I did not assert that anyone who understands affirmative action must like it. I pointed out that the author did not grapple with any arguments for affirmative action in the entire piece, so it is unclear if they are aware of arguments in support of it. This is, like, writing 101 -- show that you understand the arguments against your position, and dismantle them within the piece.
It's a long way of saying "I don't like affirmative action" because they're explaining why they think affirmative action is bad.
>I earned my way onto that list. And here is someone telling me people who didn’t should be added simply so I wasn’t the lone female on it?
>In three words? That’s some bullshit.
It's only a long way to say it if you're already committed to ignoring their arguments. Because in reality their arguments have a bit more nuance then just "I don't like affirmative action".
Frankly, I think they make one and only one point with a lot of different examples that make the same point in basically the exact same way: "as a woman in tech who has succeeded despite roadblocks, I feel like any amount of affirmative action will make others doubt the extent of my achievements".
I am not committed to ignoring their arguments -- I used to hold similar positions. Then I talked with people who disagreed with me, grappled with their positions, and changed my mind. The author here shows no semblance of any such depth of thought, just repeated invocations of "if I made it, it must be possible! if we help others who are worse than me, then that lessens my achievement!" At its core, it's a selfish argument[1], which is why I changed my mind.
[1]: to be clear, there are quite a few non-personally-selfish arguments against affirmative action. "it'll make others doubt how much better i am than most other women" is not one of them.
In my opinion we should judge people solely on the relevance and quality of their presentations at conferences. Why should anything else matter? I think everyone agrees with this for the most part. It's just unfortunate that some people feel the need to supply unequal treatment to certain genders/races by creating quotas.
I think a lot of people on HN and reddit agrees with your opinion. We should judge people on quality and merit. Unfortunately, studies have shown the people who claim this tend to be even more biased.
It's a problem that many people aren't aware of, and it's a very compelling argument. The eventual goal should absolutely be to completely ignore irrelevant factors (gender, race, etc) when evaluating anything (such as a conference proposal), and evaluate only based on merit; the question is over the best way to get to that point, and there's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that attempting to ignore it right now doesn't actually work.
The concept of evaluating exclusively merit is completely sensible. Doing so in practice is not trivial. And there are indeed published studies showing that attempting to do so not only fails but produces more bias.
That's a bit... ad-hominum. Maybe I'm mis-reading it, but for me it parsed more or less as "I'm not saying you're a racist, but people who say what you're saying are racists...."
If that interpretation is wrong, please do correct me.
I'd like it if arguments could stand on their own, not be dismissed because someone falls into a particular category.
>I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
The post you're responding to is making the argument "Claiming that you aren't unbiased does not make you unbiased. Trying to be unbiased does not necessarily make you unbiased."
The post you're responding to is making the argument "Claiming that you aren't unbiased does not make you unbiased. Trying to be unbiased does not necessarily make you unbiased."
No, it goes farther and very clearly says it actually mskes you more biased.
That's fair, I misparaphrased. Still, not an ad hominem because its argument appeals to studies. That could be fallacious, but it's not an ad hominem fallacy.
My goal is not to insult. My goal is to share. When people are insulted then they are not receptive to new information. Maybe I should have phrased it differently. Thank you for pointing it out. It's something I am actively working on.
...it's like saying "if you aren't poor, you don't know how poor are treated and how unfair life is". The position of privilege one lies in makes it difficult for them to see biases happening against others, and they believe those biases don't exist.
It’s not enough. You cannot just magically wish the world to change and hope everything will turn out alright. You actually have to put in the work. There may be systematic reasons at work that make sure everything is as fucked up as it currently is and we cannot just wish them away. The world is not fair or just and merit is a bullshit metric that does not work at all.
How could we change that for the better? I think quotas are certainly a nice stopgap that can help move us forward and out of this fucked up shit we are currently in. It’s a hack, sure, a dirty one, even, but as far as hacks go I think it’s quite nice.
If you are really convinced that merit based selection is even possible (all a question of degrees, right?) targeted outreach (i.e. actually asking many interesting people to submit something, not just waiting for submissions) combined with a blind review process could also work quite nicely. I know of conferences where that alone (i.e. purely merit based selection, but preceded by targeted outreach – so of those who submitted something really only the very best presenters were selected) actually worked nicely and led to dramatic shifts in – their case (because they decided to tackle gender first, but there are obviously many other angles) – gender balance.
>It’s a hack, sure, a dirty one, even, but as far as hacks go I think it’s quite nice.
And a hack that can backfire when people start incorporating the existence of the quota into their judgment about someone. For example, in a place where a quota exists to ensure a minimum number of A are hired, people will begin to assume that B's are more competent. And if the quota is actually working, they will be correct. (It is possible for A-ism to be so bad that the average B is worse than the average A even given the quota, which may mean it is even worse for A as people will often not realize this is the case and think that the average B must in all cases be better than the average A when there is a quota helping A.)
>That honestly seems like an unimportant little diversion that doesn’t matter.
Because any (to continue my example) A-ism that is caused by the quota is counted together with preexisting A-ism. Thus, while it does not appear a big deal, it may be a major deal.
The inspiration for the original article was an (accomplished) A being deeply bothered by the phenomenon you have described as "an unimportant little diversion."
There's also the issue of "corrective" quotas creating new forms of discrimination (against asian Americans, for example: http://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-organizations-see... ). I think targeted outreach and blind evaluation of applications are less prone to result in new problems.
Is it considered a new form of discrimination and not the desire effect because it is Asians and not Caucasians who suffer the greatest penalty? If that is the case, that alone tells you all you need to know about if this process is racist or not.
Because individual speakers draw crowds; individual orchestra members do not. Could you see Linus Torvalds' speaker application getting denied because it was a blind proposal from "some hothead"?
I actually could, if only for the fact that Linus Torvalds strikes quite a nerve in many people. Not that I myself consider him anywhere close to the nastiest hothead in free software.
If it were a blind proposal, you wouldn't know it was from "yet another white male".
Individual speakers draw crowds, yes. But conferences are also a way for people to share their ideas and establish their names in the first place. A conference that optimizes for crowd draw is enforcing a preexisting hierarchy to the detriment of the community.
A solution is to use the keynote address and invited speakers to draw crowds, while taking blind proposals for most of the actual content.
"What is the goal of X?" is a good question to ask in any social endeavor.
It gives women, along with other frequently disadvantaged groups, such as minorities, the obese, seniors, and physically challenged persons, a more equitable chance to be heard in the first place. It means that the speakers who are chosen have met a minimum professional relevance level. This is a good short term win.
Will it mean those people have equitable chances to do keynotes today - no more so than the current systems.
Will it mean they have a chance to build a professional reputation that may result in invitations to do keynotes tomorrow - yes. This is a good long term win.
ILM and Pixar are routinely rejected from the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater, while 30 second shorts from students often make it.
Noone cares that your computer graphics made a billion dollars, people care that they are cool.
SIGGRAPH also had, last I checked, the best gender balance of any tech community. One year our Wiki was vandalized claiming that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was canceling a reception we were having on their property because the organization was supportive of the LGBT community and had strong LGBT membership.
So, yeah, Linus freakin' Torvalds can get rejected once in a while. I think his ego would survive. ;)
Sometimes they are. I really like it. I was selected to speak at a Ruby conference with a blind submission process. I remember feeling pretty good when one of the people who was a frequent speaker at Ruby conferences was whining on Twitter that their talk wasn't selected.
When say you chose people solely on relevance and quality, but you only have men as speakers.. Then it's laughable that your system for choosing speakers isn't biased.
Percentages shouldn't be the reason why you hire or don't hire someone but they should be a measure of how much bias is in your system for choosing persons of varying classes. If your percent of xyz participants in the majority class is way higher than the distribution in the possible applicants then there is some sort of class bias(economic, race, socio) in either how you choose applicants, or in how you get applicants.
Wouldn't this only be true if there was a perfect 50/50 split of qualified speakers based on gender? Percentages can be positioned to show that bias exists only when the input doesn't match the result. It is unknown whether the field of applicants had an "acceptable" amount of diversity to begin with.
The percent ratio based on class of participants should be in range of the percent ratio of possible people qualified by class.
And as I stated.. The failure of not being near this percent is either because how you chose your participants from applicants or how you chose to get people to be applicants.
How can one have agency if they don't know that there is an opportunity?
i.e.
If an opportunity is open to all; but is only presented to one class then you are in general only going to get applicants from the class that you presented the opportunity too.
This article is kinda insulting. Panels and conferences suck when they're homogenous. They're banal and uninspiring because the perspectives are all too similar.
The reality is that they didn't work hard enough to find good quality presenters that represent the actual world we live and work in - one where people approach problem solving in myriad different ways that stem from their own history and experience.
tl;dr - if you can't find women, POC for your conference, you didn't look hard enough.
Does diversity of gender/race equate directly to diversity of content? Painting a conference as uninspiring solely based on what percentage of the panel are $demographic seems wrong. Are you suggesting that white males somehow all produce the same content?
Bias favoring white males creates a culture of entitlement. Ever went to these mediocre conferences with mediocre talks? What unimaginative blokes organize them?
Then take one considered magically good, like Strange Loop. Their excellence translations into excellent diversity work too: (http://bridgetconsulting.com/?p=131)
> if you can't find women, POC for your conference, you didn't look hard enough.
Part of the problem with finding more women and/or POC is that most conference organizers aren't looking for people at all; rather, they're looking for interesting projects/products/businesses. And what happens is they get a representative of that organization on the phone who agrees to send someone to present, but often they don't even know who will actually be getting on stage until much later.
This obviously isn't true if you're getting a keynote speaker to talk about their career, but you only get one of those per event.
The gender imbalance in tech will remain self-reinforcing unless we actively work to change it. Right now the gender balance is so bad that we're effectively giving up on half the population. How does anyone think that is a good thing? Other high-skill fields like medicine & law aren't anywhere near as imbalanced as tech.
Changing the status quo requires outreach and making the culture more inclusive. Most appeals to meritocracy in tech boil down to "but I really like the way things are now".
The gender situation in IT today is actually worse than it was when I started, twenty-odd years ago. That's sad.
And really, I think the problem starts long before college. There are structural issues in the broader culture and the education system. It's even worse for black and latino kids.
That change in culture has to start at high school and college levels, if not sooner, in educational terms for any meaningful changes to happen. Plus the culture that needs to work to change isn't necessarily just the tech culture.
Exactly. Pop-culture in the US (and high-school/college kids are drowning in it) is very anti-intellectual in general. And getting worse every year (reality shows, etc).
But a lot of discrimination comes from female peer-pressure, not males. My daughter kept repeating "math is hard" because her female friends kept saying so, until I had none of it. She ended up being very good in math, but chose chem+biology as her major in college :-)
> medicine & law aren't anywhere near as imbalanced as tech
It looks like females comprise over 90% of our nurses and about 20% of our surgeons (in the US). For the matter, I understand the trend is going in the wrong direction in Scandinavia.
The lack of representation of women at these sorts of conferences is in and of itself something that turns women off participating in them and ultimately off the profession. It's a self-perpetuating problem. Until you get that essential fact, you just don't get the overall problem.
"For all they know, 95% of speaker pitches came from men and thus why they ended up with a 95% male speaker line up once they whittled down the list to the best pitches." Shouldn't the very next thought be: "gee, why would 95% of speaker pitches come from men?" Why might that be the case?
To me, the "women just aren't interested in tech" explanation is ridiculous on its face. "Women just don't want to be in a high-profile, financially rewarding career with tons of growth potential, because ____." What goes in the blank? I'm dying to know.
Try this one: "Women just don't want to be in a high-profile, financially rewarding career with tons of growth potential, because their parents raised them to be interested in what they thought 'proper ladies' should be interested, e.g. not tech."
I think a large part of this problem is generational. As we see female numbers increase every year, eventually it'll reach some sort of equilibrium. It's like asking 20-30 years ago why there weren't more women in business. I think it was just because until it becomes a socially regular thing to see, only the exceptional will try to break through that glass ceiling. Like the article says, forcing inclusion of women who aren't interested or particularly good at the topic won't help anyone.
This is pretty much the issue. People keep trying to point the finger, blame somebody so that everything can be fixed. Feel-good finger-pointing indeed.
But "women in tech" has a lot of factors and they're not the same worldwide (most of the articles talking about this are so incredibly US-centric, but that's another issue). There's hiring policies, positive discrimination, education choices, social factors, etc... You can't point the finger. Society evolved that way.
If you stop giving a shit about gender, instead of focusing so much on it, you're a lot more likely to get results.
What bothers me most is that it's not inherently wrong that there's a disproportionate % of male/females in a certain factor. There's also a disproportionally high amount of white people in Europe. Is that somebody's fault? Is it a problem?
If some form of inequality is actually caused by a malevolant actor, then sure, you got someone to blame now and you have something to fix. Something concrete. Sometimes that's the case. But "women in tech" ratios are certainly not the result of sexism. And I find the lengths guys will go to to get more women involved in their sector creepy and revolting, more so than anything else.
This is magical thinking. If I just wish it to go away it will … sorry, that’s not how the world works.
Past oppression, even if it didn’t exist anymore today (but it actually still does, so even that doesn’t work out!) extends from the past into the future! That’s what’s so devilish about it. You cannot just be gender/color/whateverblind and hope the problem will just go away. You have to actively work to make the world a better place.
> This is magical thinking. If I just wish it to go away it will … sorry, that’s not how the world works.
And it's not what I said. I said caring so much about gender just serves to reinforce the problem. You're more likely to get results ignoring it than focusing SO MUCH on it and forcing quotas. The article explains why really well.
But yeah, well done on disregarding the rest of my post. I don't know why I bother writing more than 140 characters if it's just to get cherry-picked.
But that’s exactly what I say! You are engaging in magical thinking. Wishing the problem to go away won’t make it so! Really not, that’s not how the world works and that’s not how past oppression extends into the now.
You have to care about this and think about this deeply. I also agree that quotas are a dirty and inelegant solution and I always love to hear alternate approaches (e.g. two-phase selection process including first a call for papers plus targeted outreach followed by a blind review phase), but the point is you have to think deeply about the problem and actually engage with it deeply. It’s a hard problem – just wishing it to go away won’t make it so. That’s magical thinking.
You have to think about it more not less. Also, quotas, while a very dirty solution, are to my mind a hell of a lot better than status quo. But as I said, I’m sure it’s possible to do better than quotas – but not by just ignoring the problem.
You're reading something in what I write which isn't actually there. It's possible you're either looking for a wrong opinion to correct, or it's possible I'm just really bad at explaining myself. I did read what I wrote again and nowhere do I say that we should all just "wish" the problem away. Please try to read everything in context.
> What bothers me most is that it's not inherently wrong that there's a disproportionate % of male/females in a certain factor.
Bingo. But by accepting this premise you accept that men and women are not The Same™, i.e., they do not have the same preferences, which is a problem for a lot of people.
I believe there are quite a few people who give out possibilities as to why that is, but they seem to have theories that many people just don't want to hear.
I would like to know why you think the possibility that "women just aren't interested in tech" is ridiculous on its face? I would think it would be easy to find out such things with general surveys of young men and women as they leave high school and enter college age to determine their career interests, has no one done this?
I imagine those surveys would show that women are less likely to be interested in tech. That's likely because of various cultural and societal norms that will have already influenced them long before they leave high school.
So, do we try to be proactive about making up that difference, or do we just throw up our hands and say "well, it's society!".
These things are cyclical. More prominent women in tech will influence more high school girls to get involved in tech, who will influence the generation beneath them, etc. etc. - it just needs a kickstart, that's all.
Your response is exactly what I wanted to see, that the problem is not solely a tech culture problem. Too bad that many would rather go straight into attack mode on the tech industry instead of actually discussing the many varied, and sometimes subtle, problems that are presented with this topic.
I, for one, am being proactive today with my daughters before they are even in middle school. But, alas, I often feel real lonely as I'm attempting to do this at the same time people are attacking my chosen career; labeling me as part of the problem.
Can't speak for the parent but for me the actual supposition that "women just aren't interested in tech" itself isn't farcical, but the epistemological basis for making that claim in this day and age absolutely is.
You can take all the surveys you want of billions of people but until you have a deep understanding of the sociological and psychological landscape you can't demonstrate that womens' collective "disinterest" in tech is anything but a facade resulting from some unknown variable or an out of control feedback loop (i.e., what if the impact of a girl seeing a 2:1 ratio of men to women in her favorite field leads to a death spiral where it ends up being 9:1 despite equal interest?)
I didn't choose to be an engineer because it was high profile, financially rewarding with tons of growth potential. I chose it because I absolutely love designing and building things. If you've ever been completely captivated by the sight, sound, and smell of a steam locomotive's moving parts, or sheer awesome thrill of a top fuel dragster or P51 at full throttle as it "digs in", or building something nobody has made before, you are not really an engineer.
If you can't use a piece of machinery, look at software, read about Fukushima, and not always be thinking about how you'd design it better, you are not really an engineer.
If you wouldn't work on cool engineering projects for free just because they are cool, you are not really an engineer.
If you just want to do engineering to make a pile of money and retire, you are not really an engineer.
If you want to present at conferences for the fame and recognition, you are not really an engineer. If you present because you cannot resist telling everyone about this totally awesome piece of engineering, you are likely a real engineer.
Same here. I wouldn't even be interested in tech jobs other than programming. I don't care about the money. Two years ago I even turned down a promotion to the manager because all I wanted to do was (and is) coding. Also, the original commenter implies that the average man and woman have the same (tech) interests, which is simply wrong. The average man and the average woman are not the same.
As someone who has been accused of loving coding so much I'd do it for free, I think your point of view is needlessly self-aggrandizing. The world needs a few single-minded individuals, no doubt, but what keeps the lights on day to day are people with aptitude who fill their roles for professional, financial, and social reward. You're "really an engineer" if you can do the work, not for what you do or don't do in your free time.
And I fundamentally disagree with your implication that women who don't want to undertake the social, financial, and professional liability of being a minority in their chosen line of work wouldn't have been "real engineers" anyway, because "real engineers" would have cast such practical considerations aside.
Your last line is a loaded question as it implies a near total lack of desire instead of a lesser desire that would still result in having another career that is more interesting.
Better question(s), is there, on average, some social factor that would result in men rating a careers desirability different from a woman?
If so, would this rating result in tech careers being rated, on average, differently between the genders?
Finally, what percent of the difference does this explain? Even if there was some reason men desired to work in tech more that would result in a 60/40% split in favor of men, but reality shows a 80/20% split, then there is still other forces at work.
> Women just don't want to be in a high-profile, financially rewarding career with tons of growth potential, because ____.
a) It is not high profile. Outside of a few tech hubs the work is neither cool nor well respected.
b) It is no more financially rewarding than many other careers. In my city the average software developer earns about the same as a nurse. There are plenty of good developers in the US who are on less than 6 figures.
c) Unlike nursing etc, there is an incredible amount of churn and knowledge quickly devalues. This concerns anybody who wants the option of taking a few years off work.
d) Despite c) we rarely allocate any work time for L&D. So if you don't want to fall behind then you need to spend a significant chunk of your own time on L&D. Great if you are looking for more work-life balance!
This "it's not high-profile" trope is just self-aggrandizement from nerds who want to feel like their outsized salaries are just rewards for a lifetime of persecution and neglect.
In reality, most work done by most people is not "high profile".
There are lottery-win careers like managing director path investment banking or high-end corporate consulting, which only a tiny fraction of all the practitioners in those fields get, and there are medical doctors.
Pretty much everything else is just a job, like all the other jobs, and you're crazy if you think office managers, machinery parts sales reps, and accountants have higher-status jobs than software developers.
It's time to kill this meme about tech being low-status.
How can one lament the lack of women in a conference panel but make no mention of how lily white it is?
Is it just me or do most of these underepresentation conversations seem to focus on gender more than race? How the heck does that make any kind of sense?
If anything racial disadvantages have even broader economic consequences than gender. How is race not an intrinsic, automatic part of every conversation on representation in tech alongside gender? Why is it "women in tech" instead of "women and minorities in tech"?
Yes, it's multiply awful for those on the intersections: particularly women of color. Therefore they're the ones we’d expect a consistently ethical person to be most concerned about. (And helping improve their situations helps others too.)
> Therefore they’re the ones we’d expect a consistently ethical person to be most concerned about.
Why is that? I mean, I think of arguments for it, but I can think of arguments against it as well, enough that I don't think it qualifies as obviously true.
It's pretty awful for men who are ethnic as well. I come from a poor hispanic background but I keep getting lectured on my male privilege by upper middle class white people.
I'd say it's pretty awful for non-upper middle class white men as well. I think we need to make sure everyone has the opportunities they desire, but repeatedly telling 50% of the population that they're privileged when that's most definitely not the case isn't helping anyone.
Coming from similar background, I say just screw 'em, honestly. Look out for yourself, and I know it's easier said than done, but don't give much weight to what other people think.
That was my strategy for a long time. I just focused on being the best dev I could be. Have I experienced racism in a professional environment? Yes. But again, I just focused on being the best I could be and worked past it.
I'm successful enough now but it worries me that the same tools I used to get ahead are now being systematically disassembled. Meritocracy is now a bad word. High standards are deemed non-inclusive. Being male, regardless of your socio-economic background is now a handicap. Questioning any of this will get you labeled at the very least misogynist or racist. Publicly questioning it will likely get you fired.
These developments worry me. While I "have mine" through 10+ years of very hard work, I'd like to leave the ladder in place so others can climb up instead of burning it down and helicoptering a chosen few up.
Take a good long hard look in the mirror and repeat after me, "I am part of the problem. I have no business preaching about a profession of which I don't belong"
If I go to a conference I want to listen to the best and the brightest, not the most "under-represented" or whatever trendy bullshit it is this week.
This used to be a respectable profession. Funny how it's being destroyed from the outside and not from within.
>How can one lament the lack of women in a conference panel but make no mention of how lily white it is?
Maybe it is related to how the mismatch from base rate in prison populations in regards to race is a sign of systematic racism against the over-represented groups, but the same doesn't seem to be reported in regards to sex.
If prison offered good job training (and we got people to be willing to employ felons), I think recidivism rates would take a significant dip. But oddly enough, such a solution would only further solidify the gender gap in tech as such scholarships would be going to far more men than women.
> Maybe it is related to how the mismatch from base rate in prison populations in regards to race is a sign of systematic racism against the over-represented groups
I've usually seen prison population cited not alone, but along with (and as an example of the outcome of) more direct examples of disparate treatment, such as unequal sentencing for like offenses, and the definition of different sentencing categories for different categories of narcotics, with the higher sentences being for possession or sale of categories disproportionately in use in the black community at the time the differential treatment was adopted.
It is in the social circles I frequent. Really the only way to know what tech is like for people with X experience is to listen to and follow (in the social media sense) people with X experience. No one can fully understand how other people experience things.
People do talk about it, but it seems women are either more interested in talking about it or more likely to take action about it.
I am part of a racial minority, and to be honest trying to "do something about it" never really interested me. Racial disadvantages never meant much to me personally.
And no, there's no way in hell I can pass of as white, in person or on the phone.
Part of the reason minorities are less willing to talk is because people are not really willing to listen. I just left a company where multiple complaints by people of color were dismissed.
> There’s also no African Americans on the Edge Conference’s roster. I don’t see any people of (obvious) Hispanic descent. Why is no one up in arms over that?
Because people who care don't get nearly as much press as people who talk about women being excluded.
Because the men who work in tech don't care so much about race, but they do care about the obvious lack of women.
Because it's easier to go "we have 40% asians and indians" and ignore the issue than to find a way around "we have 95% males".
Kids (and people that didn't grow up) will try for a long time to avoid this discussion. But I have to say to you: you lost. You can leave, or you can adapt. But you can't stop it.
Similar to the putative attitude of the organizers of these conferences, colleges have bent over backwards to get more female enrollment (indeed, there are now more females going to college than males). However,
"A new report from the National Student Clearinghouse looks at degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) and finds that the share of STEM bachelor’s degrees going to women ticked down over the past decade. The biggest decline was in computer science, where women received 23 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2004 and just 18 percent in 2014. On the bright side — at least for career prospects — both men and women are slightly more likely to be majoring in STEM fields today than they were in 2004; it’s just that men have shown more growth than women."[0]
The opportunities are there for those females who want it. Maybe most of them simply don't want to go into the computer field---individual men and women have different things they want out of life and out of their careers, which is ok! Why should everyone be a computer science major? The world would be a pretty dull place.
The author's points are quite valid; I would add that you don't want to push people into a field they have no interest (or aptitude) in. It makes the person miserable and cheapens the degrees of others (a smaller consideration in tech, I'll grant you, since it's more meritocratic than some other fields).
The smallest minority is the individual. If 95% of individuals who happened to be men gave the best auditions, they should probably be given the spots. I say "probably" because if it's a private conference, the organizers can do whatever they want, and people need not attend if they don't like the speaker choices. Ultimately, if women are dissatisfied with the "boys club", they can organize their own conference across the street.
The opportunities are there for those females who want it. Maybe most of them simply don't want to go into the computer field
You seem to take that as a law of nature... as though it's natural for there to be a truly massive gender bias in computing, a gender bias that was far less 20 years ago and has gotten egregiously worse since roughly 2000.
The real question should be: why the hell aren't women enrolling into and graduating from CS programs?
The answer is probably enormous and systemic, but the current situation should not be seen as acceptable, IMO.
Incidentally, the same questions could (and should) be asked of, say, men in nursing. And, again, the answers are certainly enormous and systemic, starting from childhood socialization, running through peer group issues, and on and on.
> The opportunities are there for those females who want it.
This is a fallacy. The problem isn't that sexism in STEM isn't conscious choice; it's not like those nasty menfolk go out of their way to make women feel unwelcome. It's systemic, a culture where women are perceived as less technically competent, more unstable, less deserving of recognition or promotion. If our names are clearly female-gendered, our papers and conference submissions are accepted less frequently, even if the paper itself is the same. The old joke among women in STEM is that "you have to work twice as hard to get half the credit."
I've been coding for the web since 1996, professionally since 1998. I currently work as a senior software developer for a major retailer, and as you might have guessed, I'm female. Science, tech, engineer, math - all of these fields have gotten significantly more hostile towards women in the years I've been involved with them. Under the guise of "professionality" I've been stalked, harassed, invalidated and belittled - and I've experienced less problems than most of my female colleagues.
I look around at my coworkers, and of the several hundred developers and engineers there, less than 5 are women. 98% of my coworkers are male. I get talked down to by junior developers all the time; they either mistakenly assume I'm new to the field or not a developer at all. These aren't guys trying to make it difficult. They're operating under flawed, sexist assumptions, and that's what makes working in STEM an uphill battle. How many times can you get the message "you're inferior" before you believe it? 100? 1000?
I have a 12 year old cousin who loved programming the first time she tried it. She's smart and driven and would be a great developer. She's already given up on it; would you like to know why? Because she's isolated as a female geek and was teased about being a girl. Arguing that if we don't like it, we can just organize our own whatever is dismissive and reductive. You know what happens when we organize our own whatever? We get harassed and threatened and tons of shit heaped on us because we're women. So don't tell us that it's "there if we want it," because it's not.
105 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadAsserting that anyone who understands affirmative action must like it is begging the question.
>I earned my way onto that list. And here is someone telling me people who didn’t should be added simply so I wasn’t the lone female on it?
>In three words? That’s some bullshit.
It's only a long way to say it if you're already committed to ignoring their arguments. Because in reality their arguments have a bit more nuance then just "I don't like affirmative action".
I am not committed to ignoring their arguments -- I used to hold similar positions. Then I talked with people who disagreed with me, grappled with their positions, and changed my mind. The author here shows no semblance of any such depth of thought, just repeated invocations of "if I made it, it must be possible! if we help others who are worse than me, then that lessens my achievement!" At its core, it's a selfish argument[1], which is why I changed my mind.
[1]: to be clear, there are quite a few non-personally-selfish arguments against affirmative action. "it'll make others doubt how much better i am than most other women" is not one of them.
See bottom of this page. http://managingbias.fb.com/ It's kind of like when people say "I don't see race."
The concept of evaluating exclusively merit is completely sensible. Doing so in practice is not trivial. And there are indeed published studies showing that attempting to do so not only fails but produces more bias.
If that interpretation is wrong, please do correct me.
I'd like it if arguments could stand on their own, not be dismissed because someone falls into a particular category.
>I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
and all that.
The post you're responding to is making the argument "Claiming that you aren't unbiased does not make you unbiased. Trying to be unbiased does not necessarily make you unbiased."
That's certainly not ad hominem at all.
No, it goes farther and very clearly says it actually mskes you more biased.
How could we change that for the better? I think quotas are certainly a nice stopgap that can help move us forward and out of this fucked up shit we are currently in. It’s a hack, sure, a dirty one, even, but as far as hacks go I think it’s quite nice.
If you are really convinced that merit based selection is even possible (all a question of degrees, right?) targeted outreach (i.e. actually asking many interesting people to submit something, not just waiting for submissions) combined with a blind review process could also work quite nicely. I know of conferences where that alone (i.e. purely merit based selection, but preceded by targeted outreach – so of those who submitted something really only the very best presenters were selected) actually worked nicely and led to dramatic shifts in – their case (because they decided to tackle gender first, but there are obviously many other angles) – gender balance.
And a hack that can backfire when people start incorporating the existence of the quota into their judgment about someone. For example, in a place where a quota exists to ensure a minimum number of A are hired, people will begin to assume that B's are more competent. And if the quota is actually working, they will be correct. (It is possible for A-ism to be so bad that the average B is worse than the average A even given the quota, which may mean it is even worse for A as people will often not realize this is the case and think that the average B must in all cases be better than the average A when there is a quota helping A.)
Only used by people who really think there is no problem, used to argue in bad faith.
But, ok, can you suggest an alternative that’s not just proving up the awful status quo? I love more elegant solutions!
Because any (to continue my example) A-ism that is caused by the quota is counted together with preexisting A-ism. Thus, while it does not appear a big deal, it may be a major deal.
Edit: missed the meaning of "blind".
Individual speakers draw crowds, yes. But conferences are also a way for people to share their ideas and establish their names in the first place. A conference that optimizes for crowd draw is enforcing a preexisting hierarchy to the detriment of the community.
A solution is to use the keynote address and invited speakers to draw crowds, while taking blind proposals for most of the actual content.
"What is the goal of X?" is a good question to ask in any social endeavor.
> A solution is to use the keynote address and invited speakers to draw crowds
Ok, but nothing's solved, just pushed up a level.
Will it mean those people have equitable chances to do keynotes today - no more so than the current systems.
Will it mean they have a chance to build a professional reputation that may result in invitations to do keynotes tomorrow - yes. This is a good long term win.
Noone cares that your computer graphics made a billion dollars, people care that they are cool.
SIGGRAPH also had, last I checked, the best gender balance of any tech community. One year our Wiki was vandalized claiming that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was canceling a reception we were having on their property because the organization was supportive of the LGBT community and had strong LGBT membership.
So, yeah, Linus freakin' Torvalds can get rejected once in a while. I think his ego would survive. ;)
Percentages shouldn't be the reason why you hire or don't hire someone but they should be a measure of how much bias is in your system for choosing persons of varying classes. If your percent of xyz participants in the majority class is way higher than the distribution in the possible applicants then there is some sort of class bias(economic, race, socio) in either how you choose applicants, or in how you get applicants.
And as I stated.. The failure of not being near this percent is either because how you chose your participants from applicants or how you chose to get people to be applicants.
Applicants are self-selecting. Your argument attempts to shift responsibility (and agency) away from speakers and practitioners.
How can one have agency if they don't know that there is an opportunity?
i.e.
If an opportunity is open to all; but is only presented to one class then you are in general only going to get applicants from the class that you presented the opportunity too.
The reality is that they didn't work hard enough to find good quality presenters that represent the actual world we live and work in - one where people approach problem solving in myriad different ways that stem from their own history and experience.
tl;dr - if you can't find women, POC for your conference, you didn't look hard enough.
Then take one considered magically good, like Strange Loop. Their excellence translations into excellent diversity work too: (http://bridgetconsulting.com/?p=131)
Part of the problem with finding more women and/or POC is that most conference organizers aren't looking for people at all; rather, they're looking for interesting projects/products/businesses. And what happens is they get a representative of that organization on the phone who agrees to send someone to present, but often they don't even know who will actually be getting on stage until much later.
This obviously isn't true if you're getting a keynote speaker to talk about their career, but you only get one of those per event.
Changing the status quo requires outreach and making the culture more inclusive. Most appeals to meritocracy in tech boil down to "but I really like the way things are now".
And really, I think the problem starts long before college. There are structural issues in the broader culture and the education system. It's even worse for black and latino kids.
But a lot of discrimination comes from female peer-pressure, not males. My daughter kept repeating "math is hard" because her female friends kept saying so, until I had none of it. She ended up being very good in math, but chose chem+biology as her major in college :-)
It looks like females comprise over 90% of our nurses and about 20% of our surgeons (in the US). For the matter, I understand the trend is going in the wrong direction in Scandinavia.
"For all they know, 95% of speaker pitches came from men and thus why they ended up with a 95% male speaker line up once they whittled down the list to the best pitches." Shouldn't the very next thought be: "gee, why would 95% of speaker pitches come from men?" Why might that be the case?
To me, the "women just aren't interested in tech" explanation is ridiculous on its face. "Women just don't want to be in a high-profile, financially rewarding career with tons of growth potential, because ____." What goes in the blank? I'm dying to know.
I think a large part of this problem is generational. As we see female numbers increase every year, eventually it'll reach some sort of equilibrium. It's like asking 20-30 years ago why there weren't more women in business. I think it was just because until it becomes a socially regular thing to see, only the exceptional will try to break through that glass ceiling. Like the article says, forcing inclusion of women who aren't interested or particularly good at the topic won't help anyone.
But "women in tech" has a lot of factors and they're not the same worldwide (most of the articles talking about this are so incredibly US-centric, but that's another issue). There's hiring policies, positive discrimination, education choices, social factors, etc... You can't point the finger. Society evolved that way.
If you stop giving a shit about gender, instead of focusing so much on it, you're a lot more likely to get results.
What bothers me most is that it's not inherently wrong that there's a disproportionate % of male/females in a certain factor. There's also a disproportionally high amount of white people in Europe. Is that somebody's fault? Is it a problem?
If some form of inequality is actually caused by a malevolant actor, then sure, you got someone to blame now and you have something to fix. Something concrete. Sometimes that's the case. But "women in tech" ratios are certainly not the result of sexism. And I find the lengths guys will go to to get more women involved in their sector creepy and revolting, more so than anything else.
Past oppression, even if it didn’t exist anymore today (but it actually still does, so even that doesn’t work out!) extends from the past into the future! That’s what’s so devilish about it. You cannot just be gender/color/whateverblind and hope the problem will just go away. You have to actively work to make the world a better place.
And it's not what I said. I said caring so much about gender just serves to reinforce the problem. You're more likely to get results ignoring it than focusing SO MUCH on it and forcing quotas. The article explains why really well.
But yeah, well done on disregarding the rest of my post. I don't know why I bother writing more than 140 characters if it's just to get cherry-picked.
You have to care about this and think about this deeply. I also agree that quotas are a dirty and inelegant solution and I always love to hear alternate approaches (e.g. two-phase selection process including first a call for papers plus targeted outreach followed by a blind review phase), but the point is you have to think deeply about the problem and actually engage with it deeply. It’s a hard problem – just wishing it to go away won’t make it so. That’s magical thinking.
You have to think about it more not less. Also, quotas, while a very dirty solution, are to my mind a hell of a lot better than status quo. But as I said, I’m sure it’s possible to do better than quotas – but not by just ignoring the problem.
Bingo. But by accepting this premise you accept that men and women are not The Same™, i.e., they do not have the same preferences, which is a problem for a lot of people.
(notice I said preferences and not abilities)
I would like to know why you think the possibility that "women just aren't interested in tech" is ridiculous on its face? I would think it would be easy to find out such things with general surveys of young men and women as they leave high school and enter college age to determine their career interests, has no one done this?
So, do we try to be proactive about making up that difference, or do we just throw up our hands and say "well, it's society!".
These things are cyclical. More prominent women in tech will influence more high school girls to get involved in tech, who will influence the generation beneath them, etc. etc. - it just needs a kickstart, that's all.
I, for one, am being proactive today with my daughters before they are even in middle school. But, alas, I often feel real lonely as I'm attempting to do this at the same time people are attacking my chosen career; labeling me as part of the problem.
You can take all the surveys you want of billions of people but until you have a deep understanding of the sociological and psychological landscape you can't demonstrate that womens' collective "disinterest" in tech is anything but a facade resulting from some unknown variable or an out of control feedback loop (i.e., what if the impact of a girl seeing a 2:1 ratio of men to women in her favorite field leads to a death spiral where it ends up being 9:1 despite equal interest?)
If you can't use a piece of machinery, look at software, read about Fukushima, and not always be thinking about how you'd design it better, you are not really an engineer.
If you wouldn't work on cool engineering projects for free just because they are cool, you are not really an engineer.
If you just want to do engineering to make a pile of money and retire, you are not really an engineer.
If you want to present at conferences for the fame and recognition, you are not really an engineer. If you present because you cannot resist telling everyone about this totally awesome piece of engineering, you are likely a real engineer.
And I fundamentally disagree with your implication that women who don't want to undertake the social, financial, and professional liability of being a minority in their chosen line of work wouldn't have been "real engineers" anyway, because "real engineers" would have cast such practical considerations aside.
Better question(s), is there, on average, some social factor that would result in men rating a careers desirability different from a woman?
If so, would this rating result in tech careers being rated, on average, differently between the genders?
Finally, what percent of the difference does this explain? Even if there was some reason men desired to work in tech more that would result in a 60/40% split in favor of men, but reality shows a 80/20% split, then there is still other forces at work.
a) It is not high profile. Outside of a few tech hubs the work is neither cool nor well respected.
b) It is no more financially rewarding than many other careers. In my city the average software developer earns about the same as a nurse. There are plenty of good developers in the US who are on less than 6 figures.
c) Unlike nursing etc, there is an incredible amount of churn and knowledge quickly devalues. This concerns anybody who wants the option of taking a few years off work.
d) Despite c) we rarely allocate any work time for L&D. So if you don't want to fall behind then you need to spend a significant chunk of your own time on L&D. Great if you are looking for more work-life balance!
In reality, most work done by most people is not "high profile".
There are lottery-win careers like managing director path investment banking or high-end corporate consulting, which only a tiny fraction of all the practitioners in those fields get, and there are medical doctors.
Pretty much everything else is just a job, like all the other jobs, and you're crazy if you think office managers, machinery parts sales reps, and accountants have higher-status jobs than software developers.
It's time to kill this meme about tech being low-status.
> In reality, most work done by most people is not "high profile".
Spot on! And so you can't expect women to want to become software developers because of its high profile.
Is it just me or do most of these underepresentation conversations seem to focus on gender more than race? How the heck does that make any kind of sense?
If anything racial disadvantages have even broader economic consequences than gender. How is race not an intrinsic, automatic part of every conversation on representation in tech alongside gender? Why is it "women in tech" instead of "women and minorities in tech"?
Why is that? I mean, I think of arguments for it, but I can think of arguments against it as well, enough that I don't think it qualifies as obviously true.
I'd say it's pretty awful for non-upper middle class white men as well. I think we need to make sure everyone has the opportunities they desire, but repeatedly telling 50% of the population that they're privileged when that's most definitely not the case isn't helping anyone.
I'm successful enough now but it worries me that the same tools I used to get ahead are now being systematically disassembled. Meritocracy is now a bad word. High standards are deemed non-inclusive. Being male, regardless of your socio-economic background is now a handicap. Questioning any of this will get you labeled at the very least misogynist or racist. Publicly questioning it will likely get you fired.
These developments worry me. While I "have mine" through 10+ years of very hard work, I'd like to leave the ladder in place so others can climb up instead of burning it down and helicoptering a chosen few up.
If I go to a conference I want to listen to the best and the brightest, not the most "under-represented" or whatever trendy bullshit it is this week.
This used to be a respectable profession. Funny how it's being destroyed from the outside and not from within.
Maybe it is related to how the mismatch from base rate in prison populations in regards to race is a sign of systematic racism against the over-represented groups, but the same doesn't seem to be reported in regards to sex.
I've usually seen prison population cited not alone, but along with (and as an example of the outcome of) more direct examples of disparate treatment, such as unequal sentencing for like offenses, and the definition of different sentencing categories for different categories of narcotics, with the higher sentences being for possession or sale of categories disproportionately in use in the black community at the time the differential treatment was adopted.
I am part of a racial minority, and to be honest trying to "do something about it" never really interested me. Racial disadvantages never meant much to me personally.
And no, there's no way in hell I can pass of as white, in person or on the phone.
Because people who care don't get nearly as much press as people who talk about women being excluded.
Because the men who work in tech don't care so much about race, but they do care about the obvious lack of women.
Because it's easier to go "we have 40% asians and indians" and ignore the issue than to find a way around "we have 95% males".
Only one of these is relevant to being a good developer.
"A new report from the National Student Clearinghouse looks at degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) and finds that the share of STEM bachelor’s degrees going to women ticked down over the past decade. The biggest decline was in computer science, where women received 23 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2004 and just 18 percent in 2014. On the bright side — at least for career prospects — both men and women are slightly more likely to be majoring in STEM fields today than they were in 2004; it’s just that men have shown more growth than women."[0]
The opportunities are there for those females who want it. Maybe most of them simply don't want to go into the computer field---individual men and women have different things they want out of life and out of their careers, which is ok! Why should everyone be a computer science major? The world would be a pretty dull place.
The author's points are quite valid; I would add that you don't want to push people into a field they have no interest (or aptitude) in. It makes the person miserable and cheapens the degrees of others (a smaller consideration in tech, I'll grant you, since it's more meritocratic than some other fields).
The smallest minority is the individual. If 95% of individuals who happened to be men gave the best auditions, they should probably be given the spots. I say "probably" because if it's a private conference, the organizers can do whatever they want, and people need not attend if they don't like the speaker choices. Ultimately, if women are dissatisfied with the "boys club", they can organize their own conference across the street.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...
You seem to take that as a law of nature... as though it's natural for there to be a truly massive gender bias in computing, a gender bias that was far less 20 years ago and has gotten egregiously worse since roughly 2000.
The real question should be: why the hell aren't women enrolling into and graduating from CS programs?
The answer is probably enormous and systemic, but the current situation should not be seen as acceptable, IMO.
Incidentally, the same questions could (and should) be asked of, say, men in nursing. And, again, the answers are certainly enormous and systemic, starting from childhood socialization, running through peer group issues, and on and on.
This is a fallacy. The problem isn't that sexism in STEM isn't conscious choice; it's not like those nasty menfolk go out of their way to make women feel unwelcome. It's systemic, a culture where women are perceived as less technically competent, more unstable, less deserving of recognition or promotion. If our names are clearly female-gendered, our papers and conference submissions are accepted less frequently, even if the paper itself is the same. The old joke among women in STEM is that "you have to work twice as hard to get half the credit."
I've been coding for the web since 1996, professionally since 1998. I currently work as a senior software developer for a major retailer, and as you might have guessed, I'm female. Science, tech, engineer, math - all of these fields have gotten significantly more hostile towards women in the years I've been involved with them. Under the guise of "professionality" I've been stalked, harassed, invalidated and belittled - and I've experienced less problems than most of my female colleagues.
I look around at my coworkers, and of the several hundred developers and engineers there, less than 5 are women. 98% of my coworkers are male. I get talked down to by junior developers all the time; they either mistakenly assume I'm new to the field or not a developer at all. These aren't guys trying to make it difficult. They're operating under flawed, sexist assumptions, and that's what makes working in STEM an uphill battle. How many times can you get the message "you're inferior" before you believe it? 100? 1000?
I have a 12 year old cousin who loved programming the first time she tried it. She's smart and driven and would be a great developer. She's already given up on it; would you like to know why? Because she's isolated as a female geek and was teased about being a girl. Arguing that if we don't like it, we can just organize our own whatever is dismissive and reductive. You know what happens when we organize our own whatever? We get harassed and threatened and tons of shit heaped on us because we're women. So don't tell us that it's "there if we want it," because it's not.