The answer is obvious: it's bias. I'll never forget the day I removed my picture from my LinkedIn profile and the amount of random spam I received increase substantially.
People don't like the answer, but there's only one: anonymity. Any other solution simply changes who will be discriminated against.
I honestly don't understand how someone can be sexist. I have never thought lesser of the people I've worked with because of gender. I don't know if this is too personal but would you mind talking with me to explain what it's like. ive worked work many females in the past with no issues besides personalities. I just want to really understand and empathize.
feel free to reach out at jbhatab@gmail.com if youd be so kind
I'm above the average looking guy. When I added my picture to LinkedIn the amount of spam increased substantially.
People are really biased creatures. Usually the intent is not malicious, but rather caused by tribalism, evolution, empathy, mirror neurons etc.
One example is ageism, which is actually a systematic bias. For examplem to be a president you have be 35 or older. Let's imagine we created a perfect candidate in a lab which is 29. She's creme de la creme. And we have abolished this law.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but this is a clear case of begging the question. Is Silicon Valley really awful to women? Do we have any comparative data that suggests that SV is any more sexist than most industries? I hear a lot of unpleasant anecdotes, but very little data.
I think that the answer to this question is very important. If we operate on the presumption that SV is uniquely awful, then we may be looking for solutions to sexism in all the wrong places.
The question implies it. The question "why is silicon valley so awful to women" implies that it is uniquely so, otherwise the question would be "why are men so awful to women", or "why is corporate america so awful to women".
SV is objectively worse than corporate America as a whole... But that doesn't really matter. Tech has a problem and other industries also having problems -- maybe even worse problems! -- doesn't excuse it. This is fixable, but it starts with acknowledging it exists.
That's an interesting theory. The question though is whether or not it is true. It certainly could be true. But it could also be that SV is more self-critical, and so we hear about it more. It could also be that we (denizens of HN, that is) are in SV (in the broad sense of 'tech') and therefore more aware of its shortcomings. And it could also be that it is in fact more hostile to women. In the absence of data, we simply don't know.
No one is discussing under-representation in this thread. What's being discussed is how women are treated. Your response was either a non-sequitur, or referring to the article, which is discussing the treatment of women.
And supporting younger women to go into software development isn't something anyone has an issue with (except maybe the frequency and extent of it). We don't say there's a problem with the health care industry just because there aren't enough male nurses, we know the cause and it's a cultural one, not an industry one.
Of course the gender disparity in healthcare is a problem too. You disagree? Google those job titles and "gender inequality" for many articles and discussions about the problem and what's being done.
The gender gap is particularly significant in careers that pay well and are growing in numbers, such as those in IT. (It's a problem that most flight attendants are female, but IMHO it's less pressing.)
The reason for the title, as explained in the article, is because it's surprising. In other words, you wouldn't think that the culture of SV would often be difficult for women based on the way these companies market themselves.
It's the same reason why after every election there are dozens of articles about white progressives being at odds with the black community, as opposed to just having a general article on race relations in America or whatever.
Of course it's not. It doesn't allow you compare to other industries at all. The question you answered was:
>Do we have any comparative data that suggests that SV is any more sexist than most industries?
You provide no comparative data. Comparison to other industries is necessary to identify the scale and causes of the problem, which are necessary in order to fix the problem.
I'm on my phone, but tech is generally worse(0) than doctors(1) and lawyers(2), two professions that made huge improvements in the last decade. Note that's just doctors and lawyers, not the whole legal and medical field, which would likely be an even more unfavorable comparison.
How bad does tech have to be for you to acknowledge a problem? Isn't "worse the average female participation" bad enough?
>How bad does tech have to be for you to acknowledge a problem?
Who said I didn't acknowledge there was a problem? The descriptor at issue is awful. The usual conditions for use of the word "awful" require more than just there being a problem.
The alternate hypothesis that I mentioned, that sexism in tech comes from the country as a whole, is not a denial of there being a problem. I don't see how that could be inferred.
>tech is generally worse(0) than doctors(1) and lawyers(2)
Lawyers and doctors are generally highly educated, whereas the majority of the technical workforce has a Master's in some kind of engineering or even less. The educational institutions provide a means to change culture which generally means that cultural changes propagate faster here than in most of the country. As such it's a bit of a biased comparison. This is why, as you mention, there have been "huge improvements" in such a short time span as the last decade.
I don't follow your point. Is the problem not sufficiently awful to bother trying to solve it? Or is it that tech is off the hook because it's the schools or "the country as a whole" (whatever that means) which is more to blame?
The gender imbalance is particularly acute in silicon valley and I think SV has an obligation to do something about it. It isn't about whose fault it is.
- Generally SV companies should be expected to comply with federal laws/norms on inclusiveness but "special action" is unnecessary and mostly self-congratulatory (oh wow this tech stuff is so awesome everyone should do it)
- there is a plausible if isolated and somewhat orthogonal correlation between companies which make money by "breaking rules" and companies where people break rules as relates to acceptable social conduct. In the specific case of companies (AirBnB, Uber) who are essentially being paid by venture capitalists to ignore regulations and hide the money trail it makes sense that such norms may enforce loyalty. It's sort of like David Cameron's porcine bride. However only a small (but highly notorious) fraction of SV companies depend on this.
On the third point I want to note that saying "tech jobs are awesome, why aren't more women in them" is a sneaky way of asserting "tech jobs are awesome" i.e. for everyone. In reality they're okay but it's not like people here are actually happier or anything.
The average IT-Enthusiast on youtube,streaming a project is usually male. The participation there is voluntarily, no discrimination by google. You cant carry the dog to hunt.
I implore you to seek out a woman who has ever posted a video about IT (or, worse, video games) and ask them how that experience went and if they're likely to repeat it.
This is a big problem even if there isn't active discrimination by Google (or anyone else).
Just put into the faces video some random looping guy GIF. And you can kick the usual horny teenager.
You can not have a video at all, and not use a microphone- just chatting.
The internet is asexual by nature which is great. Your argument is invalid, there is no problem there, except for one group demanding social controll over all others.
So - women should only be on the internet if they're willing to hide their entire identity and never use their voice? And that's your idea of a solution?
The 'education level' field is the only data to compare whether the employees are equally qualified. There are many variables not accounted for other than gender that could affect salary. So, no, that simple chart is barely sufficient to demonstrate anything at all, certainly not systemic sexism.
Representation tells us almost nothing, because of the problems further up the pipeline. Women aren't studying CS in large numbers, which may or may not have anything to do with SV. Women make up only 18% of computer science graduates, so one could easily argue that your data shows that women are significantly over-represented in the industry.
Why so few women study computer science is an important question. Again, I think it's dangerous to presume the answer without sufficient data.
If SV is actually a great place for women to work, then front-page stories about it being awful isn't going to help increase the number of female CS students.
News can be both truthful and misleading. The frequency and tone of this type of article is completely disproportional to reality.
There are definitely problems in how women are treated in tech, just as there are in every other field with similar demographics that comes to mind. Those problems need to be addressed.
The title of this article is "Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?", though. "Awful". Do you really believe that it's "awful", particularly relative to all other professions?
It's important to keep in mind when analyzing this issue; SV is not "an industry." There are many companies there across a variety of industries, many of which are tech related. But as much as the media would have us believe otherwise "tech" is not one actual industry. It's a poorly defined category of industries.
My point being, SV companies are so diverse across their actual industries it's probably best to compare them as a region against companies in other major regions.
"A recent survey called “Elephant in the Valley” found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions."
See the word "comparative" in my comment. We don't know if women in tech are experiencing exceptionally high levels of sexism, exceptionally low levels or completely average levels. The answer to that question matters greatly to how we formulate a response to whatever level of sexism exists in our industry.
Suppose the amount of sexism in Silicon Valley is average, or even below average. Do you think that means there's nothing we can do and that we should just accept it as a fact of life? I would say that so long as the amount of sexism is non-zero there's work that can be done.
" I hear a lot of unpleasant anecdotes, but very little data."
Question was asked in the article, ("Where are the numbers?"). [0] For all the posturing on how good SV is at data, the question has to be asked, "Why can't tech companies collect and show data on staff?" [1] The only conclusion I can make is SV tech companies do not see this as an ^authentic^ problem.
I don't get why this isn't obvious. Software is seen as the wild west of engineering. Exciting, competitive, reckless, sometimes brutal.
It's like Wall Street, selling cars, working oilfields. The popular perception has been fuelled by megafounders who struck gold, becoming the richest people in the world by their mid 20's. SV is in a 40 gold rush for the next big thing and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.
For all sorts of reasons that have been beaten to death, most women won't stick around in such a field.
For gender balance to return in our lifetimes software engineering would need to lose much of the existing culture
But what does it have to do with gender? Yes SV is highly competitive but are we in a place where it's common for men to put down women just because of that?? It seems extrem to me.
If you want horror stories, ask lots of intelligent women from western Pennsylvania why they are now sitting in Silicon Valley.
There is a big difference between a couple of socially inept brogrammers making shitty comments and every single relative asking you why you're planning to go to college instead of getting pregnant like your sister.
You're not saying SV isn't awful with this comment. You're just saying western Pennsylvania is awful as well. It's not like it's some kind of a race to the bottom.
"Awful" is going into court 3 times because the court couldn't get your house title right because you are married but didn't take your husband's last name.
"Awful" is being told you don't need a scholarship because you're just going to get pregnant anyway.
"Awful" is being a female in Japan who felt that suicide was her only option because if she got fired she was never going to get another job.
Does Silicon Valley need work on fairness? Yeah, on a lot of fronts. However, almost all of them are malfunctions of "power". Trump wasn't grabbing pussies because he's in Silicon Valley.
It's not specific to sexism, and it's not specific to Silicon Valley. It's about the fact that the powerful feel they can abuse their position.
Not sure I understand. Why do you want to adjust my level of awful? It's not like we've got to prioritise - they're different areas. It's not like we have to solve one to solve the other - the are problems that can be addressed at the same time. They're both awful situations in their local context. I don't think we need to have a race or classification between those, unless they lead to difference in how we approach them. If it's just to say this is more awful than that... what's the point?
I am pointing out that Silicon Valley sexism is an edge case and is a fire on top of your stove at best while your entire house is burning down around you everywhere else.
If you want a more geeky description and I'm being charitable, consider it an Amdahl's Law problem. You're optimizing a tiny case while leaving the big case go.
If I'm being uncharitable, it's a case of "Why do animal protesters throw paint on old ladies and not Hell's Angels?"
People are happy to attack sexism in Silicon Valley because it's pain-free. Attacking sexism around our current Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief is likely to provoke a response that people are not prepared to face.
ask lots of intelligent women from western Pennsylvania...every single relative asking you why you're planning to go to college instead of getting pregnant like your sister.
I was born in western PA. Yes, this was a thing there when I was growing up. In both cases, people are probably just being subject to their culture. They may not even think they are being aggressive or doing harm. They may even be virtue signalling from their point of view.
Nobody should be making shitty comments to begin with, nor should there be a "brogrammer" culture in the workplace, this isn't a frat. Dismissing the problem by comparing with a similar but worse problem doesn't do anything but ignore the problem all together, think you may want to read up on a fallacy called "Relative Privation"
> Why is [Insert location of choice] So Awful to Male Babysitters?
Culture and everything else that comes along with gender minority work environments. You adapt, like everyone else.
The push for institutionally enforced advantages is just insane:
> “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,”
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Giving a minority share an unfair advantage in the market just because "they're a minority" is not progress. I'm so disappointed at how manipulative these sorts of ideals are in reality. Their proponent's hearts are in the right place, but the outcomes are just so backwards.
Regardless of your gender, if you're in an environment and you're discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it. Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
If there is not equality of outcome, then either: (1) no equality of opportunity exists; or (2) there is some confounding factor.
Ironically, you identify the thing that creates unequal opportunity: the "culture" that "comes along with gender minority work environments." Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't. That's not equality of opportunity.
Acknowledging that the existence of a gender disparity in and of itself creates a hostile culture for the minority gets you halfway to understanding why attempts at eliminating the disparity directly are justified. And such measures are inherently temporary: once you eliminate then disparity that creates the hostile culture, you eliminate the need to take any affirmative measures to keep the new ratio.
You also precisely identify why you can't fix past institutional discrimination simply by no longer doing it. The past discrimination creates a culture that's hostile to the minority gender. That culture is self-perpetuating without active intervention (the "policing" you complain of).
> Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't. That's not equality of opportunity.
Depends where you define the line between opportunity and outcome. You could take a step back and argue that equal opportunity exists in the education space for both women and men to thrive in said field. The fact that this doesn't result in a 50/50 split in gender in the market is an indicator to me that the cause isn't institutional, it's cultural.
You can't police culture and you shouldn't be trying to police the outcomes of a "free market". I appreciate your perspective, but I think you've honed in on symptoms, not the cause.
If the cause is institutional, fix it 100%. All hands on board, sign me up.
If its cultural - adapt. Cultures will also adapt in-time to the individuals that make up said culture.
To me, equality of opportunity means "substitution equality." I.e. you should be able to swap someone's gender and the way the external world treats them should be identical at every step.
> I.e. you should be able to swap someone's gender and the way the external world treats them should be identical at every step.
This is equal outcome in my eyes, not equal opportunity.
It's a stance of absolutes, a "perfect-world" scenario - a practical impossibility.
You've got to align your goals and perspectives to the reality of the world. Men and women are genetically and physically different which manifests in many different ways culturally. There are so many variables here that I'd be writing an essay if I wanted to list everything that shapes my bias - but the point I'm getting at here is; as individuals we're all different in varying ways and this is a great thing (I'd rather not be genderless, featureless clones).
Focusing on eliminating negative bias is great, sure. But its not a gender issue and should never be institutionally enforced as such. Hell, cultural issues and differences should never be institutionally enforced in my eyes. It's just trading in negative discrimination for positive discrimination.
> If there is not equality of outcome, then either: (1) no equality of opportunity exists; or (2) there is some confounding factor.
That's exactly what everyone is arguing, there are cultural (sub-cultural) issues and it's probably up to the subculture to fix them. You can't fix the lack of women by discriminating against men, you have to get them interested in computers as kids. You can't fix the lack of black people by discriminating against white people and asians, you have to do it by ensuring they have schools just as good as the white kids and quite possibly a lot of sub-cultural issues.
> Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't.
Correct for the US, incorrect for China, Romania, India or Ukraine. So it doesn't seem to be a universal global phenomenon, Silicon Valley can always import people (and women specifically) from programming-friendlier cultures, so there's little incentive to treat it as a problem.
Except culture begets the discrimination. The immediate fix is to go through legality. If you want to change things on the long-term to make it a better place for people of all genders, races and religions to work, you have to change the culture. Otherwise it's a problem that will never, ever go away.
For many minorities, by the time they get to work, they're so sick of discrimination that they prefer to quit, as opposed to going through the pain of official channels that are just as discriminatory as the perpetrators that they were going to report.
What you said is like saying "You burnt yourself because the house is on fire? Have you tried applying burn cream? Don't waste your time putting out the fire, just apply burn cream and live with it"
I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think you know the problems of the people affected. I take that just from "discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it".
What are the legal channels for suspecting you're denied a position because of being part of minority X. Sure, the company is all non-X, but does it prove anything? Where do you go when your opinion is being ignored every day - what's the legal channel for that? How much effort and money do you want to spend just to be treated as a normal person. You're not going to crush it. You'll be left on your own.
> Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
Sure, there's got to be a balance. You can't police everything and force anyone to think anything. But promoting going away from the status quo is a positive thing.
> The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.
In an environment that's over 80% male, not to mention largely young and/or single, women will have a rough time. I don't think SV is necessarily any worse than any other similar environment (e.g. infantry, oilfield work), but that's not high praise.
I do, but I don't have a good answer. Maybe 65/35 is already beyond the cultural tipping point. Maybe women, who are more mature at college age and now make up a sizable majority of the undergrad population, realize that there are better options than tech.
> realize that there are better options than tech.
What would those be? Tech is relatively easy, relatively highly paid, it involves no hazardous work conditions, and it can be done from almost anywhere in the world with good internet connectivity.
Travel nursing, for some people. Instead of putting in hours sitting and staring at a screen (which is somewhat hazardous in the long term), you work a 3-month stint for premium pay, then do whatever you want until you need more money.
Or if you like interacting with people more than machines, sales and marketing are universal skills that are always in demand.
Isn't that a question for women? Why haven't their number increased as much as men during the same period? My best guess is that it's due to social pressures from other women about being geeky and nothing to do with men.
"In an environment that's over 80% male, not to mention largely young and/or single, women will have a rough time."
I wonder if we ask the same questions about men in female dominated careers such as nursing, and ones where men have almost been driven out of, like K-12 education.
>I wonder if we ask the same questions about men in female dominated careers such as nursing, and ones where men have almost been driven out of, like K-12 education.
This has been mentioned many times on HN. Yes, there are programmes to get more men into teaching young people, and into nursing. (Also more women into mining and construction).
Because Silicon Valley can't even agree there is a problem.
Just look at this thread of all the people whining for more data on this supposed "problem". Some of the folks won't be happy until there are secret Amazon Echo's tabulating all the shitty comments and passive aggression in every office or emails being scanned and categorized for domineering and condescension.
and even then you'll get a bunch of "correlation doesn't equal causation, dummy!"
When a minority group is consistently saying there is a problem, one should probably question their existing beliefs and wonder if they don't see it due to some sort of bias. And it's fine to be wrong, to not have see it. However, take an honest chance to listen. Not debate. Listen.
For a bunch of smarter-than-average folks here, we're still susceptible to groupthink.
It's called death by a thousand control variables. If only the data controlled for {education, hours worked, experience, attractiveness, nail color, booger density} then you'll see no effect...
Except by then, the whole analysis becomes a charade. When you try all the possible combinations of variables and then stop the moment you find one that rejects the null hypothesis, your analysis isn't objective... it is predetermined.
I've never heard of death by a thousand control variables.
What's exactly wrong with data controlled by relevant variables such as education, hours worked, and experience? If you find a combination of variables that reject the hypothesis, maybe you should look further into it, no? Dismissing it because you think it's not objective for some absurd reason is rather unscientific. "Trying all possible combinations of variables" does not disqualify an analysis from being objective--not sure where you got that idea from.
There is nothing wrong with controls when they're relevant and have a convincing motive behind their inclusion.
What's not okay is sequentially trying all of the possible analyses and then stopping the moment you find the exact combination of variables that tells you what you had already assumed to be true. Especially so when simple analyses point to A, and you keep adding new variables until you get to B, which is exactly the case here. That is a very well known abuse of statistics. There is a reason all the well known and popular Information Criterions (which measure model quality) are parameterized by the number of parameters in the model.
And while adding control variables isn't per se bad, there are proper precautions to take when doing so, which become exponentially more costly the more you add. Such as segmented sampling, non-linearity transformations, and even controlled experiments. Because these fraudsters have a motive, the model only needs to be as rigorous as necessary to secure their predetermined conclusion. The "keep adding variables" model almost always ends up as a way to lie with statistics.
Wow, I've seen so many comments by climate change deniers using arguments so similar to yours that I literally had deja vu.
The horseshoe nature of politics will never cease to amuse me, though; thanks for the example.
Also, if a hypothesis is supported by simple studies but falls apart under more complex ones, it might be too simplistic a hypothesis. Almost as if sexism (and sexism guilt-slinging) wasn't an entirely black-and-white problem. Who'd have thought?
Climate Change Deniers are some of the biggest users of the flawed analyses that I'm talking about. For example, several climate change deniers argue that if you control for urban heat island effects, the magnitude of the human component decreases substantially. Such willy-nilly expansions of model complexity fall apart when modeled more rigorously [0][1].
You'll notice that I've never claimed that new parameters universally make the model worse. All of the common Information Criterions [2][3][4] are numerically capable of improvement of model quality with increases in parameter space...it's just unlikely. Such p-value hunting might give you the p-value you're looking for, but it is very unlikely to improve the model.
Sexism is a hard problem. Throwing variables wantonly at models until sexism disappears isn't doing anything for the problem...it's nothing more than a pseudoscientific way of pretending it doesn't exist.
I will not apologise for being driven by evidence. If we accept claims we agree with on face value, we lose the moral high ground to reject claims we disagree with on the basis of evidence. Without good evidence, all is lost. We do not blithely accept the claims made by Trump, nor should we blithely accept the claims made by our allies.
If sexism is a major problem in the technology industry, it should be easy to produce data demonstrating that fact. Until we understand the magnitude and nature of the problem we face, any attempts to find a solution are, in a very literal sense, completely misguided.
So what counts as evidence? Differences in hiring rates, different percentages of the workforce, pay gaps, lack of advancement, mountains of anecdata? Because it seems like when confronted with data, people are quick to shout "correlation" and "cultural factors".
IMO the reason is that most IT wasn't really engineering until fairly recently. Back in the 90s, which weren't long ago, you could make a ton of money without really knowing anything at all.
Nowadays those people are senior leaders. So they do what people do in these situations: gather the tribe. (Aka old boys network) More than in any other line of business that I have seen, IT has lots of old school ethnic and cultural fiefdoms. Bro guys, various south asian groups, school alumni, etc.
The places I have worked at that had more women in technology also had fewer of these networks.
Look at the story about the dude stealing tech from Google, starting a fake company to get bought out by his pals at Uber. In what other industry is bullshit like that even possible!
>“Workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled” are the main reasons women leave tech.
Based on what I've seen over the last 10 years working at a variety of software companies: both men and women get mistreated, roughly equally, at least at the places I've worked. People often assume the reason they are being mistreated is due to some factor of themselves (race, gender, etc), but this is the fundamental attribution fallacy (see social pyschology) that colors our perceptions.
But, i haven't worked at every company. Perhaps, there are some where egregious conditions do exist, as mentioned in the article.
As long as the talent oversupply exists, it will be hard for men & women affected by these adverse conditions to move to companies with better cultures.
But women are leaving at a higher rate than men. And if you look at the diversity stats that come out it is usually the case that women are less represented in management than even tech, which suggests their complaints about access/stalling may be more correct in aggregate.
There was an article a while back (I can't link it right now because I'm in mobile) that showed that even when they masked voices, women did worse in programming interviews.
The problem? They didn't bounce back from failure as well as men did. They failed and quit, while the men continued to fail until they had success. How can you know this isn't a similar effect?
Men are often the breadwinner and socially conditioned to provide for their families so they might be forced to stay, even when they want to quit, and you have to stay to even have a chance at a promotion unless you were born an elite like Elizabeth Holmes.
Engineers are aholes. How the negativity manifests itself is different between genders but the fact remains, Engineers are aholes. Nonstop, 24/7. As a software contractor I interview more than most I can tell interview horror stories that will peel paint. Has little to do with my gender though. Key man is common problem in the valley. Some person makes themselves a key man in the company and then reign down holy hell on everyone around them. This scenario plays out every day in Silicon Valley. The point is the problem is much larger than just how women are treated, but how people are treated. If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen is the mind set. Its a dog-eat-dog world and I'm wearing Milkbone shorts, as they comedian quipped. Root cause is not gender specific. Root cause is mean people in general. Mean people are going to be mean people, independent of gender. It doesn't help that Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, Larry Elison, Steve Jobs are pretty much mean people role model CEOs people understand being mean as necessary. It would be interesting to redo this study and swap being mean for gender as the bias. I have no data but I suspect that being mean is a far bigger factor than gender bias. At a minimum being mean plays a large role and if addressing part of the root cause is not part of the solution then all of the bias related solutions are sure to fall short.
If everyone was respectful then of course the problem would resolve itself.
But imagining for a second that the story did somehow manage to get statistics and quantify the "mean"-ness of an individual, there would still be case for sexism being a factor that uniquely impacts women more negatively.
For example, many people are somewhat "mean" but
1. Are these people only mean to women?
2. Are they "meaner" to women than men?
3. Are they mean in different ways to women? (ie, sexual harassment is usually only towards women)
Interesting thoughts though. I wonder though if emphasizing a more radically respectful culture in general would make a difference. It would definitely curb the resentment that men feel over stuff like diversity hiring goals, but without data, we do not know if it would meaningfully make women and minorities experiences any better.
Silicon Valley is awful to many groups. From Spanish speakers, to non-homeowner natives, to women.
I feel like maybe we ought to give some attention to the situation of the masses of Spanish speakers in the bay area. They're certainly facing far worse than women in tech companies, and it's a much more fundamental problem.
Everyone saying "SV isn't worse than X" is missing the point of the article. Yes, we know plenty of industries are more awful. The point is that SV talks a big game when it comes to taking care of workers (high pay, perks, unlimited vacation), but doesn't always walk the walk when it comes to improving the treatment of female or minority workers.
Relevant quote:
> That the tech industry would prove so hostile to women is more than a little counterintuitive. Silicon Valley is populated with progressive, hyper-educated people who talk a lot about making the world better. It’s also a young field, with none of the history of, say, law or medicine, where women were long denied spots in graduate schools intended for “breadwinning men.”
> “It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”
Everyone has a bias, plain and simple. You don't overcome the bias with programs or incentives, it takes a fundamental change of attitude among the people perpetuating the bias. Its something that should be acknowledged and pointed out but not forced down people's throats.
Yes, with the distinction that they're (often) victims of themselves.
There has been plenty of poor, alienated groups throughout recent history. Irish, asians, jews, post WW europeans, vietnamese, balkan refugees. They all reverted to the mean (some above) in a generation or two, so at what point do you consider that there may be something different with this particular group that they've been unable to do that?
In the same way you can't blame silicon valley for the lack of women when their simply aren't enough coming through to get close to 50% employment. It's not SV discriminating against women, it's women choosing not to go into comp sci.
Now here we are, telling women and minorities that they made the wrong decision, as though they're helpless individuals that can't decide for themselves.
I don't think this conversation will be productive. Slavery is a completely different phenomenon than all of what you mentioned. I encourage you to go read up on this.
You can start with the The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander.
ok, just to start let me acknowledge that sexism is pervasive in tech as well as elsewhere.
but maybe Silicon Valley is awful to everyone. the reality distortion field that sustains the notion that these people are special, in fact gods among men, twists the normal social contract into something unrecognizable.
put that in the context of a fairly sexist society, add a healthy dose of people who are in tech because they couldn't hack it in the normal world, and voila
I was watching the "Silicon Valley" TV show and was surprised how women are presented. Whether they are coders or non-tech, the theme went like this:
Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
Women who can't code: generally presented either as stupid, dumb or as assistants of men who knew better.
It seem that Hollywood is also complicit in presenting women as sex object. But I wasn't sure if this really is the truth about the culture in general in SV.
> Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
133 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadPeople don't like the answer, but there's only one: anonymity. Any other solution simply changes who will be discriminated against.
feel free to reach out at jbhatab@gmail.com if youd be so kind
People are really biased creatures. Usually the intent is not malicious, but rather caused by tribalism, evolution, empathy, mirror neurons etc.
One example is ageism, which is actually a systematic bias. For examplem to be a president you have be 35 or older. Let's imagine we created a perfect candidate in a lab which is 29. She's creme de la creme. And we have abolished this law.
No dice. She would not win.
Was it the picture or just bots picking up on activity changes?
I agree about anonymity though, it's the only solution that adds a degree of fairness.
I think that the answer to this question is very important. If we operate on the presumption that SV is uniquely awful, then we may be looking for solutions to sexism in all the wrong places.
If you read the article there is data too, btw.
There's also evidence (e.g. in the linked article) that women are indeed treated unfairly.
Not on its own, it's not.
The vast majority of healthcare workers are female. 98% of dental hygienists, and 91% of RNs are women.
There are 3.6m programmers in the US (as of 2017) and 3.5m nurses (as of 2011) - programmers and nurses have relatively similar salary ranges.
Is the underrepresentation of men in the nursing profession worth addressing on its own?
How about electricians? 99% of journeyman electricians in the US are male. Is that worth addressing?
Yes, and there are programmes encouraging men to go into nursing.
We do.
I don't believe that's true.
The gender gap is particularly significant in careers that pay well and are growing in numbers, such as those in IT. (It's a problem that most flight attendants are female, but IMHO it's less pressing.)
It's the same reason why after every election there are dozens of articles about white progressives being at odds with the black community, as opposed to just having a general article on race relations in America or whatever.
It does not. Another reading would say, "why is it as awful as it is?"
>Do we have any comparative data that suggests that SV is any more sexist than most industries?
You provide no comparative data. Comparison to other industries is necessary to identify the scale and causes of the problem, which are necessary in order to fix the problem.
How bad does tech have to be for you to acknowledge a problem? Isn't "worse the average female participation" bad enough?
0) https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/Computer_information_technology...
1) http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/?d...
2) https://bol.bna.com/the-legal-professions-gender-imbalance-i...
Who said I didn't acknowledge there was a problem? The descriptor at issue is awful. The usual conditions for use of the word "awful" require more than just there being a problem.
The alternate hypothesis that I mentioned, that sexism in tech comes from the country as a whole, is not a denial of there being a problem. I don't see how that could be inferred.
>tech is generally worse(0) than doctors(1) and lawyers(2)
Lawyers and doctors are generally highly educated, whereas the majority of the technical workforce has a Master's in some kind of engineering or even less. The educational institutions provide a means to change culture which generally means that cultural changes propagate faster here than in most of the country. As such it's a bit of a biased comparison. This is why, as you mention, there have been "huge improvements" in such a short time span as the last decade.
The gender imbalance is particularly acute in silicon valley and I think SV has an obligation to do something about it. It isn't about whose fault it is.
- causation matters
- SV is not a notable causal locus
- Generally SV companies should be expected to comply with federal laws/norms on inclusiveness but "special action" is unnecessary and mostly self-congratulatory (oh wow this tech stuff is so awesome everyone should do it)
- there is a plausible if isolated and somewhat orthogonal correlation between companies which make money by "breaking rules" and companies where people break rules as relates to acceptable social conduct. In the specific case of companies (AirBnB, Uber) who are essentially being paid by venture capitalists to ignore regulations and hide the money trail it makes sense that such norms may enforce loyalty. It's sort of like David Cameron's porcine bride. However only a small (but highly notorious) fraction of SV companies depend on this.
On the third point I want to note that saying "tech jobs are awesome, why aren't more women in them" is a sneaky way of asserting "tech jobs are awesome" i.e. for everyone. In reality they're okay but it's not like people here are actually happier or anything.
This is a big problem even if there isn't active discrimination by Google (or anyone else).
Why so few women study computer science is an important question. Again, I think it's dangerous to presume the answer without sufficient data.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
There are definitely problems in how women are treated in tech, just as there are in every other field with similar demographics that comes to mind. Those problems need to be addressed.
The title of this article is "Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?", though. "Awful". Do you really believe that it's "awful", particularly relative to all other professions?
My point being, SV companies are so diverse across their actual industries it's probably best to compare them as a region against companies in other major regions.
-- from the article (which includes a link)
Question was asked in the article, ("Where are the numbers?"). [0] For all the posturing on how good SV is at data, the question has to be asked, "Why can't tech companies collect and show data on staff?" [1] The only conclusion I can make is SV tech companies do not see this as an ^authentic^ problem.
Reference
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13880515
[1] Staff numbers, pay, diversity, disciplinary actions taken, reported, etc.
It's like Wall Street, selling cars, working oilfields. The popular perception has been fuelled by megafounders who struck gold, becoming the richest people in the world by their mid 20's. SV is in a 40 gold rush for the next big thing and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.
For all sorts of reasons that have been beaten to death, most women won't stick around in such a field.
For gender balance to return in our lifetimes software engineering would need to lose much of the existing culture
If you want horror stories, ask lots of intelligent women from western Pennsylvania why they are now sitting in Silicon Valley.
There is a big difference between a couple of socially inept brogrammers making shitty comments and every single relative asking you why you're planning to go to college instead of getting pregnant like your sister.
"Awful" is going into court 3 times because the court couldn't get your house title right because you are married but didn't take your husband's last name.
"Awful" is being told you don't need a scholarship because you're just going to get pregnant anyway.
"Awful" is being a female in Japan who felt that suicide was her only option because if she got fired she was never going to get another job.
Does Silicon Valley need work on fairness? Yeah, on a lot of fronts. However, almost all of them are malfunctions of "power". Trump wasn't grabbing pussies because he's in Silicon Valley.
It's not specific to sexism, and it's not specific to Silicon Valley. It's about the fact that the powerful feel they can abuse their position.
If you want a more geeky description and I'm being charitable, consider it an Amdahl's Law problem. You're optimizing a tiny case while leaving the big case go.
If I'm being uncharitable, it's a case of "Why do animal protesters throw paint on old ladies and not Hell's Angels?"
People are happy to attack sexism in Silicon Valley because it's pain-free. Attacking sexism around our current Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief is likely to provoke a response that people are not prepared to face.
Unfortunately that's the important battle.
I was born in western PA. Yes, this was a thing there when I was growing up. In both cases, people are probably just being subject to their culture. They may not even think they are being aggressive or doing harm. They may even be virtue signalling from their point of view.
Culture and everything else that comes along with gender minority work environments. You adapt, like everyone else.
The push for institutionally enforced advantages is just insane:
> “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,”
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Giving a minority share an unfair advantage in the market just because "they're a minority" is not progress. I'm so disappointed at how manipulative these sorts of ideals are in reality. Their proponent's hearts are in the right place, but the outcomes are just so backwards.
Regardless of your gender, if you're in an environment and you're discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it. Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
/rant
Ironically, you identify the thing that creates unequal opportunity: the "culture" that "comes along with gender minority work environments." Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't. That's not equality of opportunity.
Acknowledging that the existence of a gender disparity in and of itself creates a hostile culture for the minority gets you halfway to understanding why attempts at eliminating the disparity directly are justified. And such measures are inherently temporary: once you eliminate then disparity that creates the hostile culture, you eliminate the need to take any affirmative measures to keep the new ratio.
You also precisely identify why you can't fix past institutional discrimination simply by no longer doing it. The past discrimination creates a culture that's hostile to the minority gender. That culture is self-perpetuating without active intervention (the "policing" you complain of).
Depends where you define the line between opportunity and outcome. You could take a step back and argue that equal opportunity exists in the education space for both women and men to thrive in said field. The fact that this doesn't result in a 50/50 split in gender in the market is an indicator to me that the cause isn't institutional, it's cultural.
You can't police culture and you shouldn't be trying to police the outcomes of a "free market". I appreciate your perspective, but I think you've honed in on symptoms, not the cause.
If the cause is institutional, fix it 100%. All hands on board, sign me up.
If its cultural - adapt. Cultures will also adapt in-time to the individuals that make up said culture.
What would that argument look like?
This is equal outcome in my eyes, not equal opportunity. It's a stance of absolutes, a "perfect-world" scenario - a practical impossibility.
You've got to align your goals and perspectives to the reality of the world. Men and women are genetically and physically different which manifests in many different ways culturally. There are so many variables here that I'd be writing an essay if I wanted to list everything that shapes my bias - but the point I'm getting at here is; as individuals we're all different in varying ways and this is a great thing (I'd rather not be genderless, featureless clones).
Focusing on eliminating negative bias is great, sure. But its not a gender issue and should never be institutionally enforced as such. Hell, cultural issues and differences should never be institutionally enforced in my eyes. It's just trading in negative discrimination for positive discrimination.
That's exactly what everyone is arguing, there are cultural (sub-cultural) issues and it's probably up to the subculture to fix them. You can't fix the lack of women by discriminating against men, you have to get them interested in computers as kids. You can't fix the lack of black people by discriminating against white people and asians, you have to do it by ensuring they have schools just as good as the white kids and quite possibly a lot of sub-cultural issues.
Correct for the US, incorrect for China, Romania, India or Ukraine. So it doesn't seem to be a universal global phenomenon, Silicon Valley can always import people (and women specifically) from programming-friendlier cultures, so there's little incentive to treat it as a problem.
For many minorities, by the time they get to work, they're so sick of discrimination that they prefer to quit, as opposed to going through the pain of official channels that are just as discriminatory as the perpetrators that they were going to report.
What you said is like saying "You burnt yourself because the house is on fire? Have you tried applying burn cream? Don't waste your time putting out the fire, just apply burn cream and live with it"
What are the legal channels for suspecting you're denied a position because of being part of minority X. Sure, the company is all non-X, but does it prove anything? Where do you go when your opinion is being ignored every day - what's the legal channel for that? How much effort and money do you want to spend just to be treated as a normal person. You're not going to crush it. You'll be left on your own.
> Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
Sure, there's got to be a balance. You can't police everything and force anyone to think anything. But promoting going away from the status quo is a positive thing.
> The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.
In an environment that's over 80% male, not to mention largely young and/or single, women will have a rough time. I don't think SV is necessarily any worse than any other similar environment (e.g. infantry, oilfield work), but that's not high praise.
It's a bit off-topic, but this old Phil Greenspun article comes to mind: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
What would those be? Tech is relatively easy, relatively highly paid, it involves no hazardous work conditions, and it can be done from almost anywhere in the world with good internet connectivity.
Or if you like interacting with people more than machines, sales and marketing are universal skills that are always in demand.
I wonder if we ask the same questions about men in female dominated careers such as nursing, and ones where men have almost been driven out of, like K-12 education.
This has been mentioned many times on HN. Yes, there are programmes to get more men into teaching young people, and into nursing. (Also more women into mining and construction).
also: I had no idea there was even a down vote button on HN.
Just look at this thread of all the people whining for more data on this supposed "problem". Some of the folks won't be happy until there are secret Amazon Echo's tabulating all the shitty comments and passive aggression in every office or emails being scanned and categorized for domineering and condescension.
and even then you'll get a bunch of "correlation doesn't equal causation, dummy!"
When a minority group is consistently saying there is a problem, one should probably question their existing beliefs and wonder if they don't see it due to some sort of bias. And it's fine to be wrong, to not have see it. However, take an honest chance to listen. Not debate. Listen.
For a bunch of smarter-than-average folks here, we're still susceptible to groupthink.
Except by then, the whole analysis becomes a charade. When you try all the possible combinations of variables and then stop the moment you find one that rejects the null hypothesis, your analysis isn't objective... it is predetermined.
What's exactly wrong with data controlled by relevant variables such as education, hours worked, and experience? If you find a combination of variables that reject the hypothesis, maybe you should look further into it, no? Dismissing it because you think it's not objective for some absurd reason is rather unscientific. "Trying all possible combinations of variables" does not disqualify an analysis from being objective--not sure where you got that idea from.
What's not okay is sequentially trying all of the possible analyses and then stopping the moment you find the exact combination of variables that tells you what you had already assumed to be true. Especially so when simple analyses point to A, and you keep adding new variables until you get to B, which is exactly the case here. That is a very well known abuse of statistics. There is a reason all the well known and popular Information Criterions (which measure model quality) are parameterized by the number of parameters in the model.
And while adding control variables isn't per se bad, there are proper precautions to take when doing so, which become exponentially more costly the more you add. Such as segmented sampling, non-linearity transformations, and even controlled experiments. Because these fraudsters have a motive, the model only needs to be as rigorous as necessary to secure their predetermined conclusion. The "keep adding variables" model almost always ends up as a way to lie with statistics.
The horseshoe nature of politics will never cease to amuse me, though; thanks for the example.
Also, if a hypothesis is supported by simple studies but falls apart under more complex ones, it might be too simplistic a hypothesis. Almost as if sexism (and sexism guilt-slinging) wasn't an entirely black-and-white problem. Who'd have thought?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
You'll notice that I've never claimed that new parameters universally make the model worse. All of the common Information Criterions [2][3][4] are numerically capable of improvement of model quality with increases in parameter space...it's just unlikely. Such p-value hunting might give you the p-value you're looking for, but it is very unlikely to improve the model.
Sexism is a hard problem. Throwing variables wantonly at models until sexism disappears isn't doing anything for the problem...it's nothing more than a pseudoscientific way of pretending it doesn't exist.
[0] https://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.ht...
[1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/october/urban-heat-island...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_information_criterion
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviance_information_criterion
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akaike_information_criterion
If sexism is a major problem in the technology industry, it should be easy to produce data demonstrating that fact. Until we understand the magnitude and nature of the problem we face, any attempts to find a solution are, in a very literal sense, completely misguided.
Solid comparative studies that account for confounding factors. Something obviously not taught in gender studies.
Nowadays those people are senior leaders. So they do what people do in these situations: gather the tribe. (Aka old boys network) More than in any other line of business that I have seen, IT has lots of old school ethnic and cultural fiefdoms. Bro guys, various south asian groups, school alumni, etc.
The places I have worked at that had more women in technology also had fewer of these networks.
Look at the story about the dude stealing tech from Google, starting a fake company to get bought out by his pals at Uber. In what other industry is bullshit like that even possible!
Based on what I've seen over the last 10 years working at a variety of software companies: both men and women get mistreated, roughly equally, at least at the places I've worked. People often assume the reason they are being mistreated is due to some factor of themselves (race, gender, etc), but this is the fundamental attribution fallacy (see social pyschology) that colors our perceptions.
But, i haven't worked at every company. Perhaps, there are some where egregious conditions do exist, as mentioned in the article.
As long as the talent oversupply exists, it will be hard for men & women affected by these adverse conditions to move to companies with better cultures.
The problem? They didn't bounce back from failure as well as men did. They failed and quit, while the men continued to fail until they had success. How can you know this isn't a similar effect?
This is the article I mentioned.
But imagining for a second that the story did somehow manage to get statistics and quantify the "mean"-ness of an individual, there would still be case for sexism being a factor that uniquely impacts women more negatively.
For example, many people are somewhat "mean" but 1. Are these people only mean to women? 2. Are they "meaner" to women than men? 3. Are they mean in different ways to women? (ie, sexual harassment is usually only towards women)
Interesting thoughts though. I wonder though if emphasizing a more radically respectful culture in general would make a difference. It would definitely curb the resentment that men feel over stuff like diversity hiring goals, but without data, we do not know if it would meaningfully make women and minorities experiences any better.
I feel like maybe we ought to give some attention to the situation of the masses of Spanish speakers in the bay area. They're certainly facing far worse than women in tech companies, and it's a much more fundamental problem.
Relevant quote:
> That the tech industry would prove so hostile to women is more than a little counterintuitive. Silicon Valley is populated with progressive, hyper-educated people who talk a lot about making the world better. It’s also a young field, with none of the history of, say, law or medicine, where women were long denied spots in graduate schools intended for “breadwinning men.”
> “It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”
There has been plenty of poor, alienated groups throughout recent history. Irish, asians, jews, post WW europeans, vietnamese, balkan refugees. They all reverted to the mean (some above) in a generation or two, so at what point do you consider that there may be something different with this particular group that they've been unable to do that?
In the same way you can't blame silicon valley for the lack of women when their simply aren't enough coming through to get close to 50% employment. It's not SV discriminating against women, it's women choosing not to go into comp sci.
Now here we are, telling women and minorities that they made the wrong decision, as though they're helpless individuals that can't decide for themselves.
You can start with the The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander.
But why change the subject? The past isn't going to improve the future.
> > Who are you to say that there culture
Hmm.
Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13872689 and marked it off-topic.
but maybe Silicon Valley is awful to everyone. the reality distortion field that sustains the notion that these people are special, in fact gods among men, twists the normal social contract into something unrecognizable.
put that in the context of a fairly sexist society, add a healthy dose of people who are in tech because they couldn't hack it in the normal world, and voila
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
Women who can't code: generally presented either as stupid, dumb or as assistants of men who knew better.
It seem that Hollywood is also complicit in presenting women as sex object. But I wasn't sure if this really is the truth about the culture in general in SV.
Carla played by http://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley/cast-and-crew/alice-wetter... was a prominent woman coder with none of what you described exhibited.
Granted, I can't think of any other female coding characters on that show.
Did you mean the HBO "Silicon Valley" show or a Bravo TV series with the same name (later re-branded "Start-Ups")?
I read or skimmed every comment up to this moment, and every single one sounds like it's written by a male.
Perhaps I'm silly but I feel a female commenting here would have mentioned their experience-- and nobody so far does as far as I could tell.