpetuate inequality.
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And if women were leaving because they didn't like the work, you might have a point. But that's generally not the case. It's really common for women to love tech, love coding, and get totally burnt out on a inimical work environment.
Maternity Leave and Small Companies (Score:3, Interesting)
Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies
Greetings from Silicon Valley where I've worked at five startups. In one of them, with about 25 employees, our female Director of Marketing started her several month maternity leave two months before we shipped our first product. This left a huge hole and being a startup, no new person was hired and all the existing management was required to chip in to get her job done. In the engineering department this was especially a touchy subject and needless to say, when she came back from leave she was not welcome in the engineering part of the building. I think startup companies and maternity leave are mutually exclusive.
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In that situation what would you have liked her to do? I can honestly only think of two possible options. She could get an abortion for the good of the company, or she could take less time off which might negatively affect the child's health and certainly mean she would miss out on much of its early life. Oh, well, there is a third option, which is that women of child baring age just shouldn't get jobs where they can't easily be replaced at short notice.
Personally I think that if a company can't cope with a
good for us (Score:4, Funny)
Selection bias (Score:3)
Did they also interview men who left the technology field?
I've interviewed at companies and been disgusted at what I saw of their culture. But that's not a feature of technology, except to the extent that current demand for technology allows dysfunctional businesses to survive longer than they should.
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Interviewing disgruntled people will certainly tell you why they think they are disgruntled, but most of the I know manage to be disgruntled no matter what.
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Interest (Score:2)
Complete opposite at our corporation (Score:2)
At the corporation that I work that, the CTO is a woman. *Every* single person that reports to her, is a woman. Most of management is female.
It's so anti-male, for instance, we recently had a tour of our department by upper management (approximately 15 people I'd guess) and there wasn't a man amongst them. I jokingly told my coworker the only way we'll ever get promoted is to cut off our penises, and... well it's partly true.
Majority of the IT sector is male. Majority of management is female. This is h
Bias in the precis.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, so they chose women who'd left the field completely. That means getting out full stop. You don't do that for career progression, you don't usually do that for more salary. You get out because it's not for you.
Now, if they'd gone and surveyed an equal number of women who chose to stay in the field as well, and an equal number of men who had left the field entirely and also ones who chose to stay, they'd at least be showing an attempt to remove bias. But no. They chose to skew the numbers completely and then write that it's all the fault of men (again).
I nearly got out of the field because the women in management above me didn't really understand how to run an enterprise class department, which did nasty things to my health.
I'm pretty sure that if you choose men who leave the field with women management as a bias adjuster you'd find a lot that just say "management often sucks". Gender isn't necessarily the decider. Hell, where I work, the women are often far more lewd and crude than us men (for the simple reason they can; if we crack those jokes, we stand a very big risk of being had up for sexual harrassment if the gal in question is having a bad day). Politics these days are hideously misandrist, yet nobody seems to give a damn about that.
Are these issue really female-specific (Score:5, Insightful)
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No rage over roofers, drillers, and boilermakers? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it strange that we talk about discrimination in high tech, when we have literally dozens of fields over 90% male, with and only a handful of niche tech fields even in the top 100. Hell, from that chart, we have sixty-one fields more male-dominated than CNC programmers (at 93.5%), the highest of the male-dominated tech fields. And general purpose coder only pushes 78.5%, with over a hundred non-tech fields higher on the list.
Yes, Slashdot has the byline "news for nerds". Until I start hearing people whine about why we don't see more female pipefitters, however, fuck right off about the "culture" in IT as somehow magically the core of the problem.
More relevantly, if we have a problem, that problem comes from human culture, not tech culture. Women don't do construction and men don't teach (at least not below the HS level), simple as that. However - And this counts as the simple most important point you will read in this entire discussion - They can! If a woman wants to get trained as a master pipefitter, she could have a well-paying job a week after completing her apprenticeship (usually 4-5 years); and even the apprenticeship phase doesn't suck all that bad, they make enough to live on in most of the US.
But we - as a species, not as a niche community of high-tech misogynists - view fitting pipe, welding, roofing, well-drilling, etc as "dirty" jobs that women don't want to do. We view dealing with disgusting snotty little 6YOs, much less trying to cram facts into their head, as something males don't want to do. Does that come from the fact that each side really doesn't want to do "off-gender" jobs, or the fact that society has conditioned us to believe that?
Short answer: it doesn't matter. Do what you want. If, however, you discover that the conditions in your chosen profession don't agree with your personality, don't blame the job, blame what you see in the mirror.
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It's a problem of basic gender balance (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend in the medical field. It is female dominated. She reports that the females there
a) sexually harass the younger, good looking men
b) are generally verbally abusive and dismissive to the men
c) exclude the men from lunches.
d) preferentially break up the shit duties based on seniority.. which means mostly women have the 'good' duties and schedules and mostly men have the shit duties and schedules.
I.e. they are in the majority and they rule the roost. If the men don't want their working lives worse than they already are, they just "go along to get along" and tolerate the abuses.
The current IT field starts with self selection by gender before high school. For what ever reason, girls don't prefer IT things as a group. It gets worse in college. I have personal experience with this. We started with fewer females to begin with and when we hit the weedout courses, the females dropped out or transferred to other easier degrees at a higher rate. Keep in mind 70% of everyone of both genders who started as freshmen didn't get a degree at all. By the end, the ratio was about 99% men and 1% females.
Now we go to the work environment. Of men, I knew over 30% who would leave work and go home and "play" on computer with .net, java, html, etc. An other 10% would work after hours on project management certification or advanced degrees. Of women, I knew exactly ONE woman in 10 years who behaved like that. About 10% of women would work on pmi or advanced degrees.
After a while, those who loved computers and "played" on them outside of work hours excelled technically. More females tracked off into management than males.
Which leads to a majority male environment. There just aren't enough females interested at a young age, those who are interested drop out more in college, most that graduate don't "love" computers-- they just see IT as a job/career not as "play."
And in a majority male environment, it's hard to prevent
a) Males excluding females when they socialize over fantasy football and the latest html changes.
b) Hanging out with females socially is fun but risky. You could do something and get a complaint.
c) Males despite being in the majority still tend to get the shit duties (such as working at night to install a program while the female gets to stay home because it's "dangerous" at night).
d) Males in a majority can get *too* comfortable making off color comments or telling off color jokes. This can lead to complaints.
At the last place where I worked, females were about 70% of the managers and team leads. There were some sexual harassment issues around 2005 and after that it was annual training and an extremely dust dry environment socially. It was also an older crowd (about 42 average) so the sexual hijinks were gone.
WOW my experience has been the opposite (Score:2)
I worked in an R&D email implementation unit for a very large financial institution, staff was about 20 employees, 9 of which were female. We did a large amount of project driven interaction with many other groups and the women seemed to do better than men in that area. The only area that I never saw a woman working in was M$ contractors, and they were all but one low caste East Indians, their mouth piece was the stereo type Oxford English sounding East Indian who spoke for them most of the time.
Mend leaving tech. (Score:2)
Has there ever been a study on why men leave the tech industry? I bet many have and for reasons similar to why women leave the tech industry. Looking at one side of the industry creates a slanted view of the situation.
Re:Most women are INSANELY good at tech... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Being good with tech is not the ability to play with a smart phone. It's the ability to design one.
Programmers are often the worst designers in the world. They understand logic and how to code, but often lack the design skills to make the code actually useful to the masses.
The super users of a product often understand the products way better, and even use their products in ways the original designers couldn't even dream of. I've seen kids design their own apps just because they're THAT much into their smartphones.
Re:Most women are INSANELY good at tech... (Score:5, Informative)
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They understand logic and how to code, but often lack the design skills to make the code actually useful to the masses.
"Design" in this context means "engineering design", not a fancy skin.
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When was the last time you sat in a classroom full of kids/students? Take a look around yourself, most if not all females are heavily into their smartphones, they quickly share apps and use their cellphones as it would be a natural part of their body.
Let me know how that translates for them into being able to solve differential equations or quickly understand the behavior of electronic circuits from schematics, once you find that out. :-p
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Actually, I have a theory -- and it's a revolution, just not a positive one.
You have many valid points there.
However, I'd still like to challenge the belief that the technology of today is creating noise rather than giving people the focus and energy they need to concentrate on good education. You have to see these devices as a PART of their education.
Their smartphones, iPads, Android-tables etc. are like carrying around huge stacks of books with all the information they could possibly fit in their heads, the more information you have at hand - the more material you have for m
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Yeah, but young women are more likely to look into careers in tech if women in their communities are in tech. (On my phone, can look up the reference later if you'd like.) So if you lose the women who are there you are also losing the women in the pipeline. Tech had to look like a reasonable option if you want to attract more than a few mavericks (like me.)
(And I eventually went into research, though I contribute to actively contribute to the pipeline on the teaching side. And hey, if industry sounds more e
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If you dont like it, log in, otherwise just STFU, we have choices
Re:It has to stop ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You know, that is why men routinely do not do that. But there are always some female underperformers that keep complaining and want it all for free (there are about the same number of men doing underperforming, but they tend to be embarrassed about it), and these do understandably not get any sympathy.
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