Tech's Gender Gap Started At Stanford 224
JCallery writes: The New York Times has an in-depth look at the gender gap in tech through the eyes of Stanford's class of 1994. The article surveys the culture of the school and its attempts at changing the equation on diversity. It also examines Stanford's impact on the big companies (Yahoo, PayPal, WhatsApp, Stella & Dot) and big names (Peter Theil, Rachel Maddow, Brian Acton) that came of age during the pioneering era of the early web.
Risk = Reward (Score:5, Interesting)
"A group of British researchers have analyzed data from the Darwin Awards and found that men are more likely to engage in life-threatening risky behaviour than women."
The term "idiotic" is used a lot in the quoted article, but it is a genetic fact that males are more willing to take a chance. The outcome is a gender gap. Women should stop their shrill haranguing, get their hands dirty and be more "idiotic".
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Re:Risk = Reward (Score:5, Informative)
WTF is this modded Troll? See my quote from TFA below that DIRECTLY SUPPORTS PARENT'S ASSERTION:
"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."
Almost Shirley (Score:5, Insightful)
In the eye of the beholder, one's genius is often the waste-of-oxygen of another.
Re:Risk = Reward (Score:5, Informative)
WTF is this modded Troll? See my quote from TFA below that DIRECTLY SUPPORTS PARENT'S ASSERTION:
"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."
There are people her who pull out the sexist card, the downmods, unless you conform to their very narrow perception of reality. Someone called me sexist because I noted it isn't difficult to walk over to the "boys to section", after I said I'd let my daughters play with any toy they wanted, be it tradional male, or female type toy. Expect this post to be hit with either flamebait or troll about ten minutes after I post it.
And yes, that quote is in the story.
I thiink the answer to why a lot of women are not going into particular fields is twofold. First off, you have to really really want to be a STEM worker. There are better paying jobs, with better job prospects, better pay, and one each shitload more prestige than STEM work.
If my offspring was engaged to a programmer, I'd ask him or her if they had any plans for when their job was outsourced.
In my own case, I spent a lot of extra hours, including overnights at the job. Field trips with indeterminate length of stay. Lost a lot of vacation, (Got a couple months a year, took a week or less. Times that over 30 plus years.
I think that for all the bitching and moaning over this subject, the answer is much simpler than the variations on the "Men suck" meme.
In the earlier days of post liberation, women tried a lot of different careers. Eventually, they found out which ones they wanted to be in. And it doesn't have a whole lot to do with what we are hearning about.
I find it hard to believe that the often shy geeks in STEM fields are more sexist than the business people in industry where "escorts" are a standard practice. It does not compute.
And I have worked in efforts to engage young women in STEM fields. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that there two ways to get more women in STEM fields. Either force more women into them, or fire men until we reach equal gender representation.
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If STEM jobs are so bad why do men do them? Do women just make better choices?
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Males tend to take more risks, this is evolved trait that greatly benefited hunter-gatherers (e.g. going after mammoth). Males also tend to fail more, server rooms and call centers are littered with dead-end careers. In reality, few men success, but few that do skew the statistics because of the nature of success.
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Just on a point of order, women have worked outside the home as long as men have worked. The only "liberating" that was done involved fewer requirements for physical strength in order to work and the mass production of white goods, reducing the effort involved in housework to a couple of hours a day.
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While the troll mod is unjustified, it also misses the point and makes sets up a straw feminist to make its argument.
The point is that we waste a lot of talent because silicon valley and many companies are set up to value masculine attributes - daring, aggressive behaviour that involves a lot of risk. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but it also means that we might never get to see that brilliant technology that was invented by a female coder.
More over, that point focuses on the people at the top of star
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That is NOT what the study said. The study stated that men were more likely to receive the Darwin awards than females. They suggested possible reasons for this including selection and reporting bias (ex. it's more OK to laugh at the deaths of men then that of men).
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That is NOT what the study said. The study stated that men were more likely to receive the Darwin awards than females. They suggested possible reasons for this including selection and reporting bias (ex. it's more OK to laugh at the deaths of men then that of men).
Would it not be true that natural selection would select for women who were predisposed toward being risk averse? If you want your offspring to survive to reproduce, you can't be doing the prehistorical version of base jumping.
And for men, especially in prehistoric times, those who took risks might have been rewarded with more and better food, and therefore could provide more for their offspring.
Simplistic, it's true, but I have to say there is something to it. My better half is quite risk averse - b
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And for men, especially in prehistoric times, those who took risks might have been rewarded with more and better food
Far more importantly, they were likely to be rewarded with more and better mates. Through history, most human societies practiced some degree of polygamy. Men are more likely than women to have many offspring, but they are also more likely to have zero offspring. So they have a stronger genetic incentive to pursue a risky "winner-take-all" strategy. Even today, a guy who takes risks that pay off, can sire a family, divorce, marry another woman half his age, and sire another family. Of course, this is easier in a community property state.
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We need to encourage more women to participate in Darwin Award activities!
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Wait, you mean there's a life-threatening behavior gap? This is unacceptable, we must encourage women to do stupid things that may risk their lives. To not do so is sexist!
Actually, this is mostly done. The lifespan of women and men is quickly converging, as is pay (if you take into account lifetime hours worked - for professional women who haven't had a kid, I believe women are slightly ahead under 35 now).
Does Slashdot have to have a "gender gap story" every 2 Bennett stories or something? I guess it's out with "news for nerds" and in with "Reddit envy".
A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled (Score:3)
Really how could anyone think a piece with that title is anything but a biased bit of garbage not fit to line a birdcage with ?
There is reporting and then there is agenda reporting. It's pretty damn clear that the NYT is agenda reporting to the point it would make Hearst blush.
Re:A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled (Score:5, Informative)
I thought it was serious until I read that students showed up at Stanford in 1994 barely knowing what email was. Then I realized it's satire. I mean, you can't seriously propose that the tech revolution started in 1994, right? Even Intel, Apple and Microsoft are latecomers to teh tech revolution, which was already very gender biased in the late 70s. When did "high tech" begin? I'm not sure, maybe WWII, maybe the industrial revolution, or maybe as late as teh semiconductor. All of these were well before Stanford class of '94 graduates were BORN. Even I knew what email was long before 1994, I even had email of my own.
This isn't intended to be a geriatric post where I try to claim I'm an OG, most things high-tech were invented before I was born. C existed, Unix was a thing. The only thing the mid-90s meant to high-tech was the birth of the popular internet, which many of us remember being the death of the useful internet.
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Re:A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet "high-tech" started long before that, and was already very gender biased. The article specifically said "email", which was quite common in the 80s on college campuses and high tech industries, I know because I had to maintain some legacy scripts, rules for which were set up in the 80s and nobody really understood anymore in 2000.
The article is correct on some facts, but is entirely lost in narrative.
That is how it really was in 1994 (Score:2)
That is how it was.
In early 1994 I was writing technical reports with a pen and giving them to a typist. By the end of the year it improved, I could type them up to save on a floppy disk to give to typists who would adjust them to the organisations style and then print them out, then I would glue photographs onto the reports and they would be distributed. I'm not sure if we got email in that ye
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I was in Stanford class of 1994 - which means, yes, I started in 1990. And, yes, we barely knew what real "email" was, since pretty much no 18 year old in high school had it. I had been on BBSs for 4-5 years before that, but at that point for even the leading edge outside of academia it was private BBS or CompuServe, etc.
By 1994 email was ubiquitous, Usenet was already long in the tooth, the Mosaic browser had been released, and we all had wired Ethernet in our dorm rooms (which still was definitely NOT t
What do you expect from STANford (Score:5, Funny)
It was started by a MAN named STAN, obviously a male chauvinistic pig school.
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And the maternal copulater is statistically likely to pray to Mecca.
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Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, Istanbul...
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night
Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you've a date in Constantinople
She'll be waiting in Istanbul
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way
So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can't go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why d
Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Number one, they're looking at the extreme high end of achievers, who - guess what - aren't representative.
And then the TFA has this gem:
"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."
Does anybody see what I see there?
Yup (Score:3)
But then again, I have not hear the arguments about the patriarchy and misogyny for a while so at least it's different agenda based reporting.
Society does not have enough turmoil, so we have to invent and spew more...
Clickbaiting Bullshit Works (Score:2)
But then again, I have not hear the arguments about the patriarchy and misogyny for a while so at least it's different agenda based reporting.
Society does not have enough turmoil, so we have to invent and spew more...
Here's an article [slashdot.org] posted three weeks ago about a woman in STEM that (for once) contains no clickbaiting headline, libel about entire groups committing discrimination & misogyny & harassment, nor the usual thinly veiled, anvilicious feminist agenda.
It was just an honest and interesting account of life at CERN, with a woman at the center of it. It garnered barely 30 comments. Who wants to bet this thread will end up with three times that?
Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't anyone else see that it's immoral to press, entice or implore a woman to sacrifice her child bearing years so she can fix your computer, or to let other people do so?
Didn't the article about how Facebook is funding freezing womens eggs wake anyone's eyes up to just how fucked up we've become?
Is that what you want for your daughter? Sure as hell isn't what I want for mine.
If that's what you're going to use your power for, you shouldn't have it.
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The point is that it shouldn't be a choice between kids or career. Why can't men and women have both?
Society needs kids, obviously. Society has an interest in seeing kids brought up well, which means a reasonable and stable income, time enough for parenting, high quality childcare and education. If we can't facilitate that, it's a problem that needs to be fixed.
Unless you think women should just plan to marry a guy with a good job who can look after her and her child, or maybe become a welfare queen, women
Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that it shouldn't be a choice between kids or career.
Yeah the choice is kids or career without much water between the two. If you don't like that resign yourself to having your children raised by strangers and hired help, which for most isn't acceptable. Raising children takes time and effort, something that the convenience of white goods and reduced physical requirements in the workforce hasn't changed.
What we're seeing now is a lot of women who went into the workforce and discovered that they were going to be neither wealthy nor successful, just like 99% of men in the workforce. Instead they're going to have a middle class lifestyle that they'd probably have been able to enjoy anyway plus a family had they chosen to raise kids instead. [dailymail.co.uk] Is it any wonder womens' happiness has been decreasing. [theatlantic.com]
That's not to say that men shouldn't be househusbands except it seems women aren't very attracted by that. Patriarchy, right?
I think first of all that the religion of feminism needs to die loudly and publicly along with every other social engineering cult, and secondly that people need to learn to differentiate between "a career" and "financial independence". These aren't the same thing.
And do not mistake me for a conservative or a traditionalist, I am neither.
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Very good question with a simple answer. Our economy is built on assumption of perpetual growth that comes from increased productivity. If productivity stands still we experience recessions. Some of the productivity gains come from technology, but majority of it comes from grinding more out of workers.
Did you ever notice than your grandfather was a sole bread winner and only worked 9-5 with serious overtime pay, while both you and your spouse are grinding
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Society does not have enough turmoil, so we have to invent and spew more...
The first half of that sentence may have been sarcasm but its true! Crime, teen pregnancy, car accident deaths are all historically low. Life expectancy has never been higher, the cold war is over, etc, etc. Thats why those in power need the war on terror and the left vs right political circle jerk.
The unfortunate part is, the one true long term existential threat facing society is the only one the aforementioned powerful ones choose to ignore. Yes, AGW. Everything else "wrong" with society can be fixed at
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"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."
Does anybody see what I see there?
Exactly. The gender gap in tech** didn't start at Stanford, it started about 10000+ years ago when women stayed home in relative safety while men went out on ambitious quests to hunt wild and dangerous beasts.
**or wall street or any other career that is all consuming.
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Yes, the women who were finally admitted to engineering school in 1943, 44, and 45, and who were then kicked out (in some cases bodily) in 1946 without being allowed to graduate (much less take the jobs for which they had sought education) were just playing out a male-centric fantasy of evolutionary biology "explaining" pre-historic history. Got it.
sPh
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Most of the men never saw a shot fired in anger. For every JFK there were several Richard Nixon REMFs sitting at a base playing poker.
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For every JFK there were several Richard Nixon REMFs sitting at a base playing poker.
So...who did the one guy play with?
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You are totally correct in that. And even 20+ years later, my mom was working in admissions at a major university and was passed up for promotion because she "was probably getting married soon, and would just have kids and leave" (which she did, ie. ME, but I still don't agree with that any more than "preexisting conditions").
But 60 years later, that argument is just not true any more (especially at Stanford, my alma mater), and should be put to bed. The GP comment was what I would call "totally douchey"
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... gamergate is actually about ethics in quests?
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Does anybody see what I see there?
That women need more encouragement? That silicon valley rewards aggressiveness and risk taking, rather than good technology?
TFA says that silicon valley is a meritocracy, but then demonstrates that "merit" actually means masculine attributes rather than technical ability. That's the problem, and we lose out on potentially great tech and programmers because we don't value their work more than their personality.
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What are you babbling about now, there isn't some great god of success sitting there handing out career advancements based on people's personalities in silicon valley. The world as viewed through a feminist lens appears indistinguishable from a world viewed through the eyes of a primitive witchdoctor.
What gender gap? (Score:5, Insightful)
News flash:
Not everything in this world is going to mimic the real demographics of the planet. If they idea is that we're all special snowflakes, we're sometimes going to find some people better suited to certain things than others. Unless there is evidence that the best person isn't being hired for the job, there is no gender gap. A gender gap is an artificial construct made by people who can't get past gender in the first place.
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Not everything in this world is going to mimic the real demographics of the planet.
No, but human abilities tend to fall along bell curves.
Observation: White males are overrepresented in tech fields when contrasted with non-white, non-male, or neither-white-nor-male workers.
Feminist/progressivist position: The reason behind this overrepresentation is a complex system of biases (consider all the studies that have shown that people whose names, listed, on resumes, sound white and male, are more likely to get called in for interviews), historical factors (such as unequal education opportu
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Excellent summary. Thanks.
sPh
Re:What gender gap? (Score:5, Informative)
I can't possibly imagine what would ever give anyone cause to think that...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanha... [buzzfeed.com]
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One person doing something does not meant that the 50% of the population who share her gender is dishonest. #GamerGate is over, the bullshit was exposed. Let it go.
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That pre-dated gamergate and had nothing to do with it. upwards of 10% of all rape claims are patently false. Another 40% lack sufficient evidence to tell either way, so the amount of fake rapes reported to police could be anywhere from 10-50%
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One person doing something does not meant that the 50% of the population who share her gender is dishonest.
For a moment I read that as "does not meant that the 50% of the population who share his gender.." and thought you were commenting about the absurdity of the broad-based accusations that men in general are the problem.
Then I re-read and realized you were just being disingenuous.
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I would say that the backlash against feminazis and SJWs started by GG is just getting started, and it's long overdue.
It is very simple (Score:2)
White males had more options to follow the money, and when the money started turning up in IT they squeezed the women out of the profession.
It's a cultural thing which we are perpetuating where employment is by the "best fit" instead of by ability. That's how we ended up with programmer pits filled with chest beating little boys in the shape of men acting like the stockbrokers that gee
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That's not my observation. Where I work, white males are slightly underrepresented. (Asian males are drastically overrepresented...)
If your basic observation is wrong, what does that say about all the speculative analysis you've based on it?
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(I'm very uncomfortable with "affirmative action" type initiatives, since a pure meritocracy looks fairer, but perhaps they're sometimes needed to clean up after past injustices?
Affirmative action is supposed to still be a meritocracy, it's just that you make some effort to get members of the minority group to apply instead of just throwing the posting out there. For example, you might make an effort to network with women so that they see your job listing, as often guys mostly have other guys in their circles. It might go as far as offering grants to help minority candidates afford to apply and study, or to move to where the job is.
Ultimately though the choice of candidate is down
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Feminist/progressivist position: The reason behind this overrepresentation is a complex system of biases (consider all the studies that have shown that people whose names, listed, on resumes, sound white and male, are more likely to get called in for interviews), historical factors (such as unequal education opportunities), and cultural factors (for example, unequal participation can form a positive feedback loop because being the odd person out, especially in a very visible way, can be off-putting). Then, of course, there really is a lot of overt misogyny, as five minutes on Reddit can prove not merely beyond doubt, but also beyond hope. All of these things (or rather, the gender-related rather than race-related parts) are what feminists are referring to when they use the term "patriarchy". In my opinion that's a poorly chosen term, implying something less nebulous, more focused, intentional, and planned than is the case; but there you are -- the feminist movement isn't perfect either.
("Privilege" is another term that leads to endless misunderstanding, since it gets thrown around in a manner that can sound pretty accusatory, but that again misses the point. The observation that certain people benefit from certain injustices is not the same as blaming them for those injustices. Maybe you went to Harvard on the family fortune your great-grandfather made by exploiting slave labour, and are therefore better educated than the black guy across town whose great-grandfather was one of those slaves. You hold no moral responsibility for slavery, but your superior employment prospects are still the product not of disinterested meritocracy, but the outcome of slavery.)
Of course what exposes feminists and quite often progressives as the naked bigots dressed up in flowery language they are, is that they've nothing to say about fields where women are overrepresented, or their underrepresentation in unpleasant jobs like garbage collection.
It's always a matter of great amusement to hear these often very privileged white women and men talking about how they're part of a civil rights movement when the actual civil rights movement was sparked off by a false rape allegation.
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Like a hammer, 11-in-1 screwdriver, and bailing wire all in a single fabulous Ronco creation?
It's kind of like pie a la mode or a warm doughnut with maple sugar... at the pinnacle, son!
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When I was an undergraduate the engineering students did CS classes to meet girls, since around 1% of the engineering enrolement was female and CS slightly more then 50%. Now I see far more women around in professional engineering roles than in IT positions - only one in the room of 50+ at an IPv6 thing and she was a sales rep. It's a very dramatic change and not artificial. The "special snowflakes" are the whiney little boys who can't cope with the change being pointed out to them in
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I certainly respect them for what they did, did I say anywhere that I didn't?
What I said was that a forced gender balance makes no sense. Some people are, to an extent, attracted to certain kinds of things. It isn't uniform, and there is no reason to expect it to be uniform across socio/economic/gender/nationality/etc across the world.
Why take it personally? (Score:2)
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Yet we have one. A widening one. It's probably best if we do something about it instead of pretending that there is nothing driving women away from considering IT.
Part of the HR bullshit is asking what people's hobbies are etc so we end up with a "better fit" when the reality is encouraging monocultures. Having all female school teachers is just as insane as having all male IT people, and it's far more insidious than that where it may be all male
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Typical feminist shaming language. Why don't you take it back to jezebel.
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As always, looking at this wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech
Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on
Step 3: "WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN TECH?!!!!"
Tech fields aren't some fortress designed to keep women out, they're a ghetto that unattractive or non-conforming men were shoved into. That's why the "neckbeard" stereotype is pushed so hard these days, nobody wants to give up bullying these people but they need to find some way to JUSTIFY it that also covers for the fact that bullying is exactly why the gender gap exists in the first place. So they invent this massive straw misogynist "neckbeard" caricature and start pushing it everywhere. Now it's not just that nerds are losers, it's that they're misogynist losers and that's why it's totally ok to bully them because it's all their fault anyway.
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Technology people were global heroes from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Whilst arising from groups and cultures that had been stigmatized in the 60s/70s their success at opening up the new world was lionized as the PC/technology revolution got rolling. Nerd became a cool thing to be.
Problem is that starting in the 1990s and really rolling after 2000
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Yeah, like constant demand for long hours, a severe disinclination to pay a decent salary, constant threat of being outsourced, no real promotion ladder, no real prospects after you turn 40, and most of the job is the tedious stuff that nobody likes doing.
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Tech fields aren't some fortress designed to keep women out, they're a ghetto that unattractive or non-conforming men were shoved into.
Why is this an OR? Power functions in multiple directions at the same time; if one barrier can negatively impact the mobility of non-conforming men as well as simultaneously push women even farther away from economic power that seems like a tremendous win for the patriarchy.
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Because you can't have an unfalsifiable [wikipedia.org] theory. The way your claim works everything is patriarchy no matter what it is, even if it hurts men, therefore nothing will ever NOT be patriarchy.
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I don't care if you like the word or not: you didn't use any term to describe who is performing the three steps in your post:
Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech
Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on
Step 3: "WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN TECH?!!!!"
so I offered the one that seemed closest to hand and is often used to describe a similar abstract group that seems to directly or indirectly pull the strings of our society.
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What part of "unfalsifiable" did you not understand? The problem is that you are trying to claim something whose definition is "men are privileged" is harming and oppressing men. That doesn't work because that makes your theory unfalsifiable.
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lol no i'm not. I knew it wasn't worth my time to type a definition of how I used the word because sure enough you didn't read it.
in the meantime, i'll be sure to tell everyone i know in the humanities about Karl Popper and how you can read about him on wikipedia I don't think any of them has ever thought to do so before nope not even once. ciao.
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I'm responsible for computer science admissions at an all-women college in Cambridge. I don't yet gave the figures for this year, but in the most recent year that I do have statistics for male computer science applicants had around a 15% acceptance rate, female applicants had around a 20% acceptance rate over the entire university. In spite of this, only 14% of our total admissions for CompSci were women. You can see the whole figures here [cam.ac.uk]. The women that we admit are not clustered anywhere particularly
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Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech
Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on
Funny, those masculine traits tend not to be associated with nerds.
Slashdot is exceeding itself lately... (Score:2)
...in vapid, stupid conclusions based on flawed initial premises.
First I noticed was that "coding" is a superpower.
Second is that tech's gender gap began in 1994? Seriously?
So before 1994, women were nearly equally represented in computing? HAHAHAHA.
It's not even worth refuting, it's such an asinine premise.
Hint to the author: the world began before you.
there was certainly interest... (Score:3, Informative)
...up until 1984. Interesting story about the culture which helped shaped women out of the field, or at the very least, class them out.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding
Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately... (Score:4, Informative)
Um, much more nearly, yes.
1943 to 1945 - women were about 95% of the computing workforce.
1946 to mid/late 1950s - still a very large percentage of women, since they had the experience (from the war) and were pushed back out of other engineering fields. Computing, being a branch of applied mathematics, was considered "acceptable" for women to take up
1960-1980 - still a large percentage of women in "data processing" (as programmers and systems analysts, not just keypunch operators), esp in very large companies.
1980 - boom in university computer science begins and many women are interested. 1984 is the peak post-war year for women graduating from engineering programs (around 40% IIRC); a large percentage are CS with many of the rest EE. Many of these women (my classmates) go on to critical roles in companies and universities building out this " 'net " concept (later renamed the Internet).
post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.
So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.
Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately... (Score:5, Insightful)
I was working in the first dot com boom during 1998-2001. Now, I was working in Amsterdam rather than the US, but I did get to feel exactly how screwed up this situation got. And looking back at it, this article does re-iterate a lot of those points quite clearly.
The people that succeeded were for the most part the ones that put in long hours, were ruthless about achieving their goals and cared not about things like "work/life balance", "emotional stability", "health concerns", etc. Whenever I came out to the US to talk shop with other internet infrastructure people, they were working long hours, ignoring what the industry said they could / couldn't do. There were women in tech, but they weren't the programmers - the ones I met tended to be algorithms people, data scientists, etc. They weren't in the meat grinder of bashing out C/perl code.
The article covered the long hours, it covered what happened when things went pear shaped, and it did a pretty good hatchet job on the kind of focus and ruthlessness you needed to get where you wanted to go. It was amazing to watch and now a little scary. Then the dot-com bust happened and people lost everything. Plenty of people I knew said "fuck it" and left the industry. Those that stayed either made their money, or they were just suckers for loving their jobs. They didn't have strong personal relationships with others. They just loved kicking ass and taking names in their work career. That sometimes worked out for them and sometimes didn't.
A lot of the people I knew in the tech field did just leave and look for something more stable. The people that stuck it out were homeless, couch-surfing, living with family/friends, existing wherever they could just to get over the sheer loss of everything. Not everyone is cut out for that level of destitution and dedication - eventually they'll snap and go off to something more stable.
This field is terrible. It chews you over and spits you out. If you're lucky then you make a bunch of money and save a bunch of money. Plenty of people working in tech and living in San Francisco aren't even doing that. We don't necessarily churn out people who are risk takers out of university - heck, churning out creative thinkers just became an "in vogue" thing again with this whole maker faire mentality that's happening nowdays. But when the thing crashes again, you'll see the same cycle - those who are willing to risk it all and live hand-to-mouth from wherever they can will do it. Others will go find whatever is safe and stable and start life again from there.
Now, is that gender biased? Maybe. Someone has to go do a little more research to figure that out. But from what I saw, there were a handful of women that stuck through that and came out ahead. Most that I knew just gave it in and went back to school, moved in with parents, or decided to stop work and have babies. The guys seemed more happy to take the risk again and again and live hand-to-mouth.
There's lots to fix. We have to stop being insensitive asshats. part of that is institutional - the brogrammer culture is strong here. Part of that comes out of all of the stupid stress and anxiety that litters this community. It's hard to pay attention to how you live, how you interact, how you make others feel, how to communicate well and well, how not to be an asshole if you're always stressed out, anxious and sleep deprived. add in a bit of being shouted at and some threats about your job security and .. well, you just stop giving any fucks. Part of it is no constant exposure to dealing with other people and a focus on your ability to churn out code - your job doesn't tend to want you spending time each day to improve yourself in all ways - it needs to be work relevant, and hey you have that deadline that just appeared? Eww. It's good to see people standing up and calling out bad behvaiour. it's good to see that some communities are sprouting up and eschewing shitty behaviour. But I'd really like to see the stress, anxiety and hours drop as well as a focus on people interaction. My 20 year old self gave no interest to any of these things. My 35 year old self .. suddenly realises that it's pretty fucking important.
the internet happened (Score:2)
post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.
So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.
The internet happened. Online venues (like slashdot) became places where self-selection happens. Being mostly male to begin with, that's the direction online forums went. More and more pure. This is where people exploring an interest in technology go, and learn it's a field where it's acceptable to say the kind of shit that gets up-moderated here. Fewer women enter the field. Online forums become more pure. Rinse and repeat.
Re: (Score:2)
1943 to 1945 - women were about 95% of the computing workforce.
And by computing workforce, you mean this? [computerhistory.org]
Furthermore, even quite some time after the advent of digital computers, there was this period in which the prevalent opinion in the field was that computer hardware design happened to be the actually important (and perhaps prestigious) job whereas programming said computers was a lowly, clerical work... I don't think that anyone should be surprised to whom these new jobs initially went. In other words, I find it plausible that the initial high involvement of women
No, No it doesnt. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sorry, what data does it have?
Oh, you mean it has unsupported assertions that match your desired worldview?
Let me make my own suggestion:
Pre mid 90s, CS was a rather unpopular course, generally filled with people who had a true interest in it, and in quite low numbers.
Therefore it tended to have a moderately (more) balanced gender participation, although that does vary quite strongly depending on location.
During the later 90s, the 'tech boom' made it a much more popular course for a lot of people who through it could be a path to 'success', the
content was watered down, the attendance went through the roof, and more of a male bias was seem.
HOWEVER, what to know where the opposite happened? business courses, MBAs, Laywers, Doctors.
Thats right, women CHOSE to avoid tech because they saw a larger payout in other areas - and women in general are better at long term planning.
Women went for the established, known risk long term payout of those kinds of course (at least as viewed at the time), whereas Men tended to bias more
towards the 'excitement and risk' of tech, with a lower probable payout.
But history meant a few of the tech people ended up making it big - so not its 'unfair' that more women didnt choose that path, and its the mens fault.
Get real, CS, and other tech courses, were most certainly NOT sexy in the early-mid 90s, and women were not excluded - most people who took them
were looked down on by much of the rest of the faculty.
Or, should we perhaps look at the current gener in bio-research, and advanced medical? a HUGE bias to women - who is screaming out about fixing that
equality? yes? please? no one? thought not.
Its just more of the usual - if something does well, women want 'equality' inforced there, but if it doesnt, they are happy to ignore it.
Or should be be trying to fix the gender gap in trades and manual labour areas? more women working in mines and fabrication?
Thought not..
Re: (Score:2)
Fair request. Unfortunately that's based on 30 years of reading the history of computing (as well as being there when some of it occurred), generally in sources which were never transferred to digital/online. Also working for a professor who had a NSF contract to study that question ~1983 and helping him collate surveys (again - paper!), run stats, etc. Probably read a lot of the papers he had ordered prints of as well. Would probably take a PhD research effort to put it all into citation form, even if
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There wasn't much women on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day...
Are you certain? It's difficult to imagine that many men heading single-mindedly toward their deaths with no promise of procreation.
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superficial read... (Score:4, Informative)
That summary is a total superficial read of the article.
It seems to me the point of the article was that 1994 (the web 1.0 boom of silicon valley) seemingly should have been more women friendly, but the valley was already being run by money from the previous booms in silicon valley and for a multitude of reasons which they list (e.g., male dominated venture capital firms), was unfriendly to women as chronicled by the biographies of the class of '94 from Stanford. One of the reason they cited was that women seem to gravitate towards "safe" jobs (e.g., law, finance, medicine) and a new "boys-club" mentality of the startup culture (specifically mentioning Paypal which was a Stanford dominated startup).
These same trends were most certainly true both before 1994 and after 1994 and not exclusive to Stanford... TFA didn't say techs' gender gap started at Stanford. TFA used Stanford as emblematic of the issue.
Re:superficial read... (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading "how to interview in Silicon Valley" articles during that time period that described firms doing things such as flying entire recruiting classes to Las Vegas and eliminating any candidates who didn't gamble and drink in large quantities. That's behavior that predictive for success in complex business-focused entities for sure.
sPH
True, But It Goes Back Way Farther (Score:2)
It's not just "Tech's Gender Gap" that started at Stanford; Silicon Valley itself started at Stanford (see Francis Terman, William Shockley, Fairchild Eight, etc.). So while it's technically accurate to say the gender gap started at Stanford, it's just as accurate to say CD-ROMs or Pets.com or anything else Silicon Valley-related started there. Silicon Valley is the genesis of digital technology, and Stanford is the genesis of Silicon Valley.
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Doesn't anyone check facts? (Score:2)
By 1994, the gender gap in tech was already well-established; it wouldn't become much greater until the .com crash. And it didn't start at Stanford, it was at least a national phenomenon. My second-rate east coast state school showed the same trends.
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By 1994, the gender gap in tech was already well-established;
Is that BC or AD? Because I suspect the former is probably true, as well.
Just (Score:2)
Women are first held back by their much lower fertility cut-off age. This causes the world to crowd in earlier, wanting babies, marriage, and relationships, distracting and rushing them so they find it harder to take the time and effort to pursue uncertain and uncommon paths.
In a different way women do it to themselves, avoiding founding the big universal services, instead starting companies that sell mainly to other women: fashion, children's products, jewelry, cosmetics, craft, and journalism targeted
Study is a waste of time and money (Score:2)
IT is all going to be offshored anyway.
High Tech? (Score:2)
I find it odd that they equate "early web" with "high tech". This was the point in time when computers basically dumbed themselves down, and any company throwing up a web page claimed that they were high tech in order to get funding. Before 1994 the engineers at Stanford, men and women, were instrumental in building up the state of the art in computer science and they came from engineering disciplines completely distinct from the MBA program.
The gender gap that exists is not necessarily in the business en
i wonder... (Score:2)
...it is gender bias that most women don't become plumbers either?
Seems to me that the high tech women CEOs (Score:5, Insightful)
have all been massive failures.Well Virginia Rometty hasn't been a massive failure, but she hasn't been a success either.
Smart kids are usually socially awkward (Score:5, Insightful)
Face it, smart kids were mercilessly teased in school since a long time before 1994. But being socially awkward, these kids stick to what they ARE good at, like tinkering with computers. This provides an escape for them, since they don't have a clue how to be accepted by others.
Girls tend to mature socially earlier than boys. They DO understand how to relate to others socially, and they don't want any part of the kind of treatment they see their smart male friends enduring. So...they do the smart thing...they stay away.
Is this all a terrible injustice? Probably. But we shouldn't be blaming the men. They are the ones who stuck with their quest despite the pressure. If there is anyone to blame, blame Hollywood, which (at the time) produced movie after movie reinforcing the "nerd" stereotype.
The gender gap is female choice. (Score:2)
Either force women to join the tech industry by law or there will always be a gender gap... oh unless you lobotomize men so they can't even do it if they want to do it.
Short of that... gender gap is forever. Women don't want to do it - so they don't.
*facepalm* No, it didn't (Score:2)
Tech's Gender Gap Started At Stanford
No it didn't. It started when tech started, at which point males and females had already been different from each other, on average, for millions of years. Might as well talk about the mammoth-hunting gender gap.
Gender discrimination, now, that's something else. But I don't think that started at Stanford in 1994, either.
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"Also don't get why people care about the gender gaps, but whatever."
You would if it affected you personally, or your daughter (assuming you have one). Maybe it had a direct impact on you if your mom worked, because women tend to be paid less for the same work.
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Good point. You left out the generation gap, and of course The Gap, which derived its name from the generation gap [wikipedia.org] because it was selling casual clothing to Boomers.
Keyword = 'Diversity' (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever I scan a document or an article and the word 'Diversity' pops up ... sigh!, yet another useless Political Correctness piece of crap!
The theme is always the same --- no matter if it's tech, or business, or wealth, or whatever-you-can-think-of, their basic argument is that someone has been _WRONGED_ and we must do everything to right the wrong, to make sure that the disenfrenchised party is disenfrenchised no more !
The 'common theme' is 'GAP', and the adjective can be 'racial', or 'gender', or 'wealth', or whathaveyou
They never care to address the WHY, they only want to talk about the "injustice"
The society is not going forward if every time they come up with something new the rest of us have to stop everything in order to 'help the disenfrenchised'