"Flipping Table emoticon (written as: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) is a text-based emoticon depicting a person flipping a table out of rage. Primarily used by East Asian internet users to express rage, the emoticon became popular among Western internet users following its introduction through internationally popular online games."
Interesting that the etymology of flipping tables meme apparently comes from East Asia. I'd have thought of the "other" famous table flipping incident:
> Where did we make that left turn into experienced, table flipping talent leaving the industry and the culture of brogramming scaring new talent away?
That sounds like "table flipping" is a good thing, like "turning the tables" on someone, but I'm honestly a bit puzzled.
Table flipping is an expression of frustration; it means someone's given up on trying to solve a problem constructively and gotten so angry that they flip the table over. In context, the relevant part of the metaphor is giving up on the problem.
While I have never known anyone to actually flip a whole table before, I have seen someone flip a game board, scattering pawns, cards, and tokens everywhere.
It isn't just walking away, it's walking away while giving everybody the finger--a belligerent surrender.
People who throw a tantrum rather than being professional. E.g., that developer who decides a requirement or dev issue is wrong and slam's his or her fist on the table rather than politely discussing their objection.
Also applies to some particularly obnoxious clients in my experience.
However, that is not what the author means in the context of the article. It seems to me that she is using it to refer to experienced developers who are fed up with the change in software toward the "brogramming" culture (though god I hate that word), and are at the stage where they'd rather get out of software then try to change things.
That said, the way she uses the phrase seems particularly odd to me, and it took me a while to try to understand what she meant.
I'm on a tangent but as a Third World millennial, this what I envy most about First World millenials, a previous generation of cool people who invented and got to play around with all this cool tech. Everyone I know didn't have parents that got them into programming or messing with hardware. Most of my country's "Gen X" were teachers and technicians at best.
My parents were a construction worker and a secretary and I didn't know anybody who owned a computer until I was probably 13. Still, once I learned that programming was a thing I could do, almost nothing could have stopped me from doing it.
It could be that the people who getting into cool tech now because they're wired that way are going to be the ones others look up to later.
If you aren't in the cool second generation, that just means you are in the even cooler first generation.
Actually, that applies to a lot of "first world" people too. We aren't all multigenerational tech dynasties over here.
Most of the people who were doing anything genuinely pioneering with computers are retired or dead now. Nowadays it's somehow a big deal to write a Javascript framework or some app which made money.
The vast majority of technical people in the US also had no family connections to technology. There are whole memes about the annoyingness of constantly being called on to fix your family computers.
I sort of know what you mean, nobody around me growing up thought computers or programming were cool or even useful. My parents were just straight up worried about how much I liked computers until I got out of school and got jobs. And this was America in the late 90s, post Microsoft success.
I'll just add my two cents here. My parents are Baby Boomers and neither kept up on technology (they're both finally comfortable using cell phones and texting, not quite to apps yet however). I loved playing video games growing up and my father is an avid outdoor type (loves plants, gardening, etc) was always harping on me to go outside and do stuff, rather than sitting gaming (and I did go outside and ride bikes, play basketball, or sorts of stuff. I think he just always managed to catch me when I was gaming haha). But all that gaming led to my interest in computers, and building/upgrading my PC because it was slow and I lagged like mad in MMORPGs, which eventually led to my choosing to study Computer Science in college. I'm sure there are actually a lot more people like me who picked up programming later in life (I didn't write my first line of code until I was 19!) than those whose parents got them started young.
I war born in 1978, so I'm not quite a millenial, but I don't particularly identify with gen X either (especially because most of them were already over 30 by the time I graduated high school!). I also am Brazilian-American, so I grew up in both the First World _and_ Third World. In a sense I guess I straddle in both dimensions you cite.
While the availability of technology in the US was a huge advantage, it's not like I was surrounded by tech pioneers. Remember, the tech world was much smaller in the 80s, the PC revolution was still very much a hobbyist/office thing until the web went mainstream in the 90s. I feel like I was drawn to computers out of the meager availability to me and nothing was going to keep me away from them. It was not really supported by my parents, and getting information was incredibly difficult. Eventually once my friend got a modem and we were able to get into the BBS scene and find some user groups then things loosened up a bit and the knowledge started to come (but still 100 times harder than it is today with the technical information available online). I feel like those user groups were like oases of tiny groups of computer enthusiasts among tens of thousands of "normals" who might suffer a computer at work, but had absolutely no interest in knowing anything about it.
I suspect the ratio of passionate computer geeks is similar, except now computers are so powerful and useful that people are drawn into the industry for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with genuine curiosity/obsession with how they work.
What really irks me is that these sorts of statements on gender never so much as acknowledge the flip side. There are probably blog posts somewhere about how we don't have enough boys going into fashion, elementary school education, communications, nutrition, nursing, or human resources.
To escape naivety, we need to start looking at the big picture where an individuals choice is not, "Yes Tech!" or "No Tech!" but more accurately a wide variety of options, and try to understand why women are so drawn to other fields.
Women are doing better in school than boys. Women do better across all subjects, including STEM. They are choosing other fields, why? Is the presumption being made here that every woman thinks programming is the best field of all time, but they're just scared away by men? That seems very self-centric and dishonest. I'm sure that men face the same amount of stigma and social barriers in female dominated landscapes.
Maybe things like fashion, teaching kids, and helping others (both physically and psychologically) come across as much more fulfilling than doing math on a computer all day.
When I lay out the two options: men are scaring women away from technology || most women identify more with a plethora of other subjects.
Well, the first makes for a good drama, but the latter is obvious.
Not only that, but where is the fight for gender parity in coal mining or logging?
I'm not saying that gender parity in tech is not a worthy goal. Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in.
> Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in.
So? Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation, what benefit is there to mentioning it? Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?
Thank you for your charitable interpretation of my statement. I look forward to you having an open mind when entering a discussion of gender equality in the future./s
Unsarcastically, I think it's disingenuous that you would presume to know the intent of my statement and therefore can project whatever intent you wish into it.
>what benefit is there to mentioning it?
The point of mentioning it is that there are some fields that there is a push for gender parity into and others that are not. If we want gender parity in some fields but not others then we need to understand what makes the fields where parity is sought different from fields where parity is not sought. Perhaps we can learn something about these fields that would make achieving gender equality easier.
> Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?
Again, this is what happens when you assume intent and project malice into that intent.
> The point of mentioning it is that there are some fields that there is a push for gender parity into and others that are not
I think the main point of the article isn't gender parity, but equal treatment in the workplace. The focus of the article wasn't about increasing women participation in tech, but stopping gender discrimination in the workplace.
Not only that, but where is the fight for gender parity in coal mining or logging?
How do you know that there isn't a fight for parity in those industries? I wouldn't have the first clue, because I don't give a rat's ass. What I do care about, and can influence, is what goes on in the industry in which I work.
A weak effort at derailing the conversation. I'll give it a "2.5".
It's not an appropriate comparison. Mining and logging are extremely dangerous, hard physical labor.
Computer programming is at the complete opposite end of the safety spectrum, the biggest health risks being RSI from typing and other chronic issues from prolonged sitting, and there are effective countermeasures against both of these risks. There is no valid reason why more women should not be able to do it.
>Mining and logging are extremely dangerous, hard physical labor.
Okay, and? There are pushes for parity (or at least more inclusion) of women and men in firefighting, policing, and combat roles in the military, all of which are extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor.
The issue here is that technology is one of the few fields where the fight for the parity in gender is focused. I don't have a problem with that, gender equality is a good thing. Understanding why technology is a focus and different from mining and logging might help us understand and discover ways to bring about that gender parity.
>There are pushes for parity (or at least more inclusion) of women and men in firefighting, policing, and combat roles in the military, all of which are extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor.
There are pushes for relaxing restrictions on women attempting to make a statement by forcing their way into said extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor roles without stopping to consider the real-world repercussions of said relaxed restrictions.
Some people are drawn to activities which are dangerous, hard, and/or physical, whether those activities are intended for fun or profit. Why do you imagine that none of these people would ever be women?
You seem to be taking a pure statistical approach yet ignoring OPs specific complaints with tech workplace . I don't see her saying that more women should be programmers . Rather that they are treated with a level of condescension even in cases of extreme cred/achievements . At least that's what I got out of reading it
I agree, I am straying away from the author's main point. Which is clearly that the programming work place has become a worse place for women. As far as that thesis is concerned, I think it's far more likely that her transition to the younger, more hipster Ruby on Rails ecosystem is far more likely the culprit than her, "the world is going to shit" hypothesis. Her arguments are also wildly up for interpretation: "you did surprisingly well on that programming test" or flak for not "stepping up". These things may have absolutely nothing to do with her gender for all we know. Maybe events in her life or simply the process of aging has made her shift towards a more gender sensitive mindset. We have no way of separating her bias from the events, or using time as an accurate measurement when she admits she switched to a new ecosystem. In short, I think her actual argument is so weak, it wasn't even worth having a discourse about.
What I think is far more important is this idea that's being perpetuated that tech is this special place that scares away women. When the reality is that other fields just have more to offer.
I suspect her issues were due to age, and microsoft stack /enterprise" experience moving into a younger scene like Rails/Django. I heard stuff all the time against people using visual studio, and god forbid they ever used Microsoft SQL Server instead of Postgres. Applicants got put through the wringer during interviews at my last job. The CTO, She literally scoffed during interviews when people mentioned microsoft's enterprise stack.
I see no such hypothesis in the article. Your comments in this thread have taken it in precisely the wrong direction: tedious, predictable, and acrimonious. Please don't do this here.
Then you and I are reading the article completely differently than I am:
> Or maybe you're just not a good 'team fit'. It's tough to pass a brogrammer interview. At the other end, it's too easy to push experienced technical women into 'project manager' and administrative roles, and eventually we flip the table. Brogrammers at one end of the pipeline, flipped tables at the other.
The article definitely strikes me as a "world is going to shit" hypothesis since it starts out in the beautiful era of the past and takes the reader to the ugly era of the present. I'm sorry that you disagree with me so strongly on my reading of the article. I understand that my original comment was too off-topic, and belonged more in its own thread rather than as a response to the post. However, it is unfair to say that I meant harm by sharing that I think gender issues are much larger than the tech field, and that we do them an injustice by thinking of gender discrimination as a problem internal to programming, engineering, science, etc. Because in a tech centric place it's easy to think these issues are unique to our fields.
Please understand that sometimes sharing an opinion like this is going to incite people regardless of how it's presented. Some people think expressing an opinion like this somehow says that there is no gender inequality in tech. When all I said was that we need to look at external rather than internal reasons.
When I lay out the two options: men are scaring women away from technology || most women identify more with a plethora of other subjects.
Well, the first makes for a good drama, but the latter is obvious.
It wasn't so obvious in the 80s, when plenty of women were getting CS degrees and working in software. All I have is anecdata because I'm too lazy too look up hard numbers, but these days it seems a large number of the women I run into in software at large companies and small are doing PM work or are on a test team, and not nearly as many as developers. Could be that as more PM/test positions opened up (positions that were not nearly as common 30 years ago), women gravitated toward those positions. Or, as is commonly thought, as more workplaces turned into extended college parties, the women got driven off. Hell, it turns me off. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to just get my work done.
Pretty sure this has more to do with the college major gender split. Women account for less than 20% of CS and Engineering degree graduates [1]. Since these days most companies recruit early career hires out of those majors specifically (no one wants to train from scratch), it leads to massive gender weighting in full time developer positions.
Yours is a subject that deserves discussion, but not everyone is qualified to give such broad perspectives. The author clearly has a strong history as a woman in STEM, so I don't think it's fair to discount her story outright.
Men and women do face a lot of differing challenges in various industries, and for every anecdotal story of strife there's another anecdotal story of success. The best we can do is look at the statistics, recognize trends, and try to address them as best we can. Clearly there are certain aspects of tech as an industry that aren't entirely conducive to female participation.
Women may be equally qualified, do better in school, etc. but that doesn't mean they don't face challenges that don't deserve our consideration.
The main difference is that in the examples you mention there is a significant disparity in remuneration when compared to software engineering.
If there are societal reasons which encourage women to pursue industries other than STEM, these then effect the participation rate in high-earning industries creating income inequality.
"we don't have enough boys going into fashion, elementary school education, communications, nutrition, nursing, or human resources."
And, yet, look who are in leadership roles even in those female dominated industries. Somehow, the majority of the wealthy fashion designers are white men. Somehow, the majority of principals in elementary education are white men. The executives that nurses answer to? Once again, predominantly white men.
There's a useful discussion to be had about why more boys or girls don't go into certain fields...and, feminists have been having those conversations for many years (yes, talking about the boys, too, because it often comes down to the same core problem). And, it's too complicated to sum up with statistics about who goes into what industry. But, there are a variety of real problems that come from these imbalances and these inequalities, so it's useful to try to sort them out and figure out root causes, without simplifying it down to gender essentialist arguments (i.e. that "women go into caregiver fields because women like that sort of thing" and "boys are big and tough and like machines so they go into STEM fields and shoot guns").
Finally, to pretend our industry is not overtly hostile to women is to ignore thousands of women who have told their stories of being made to feel unwelcome, disrespected, and even harassed and abused, because of their gender, when working in technical fields.
Show me an industry where there aren't thousands of women who have told their stories of being made to feel unwelcome, disrespected, and even harassed and abused, because of their gender, while working.
The existence of other industries where women are treated worse than their male peers, harassed, or otherwise mistreated because of their gender in NO WAY excuses the fact that it happens in our industry, nor does it diminish our responsibility to fix it.
Cool. That's improved remarkably in the past couple of decades. Every principal I ever had was a white male, and the balance for most of the history of our public education system was way off.
Of course...I wonder how it looks when you go even further up the executive chain in public education?
Nonetheless, it is not our topic of discussion here. Tech is remarkably unbalanced, and we've been told countless times by countless women why it is remarkably unbalanced (or at least a big enough part of the reason for us to want to do something about it).
Edit: Also, you know nothing of my political beliefs, and my political beliefs have no bearing on what women have said about their experience in tech fields.
It is disingenuous to continually change the subject from the gender imbalance in tech, particularly when we're talking about an article by someone who has first hand experience about why that imbalance has developed.
Take a look at this [1] article, especially the first chart.
True, a slight majority of principals are women, but it's much more illustrative to look at the career progression. Those selected to be moved up the career ladder are clearly primarily men.
> And, yet, look who are in leadership roles even in those female dominated industries. Somehow, the majority of the wealthy fashion designers are white men. Somehow, the majority of principals in elementary education are white men. The executives that nurses answer to? Once again, predominantly white men.
I can't say for other nations, but the yearly statistics collected by the Swedish government is showing that the leadership roles in female dominated industries have switched over to be female dominated, where healthcare and education are currently at 80%+ female CEO/president and increasing. About 20% of the industry has a leadership that is female dominated of around 70%, 25% is balanced with 50/50, and the rest 55% is male dominated.
Inequality in gender distribution seems to only get more extreme each year here and female industries tops the lists with several that has a over 90% female to male distrubution. The very top of the list is a profession with 99.94% female to male ratio, and the whole male group of the profession could fit in a single mini-buss. This is in my view the primary reason why no feminist politician in Sweden ever brings up this yearly statistics, as the facts doesn't support the narrative being presented.
The changes as reported last report was minor changes in the top list of male dominated profession with about 2 percent increase in females to males, but in the female dominated professions the change goes the opposite direction with ever higher female to male ratio. Some professions like psychology is reporting that at university level it is about 95% female to male ratio, and if nothing is changed soon there won't be any male therapists once the last 20% that currently work reach the age of 65.
As someone sooner or later always want links:
http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/ (you have to build you own query and compare it to previous years).
The difference is that men don't face barriers to entering and progressing within woman dominated industries or positions. Their skills, motivations, competence, etc are called into question because of their gender. They don't face sexism or harassment in the workplace. They aren't passed up for promotion or pay raise that go to their less qualified colleagues of the opposite gender. When your peers start telling you there's a problem in the industry, don't try to derail the conversation by bringing up other industries or saying that women just are choosing to join other industries.
This is incorrect. I recently read an article (unfortunately, it's in Czech) about a father who decided to take parental leave, and what sexism he faced from the other mothers. It wasn't so blatant but he felt more like a stranger.
I'll take the bait: tell that to my father who is a nurse. He has fought blatant sexism and discrimination his entire career. And I wont speak to the taunting I endured for having a father who did "woman work."
"Meet the Parents" was light on the view of men who work as nurses...
Sexism and discrimination are hurtful regardless of the industry or the dominant gender of that industry. Unfortunately as humans we are better at finding ways to highlight differences than working together collectively.
And, unfortunately, we in the software industry are no better at overcoming our latent human biases than any other industry.
Please don't take HN threads on ideological flamewar tangents. They're always the same and always degrade the discussion in the same way.
The OP is a fine article by a specific person about specific experiences and it deserves specific responses. If you don't want to engage with what's interesting about a particular article, please don't post in its thread.
You will have a difficult time squaring a pure preference theory away with the implosion in the number of female computer science graduates over the past three decades. Whatever the cause is, it wasn't there in the 1980s (or at least not nearly as pronounced).
I'll also note that there are plenty of other options that have been discussed and that may be turn out to be one of the root causes, not just the two you are considering.
>I'll also note that there are plenty of other options that have been discussed and that may be turn out to be one of the root causes, not just the two you are considering.
I completely agree and was just using one possibility to illustrate my point that this topic seems to be crippled by this "Yes tech!" "No tech!" paradigm. Did you have any specific alternatives you were thinking of? Also if you know of any articles on the subject I'd love to read them. I think one possibility is that gender roles have gotten worse over time. In the 70s and 80s we had a lot of women joining the work force as families switched from single income to dual income households. I wonder if the result of things "settling" in the decades that passed was a more pronounced reflection of social values (gender roles) in the work force.
> Did you have any specific alternatives you were thinking of?
There are several.
For example, it is known that gender bias in groups has a tendency to not only perpetuate itself, but to also reduce participation by the minority gender (even without any hostile action by the majority; it seemingly suffices often to simply feel like an outsider).
Second, the power of stereotypes is strong, even where they are wrong. For example, in Liechtenstein's 1968 referendum on women's suffrage, even nearly half the women wanted to deny themselves the vote [1]. A bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, but indicative of how powerful established stereotypes can be. In the early 1980s, working with computers was still often considered to be something more like a secretarial job.
Third, computer science started to pay more and grant higher status, making it more attractive to men (especially in a society where men are still predominantly the breadwinners and women responsible for childcare [2]).
And that's just off the top of my head.
I have no idea what the actual causes are (I am fairly convinced that there are several of them, working in tandem). What I do know is that gender roles are shaped pretty much from birth, so I'm extremely skeptical of a theory that attributes this to preference alone (preference may well play a role, but it's so very difficult to tease out the difference between nature and nurture when it comes to these things).
For most of that three decades it was actually more of a lack of explosion rather than an implosion. From the early '70s through the mid '80s, both men and women were growing in undergraduate CS degrees, with the women growing quite a bit faster.
Then they both fell dramatically through the mid '90s. Women dropped in half, and men dropped by about 36%.
Then men exploded, and by the mid '00s were about 60% above their mid '80s peak, whereas the women were only back to about the same as their mid '80s peak.
Then they both declined, and again the women's decline was more. Men fell about 25%, and women fell about 50%, by the end of the '00s.
It's that explosion of men from the mid '90s through the mid '00s that is the biggest contributor to the percentage of undergraduate CS degrees that go to females dropping in half from its mid '80s peak.
I've not heard any good theories on why there was such a surge of men coming to CS from the mid '90s through the mid '00s.
For master's degrees, the situation is quite different. From the early '70s through the mid '00s, both men and women rose slowly and steadily, with the women rising faster until the mid '80s when they then rose at about the same rate. This resulted in the percentage of master's degrees going to women rising steadily to around 32%. Then there was a slight decline for both men and women, with the women declining slightly more.
For PhDs, there was no decline. Both men and women rose from the early '70s through the end of the '00s (when my data ends), with the women rising faster so the percent of PhDs going to women in CS rose steadily from about 7% to about 22%.
Not that I have any desire to go back to collared shirts, ties, and dresses, but the author caused me to wonder if it wouldn't do something to dial the "frat house" dial back a notch. Because, gawd, does it get old.
I gather that I'm about the same age as the author. And she's right, there was a time that we worked side-by-side with the wimmin folk and didn't think a thing of it. Hey, it was a brave new world of software, and in that brave new world gender didn't matter anymore. I remember it as a time of software being a good place for women to go because it paid well and it didn't matter as much as other fields if you were "a girl". It worked out well for my Mom around that era.
But I don't know when it changed and why it changed, so I don't have good answers for the current situation. But things have changed for sure.
> Not that I have any desire to go back to collared shirts, ties, and dresses, but the author caused me to wonder if it wouldn't do something to dial the "frat house" dial back a notch. Because, gawd, does it get old.
> I gather that I'm about the same age as the author.
Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much, I'm probably a lot younger and male to boot, and I think the same when visiting the offices of some companies that are popular these days.
Well, it's worth something to me because I sometimes wonder if it's just me being "the old guy" rather than just having a work ethic that causes me to want to go to work to work, not play foosball (not that I haven't kicked some 20-something ass at the foosball table from time to time during work hours).
I'm in my early 30s and wish there was a better middle ground. I feel like there is a dichotomy: work for a highly brogrammer company building a fun product from scratch as a slave laborer, or work for boring XYZ.net as a steady Eddie. I want a personal life but I also want to build something new with respectful people in an inclusive environment.
The do-or-die environments of most startups just pushes everyone but the bros out.
If you are in the bay area, you might want to take a look at PlanGrid. We have a diverse culture which we're proud of, value work-life balance, and still build cool things that make a difference.
My CO also offers unlimited vacation (though they are careful to say it's actually "untracked vacation"). In my experience you can always try but there's a certain amount of unspoken personal capital that's involved that makes the whole process unnecessarily ambiguous.
Funny you mention PlanGrid because I grew up doing contruction and considered the company. I remember being much more satisfied with my work back then... A fundemental difference I see is that a project is started and then finished, not started and then kept on life support until V2 can be started.
Alas your company is in the city and I prefer the valley.
You might want to try dev shops rather than startups. Some of them work with startups and small companies to build interesting things, but since they get paid on hourly or project rates, the environment tends to be more life-friendly and less bro-oriented.
I don't think it's do-or-die, so much as, a lot of startups these days are founded by people without as brutally strong technical skills as in the past, as the businesses are a lot less technical, so a typical hiring strategy of "hire people who we communicate well with and aren't that expensive and work really hard" causes the yolo nodejs rockstar culture. You can't work smarter than the CTO - A hires A and B hires C, etc. None of this matters anyway though because the best talent knows how to find people like them, and the people who want yolo nodejs rockstars know how to find them too and everybody is happy. It follows that the middle ground companies will be those working on more technical problems with more technical founders/leadership, but it also follows that the hiring bar will be higher at those companies.
Try a more traditional (non-software) engineering company. I get to work on hard problems with smart people (from several different technical backgrounds), work closely with academia and researchers, get a lot of autonomy as to how I approach projects, get a reasonable amount of money and get to go home after 7-8 hours every day.
I've worked for one startup and a handful of large publicly traded companies (Fortune 1K, Fortune 500, etc). My current employer is a ~5k-person software development shop that does a lot of government work, so it's largely like what you describe. It really does seem to be the sweet spot.
- Lax dress code (collared shirt, jeans on Friday only)
- Free soda in the home office
- 120 hours PTO + sick time
- Start any time between 6 and 9
- 8 hour day includes 1 hour lunch break, so really 35 hr/wk of work
- Overtime is explicitly banned, you actually need approval (since most time is billed to a client)
- WFH is available depending on your client, some have access restrictions that make it impossible but barring that you can WFH when needed/approved
There are plenty of companies in a great middle-ground. You just have to look beyond the typical "startups" of SV and focus on those that have a good business and sound interesting to you.
There is something about the collared shirts. From my experience, I have seen more women in senior, specialist positions at large multinational enterprises like banks and accounting firms. It's also the only kind of place I've seen black and hijab wearing muslim women in senior roles. Almost never in tech companies run by guys in their 20s.
> But I don't know when it changed and why it changed, so I don't have good answers for the current situation.
I would love to know the answer too. I suspect that thanks to advances of feminism, there are now more professional careers available for women (such as various management positions) and they prefer those to programming or technology. But this theory is, for some reason, controversial.
Imagine how you would feel if, to stay relevant and in-touch with the major decisions at your work, you felt pressure to get involved in things that you have literally no interest in. Going on wine tours, maybe some yoga, trashy soap operas that the office loves to hate.
Which isn't to say that people would exclude you from their team if you don't get involved, but you couldn't say that you have the easy camaraderie that most of the team seems to have. You're a little outlier, you're not quite in-step, references fly over your head. And you have to be _so careful_ to be friendly, but not _so_ friendly that your co-workers think you're hitting on them.
Occasionally, you miss a decision that happened to be discussed at the cocktail bar over lunch - it was just a spur of the moment thing, forgot to invite you, didn't think you would be interested. You talk about how you would have solved the problem, but it's just not seen as graceful enough to be worth exploring further. Because you weren't involved in making those decisions, your name doesn't come up when being considered for lead positions.
You're at a company event, and you think you've escaped someone asking you about your spouse that must work there. Then, someone hands you the trash to take out while they tell a hilarious joke about the only things men are good for.
You can't put your finger on any one thing (ok, maybe the trash thing), but when another opportunity comes along in a different field, maybe you take it. You can't say you really enjoy your work anyways.
This isn't even a gendered problem. The expected social activities may change depending on your gender (i.e. golf, beer tasting, cycling vs yoga, wine tours and soap operas), but getting into management requires people to be comfortable (warmth, "cuddliness", trust in good faith) with you then confident (trust in your competence) in you. You can't rely on competence alone and move on to roles where your competence matters less than how comfortable people are with you in that role. That's why these activities exist. They serve as a proxy for determining if there is a basis to be comfortable and then actually establishing that comfort with one another. You can't establish warmth from code or architecture. Mentoring yes, but not code or architecture.
The requirement for warmth enables politicking.
The interesting thing about the culture of projects like the kernel dev mailing list is that there is a strong culture of only caring about "Is the code from this person good?" and dismissing the question "Is this a good person (according to my own personal definition of what a good person is)?"
The parent comment from @js8 talked specifically about why women might self-select out of doing technical work, which was the point I was addressing.
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make in contrast - could you qualify how politicking and 'warmth' is relevant to contributing to the brogrammer culture?
I guess I misunderstood what the parent comment was about. Now that I've reread it, it's subtle, but I can see what it's driving at.
That said, now that I understand it, I feel like the parent comment being sexist toward both men and women to illustrate a false dichotomy.
It stereotypes women as being interested "wine tours, maybe some yoga, [and] trashy soap operas". I've met plenty of women in tech that have no interest in such things and I've met plenty of male engineers in tech interested in the first two of those three things. I don't know anyone in tech interested in the last item and to be honest I can't imagine a dominantly female tech industry establishing a culture where anyone is interested in such things. Looking at all the female engineers I work with that are great coders and great to work with and solve problems with, I can't imagine them really creating a culture that values social activities different from the ones I see my male colleagues participating in. They'd still play board games. They'd still read and watch sci-fi. They'd still hike and cycle. None of these activities strike me as particularly male oriented. They strike me as nerd oriented and they are incompatible with societies neurotypical social expectations for both men and women.
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Strangely this particularly part of the comment caught my attention:
"And you have to be _so careful_ to be friendly, but not
_so_ friendly that your co-workers think you're hitting on
them."
What I found interesting is that it called my attention to something I had never noticed before and haven't seen anyone else point out.
When I look around at my workplace and previous workplaces, there are women who have a lot of ease fitting in and there are women who don't. Those that do remarkably well are often remarkably similar to the men who do well. They care about code in and out of work. Their interests outside of work are nerdy (hacking, making, sci-fi, board games, etc.). They spend relatively little time preening (social self-grooming).
Those that are most challenged and have the biggest difficulty fitting in and getting along with their colleagues don't share these traits. One trait I see in common with many of the women that have difficulty in tech culture is that the more closely approximate the gender roles and expectations that society at large sets for them; the most damaging of which is preening. Society has for a long time had a strong expectation for women to self-groom socially a lot more than men. Women are basically expected to wake up each morning and dress well, put on make up, etc. Those that don't do this will encounter friction socially outside the office and those that do will encounter friction inside the office.
The reason I find this observation interesting is that it's not even a problem exclusive to women in tech. Men that socially self-groom are more likely to feel like outsiders. An example of such high social self-grooming that would make you feel like you don't belong is wearing collared shirts, nice pants, nice shoes, possibly even a suit jacket or even a full suit. Interestingly, Greg Foster over at AirBnB even wrote about this exact type of discrimination in his essay "Does tech discriminate against suits?"[0].
Assuming this is valid anecdotal observation, there are two things to consider:
- For this particular phenomena, is this illustrative of tech discriminating against women or is it tech discriminating against the high self-grooming? (I'm not saying there aren't other ways in which women are made to feel like outsiders, I'm just picking one in particular that applies to men as well, but AFAICT seems to affect women disproportionately, since I've observed that women are likely to continue to highly self-groom in an engineering environment.)
- If it is, then is the problem with tech discriminating against male or females that ar...
I am not really convinced this applies more to say, programmers, than other professions (such as management), so I don't think this is the reason.
In any case, it doesn't matter really. We don't know what the truth is, and AFAICT no one is really looking for it (I unfortunately don't have enough (interest/(resources*time)) to do a study).
From small anecdata I have, I had several smart women told me that they want to quit because they themselves feel they are not smart enough or skilled enough to do programming. I have never heard of somebody wanting to quit (the field) because there was some idiot thinking they can't do it. In fact, having to prove yourself may actually be motivational.
And I think I am not righteous enough to claim that when a person says "the reason is that I don't feel I can do it", then there must be something in the environment causing it. It may simply be their preference, and I have to respect that. Maybe their thinking is delusional, but unless they clearly say, "this external reason is the reason", we can't do anything about it if we respect personal freedom of choice.
So yeah, we should do a study, ask women, why they don't want to do it, and if they say, "it's boring", just accept that as a fact of life and move on and stop searching for reasons in patriarchies and whatnot.
And I don't think it's quite morally correct to try to somehow correct people's preferences, however silly they might be. If they should be convinced for economic reasons (say, STEM is important), then it should be done with money.
I never know if it's nostalgia or not, but I've often felt the same way - that the younger generation of geeks, thanks to one part 4chan and one part Silicon Valley mercantilism, has gotten a very twisted attitude about nerd gender dynamics that's quite different from the idealists of my youth.
I think 4chan and Silicon Valley mercantilism are themselves a symptom of public education's failure in general and towards boys in particular.
Boys are struggling in many areas in western society. They happen to be succeeding in tech. It's no wonder they're edgy about letting outsiders manipulate the field.
Silicon Valley preaches individual achievement and personal responsibility. No doubt boys often needed those skills to survive an education system designed around them. Feminism often pushes for change at the institutional level, not for individual accountability thus the tension IMO.
I think your opinion is flawed. You seem to be giving Feminism and Education in general too little credit for their good intentions (which are basically, woman being treated equally as men) and way too much credit for their impact on society. People don't found startups because of Feminism, or something they learned in a classroom, or even from listening to some unicorn founder preaching "personal responsibility". They found it as a way to make money doing something interesting instead of super boring CRUD problems.
More than that, your opinion about education seems to not actual support the fact that fewer women are going into Computer Science and related fields than were in the 80s. If it was all down to education/politics, and there's more money now in this field than there was then, why has that ratio gone down? OTOH, if the people making the hiring decisions at startups are choosing to not hire women (consciously or not) and those decisions are trickling into the rest of the midsize companies, then maybe there's something wrong with the hiring process itself.
In my original comment I said that men are succeeding in tech and not much else. I think these numbers show that.
If there are fewer women going into CS then it's not the hiring process that's the problem, it's a supply issue.
People have many reasons to create startups, but the decision to make one is way down the pipeline of where any issue lies.
What makes someone passionate enough about technology that they choose to study it, pursue it as a career and eventually maybe do a startup? That question gets answered early in life and doesn't have to be the same for everyone.
Women don't have to be interested in technology. They should be given the same opportunities as men if they are though and from everything I've ever seen in our industry, they are.
which are basically, woman being treated equally as men
There isn't one feminism. There are at least two major camps that I can identify. There is the one you mention that promotes a policy of equality and there is another camp that promotes a policy of equity. The goals of equality and equity are not the same, the methods to achieve them are not the same and often those in those camps consider the tactics of the other camp counterproductive or ineffective.
TBH, this dichotomy isn't even a feature isolated to feminism, but is a basic feature with most -isms and movements (for or against). There are those from one side that work towards equality and those that work towards equity, and on the other side there are those that work towards inequality and those that work towards inequity.
An approach for equality or inequality starts with promoting an idea or attitude to achieve a change in treatment.
An approach for equity or inequity jumps straight to seeking for arbitrarily chosen, unequal, and unnatural changes in treatment that breeds resentment because there is no establishment of understanding between both sides. Changes in attitude follow after the changes from a need to resolve cognitive dissonance (which leads to all sorts of zany, invented and often polar justifications for the unnatural changes (because of equity promotes an "us versus them" dichotomy instead of a unifying attitude of "we"))
I can see the change in gender ratios in the 80s being highly correlated if not partially caused by the move from an East Coast Organization Man (or Woman) industry around Route 128 with companies like IBM and DEC to a West Coast Hippie Homebrew industry around Silicon Valley with companies like HP then Apple.
When the industry moved from the east cost Organization Man (or Woman) operations, the computer science and engineering career largely fell off the map at Universities.
Up until ~93 (the year of the IBM layoffs) colleges and universities were grooming you for Organization Man (or Woman) career companies like IBM, DEC, GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, Philips, AT&T, Shell Oil, Exxon, etc.
When tech stopped being an industries made of career companies, it became a fringe industry that you only knew was viable if you knew people making a living in it. At that point we have an industry that grows far more slowly based on Granovetter's strength of weak ties and far more rapidly based on strong personal hobby interest in subject matter such that you end up learning about the myriad companies in Silicon Valley well before there was a tech media like Wired and TechCrunch standing on roof tops and declaring a gold rush.
Before Wired magazine, no one without an already strong personal interest in computers and software really knew anything about what was happening in Silicon Valley. It was essentially non-existent for an entire generation (X) and most of a second generation (Y). It's only with Millenials that Silicon Valley has been considered a good career path for those with capital in terms of technical aptitude/competence, but aren't hard core computer nerds.
I'm curious how the engineering gender ratios evolved for companies like IBM and DEC versus HP and Apple from from 1970 to 1995. Now with those figures in hand, I'm curious what impact layoffs and workforce reductions at IBM, DEC and other highly visible traditionally Organization Man (and Woman) companies had on the industry ratio and the visibility of women in the industry.
I was born in the early 80s and my formative years when I would have been thinking about "what I want to be when I grow up" were basically the mid 80s to the mid 90s. At the time, I had exactly one engineering role model from elementary school to high school, an engineer at Philips, despite the fact that I grew up in a reasonably affluent town about a 30 minutes from the IBM headquarters in upstate NY. Computer Science wasn't even on the radar career wise. You were encouraged to become a doctor, lawyer or business person. If you were interested in companies like IBM, you were encouraged to want to get an MBA and be on that side of the social divide in those Organization Man (and Woman) companies, because the engineering side wasn't considered a path towards affluence for the systems thinking gifted like medicine and law were.
Even in the early/mid-90s, working along side women wasn't a big deal. I learned a lot from some very capable senior female engineers while at Netscape. I even got some great advice on how to look at things like "part time work", etc.
I think the bro-ness goes along side the "work hard, play hard, be at the office all hours" mentality. I've been to a few different gatherings where startups were pitching (including YC) and tune out anyone who pulls the "we are a family, we are here all hours, we blahblahblah" type thing.
Liking your coworkers and developing a desire to hang out socially, etc. should develop organically instead of some "mandatory fun" type work culture.
I should add, I've talked with Google twice over the years. My favorite interview conversation ever was a woman who was deep in kernel development work, the discussion stretched my knowledge and she taught me a lot over the course of an hour interview.
The two most toxic words in the history of tech - "culture fit".
Young, smart hackers came to believe that it is not just acceptable to exclusively hire people who look and act like them, but imperative for the survival of their company. Unconscious discrimination is inevitable when you hire based on nebulous factors of compatibility rather than concrete measures of ability.
When a founder hires in this way, they create an immense obstacle to diversity. The company grows on this ethos, creating barriers both direct ("she isn't a good fit") and indirect ("I don't want to work in this frathouse"). Improving diversity in these companies is like steering an oil tanker.
In my opinion, we need a new hiring norm that reflects the hacker ethos. We need to abandon the multi-day interview gauntlet and replace it with a fair, blinded work assessment. Classical music has seen a boom in diversity since the introduction of blind auditions and we should follow suit. Everything a developer does can be fairly and accurately assessed through IRC and Git commits.
(1) The mini-computer happened. You can't read the part in Clayton Cristensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" that talks about how the industry went from 5" drives to 3.5" drives and not see how many computing dinosaurs disappeared to be replaced by completely new companies founded by outsiders that inherited practically none of the culture of the big traditional tech companies from the days of The Organization Man (or Woman).
which lead to...
(2) The central locus of the tech industry migrated from Route 128 and MIT, which were the power houses post WWII to Silicon Valley and Stanford. The two had polar opposite cultures. Gone were the cultures of places like DEC and IBM to be replaced with the cultures of HP then Apple. AnnaLee Saxenian's book "Regional Advantage" does a great job of chronicling that shift from Route 128 to Silicon Valley and how East Coast and West Coast tech culture differed. If you look at pretty much every story that talked about tech culture back in the day versus today, they are often as much about Route 128 versus Silicon Valley, but few people are aware that such a big shift happened in tech from the 70s to the 80s. It wasn't just new companies built by the same people from the old companies. They were new companies built by complete outsiders to the old computing industry. At MIT, there was tech on campus and mainstream culture was exposed, thus the companies hired from the mainstream. When the center of tech moved to a couple of buildings across the country nestled among rural orchard communities, the people worked at those companies were not a sample of that community, rural orchard farmers. Instead they were the people who were so deeply involved in engineering AND sufficiently detached from their social structures on the East Coast, that they packed up their bags and moved Westward. Migrations are remarkable for their filtering effect. You can see this just by comparing each coast non-tech culture and west coast non-tech culture. The engineers that ended up in Silicon Valley were qualitatively different in attitude and baggage like all the people that settled in SF during the Summer of Love compared to those that remained in their comfortable rooted East Coast lives. Heck, Apple used to fly a pirate flag in their offices. You would have never seen such a display at companies like IBM, DEC, GE, Philips, etc.
My daughter once remarked about something STEM-related: "he can do that <technical thing> because he's a BOY." We tried so hard to not raise her that way, and I'm sad the "meme" still managed to slip through and take root, and at such an early age. What role did I inadvertently play? No idea :(
This is why it's so important to have examples available for children that demonstrate someone outside of the "norm" taking part in an activity.
My brother is 14 and to him it is reasonable to expect that the president could be a black man (not quite there on women yet unfortunately). My family has gay friends who are married with children and these are regular facts of life to him. I don't think either of my parents have spoken to him very directly about these issues and he has managed to evolve into a pretty open minded and cool teenager.
Probably around age eight. We corrected her immediately of course and have been continuing to do so, but yeah culture runs deep and kids pick things up fast!
You should also consider that humans are naturally lazy, and our brains can make up excuses for that. Maybe she just said that because she wants her brother to do it for her, instead of doing it herself.
Most probably your child's elementary school teachers had a much bigger influence than you. They have the most time with your child and the stats for STEM are pretty bad in their ranks. If we spent as much time worrying about the gender / STEM imbalance in elementary and pre-school as we do in technology, we would fix the imbalance in technology within a generation.
If a thing is not the person whom your child looks up to's thing, then it will not be your child's thing.
This just seems weird to me as a millennial male. I am obviously lacking some perspective, but my advanced and AP math and science classes in high school were always very split by boys and girls. The upper echelon of students in those courses, of which I was consistently part of, were moreso women than men.
But when I look at what my old classmates are doing now, most of those girls went into teaching, law, and business related roles. A couple went into science and engineering and one is a dentist. Of the guys, most of them became doctors, engineers, and pharmacists and a couple work in agriculture and wildlife conservation. All of the women I am referring to know they are smart enough to do whatever they want, but they obviously decided to favor non-technical roles for their own reasons.
In the case of my wife, she moved away from more technical fields in college precisely because of her impression of who her classmates (and, later, co-workers) would be.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? Eventually women will have to take some leadership here and not expect men to say, "we're firing half our company and only hiring women who aren't even in the field anymore so we can even it out and attract more people down the line."
At some point women HAVE to stand up and take the lead for themselves.
Your original comment seemed to be arguing that this wasn't an issue because these women probably wanted first order to be doing other things. If that's the case, then we probably shouldn't be pushing too hard to get them to do things they don't want to do. I'm sure that is the case for some individuals; I don't know the distribution.
My point was to demonstrate that it's also the case, for some individuals (I still don't know the distribution), that they were turned away for reasons other than first order lack of interest in the field; and in fact, reasons we have something of an impact on.
My wife was turned away not simply because she thought she'd be working with men, but because of her impression of the particular men in STEM fields that she had experience of. I don't know if her impression was fair - looking back, she doesn't know if her impression was fair. But we do collectively have the ability to work to make sure such an impression is not fair and to work to make sure we're giving the correct impression.
Given a negative impression of likely experiences in the field, expecting outsiders to fix it is a collective action problem. If a woman correctly judges that the existing population working in a field are likely to make that field painful to work in, and she is the only one (or part of a small minority) who "stand up", then she's chosen a painful career for herself. Those of us already in the industry can work to address the problem with substantially less risk.
I'm pretty sure "we're firing half our company and only hiring women who aren't even in the field anymore so we can even it out and attract more people down the line" is effectively a straw-man. It's certainly not what I would advocate, and I don't see how my comment would have implied it.
i really appreciated this writeup.. silly things like 'you're not architecture material', 'you did surprisingly well on the programming test', and being openly berated for not wanting to 'step up' to a non-technical role are silly.
coding for 30 years then still being like, "what next? o right, ruby." is awesome.
Is "Revenge of the Nerds" (1984) a symptom of many women avoiding tech or is it one of the causes? The characters were nerdy, into tech, and generally despised by their peers (most notably women and athletes). The only girls who would associate with them were Omega Mu, who were a lot like the Tri-Lams. I don't think anyone would want to be a Tri-Lam or an Omega Mu in real life[1] (they are, after all, comically nerdy). I don't find it impossible that a generation of women thought "You know, I'd rather have an Alpha Beta, not a Tri-Lam. How do I avoid getting a Tri-Lam? Don't be an Omega Mu."
I don't think it's possible to know one way or the other. It's much more likely that RotN and things like it caused or were caused by deeply rooted stigmas against tech that made women shy away from it before even getting to the point of being exposed to 'frat-like' conditions in the workplace.
WRT the tie-in to the "nerd" phenomenon. Lots of things compete for kids' finite mental resources. It becomes a variation of do I invest in Social Status, or Subject Matter X? Those investments happen in a small way at first, but end up having an outsize impact on the rest of a kid's life.
Such choices are strongly influenced by cultural expectations for gender. Those cultural expectations are, in turn, cartoonishly amplified in the typical lord-of-the-flies high school environment.
Actually all of the above is just me—some random HN puke—speculating and repeating things I've heard elsewhere. But it definitely sounds plausible!
One Paul Graham's more well known essays talks about how, in general, being cool and being a nerd both take a significant time investment, and to be good at one you have to forgo the other.
I wouldn't read too much into that movie as an accurate portrayal of anything. The script is basically an early 80s college frat movie with all the bros in one frat replaced by stereotyped "nerds" to try and change up the formula a bit.
For contrast try: "Real Genius" or "Weird Science" or even "My Science Project" all from around that time period.
It came out a year before I was born so I don't have a way to gauge the accuracy of that particular Historical Document. I'm just having fun here. Time for an 80s movie night.
Quick anecdote from an earlier time. My mother's college roommate (Marilyn) studied Math and Physics in undergrad in the late '50s/early '60s. She went on to do a Masters at MIT and worked on the Apollo project there, which by that time was being run by another woman: Margaret Hamilton.
If I remember the story correctly, Marilyn started a PhD, but never finished due to marriage and kids. She went on to have a very happy career at NASA and retired from there eventually, around 1995.
She worked in code for almost all of her career. She worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer for at least a couple of years.
Her telling of how things were is that there were a lot of women working in what would eventually become the field of computer science. It was a flipped version of what we think of now but with some similarities.
It was flipped because women were the higher percentage of the work force in the early '60s and on into the '70s and even '80s. But this was also the same as today because the field itself was really not well-defined, and after people went from punch cards (which is what she started programming with), they went to typing. And for the average Joe, typing was a job for women: it was secretary work.
So this seems to me--with the caveat that I'm remembering some conversations I've had with this women from maybe 10 years ago when I first got interested in software and started having jobs that involved it--that there was a brief opening window at the early stages of the field when there were a lot of women practitioners.
As the field became more mainstream and more codified and promised rewards and opportunities, it appears that the guys noticed and came in rather slowly. And then pretty suddenly when it became clear that you could make a quick buck without a crapton of advanced knowledge, the brogrammers showed up and pretty much took over.
That's obviously only one interpretation, but it's an interesting one to me because Marilyn retired before things seem to have got really bad. She retired when the women were still wearing dresses to work, and the men were wearing suits, and things were mostly professional. There were probably glass ceilings, but she didn't feel one in her work because NASA has an institutional history of women doing big, important things.
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Another anecdote. This one much shorter.
A second field that seems to be to being opened up by bro-ish types (and with the incompetence and general lack of knowledge and laziness I associate with that type) is healthcare--specifically Nursing.
When I was studying Statistics at the University of North Dakota, I was living in a house with 6 other guys. Two of whom were Nursing students. They would have frat-style parties several times a week. Parties where 35-40 of their nursing school guy friends would come over, play Nickelback all night long and drink shitty beer. Basically the opposite of what I would expect from Nursing students.
I found this pretty unexpected and asked once WTF was going on here.
The answer was pretty consistent: there's a dearth of Nurses. People will pay a lot for them. The barrier to entry is pretty low. Essentially, it's quick easy money.
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All this makes me wonder how much of the shift in industry demographics is really driven by institutional sexism and how much it is just that the lowest common denominator will always try to make easy, lazy money. And then the more competent people move elsewhere, or just leave the industry entirely and go do something else.
Of course, once you reach a critical mass of bro-ism, the institutional bias does become real. But I wonder if we have a situation in business or IT management that is somewhat akin to the problems we have in U.S. Politics: the only people interested in managing are, by definition, not fit for the job. So smart people give up and walk away to somet...
Are we attempting to wash away history? It seems like this article and a lot of comments are insinuating women's rights have only decreased in the last 40 years. WHAT.
My mother, born in 1955, was told by her father there was no reason for her to take algebra or any type of math in high school because she wouldn't need it.
Maybe the upper class women of yesterday are just lamenting the death of chivalry. I don't know.
I often wonder why bro-ish types are chastised for being who they want to be. I get why it's bad when it becomes overbearing and crowds out diversity. Yet it seems bro = stupid, terrible, provide no value, and a bigot. I know some great, intelligent guys that are pretty bro-y.
It gets old when we have to constantly champion weakness, meekness, and discourage confidence. While a complete bro culture can be toxic, I've worked in majority-woman departments where the gossiping and backstabbing is just as toxic.
I'm not in any way trying to wash away history, and I am not trying to imply that women's rights have only decreased since the 50s.
I'm suggesting that there is a larger pattern operating here that is potentially more complicated than "things used to suck; now they are getting better, but not fast enough in STEM."
I agree with you that women are discouraged from entering certain fields. My mother (b. 1941) wanted to be a doctor, and her father didn't see the point. She ended up meeting my father in a German class and falling for him (he was the prof) and she ended up going the route of a German professor.
Of course we know that women are still discouraged from entering certain fields. I'm not arguing that they are not. I'm wondering if there are background signals in play here that drive women out of the fields that they are encouraged to get into.
As for bro culture, it gets chastised because it's toxic by definition, in my experience. Bro culture--to me--is quite a lot more than what you are describing it as. I'm not meek, week, and I'm not lacking in confidence. You can be all those things and still be very far from bro.
It's the stupid, terrible, provide no value, racist, sexist, bigot kind of people who walk around fist bumping and saying things like, "Dude, did we totally rape that bitch into submission, or what?!" when talking about "solving" a "hard" problem that are toxic.
It's the kind of people who think that ping pong tables and free beer make up for an utterly shitty working environment. It's the kind of people who are completely and totally unable to think that some people would want something other than what they want out of a job.
In other words, bro culture is marked by all the things you say it is "chastised" for, but not for those things in themselves. After all, we are all human and exhibit certain elements of all those things in ourselves. Bro culture celebrates stupidity, terrible-ness, sexism, and bigotry--and bro culture is entirely lacking empathy for anyone who is not a part of it.
I'm not saying anything about you or anyone you know. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it. I'm describing the characteristics that people deride when talking about it.
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I have no input about majority-women departments. I can certainly see how gossiping and backstabbing is toxic. I'll leave the criticism of those things to people who are in a position to do something about it.
I'm a mid-30s white male technologist. I can do something about bro culture. Not so much I can do about women gossiping and backstabbing.
...seriously, buddy, take a deep breath and back away from the men's rights blogosphere. That level of persecution complex is not a healthy way to think about life.
> ...seriously, buddy, take a deep breath and back away from the men's rights blogosphere. That level of persecution complex is not a healthy way to think about life.
This type of hostile response is exactly the kind of thing that ruins the gender dynamic you claim to be concerned about. My reply was not intended to be aggressive but merely stating men may have an issue gets me branded a men's rights activist.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] thread"Flipping Table emoticon (written as: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) is a text-based emoticon depicting a person flipping a table out of rage. Primarily used by East Asian internet users to express rage, the emoticon became popular among Western internet users following its introduction through internationally popular online games."
I don't understand why she chose that particular cultural marker but it doesn't change her point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple
> Where did we make that left turn into experienced, table flipping talent leaving the industry and the culture of brogramming scaring new talent away?
That sounds like "table flipping" is a good thing, like "turning the tables" on someone, but I'm honestly a bit puzzled.
It isn't just walking away, it's walking away while giving everybody the finger--a belligerent surrender.
Also applies to some particularly obnoxious clients in my experience.
That said, the way she uses the phrase seems particularly odd to me, and it took me a while to try to understand what she meant.
It could be that the people who getting into cool tech now because they're wired that way are going to be the ones others look up to later.
Actually, that applies to a lot of "first world" people too. We aren't all multigenerational tech dynasties over here.
Most of the people who were doing anything genuinely pioneering with computers are retired or dead now. Nowadays it's somehow a big deal to write a Javascript framework or some app which made money.
While the availability of technology in the US was a huge advantage, it's not like I was surrounded by tech pioneers. Remember, the tech world was much smaller in the 80s, the PC revolution was still very much a hobbyist/office thing until the web went mainstream in the 90s. I feel like I was drawn to computers out of the meager availability to me and nothing was going to keep me away from them. It was not really supported by my parents, and getting information was incredibly difficult. Eventually once my friend got a modem and we were able to get into the BBS scene and find some user groups then things loosened up a bit and the knowledge started to come (but still 100 times harder than it is today with the technical information available online). I feel like those user groups were like oases of tiny groups of computer enthusiasts among tens of thousands of "normals" who might suffer a computer at work, but had absolutely no interest in knowing anything about it.
I suspect the ratio of passionate computer geeks is similar, except now computers are so powerful and useful that people are drawn into the industry for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with genuine curiosity/obsession with how they work.
To escape naivety, we need to start looking at the big picture where an individuals choice is not, "Yes Tech!" or "No Tech!" but more accurately a wide variety of options, and try to understand why women are so drawn to other fields.
Women are doing better in school than boys. Women do better across all subjects, including STEM. They are choosing other fields, why? Is the presumption being made here that every woman thinks programming is the best field of all time, but they're just scared away by men? That seems very self-centric and dishonest. I'm sure that men face the same amount of stigma and social barriers in female dominated landscapes.
Maybe things like fashion, teaching kids, and helping others (both physically and psychologically) come across as much more fulfilling than doing math on a computer all day.
When I lay out the two options: men are scaring women away from technology || most women identify more with a plethora of other subjects.
Well, the first makes for a good drama, but the latter is obvious.
I'm not saying that gender parity in tech is not a worthy goal. Just pointing out that there are a lot of fields with skewed gender parity that there's not a push for equality in.
So? Other than to attempt to muddy the conversation, what benefit is there to mentioning it? Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?
Thank you for your charitable interpretation of my statement. I look forward to you having an open mind when entering a discussion of gender equality in the future./s
Unsarcastically, I think it's disingenuous that you would presume to know the intent of my statement and therefore can project whatever intent you wish into it.
>what benefit is there to mentioning it?
The point of mentioning it is that there are some fields that there is a push for gender parity into and others that are not. If we want gender parity in some fields but not others then we need to understand what makes the fields where parity is sought different from fields where parity is not sought. Perhaps we can learn something about these fields that would make achieving gender equality easier.
> Unless everyone at once gets up to right the world, no one should?
Again, this is what happens when you assume intent and project malice into that intent.
I think the main point of the article isn't gender parity, but equal treatment in the workplace. The focus of the article wasn't about increasing women participation in tech, but stopping gender discrimination in the workplace.
How do you know that there isn't a fight for parity in those industries? I wouldn't have the first clue, because I don't give a rat's ass. What I do care about, and can influence, is what goes on in the industry in which I work.
A weak effort at derailing the conversation. I'll give it a "2.5".
>I don't give a rats ass about it. I don't have much influence in it. I can't know for certain if X exists or not.
I assume you don't vote either, for the same reasons you listed.
Computer programming is at the complete opposite end of the safety spectrum, the biggest health risks being RSI from typing and other chronic issues from prolonged sitting, and there are effective countermeasures against both of these risks. There is no valid reason why more women should not be able to do it.
Okay, and? There are pushes for parity (or at least more inclusion) of women and men in firefighting, policing, and combat roles in the military, all of which are extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor.
The issue here is that technology is one of the few fields where the fight for the parity in gender is focused. I don't have a problem with that, gender equality is a good thing. Understanding why technology is a focus and different from mining and logging might help us understand and discover ways to bring about that gender parity.
There are pushes for relaxing restrictions on women attempting to make a statement by forcing their way into said extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor roles without stopping to consider the real-world repercussions of said relaxed restrictions.
FTFY
What I think is far more important is this idea that's being perpetuated that tech is this special place that scares away women. When the reality is that other fields just have more to offer.
I see no such hypothesis in the article. Your comments in this thread have taken it in precisely the wrong direction: tedious, predictable, and acrimonious. Please don't do this here.
> Or maybe you're just not a good 'team fit'. It's tough to pass a brogrammer interview. At the other end, it's too easy to push experienced technical women into 'project manager' and administrative roles, and eventually we flip the table. Brogrammers at one end of the pipeline, flipped tables at the other.
The article definitely strikes me as a "world is going to shit" hypothesis since it starts out in the beautiful era of the past and takes the reader to the ugly era of the present. I'm sorry that you disagree with me so strongly on my reading of the article. I understand that my original comment was too off-topic, and belonged more in its own thread rather than as a response to the post. However, it is unfair to say that I meant harm by sharing that I think gender issues are much larger than the tech field, and that we do them an injustice by thinking of gender discrimination as a problem internal to programming, engineering, science, etc. Because in a tech centric place it's easy to think these issues are unique to our fields.
Please understand that sometimes sharing an opinion like this is going to incite people regardless of how it's presented. Some people think expressing an opinion like this somehow says that there is no gender inequality in tech. When all I said was that we need to look at external rather than internal reasons.
Literally fluctuates between DH0 and DH2 on nearly all of his comments. [1] It's just articulate name-calling.
Wouldn't want someone's perspective to be too tedious, would we? Tsk tsk tsk.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
That's what smart people do: ignore anecdotes, look at actual data.
It wasn't so obvious in the 80s, when plenty of women were getting CS degrees and working in software. All I have is anecdata because I'm too lazy too look up hard numbers, but these days it seems a large number of the women I run into in software at large companies and small are doing PM work or are on a test team, and not nearly as many as developers. Could be that as more PM/test positions opened up (positions that were not nearly as common 30 years ago), women gravitated toward those positions. Or, as is commonly thought, as more workplaces turned into extended college parties, the women got driven off. Hell, it turns me off. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to just get my work done.
[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
Men and women do face a lot of differing challenges in various industries, and for every anecdotal story of strife there's another anecdotal story of success. The best we can do is look at the statistics, recognize trends, and try to address them as best we can. Clearly there are certain aspects of tech as an industry that aren't entirely conducive to female participation.
Women may be equally qualified, do better in school, etc. but that doesn't mean they don't face challenges that don't deserve our consideration.
If there are societal reasons which encourage women to pursue industries other than STEM, these then effect the participation rate in high-earning industries creating income inequality.
This is why this matters.
And, yet, look who are in leadership roles even in those female dominated industries. Somehow, the majority of the wealthy fashion designers are white men. Somehow, the majority of principals in elementary education are white men. The executives that nurses answer to? Once again, predominantly white men.
There's a useful discussion to be had about why more boys or girls don't go into certain fields...and, feminists have been having those conversations for many years (yes, talking about the boys, too, because it often comes down to the same core problem). And, it's too complicated to sum up with statistics about who goes into what industry. But, there are a variety of real problems that come from these imbalances and these inequalities, so it's useful to try to sort them out and figure out root causes, without simplifying it down to gender essentialist arguments (i.e. that "women go into caregiver fields because women like that sort of thing" and "boys are big and tough and like machines so they go into STEM fields and shoot guns").
Finally, to pretend our industry is not overtly hostile to women is to ignore thousands of women who have told their stories of being made to feel unwelcome, disrespected, and even harassed and abused, because of their gender, when working in technical fields.
No, they aren't.
From http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013313.pdf
"The percentage of public school principals who were female was 52 percent overall, 64 percent in primary schools..."
Of course...I wonder how it looks when you go even further up the executive chain in public education?
Nonetheless, it is not our topic of discussion here. Tech is remarkably unbalanced, and we've been told countless times by countless women why it is remarkably unbalanced (or at least a big enough part of the reason for us to want to do something about it).
Edit: Also, you know nothing of my political beliefs, and my political beliefs have no bearing on what women have said about their experience in tech fields.
What's really clear, is things are changing quickly, and perhaps we all need to reevaluate our beliefs and bias with current research.
True, a slight majority of principals are women, but it's much more illustrative to look at the career progression. Those selected to be moved up the career ladder are clearly primarily men.
1 - http://www.womenonbusiness.com/men-women-the-glass-escalator...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_escalator#Glass_escalato...
Inequality in gender distribution seems to only get more extreme each year here and female industries tops the lists with several that has a over 90% female to male distrubution. The very top of the list is a profession with 99.94% female to male ratio, and the whole male group of the profession could fit in a single mini-buss. This is in my view the primary reason why no feminist politician in Sweden ever brings up this yearly statistics, as the facts doesn't support the narrative being presented.
The changes as reported last report was minor changes in the top list of male dominated profession with about 2 percent increase in females to males, but in the female dominated professions the change goes the opposite direction with ever higher female to male ratio. Some professions like psychology is reporting that at university level it is about 95% female to male ratio, and if nothing is changed soon there won't be any male therapists once the last 20% that currently work reach the age of 65.
As someone sooner or later always want links: http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/ (you have to build you own query and compare it to previous years).
"Meet the Parents" was light on the view of men who work as nurses...
Sexism and discrimination are hurtful regardless of the industry or the dominant gender of that industry. Unfortunately as humans we are better at finding ways to highlight differences than working together collectively.
And, unfortunately, we in the software industry are no better at overcoming our latent human biases than any other industry.
The OP is a fine article by a specific person about specific experiences and it deserves specific responses. If you don't want to engage with what's interesting about a particular article, please don't post in its thread.
I'll also note that there are plenty of other options that have been discussed and that may be turn out to be one of the root causes, not just the two you are considering.
I completely agree and was just using one possibility to illustrate my point that this topic seems to be crippled by this "Yes tech!" "No tech!" paradigm. Did you have any specific alternatives you were thinking of? Also if you know of any articles on the subject I'd love to read them. I think one possibility is that gender roles have gotten worse over time. In the 70s and 80s we had a lot of women joining the work force as families switched from single income to dual income households. I wonder if the result of things "settling" in the decades that passed was a more pronounced reflection of social values (gender roles) in the work force.
There are several.
For example, it is known that gender bias in groups has a tendency to not only perpetuate itself, but to also reduce participation by the minority gender (even without any hostile action by the majority; it seemingly suffices often to simply feel like an outsider).
Second, the power of stereotypes is strong, even where they are wrong. For example, in Liechtenstein's 1968 referendum on women's suffrage, even nearly half the women wanted to deny themselves the vote [1]. A bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, but indicative of how powerful established stereotypes can be. In the early 1980s, working with computers was still often considered to be something more like a secretarial job.
Third, computer science started to pay more and grant higher status, making it more attractive to men (especially in a society where men are still predominantly the breadwinners and women responsible for childcare [2]).
And that's just off the top of my head.
I have no idea what the actual causes are (I am fairly convinced that there are several of them, working in tandem). What I do know is that gender roles are shaped pretty much from birth, so I'm extremely skeptical of a theory that attributes this to preference alone (preference may well play a role, but it's so very difficult to tease out the difference between nature and nurture when it comes to these things).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein_referendums,_196...
[2] Ironically, IT jobs are often more likely to allow for working from home, making it easier to reconcile a career with childcare.
Then they both fell dramatically through the mid '90s. Women dropped in half, and men dropped by about 36%.
Then men exploded, and by the mid '00s were about 60% above their mid '80s peak, whereas the women were only back to about the same as their mid '80s peak.
Then they both declined, and again the women's decline was more. Men fell about 25%, and women fell about 50%, by the end of the '00s.
It's that explosion of men from the mid '90s through the mid '00s that is the biggest contributor to the percentage of undergraduate CS degrees that go to females dropping in half from its mid '80s peak.
I've not heard any good theories on why there was such a surge of men coming to CS from the mid '90s through the mid '00s.
For master's degrees, the situation is quite different. From the early '70s through the mid '00s, both men and women rose slowly and steadily, with the women rising faster until the mid '80s when they then rose at about the same rate. This resulted in the percentage of master's degrees going to women rising steadily to around 32%. Then there was a slight decline for both men and women, with the women declining slightly more.
For PhDs, there was no decline. Both men and women rose from the early '70s through the end of the '00s (when my data ends), with the women rising faster so the percent of PhDs going to women in CS rose steadily from about 7% to about 22%.
Data if you want to play around with the numbers: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
I gather that I'm about the same age as the author. And she's right, there was a time that we worked side-by-side with the wimmin folk and didn't think a thing of it. Hey, it was a brave new world of software, and in that brave new world gender didn't matter anymore. I remember it as a time of software being a good place for women to go because it paid well and it didn't matter as much as other fields if you were "a girl". It worked out well for my Mom around that era.
But I don't know when it changed and why it changed, so I don't have good answers for the current situation. But things have changed for sure.
> I gather that I'm about the same age as the author.
Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much, I'm probably a lot younger and male to boot, and I think the same when visiting the offices of some companies that are popular these days.
Well, it's worth something to me because I sometimes wonder if it's just me being "the old guy" rather than just having a work ethic that causes me to want to go to work to work, not play foosball (not that I haven't kicked some 20-something ass at the foosball table from time to time during work hours).
The do-or-die environments of most startups just pushes everyone but the bros out.
If you are in the bay area, you might want to take a look at PlanGrid. We have a diverse culture which we're proud of, value work-life balance, and still build cool things that make a difference.
> Unlimited vacation days
If a candidate requested a firm six weeks of accrued PTO, would that be granted?
I internally translate "unlimited vacation" to "as little vacation as possible".
Personally, I'm interested in minimum vacation policies instead. The founders do reiterate frequently that 5 weeks is expected.
Alas your company is in the city and I prefer the valley.
I work for a software company with around 1000 employees and it's still a very relaxed environment:
- No dress code
- Free snacks, soda, coffee, tea
- 3 weeks vacation starting out
- Top of the line Xeon Workstation or comparable laptop with multiple monitors
- Flex work hours. I come in around 10am after exercising in the morning.
- No crazy work weeks (averaged around 40 hours a week the past year)
- Work from home when needed (bad weather, etc)
- Lax dress code (collared shirt, jeans on Friday only)
- Free soda in the home office
- 120 hours PTO + sick time
- Start any time between 6 and 9
- 8 hour day includes 1 hour lunch break, so really 35 hr/wk of work
- Overtime is explicitly banned, you actually need approval (since most time is billed to a client)
- WFH is available depending on your client, some have access restrictions that make it impossible but barring that you can WFH when needed/approved
I would love to know the answer too. I suspect that thanks to advances of feminism, there are now more professional careers available for women (such as various management positions) and they prefer those to programming or technology. But this theory is, for some reason, controversial.
Which isn't to say that people would exclude you from their team if you don't get involved, but you couldn't say that you have the easy camaraderie that most of the team seems to have. You're a little outlier, you're not quite in-step, references fly over your head. And you have to be _so careful_ to be friendly, but not _so_ friendly that your co-workers think you're hitting on them.
Occasionally, you miss a decision that happened to be discussed at the cocktail bar over lunch - it was just a spur of the moment thing, forgot to invite you, didn't think you would be interested. You talk about how you would have solved the problem, but it's just not seen as graceful enough to be worth exploring further. Because you weren't involved in making those decisions, your name doesn't come up when being considered for lead positions.
You're at a company event, and you think you've escaped someone asking you about your spouse that must work there. Then, someone hands you the trash to take out while they tell a hilarious joke about the only things men are good for.
You can't put your finger on any one thing (ok, maybe the trash thing), but when another opportunity comes along in a different field, maybe you take it. You can't say you really enjoy your work anyways.
The requirement for warmth enables politicking.
The interesting thing about the culture of projects like the kernel dev mailing list is that there is a strong culture of only caring about "Is the code from this person good?" and dismissing the question "Is this a good person (according to my own personal definition of what a good person is)?"
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make in contrast - could you qualify how politicking and 'warmth' is relevant to contributing to the brogrammer culture?
That said, now that I understand it, I feel like the parent comment being sexist toward both men and women to illustrate a false dichotomy.
It stereotypes women as being interested "wine tours, maybe some yoga, [and] trashy soap operas". I've met plenty of women in tech that have no interest in such things and I've met plenty of male engineers in tech interested in the first two of those three things. I don't know anyone in tech interested in the last item and to be honest I can't imagine a dominantly female tech industry establishing a culture where anyone is interested in such things. Looking at all the female engineers I work with that are great coders and great to work with and solve problems with, I can't imagine them really creating a culture that values social activities different from the ones I see my male colleagues participating in. They'd still play board games. They'd still read and watch sci-fi. They'd still hike and cycle. None of these activities strike me as particularly male oriented. They strike me as nerd oriented and they are incompatible with societies neurotypical social expectations for both men and women.
===
Strangely this particularly part of the comment caught my attention:
What I found interesting is that it called my attention to something I had never noticed before and haven't seen anyone else point out.When I look around at my workplace and previous workplaces, there are women who have a lot of ease fitting in and there are women who don't. Those that do remarkably well are often remarkably similar to the men who do well. They care about code in and out of work. Their interests outside of work are nerdy (hacking, making, sci-fi, board games, etc.). They spend relatively little time preening (social self-grooming).
Those that are most challenged and have the biggest difficulty fitting in and getting along with their colleagues don't share these traits. One trait I see in common with many of the women that have difficulty in tech culture is that the more closely approximate the gender roles and expectations that society at large sets for them; the most damaging of which is preening. Society has for a long time had a strong expectation for women to self-groom socially a lot more than men. Women are basically expected to wake up each morning and dress well, put on make up, etc. Those that don't do this will encounter friction socially outside the office and those that do will encounter friction inside the office.
The reason I find this observation interesting is that it's not even a problem exclusive to women in tech. Men that socially self-groom are more likely to feel like outsiders. An example of such high social self-grooming that would make you feel like you don't belong is wearing collared shirts, nice pants, nice shoes, possibly even a suit jacket or even a full suit. Interestingly, Greg Foster over at AirBnB even wrote about this exact type of discrimination in his essay "Does tech discriminate against suits?"[0].
Assuming this is valid anecdotal observation, there are two things to consider:
- For this particular phenomena, is this illustrative of tech discriminating against women or is it tech discriminating against the high self-grooming? (I'm not saying there aren't other ways in which women are made to feel like outsiders, I'm just picking one in particular that applies to men as well, but AFAICT seems to affect women disproportionately, since I've observed that women are likely to continue to highly self-groom in an engineering environment.)
- If it is, then is the problem with tech discriminating against male or females that ar...
In any case, it doesn't matter really. We don't know what the truth is, and AFAICT no one is really looking for it (I unfortunately don't have enough (interest/(resources*time)) to do a study).
From small anecdata I have, I had several smart women told me that they want to quit because they themselves feel they are not smart enough or skilled enough to do programming. I have never heard of somebody wanting to quit (the field) because there was some idiot thinking they can't do it. In fact, having to prove yourself may actually be motivational.
And I think I am not righteous enough to claim that when a person says "the reason is that I don't feel I can do it", then there must be something in the environment causing it. It may simply be their preference, and I have to respect that. Maybe their thinking is delusional, but unless they clearly say, "this external reason is the reason", we can't do anything about it if we respect personal freedom of choice.
So yeah, we should do a study, ask women, why they don't want to do it, and if they say, "it's boring", just accept that as a fact of life and move on and stop searching for reasons in patriarchies and whatnot.
And I don't think it's quite morally correct to try to somehow correct people's preferences, however silly they might be. If they should be convinced for economic reasons (say, STEM is important), then it should be done with money.
Boys are struggling in many areas in western society. They happen to be succeeding in tech. It's no wonder they're edgy about letting outsiders manipulate the field.
Silicon Valley preaches individual achievement and personal responsibility. No doubt boys often needed those skills to survive an education system designed around them. Feminism often pushes for change at the institutional level, not for individual accountability thus the tension IMO.
More than that, your opinion about education seems to not actual support the fact that fewer women are going into Computer Science and related fields than were in the 80s. If it was all down to education/politics, and there's more money now in this field than there was then, why has that ratio gone down? OTOH, if the people making the hiring decisions at startups are choosing to not hire women (consciously or not) and those decisions are trickling into the rest of the midsize companies, then maybe there's something wrong with the hiring process itself.
In general there are fewer men participating in higher education than women:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_306.10.a...
2012 shows enrollment at: 43% male, 57% female = 14% difference
In my original comment I said that men are succeeding in tech and not much else. I think these numbers show that.
If there are fewer women going into CS then it's not the hiring process that's the problem, it's a supply issue.
People have many reasons to create startups, but the decision to make one is way down the pipeline of where any issue lies.
What makes someone passionate enough about technology that they choose to study it, pursue it as a career and eventually maybe do a startup? That question gets answered early in life and doesn't have to be the same for everyone.
Women don't have to be interested in technology. They should be given the same opportunities as men if they are though and from everything I've ever seen in our industry, they are.
TBH, this dichotomy isn't even a feature isolated to feminism, but is a basic feature with most -isms and movements (for or against). There are those from one side that work towards equality and those that work towards equity, and on the other side there are those that work towards inequality and those that work towards inequity.
An approach for equality or inequality starts with promoting an idea or attitude to achieve a change in treatment.
An approach for equity or inequity jumps straight to seeking for arbitrarily chosen, unequal, and unnatural changes in treatment that breeds resentment because there is no establishment of understanding between both sides. Changes in attitude follow after the changes from a need to resolve cognitive dissonance (which leads to all sorts of zany, invented and often polar justifications for the unnatural changes (because of equity promotes an "us versus them" dichotomy instead of a unifying attitude of "we"))
When the industry moved from the east cost Organization Man (or Woman) operations, the computer science and engineering career largely fell off the map at Universities.
Up until ~93 (the year of the IBM layoffs) colleges and universities were grooming you for Organization Man (or Woman) career companies like IBM, DEC, GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, Philips, AT&T, Shell Oil, Exxon, etc.
When tech stopped being an industries made of career companies, it became a fringe industry that you only knew was viable if you knew people making a living in it. At that point we have an industry that grows far more slowly based on Granovetter's strength of weak ties and far more rapidly based on strong personal hobby interest in subject matter such that you end up learning about the myriad companies in Silicon Valley well before there was a tech media like Wired and TechCrunch standing on roof tops and declaring a gold rush.
Before Wired magazine, no one without an already strong personal interest in computers and software really knew anything about what was happening in Silicon Valley. It was essentially non-existent for an entire generation (X) and most of a second generation (Y). It's only with Millenials that Silicon Valley has been considered a good career path for those with capital in terms of technical aptitude/competence, but aren't hard core computer nerds.
I'm curious how the engineering gender ratios evolved for companies like IBM and DEC versus HP and Apple from from 1970 to 1995. Now with those figures in hand, I'm curious what impact layoffs and workforce reductions at IBM, DEC and other highly visible traditionally Organization Man (and Woman) companies had on the industry ratio and the visibility of women in the industry.
I was born in the early 80s and my formative years when I would have been thinking about "what I want to be when I grow up" were basically the mid 80s to the mid 90s. At the time, I had exactly one engineering role model from elementary school to high school, an engineer at Philips, despite the fact that I grew up in a reasonably affluent town about a 30 minutes from the IBM headquarters in upstate NY. Computer Science wasn't even on the radar career wise. You were encouraged to become a doctor, lawyer or business person. If you were interested in companies like IBM, you were encouraged to want to get an MBA and be on that side of the social divide in those Organization Man (and Woman) companies, because the engineering side wasn't considered a path towards affluence for the systems thinking gifted like medicine and law were.
I think the bro-ness goes along side the "work hard, play hard, be at the office all hours" mentality. I've been to a few different gatherings where startups were pitching (including YC) and tune out anyone who pulls the "we are a family, we are here all hours, we blahblahblah" type thing.
Liking your coworkers and developing a desire to hang out socially, etc. should develop organically instead of some "mandatory fun" type work culture.
Young, smart hackers came to believe that it is not just acceptable to exclusively hire people who look and act like them, but imperative for the survival of their company. Unconscious discrimination is inevitable when you hire based on nebulous factors of compatibility rather than concrete measures of ability.
When a founder hires in this way, they create an immense obstacle to diversity. The company grows on this ethos, creating barriers both direct ("she isn't a good fit") and indirect ("I don't want to work in this frathouse"). Improving diversity in these companies is like steering an oil tanker.
In my opinion, we need a new hiring norm that reflects the hacker ethos. We need to abandon the multi-day interview gauntlet and replace it with a fair, blinded work assessment. Classical music has seen a boom in diversity since the introduction of blind auditions and we should follow suit. Everything a developer does can be fairly and accurately assessed through IRC and Git commits.
(1) The mini-computer happened. You can't read the part in Clayton Cristensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" that talks about how the industry went from 5" drives to 3.5" drives and not see how many computing dinosaurs disappeared to be replaced by completely new companies founded by outsiders that inherited practically none of the culture of the big traditional tech companies from the days of The Organization Man (or Woman).
which lead to...
(2) The central locus of the tech industry migrated from Route 128 and MIT, which were the power houses post WWII to Silicon Valley and Stanford. The two had polar opposite cultures. Gone were the cultures of places like DEC and IBM to be replaced with the cultures of HP then Apple. AnnaLee Saxenian's book "Regional Advantage" does a great job of chronicling that shift from Route 128 to Silicon Valley and how East Coast and West Coast tech culture differed. If you look at pretty much every story that talked about tech culture back in the day versus today, they are often as much about Route 128 versus Silicon Valley, but few people are aware that such a big shift happened in tech from the 70s to the 80s. It wasn't just new companies built by the same people from the old companies. They were new companies built by complete outsiders to the old computing industry. At MIT, there was tech on campus and mainstream culture was exposed, thus the companies hired from the mainstream. When the center of tech moved to a couple of buildings across the country nestled among rural orchard communities, the people worked at those companies were not a sample of that community, rural orchard farmers. Instead they were the people who were so deeply involved in engineering AND sufficiently detached from their social structures on the East Coast, that they packed up their bags and moved Westward. Migrations are remarkable for their filtering effect. You can see this just by comparing each coast non-tech culture and west coast non-tech culture. The engineers that ended up in Silicon Valley were qualitatively different in attitude and baggage like all the people that settled in SF during the Summer of Love compared to those that remained in their comfortable rooted East Coast lives. Heck, Apple used to fly a pirate flag in their offices. You would have never seen such a display at companies like IBM, DEC, GE, Philips, etc.
Now it's your turn to change her mind.
My brother is 14 and to him it is reasonable to expect that the president could be a black man (not quite there on women yet unfortunately). My family has gay friends who are married with children and these are regular facts of life to him. I don't think either of my parents have spoken to him very directly about these issues and he has managed to evolve into a pretty open minded and cool teenager.
May I ask how old she was when she said that?
If a thing is not the person whom your child looks up to's thing, then it will not be your child's thing.
But when I look at what my old classmates are doing now, most of those girls went into teaching, law, and business related roles. A couple went into science and engineering and one is a dentist. Of the guys, most of them became doctors, engineers, and pharmacists and a couple work in agriculture and wildlife conservation. All of the women I am referring to know they are smart enough to do whatever they want, but they obviously decided to favor non-technical roles for their own reasons.
At some point women HAVE to stand up and take the lead for themselves.
My point was to demonstrate that it's also the case, for some individuals (I still don't know the distribution), that they were turned away for reasons other than first order lack of interest in the field; and in fact, reasons we have something of an impact on.
My wife was turned away not simply because she thought she'd be working with men, but because of her impression of the particular men in STEM fields that she had experience of. I don't know if her impression was fair - looking back, she doesn't know if her impression was fair. But we do collectively have the ability to work to make sure such an impression is not fair and to work to make sure we're giving the correct impression.
Given a negative impression of likely experiences in the field, expecting outsiders to fix it is a collective action problem. If a woman correctly judges that the existing population working in a field are likely to make that field painful to work in, and she is the only one (or part of a small minority) who "stand up", then she's chosen a painful career for herself. Those of us already in the industry can work to address the problem with substantially less risk.
I'm pretty sure "we're firing half our company and only hiring women who aren't even in the field anymore so we can even it out and attract more people down the line" is effectively a straw-man. It's certainly not what I would advocate, and I don't see how my comment would have implied it.
coding for 30 years then still being like, "what next? o right, ruby." is awesome.
I don't think it's possible to know one way or the other. It's much more likely that RotN and things like it caused or were caused by deeply rooted stigmas against tech that made women shy away from it before even getting to the point of being exposed to 'frat-like' conditions in the workplace.
1: http://i.imgur.com/Pf35A0D.png
Such choices are strongly influenced by cultural expectations for gender. Those cultural expectations are, in turn, cartoonishly amplified in the typical lord-of-the-flies high school environment.
Actually all of the above is just me—some random HN puke—speculating and repeating things I've heard elsewhere. But it definitely sounds plausible!
http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
For contrast try: "Real Genius" or "Weird Science" or even "My Science Project" all from around that time period.
For men (speaking as a man myself), threatened by competition, criticism is often a competitive sport.
This essay made me think of my own blind spots, and I hope I'm better for having read it.
If I remember the story correctly, Marilyn started a PhD, but never finished due to marriage and kids. She went on to have a very happy career at NASA and retired from there eventually, around 1995.
She worked in code for almost all of her career. She worked on the Apollo Guidance Computer for at least a couple of years.
Her telling of how things were is that there were a lot of women working in what would eventually become the field of computer science. It was a flipped version of what we think of now but with some similarities.
It was flipped because women were the higher percentage of the work force in the early '60s and on into the '70s and even '80s. But this was also the same as today because the field itself was really not well-defined, and after people went from punch cards (which is what she started programming with), they went to typing. And for the average Joe, typing was a job for women: it was secretary work.
So this seems to me--with the caveat that I'm remembering some conversations I've had with this women from maybe 10 years ago when I first got interested in software and started having jobs that involved it--that there was a brief opening window at the early stages of the field when there were a lot of women practitioners.
As the field became more mainstream and more codified and promised rewards and opportunities, it appears that the guys noticed and came in rather slowly. And then pretty suddenly when it became clear that you could make a quick buck without a crapton of advanced knowledge, the brogrammers showed up and pretty much took over.
That's obviously only one interpretation, but it's an interesting one to me because Marilyn retired before things seem to have got really bad. She retired when the women were still wearing dresses to work, and the men were wearing suits, and things were mostly professional. There were probably glass ceilings, but she didn't feel one in her work because NASA has an institutional history of women doing big, important things.
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Another anecdote. This one much shorter. A second field that seems to be to being opened up by bro-ish types (and with the incompetence and general lack of knowledge and laziness I associate with that type) is healthcare--specifically Nursing.
When I was studying Statistics at the University of North Dakota, I was living in a house with 6 other guys. Two of whom were Nursing students. They would have frat-style parties several times a week. Parties where 35-40 of their nursing school guy friends would come over, play Nickelback all night long and drink shitty beer. Basically the opposite of what I would expect from Nursing students.
I found this pretty unexpected and asked once WTF was going on here.
The answer was pretty consistent: there's a dearth of Nurses. People will pay a lot for them. The barrier to entry is pretty low. Essentially, it's quick easy money.
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All this makes me wonder how much of the shift in industry demographics is really driven by institutional sexism and how much it is just that the lowest common denominator will always try to make easy, lazy money. And then the more competent people move elsewhere, or just leave the industry entirely and go do something else.
Of course, once you reach a critical mass of bro-ism, the institutional bias does become real. But I wonder if we have a situation in business or IT management that is somewhat akin to the problems we have in U.S. Politics: the only people interested in managing are, by definition, not fit for the job. So smart people give up and walk away to somet...
My mother, born in 1955, was told by her father there was no reason for her to take algebra or any type of math in high school because she wouldn't need it.
Maybe the upper class women of yesterday are just lamenting the death of chivalry. I don't know.
I often wonder why bro-ish types are chastised for being who they want to be. I get why it's bad when it becomes overbearing and crowds out diversity. Yet it seems bro = stupid, terrible, provide no value, and a bigot. I know some great, intelligent guys that are pretty bro-y.
It gets old when we have to constantly champion weakness, meekness, and discourage confidence. While a complete bro culture can be toxic, I've worked in majority-woman departments where the gossiping and backstabbing is just as toxic.
I'm suggesting that there is a larger pattern operating here that is potentially more complicated than "things used to suck; now they are getting better, but not fast enough in STEM."
I agree with you that women are discouraged from entering certain fields. My mother (b. 1941) wanted to be a doctor, and her father didn't see the point. She ended up meeting my father in a German class and falling for him (he was the prof) and she ended up going the route of a German professor.
Of course we know that women are still discouraged from entering certain fields. I'm not arguing that they are not. I'm wondering if there are background signals in play here that drive women out of the fields that they are encouraged to get into.
As for bro culture, it gets chastised because it's toxic by definition, in my experience. Bro culture--to me--is quite a lot more than what you are describing it as. I'm not meek, week, and I'm not lacking in confidence. You can be all those things and still be very far from bro.
It's the stupid, terrible, provide no value, racist, sexist, bigot kind of people who walk around fist bumping and saying things like, "Dude, did we totally rape that bitch into submission, or what?!" when talking about "solving" a "hard" problem that are toxic.
It's the kind of people who think that ping pong tables and free beer make up for an utterly shitty working environment. It's the kind of people who are completely and totally unable to think that some people would want something other than what they want out of a job.
In other words, bro culture is marked by all the things you say it is "chastised" for, but not for those things in themselves. After all, we are all human and exhibit certain elements of all those things in ourselves. Bro culture celebrates stupidity, terrible-ness, sexism, and bigotry--and bro culture is entirely lacking empathy for anyone who is not a part of it.
I'm not saying anything about you or anyone you know. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it. I'm describing the characteristics that people deride when talking about it.
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I have no input about majority-women departments. I can certainly see how gossiping and backstabbing is toxic. I'll leave the criticism of those things to people who are in a position to do something about it.
I'm a mid-30s white male technologist. I can do something about bro culture. Not so much I can do about women gossiping and backstabbing.
This type of hostile response is exactly the kind of thing that ruins the gender dynamic you claim to be concerned about. My reply was not intended to be aggressive but merely stating men may have an issue gets me branded a men's rights activist.
That response was more contempt than critique.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927789 and marked it off-topic.