The biggest factor for me has been when an employer promises changes to how
the tech team is managed and then doesn’t deliver on them. To a certain
extent all teams struggle with the trade-offs between spending time
developing good specs versus staying agile, and between addressing technical
debt and building new features. But I’ve left companies after years of
chaotically fighting fires while simultaneously needing to build new
features, or after repeatedly getting disorganized braindumps or single line
descriptions from stakeholders rather than the thoughtful, detailed specs
they’ve promised.
This is everything and describes my current situation perfectly! It's so difficult to program as well as design specs and UI and manage time as well. It teaches you a lot but it's much easier if what you are being asked to build is clear in the first place!
They don't tell builders "give me a house, I want turrets and a fence and 23 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms and I want it done to a really high finish by next week".
Instead they get a detailed, industry standard, multi-stage plan that has everything they need to start, as well as access to an architect that can check on their work and when things go wrong a process for change management is included. And no-one expects a house to be built well over a weekend.
That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting, and making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow, plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.
You can quote a long paragraph that is represented as one big line very simply like this:
> That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting ...
I cut and pasted my own paragraph above. I typed a single > character in front, a space, and a pair of asterisks around it.
Is the code block format not explicitly designed for quoting lengthy snippets of text in a non-disruptive way?
>You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting
Not much work, just a handful of keystrokes with the right software, and that's without optimizing the flow much. Could get it down more by making a macro.
>making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow
While true, if the quote is indeed lengthy, wouldn't this serve the reader better than a line of text that wraps many times? Those are hard to follow.
>plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.
Yes, this improves readability by making the barrier between quotation and response more readily visible.
The only downside seems to be that the block may clamp down to a horizontal scrollbox before some reader wants it to do so. For the record, on my computer (3440x1440 raw, some HiDPI settings make effective resolution significantly smaller), I never run across such blocks that require manual scrolling. On my phone, I do need to scroll horizontally, but I think that's nice. I have not yet seen it actually break a page or make it unusable.
I don't think it's a good technique for short line snippets, but yes, I do think it improves readability for long (paragraph-length or longer) quotes.
> Is the code block format not explicitly designed for quoting lengthy snippets of text in a non-disruptive way?
No, it's designed to preserve alignment and line breaks by using a monospace font and not wrapping, specifically for the purpose of presenting source code. It's modestly useful for tabular data for the same reason. It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.
>It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.
I mean, I disagree. It looks and seems better to me. I understand that the font is monospaced but I don't see that as a problem. I understand that the text is put inside its own horizontal scrollbox instead of wrapped automatically, but again, I also don't see that as a problem for a lengthy block of text. I agree it would be annoying to have to scroll on every quotation anyone made.
When I say long blocks of text, I mean a snippet that is 60 lines by 60 columns, like the transcript excerpt I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13976410 . Personally, I would rather scroll past that than scrolling past a long italicized, autowrapped block every time I came to the thread.
People keep saying it breaks the layout in some cases, and if so, then they are right to ask that people refrain from using it until the bug gets fixed. However, I haven't observed such breakage happening, and no one I've asked has shown it. At the moment, it appears to be a personal preference thing.
I think there's a case to be made that, in general, women may be more sensitive to some universal tech industry issues which men tend to shrug off or otherwise deal with differently.
Generalizing, actually. But I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing.
Taken individually, you'll find folks all over any given spectrum, but if we're going to address "Women in Tech" vs the implicit "Men in Tech" then we can't just say "well the two are exactly the same and therefore there's no discussion to be had."
Of course there's differences between men and women. Different values, different priorities, different sensitivities. Maybe there are issues in nursing and education which men are more sensitive towards, and that's why there's such a larger opposing gender disparity in those fields? That doesn't mean that either gender is necessarily "weaker", just "different".
If we want to help technical managers retain women, then it would be helpful to determine which issues women are generally more sensitive to, even if they're the same issues men have faced for however long but which have not driven them away from the industry.
Can you pick out any problems in particular pointed out in this article, that are more frequently picked up on by women?
Most of the common ones seem to be a company or manager's words not matching their actions. The sample sizes I've experienced may be fairly small so far (very few female colleagues, as ever), but I've seen men and women leave in equal measure for that type of transgression.
I don't know of any studies, anecdotes aren't data, and I don't know of any particular issues listed in the article that might affect women more than men.
The only point I'm trying to make is the obvious one: men and women are different. It's a stupid point, taken at face value, but it's one that seems to get lost every time someone says "but men face those same issues" or "that doesn't seem like a gendered issue to me".
Yeah, I agree that on aggregate, men and women have subtly different tendencies.
The reason I bring it up though, is that I don't see or experience any particular bias around most of the the issues in the article. Most of the points raised really don't seem like gendered issues.
We need to find a way to figure out which of those differences are important, then. YC seems to be trying via this Ask a Female Engineer series, but if we ask those female engineers which issues are most important to them in regards to what would drive them away and the answers they give aren't satisfactory, then what conclusions can be drawn?
If the issues listed are largely the same issues faced by men, and if the issues have an equivalent impact on male engineer retention, then the answers are incomplete or we're asking the wrong women. Maybe we should ask female former engineers why they left the industry?
Old school feminists have been cringing at this trend for a couple of decades at this point. It's unfortunate the newer generations haven't been exposed to where we came from and how we're now regressing back, undoing much of the work they did.
Um hope I'm not being humourless but obviously if the percentage was reversed then the Men would notice and a majority would be somewhat bothered by it. Especially if they perceived a difference in how they were treated as part of that smaller group...
Isn't this kind of the point? Am I missing summat?
Your being down voted because no one wants to hear it, but there is some truth to it.
It isn't so much a biological difference (there may be some of that) but one that is likely a byproduct of how we socialize children [1].
Fixing this issue in adults is a hell of a lot harder to fix than it is in kids.
It doesn't help that software engineering as a whole, is to varying degrees, broken. From how we interview to how we manage projects [2]. We simply have no idea how to build something effective and repeatable within the constraints of the current system.
Funny how you're being downvoted too. You're probably being downvoted for pointing out the naked truth about software engineering and its utter brokenness.
It's probably true that, for the most part, men are less likely to mind, say, crude sexual remarks about women, but I don't think it follows that we should just tell women to suck it up.
I had the exact same reaction. Common themes were along the lines of not having confidence in your direct manager, especially in cases where technical folks have been promoted into management positions. I hear this all the time.
It's not like women are aliens with concerns that are completely divorced from male employees. They just have a superset of concerns that also includes the potential for gender discrimination from coworkers and managers.
I would hazard a guess that a weak manager, manages all employees poorly. However, I would bet a lot of money that, like so many things in life, when you are bad in all quadrants on one thing, you'll likely be bad at other things like managing women. Realistically, they are the nearly the same to manage, but you can do some dumb things to make them feel excluded or make them feel like there is a boys club (probably because there is.)
Susan Fowler's team, for example, a bad manager thought it was a good idea to save costs by not purchasing leather jackets for women on the Uber DevOps team. Spare the few hundred or thousand dollars (even if it were in the thousands) and make your employees feel equal and like they are a part of the same tribe. It's common sense. Pocket change to Uber and it makes people feel comfortable around their coworkers, and they will enjoy being part of a team and being passionate about their work-unit, co-workers and take pride in their company.
Here's some anecdotal evidence. I had a product manager last week tell me she thought it was great that our company bought women's jackets for the team instead of making them wear bulky men's sizes like so many companies she has worked for in the past. That cost me less than $150 for them to set up the plates/screens/whatever with the printer but it bought me thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in good-will. Great investment. For me, this was a small gesture on my part and the companies behalf. But, it went a long way. The ladies on my teams are strong contributors, and it's table stakes for me to make sure they feel included and part of the team. Even if I have to tailor to them. Pun intended.
My direct management of every employee is a little bit different based on who they are, their communication style, how they receive feedback and their work-style. I assume that gender goes a little bit into how I interact with each person on my team and I am willing to admit I probably have some biases but overall if you're already managing your team with a high eq, you'll fare well and create an inclusive team.
If these are your issues as well, you can join in and help fix them. No one is trying to invalidate your problems; this is a call to action for better engineering management practices.
Except when you interview only women about reasons they leave companies, what you hope to discover is why more women than men might be leaving. This article offers no insight on that question.
Well, due to the outrageous skew in gender, I think you have to read these things more deeply. There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries and a field that is open to all (by means of a computer science undergraduate program.) Look at something that is much harder than becoming a software engineer: becoming an MD in the United States. It has far higher mental and educational requirements; it's simply harder. An MD can learn C++ (to code their medical application) much faster than a C++ engineer can learn even a tiny part of the MD's domain expertise.
Women comprise 34% of MD's to 66% men. That is a statistical skew, but nowhere near the 93% male that programmers face. In essence when you reply to a comment here on HN you could carelessly say "he" referring to an OP without referring to their first name, whereas if this were a forum for physicians you would not make that assumption because it's not skewed enough for you to do so. (Here on HN there are lots of female engineers but they don't usually announce themselves explicitly.)
So software engineering has a gender problem. Now we're getting an interview about what some people cite for leaving an industry in which they can make six figures within their first five years, with nothing more than an undergraduate education or the equivalent self-learning of 25% of one.
So it is important to read the interviews extremely carefully and with a very open mind.
For example, what are some of the worst things about being a software engineer: insane hours; intense mental focus (it is impossible not to take your work home with you and I am sure many programmers routinely dream of the tasks they are working on); coupled with bull-pen open space offices:
However, open office plans[1] were not cited by the women in this interview. Zero mentions as far as I can see (I re-skimmed and also searched inline for "open').
The word hour or hours does not occur a single time.
So even though it appears that the issues cited are independent of gender, it is imperative to read these interviews very deeply. There could be more to them than meets the eye.
I don't know what it is, but it has to be in these interviews, lurking beneath the surface. Read more deeply.
Does software engineering have a gender problem, or a social validation problem?
It is no secret that women in nations where software engineering is likely to be a significant source of employment are far more socially attuned than men are; whether this is by nurture or nature is grist for another mill at another time. It is also no secret that software engineers rank lower on social validation than doctors. Empirically, look at a sampling of org charts, and statistically, pure software engineers (not counting Fellow-type positions, for example) rarely call the shots. Not that they should as a rule: I'm pointing out the reality.
Regardless of the US reality for doctors, with the constraints imposed upon them by the dysfunctionally-broken US healthcare policies, the social perception of doctors is "doctors call the shots". The phrase "doctor's orders" carries enormous cultural weight behind it.
To empirically test a weak form of this hypothesis, compare the number of women managers who were originally trained as programmers to women software engineers. If there is a statistically significant deviation, then some Maxwell's Demon-like mechanism at work performs a sorting function that emerges this deviation, gradually exerting an inexorable pull upon women programmers into management. A stronger experimental confirmation of this hypothesis would require someone with far more training in such psycho-social factors discrimination to devise an experiment to empirically test.
I'm not discounting the very real challenges women software engineers face. Personally, I have not witnessed first-hand any of the workplace vibe-killers described, and I've been in a lot of different workplaces by dint of my wandering consulting career, but I can believe it happens because I've also seen some really bad behavior in the species, and generally I tend to attract clients with pretty solid corporate cultures. But women tend as a statistical aggregate to pay attention to the nuances of social rankings far more than most men realize, and especially men in software engineering realize.
Putting "It is no secret" before a claim doesn't validate it, please provide some support/context for "[female devs] are far more socially attuned than men are".
Also, a phrase like "doctor's orders" is common, because most members of the public will have occasion to see a doctor, the profession having existing for a long time. There's no saying "CTO's orders", yet this is obviously a position of power.
Also, your observances wrt men and social ranking could easily be confounded if you don't have a complete knowledge of the filters on the men & women you see in IT.
Saying "C-level's orders" doesn't carry anywhere the same weight as "software engineer's orders". Given a technical decision, what weighting is the CFO's decision given over the software engineer tasked with understanding the problem domain? I deliberately chose CFO because it is a common refrain on HN and elsewhere that software engineers are summarily overridden by non-technical management on technical decisions. How frequently are doctors overridden on medical decisions by non-medicine-trained hospital administrators? I don't know the precise answer to that, but doctor/nursing friends don't complain about it.
I'm pointing out a possible line of inquiry that doesn't seem to come up in these discussions. Given the relatively low status of IT in most non-tech companies I work with, compared to Sales and Finance for example (where women are better represented than in coding and technical IT, yet sales and finance cultures can be notoriously misogynist in many orgs), it isn't an unreasonable question to pose whether or not that relative low status of programming turns off women in the general non-tech business world, which vastly outweighs our small echo chamber of strongly-tech-focused companies.
An observation I've been chewing upon. The US pharmaceutical /medical sales environment is heavily represented with women, with a blatantly cynical unspoken industry practice of hiring easy on the eyes women. This is an openly misogynist atmosphere, with getting hit on just a part of their daily sales calls, but women are not driven away by it to the point where beautiful medical sales women no longer is a cliche. Incentives matter. Might there also be the possibility the programming world's negatives outweigh the compensation, and at some point, the compensation can outweigh the negatives?
A related question is why, with so much money on the line, and as direct revenue generators, are so many women programmers in tech-focused companies relating consistently depressing stories of exclusion? In other words, are there no financial consequences for managers mishandling such valuable revenue generators in general, or is it only when the revenue generator are women?
> Start here, and expand outwards in related searches
No thank you, I'd sooner someone qualified do that.
> it is a common refrain on HN
> I don't know the precise answer ... doctor/nursing friends don't complain about it.
My point is, that this is weak subjective evidence. I do not see the same trends you do.
> it isn't an unreasonable question to pose whether or not that relative low status of programming turns off women
Isn't it? Lets establish that it is true first.
> are there no financial consequences for managers mishandling such valuable revenue generators in general
Does "so many women programmers in tech-focused companies relating consistently depressing stories of exclusion" mean that most women in tech are excluded, or that these stories bubble to the top?
Quite a few hospitals have women in executive roles, some who are trained nurses, and basically "call the shots" in that role.
At San Francisco General Hospital, At least 50% of the Administrator(s)-On-Duty are women. It's a mixture of MDs, and nurses. In fact, I've only personally met one AOD who is male (nurse). The AOD calls the shots on a daily basis.
BTW one recent CEO, Susan Currin is a nurse & the current CEO Susan Ehrlich, MD are both women.
IMO It's not a validation issue. Companies (Tech or otherwise) have the culture they reinforce, dysfunctional or not.
Respectfully, I think you missed the point of the parent comment.
Parent comment says: if `(former programmer) turned manager` is more equal in gender than `programmer`, that might mean there is a sorting function that is pulling women out of engineering and into management.
His/her hypothesis is that being a "regular dev" is not very socially respected, and thus, pushes women to want out at a higher rate than other professions, like say, Doctor.
The fact that Doctor gender ratio is similar to Manager Doctor gender ratio, actually fits his hypothesis.
Not saying I disagree with either of you, just re stating.
> There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries [...]
It's entirely possible that I am extrapolating from my own naivety, but do young men really get into software development for the money? I don't think any of my friends were thinking about our future salaries when we started programming after school. It's just this hobby that people will inexplicably pay us money for. I know this sounds like a cliché, but I've never seen data to the contrary.
Yes, it is an uncontroversial fact that the number of computer science degrees achieved correlates to the social perception of CS as a path to wealth, and the implication is that some people enrol in CS because they think there is money in it - http://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sci...
I used to think, every so often, "Don't they realize that I'd do this even if they didn't pay me?"
But then I got married, had children, the kids grew up and needed braces and cars and college. I really need work that pays well right now, whether or not I like the work.
I know very well how tough it is... but for a lot of guys, things like that are not a priority. For different reasons... I personally believe this is what makes the difference between women and men. Women tend to appreciate real things like family, kids, healthy lifestyle more than the geeks who are fine with staring a screen all day long.
> Especially as a woman, I worry about being labeled hyper-sensitive, or that my gender will influence a person’s reaction to my feedback (e.g. the perception that women are hysterical).
[...]
> The final straw has typically been something like my manager making an off-hand remark that is thoughtless and rude, or perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise, or someone I care about at work is sexually harassed or gets fired.
To me these sound like issues that women are more likely to encounter.
I'd say they're issues that are harder for woman to navigate. Not because they're less capable I should add, but because what's considered acceptable behaviour is different.
To me the ones that sound more likely to be encountered by a woman are sexual harrassment, being labeled hyper-sensitive, or worrying that gender would have an effect on communication.
"perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise... or gets fired"
Women more likely to encounter this? This stuff happens all the time to everyone. I'm not sure how this is something a woman is more likely to encounter.
I assumed everyone could use their wits and understand what part of that very short except was salient. In fact, I think you have, since you've gone ahead and elided it.
They probably aren't, but if they express displeasure about it, the same way that their male colleagues do, some people would interpret that as them being overly emotional.
I am reminded of this quote from a fantasy book about the gender-dynamics of displaying emotion:
> "If she wept, wasn't it too extravagant; if she laughed, how odd that she should do so at her brother's funeral; if she spoke, he whispered that she was frenetic; if she fell silent, wasn't she grown strangely gloomy? And you could just watch men begin to see what he told them they were seeing, whether it was there or not. Toward the end of his visit there, he even said such things in her hearing, to see if he could frighten and enrage her, and then accuse her of becoming an unbalanced virago."
You're wrong. Every industry has management problems. Women leave tech at a rate much higher than they leave other industries. The only conclusion is that tech is a hostile environment for women, or that women are intrinsically unable to perform in tech.
IMHO, tech is a hostile environment with a lot of poor managers. I think the Peter principle applies to a lot of managers in tech. Promoted past their skill set. Just because someone is a good engineer does not mean they will be a good engineering manager. Managing humans with needs, concerns, ideals and life goals is so very different than managing a code-base. Executive leadership needs to consider this when building teams and figure out how to make and/or recruit good managers.
I wouldn't scope this down to tech. Incompetence and professional disinterest is by far the norm across all industries.
Career meritocracy is, more or less, a myth. In technical fields, there is a merit baseline that has to be cleared, but after that, any further relationship between merit and position evaporates. That is inescapable. People sometimes think they've escaped it and found the promised land of meritocracy, but they haven't. That usually just means they have a politically-skilled manager who is good at keeping their belief in the fairy tale alive.
I agree that a good engineer is not necessarily a good engineering manager, but I don't believe there are good engineering managers who are not also good engineers.
>or that women are intrinsically unable to perform in tech.
The more accurate version of this is "women find less value in tech." It deserves more consideration than it gets. There are differences that aren't just cultural between genders, and its something that should be taken into account when forming a judgement on these issues.
Or it could be that "tech finds less value in women".
Historically, your argument has been used to suppress women and minorities. It's weird that every time a group doesn't fit into an industry or a culture, that group is not white men.
Note that women now exceed men as college graduates. Meaning for every profession where men dominate, you must have other professions where women dominate more. Otherwise the numbers don't add up.
Are you suggesting I have an interest in suppressing women and minorities? The only reason I'd want to do that is to decrease competition, and I can guarentee you that I share the same interest regardless of gender or ethnicity
My comment was out of an interest in not being lied to more
than anything else.
I didn't interpret that comment as a suggestion that you have an interest in suppressing women and minorities. But you might have a subconscious interest in maintaining your own worldview, wherein you're part of a group of people that 'gets' or 'finds value in' tech, and others aren't.
The subconscious forces that shape the way people think about these issues are the most pernicious.
> Women leave tech at a rate much higher than they leave other industries. The only conclusion is that tech is a hostile environment for women, or that women are intrinsically unable to perform in tech.
"Men fail to enter [teaching|nursing|child care] at a rate much higher than other industries. The only conclusion is that [teaching|nursing|child care] is a hostile environment for men, or that men are intrinsically unable to perform in [teaching|nursing|child care]."
Interestingly, I've heard women working in those fields lament the lack of male representation. In teaching and child care, some kids just respond better to men. In nursing, it's because men are generally going to have an easier time providing care for patients who are overweight.
> Each of those professions have considerable effort to increase the numbers of men working in them.
And yet the number never budges, and we don't hear the president and the media blasting said industries over their shameful employment ratios day after day.
Instead it's just "hmm yes, that's curious. Well we're working on the problem. Carry on..."
Whereas in tech if the ratio isn't 50/50 there's hell to pay. In comparison there isn't a damn thing being done to address the imbalance in the industries I've listed. Yet women in tech, that's a national crisis.
The American Counseling Association membership is 80% women. Only 10% of all social workers under the age of 34 are men. 70% of all psychology PhDs go to women. Minority representation is also very tiny. The vast, vast majority of mental health practitioners are white women.
Yet those are professions where sex-diversity has a real impact on society. It's far more serious than the sex of the person writing the code for a fucking social network.
There has been about 1 story in the NY Times about this issue in the past 10 years.
And tech sex-disparity? A near constant stream of articles.
By the way, 1% of carpenters are women and 98% of dental hygienists are women.[1] Is that catastrophic? Does it warrant NY Times articles or endless pontification?
Seems like the most logical explanation is that [teaching|nursing|child care] are inherently hostile industries for men. Gender norms in America make it so that men aren't generally trusted around children, and face difficulties in navigating woman dominated fields like nursing.
Are you arguing that tech hasn't developed into a somewhat hostile environment for woman because men face difficulties in some industries as well? Because if so that's a poor argument. It's completely possible for both to be true for the same reason while have different underlying causes
You're changing the argument. The OP said that women leave tech at a much higher rate than other industries. You claim that men enter certain professions at a much lower rate. This is apples and oranges.
You have a point there, it can be argued that there's a link. However I do think it's important to compare apples to apples, and not to apple trees. So we should be looking at why men and women leave the industry, and also why they enter.
Yeah...no. That's such a distance that "leaping" to conclusions doesn't quite cover it. How about: women are (statistically) less interested in tech? So there is less intrinsic motivation, so extrinsic factors become much more important.
Not entirely coincidentally, that is exactly what surveys starting at high-school age right through professionals leaving the profession show. And "leaving" tech is often "getting promoted to management".
UPDATE: Note that even if this explanation were not the correct one (though I think it is the one that's most correct), it would still invalidate your assertion about other explanations being the only conclusions.
You are correct. And hiring is also management responsibility (not a job maybe but they are responsible in the end). So bad hires are also management fault.
That was my impression as well. Managers get shifted around to cover up problems and are protected by their superiors. And look at how a lot of low level managers come to be - there's no real training or requirements that are specific to management, they just want to go from dev the management. And there's also next to no oversight for the managers, just, "Did your team hit its goals?" They are the modern equivalent of medieval royalty. I think they person who talked about women leaving the company for better opportunities is probably right.
This breaks the HN guideline against going full flamewar with nothing new to say.
The vector here is predictable and therefore uninteresting; most of us have been through it a zillion times and live in hope of being spared another. Therefore, please just don't.
It's always alarming to read stories such as Susan Fowler's, that remind you sexism is still out there in force, in places. But it's great to read things like this, which implies at least a good chunk of fellow female devs are having the freedom to leave because their company doesn't care about software quality.
I'm curious if you have a piece of the article that highlights that for you. I admit to skimming through it and thinking "Yeah, that's pretty much the gig."
Engineering is a hard job, there's no two ways about it. Tech managers have a doubly hard job, having to navigate a tech stack well enough to lead their team and the people skills to manage all their special snowflake devs on one hand (nothing gender or age related, I love all my lil babies, even the ones with gandalf beards and strong opinions on Richard Stallman) and some very difficult strategic objectives on the other. People who can be effective in that role are hard to find.
> If a company’s leadership feels too tightly knit – where all the managers and founders are friends that aren’t open to critical feedback from employees – I won’t even try to work out the issue before leaving
While not completely gender specific, I think that speaks to difficulty managing up.
1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest
2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.
It doesn't even need to be "young males beating their chest".
I've been in plenty of hostile reviews with completely harmless, introverted, soft spoken INTJ-types who simply can't get past some nitpick because it doesn't fit into their perfect, logical world view and refuse to budge an inch.
Our industry has a personality problem as much or more as it has a sex problem.
I've also been on the reviewing end of plenty of types who think all small things are inconsequential nitpicks which excuses them from having to change anything. Then people moan about a lack of standards and consistency between teams...
I've also died in a ditch over naming conventions for unit tests - whilst not my proudest moment - it drives home one of the key points in the article, that good managers work with all their people to make a cohesive team. Everyone has things to improve on and can benefit from constructive criticism. Management is far harder than technical work as humans always have state, there's no such thing as a pure function for humans. Knowing how to coach, mentor, advocate for, protect, encourage etc is not something you are born with, and you can't really spin up an AWS instance of a team of humans to practice on.
> 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.
If the question is "How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?" - how is paternity leave relevant (unless the father in the relationship works for the same company, I guess)?
If only women have legally mandated paid time off for new kids it'll provide even more reproduction-related disincentive to hire women, which is reason enough for it to be relevant, I'd say.
Exactly! I have anecdata from German managers """jokingly complaining""" about how one can't hire young men any more because of their potential paternity leave. This is a good thing.
As a woman, I'm much more likely to take the amount of maternity leave I desire if I think there's no professional penalty for it. Ensuring that men can take leave lowers the chance I'll be penalized for my decision since it's now a 'cost of doing business' and not a 'cost of hiring women'.
Point number 1 is ridiculous and sexist.
Oh yeah let's ship code that hasn't been reviewed because the young males in our company will act like chimpanzees, and those pesky technical debates let's scratch those too. Let's just use whatever piece of technology is trending today on HN
I didn't read that as suggesting that you shouldn't do code reviews.
The issue is when code reviews become a competitive sport, and more about technical oneupmanship than they are about improving code quality and team knowledge.
The entire purpose of a code review is to highlight things that are wrong. You can't point out things that are wrong without someone being able to spin your comments as some kind of toxic masculine impulse to show basal-primate technical dominance through demonstration of superior shamanistic technical knowledge.
Pointing out a buffer overflow isn't sexism. It's pointing out a buffer overflow.
The entire purpose of a code review is to highlight things that are wrong. You can't point out things that are wrong without someone being able to spin your comments as some kind of toxic masculine impulse to show basal-primate technical dominance through demonstration of superior shamanistic technical knowledge.
Get a fucking grip. Pointing out a buffer overflow isn't sexism. It's pointing out a fucking buffer overflow.
You could have communicated your point without the aggression. That's what I presume is gedy's original point.
Pointing out things that are wrong is fine. If you're incapable of doing that without being rude or condescending then code reviews aren't going to be the only place your lack of social graces hinders you.
Come on, you know as well as I do that there's a large chunk of (mostly male, frequently young) who LOVE to point out how wrong someone it to show how wrong someone else is. Whether it's aggressive or just passive aggressive there alternative ways to be polite and not off-putting to those less aggressive.
> You can't point out things that are wrong without someone being able to spin your comments as some kind of toxic masculine impulse to show basal-primate technical dominance through demonstration of superior shamanistic technical knowledge.
Who hurt you? I suggest you find greener pastures if you truly believe that.
I didn't say "no code reviews" I said aggressive. I've personally seen a world a difference in response from (mostly) young female engineers when the review is less about "you did this and this WRONG, FIX IT" than talking through design decisions calmly and without the (passive) aggressive stuff.
Yes this can apply to males too, but my empirical observation is mostly more applicable to females.
No one's saying we shouldn't have code reviews or technical debates, just that we need to avoid being overly aggressive. A lot of young males (including myself previously, and sometimes currently) can be very aggressive in presenting their views. This disenfranchises less outspoken people in our teams, particularly woman who generally can't be as aggressive without negative social ramifications.
I'm male, barely progressive, of below average couth, and probably seem like a dinosaur to younger colleagues when it comes to gender issues, but I think your item #1 is without question the most endlessly frustrating and pointless source of tedium in the software business and its only gotten worse during the last 20 years.
I've found myself finding more common ground with young women on my teams than with the young men for this reason, and for the reason that when I do have something constructive to offer during a review then young women generally respond to it in a way that I like (e.g. they make a value judgement about what advice was worth taking and what wasn't and do it).
The kind of men you're describing seem to find a way to turn everything into a sport, and seem to be oblivious to the effect that they have on people whose attitudes toward competition don't match their own. It is frequently embarrassing to watch, and definitely my least favorite aspect of this work.
Code reviews may have grown in importance due to scaled back formal design documents and formal qa staff and processes.
> young women generally respond to it in a way that I like (e.g. they make a value judgement about what advice was worth taking and what wasn't and do it).
In my only 10+ years experience, I noticed women seem more defensive about their code being reviewed and I have to write long formal arguments if I'm suggesting any more than a trivial change. Then there will be a discussion afterwards and based on that it's 50/50 whether it gets done. Now I pad reviews with positives about the work to soften it in some probably transparent attempt to placate the reviewee.
With men, I review the code, make a suggestion, I usually get a note "sounds good, will do." That's not all men of course, there's always at least one guy who doesn't want his code reviewed at all, too good, doesn't see the point, etc.
This is me, but not at first. I think it took me a while to realize most arguments aren't worth it and not rocking the boat has a lot of social value, especially from a "get on with my day and let bygones be bygones" perspective. I suck up some really questionable criticisms from my boss on the regular. Its not a big deal. I find women in the workplace seem to learn this lesson much later than their male peers. I think female social culture is often argument and verbal heavy and that translates poorly into the workplace. I feel this is the downside of being more socially aware earlier on than boys. Girls seem to become very sensitive to perceived slights and that hyper-sensitivity doesn't translate well into the workplace.
I work with women in their 40s who will argue about the something trivial thing until they're blue in the face. I almost never see a man act like this, especially past age 30 or so. I think older men are just taught to take arguments and conflict more seriously and take on a certain level of stoicism, if not a strong level of emotional repression, at work. In the world of men a conflict could turn into violence quickly while women on women violence is much more rare and with much less serious consequences. A 110lbs girl isn't going to be able to murder me but a 200lbs guy could easily or accidentally do so. I think subconscious knowledge of that permeates our work life and affects how we develop. By the time we enter the workplace we've internalized certain attitudes, if your attitude is 'conflict is everywhere and needs to be constantly addressed' then you'll have a hard time at work, regardless of gender.
I remember being the only man in a group of girls at my first professional job and the gossiping and negativity was extremely high with them, now I can't ever imagine socializing like that at work. It just seems crazy and a guaranteed way to ruin your day and hate your coworkers and bosses. Some of it was absolutely justified but dwelling on it was counter-productive (no one went to HR or went to resolve things, they just seethed endlessly).
Nowadays, I've picked up the 'male stoicism' that always bewildered me about older guys when I was first starting to work a 'real job.' Now it makes perfect sense to me as it limits conflict, drama, and seething resentment. Meanwhile many of my female peers never made this advancement so we have to make special exemptions and treat them with kid gloves if they're even on the receiving end of anything they'll perceive as a slight. Its exhausting, frankly, and I wonder why women, with their ultra-refined social skills, don't see that this kind of behavior is ultimately self-defeating.
That said, the above is a generalization, but its definitely an 80/20 kind of things. 80% of the women I've worked with are like this, with 20% being the exception.
> 1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest
I'm sure whatever you'd like to replace these processes could be described in equally sweeping sexist terms going the opposite direction, you know.
> 1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest
>Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest
I get what you're saying but at the same time... code reviews and conversations not debates/arguments are important regardless of gender. You're saying you want to built a tech org without that being a central idea to the way men and women on the team should work?
"aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest"
You mean passionate engineers and developers discussing ways of getting the job done most efficiently? It's a little crazy to ban this rather than encourage women to get into the discussion. If they aren't as passionate, then maybe they should be in a different career.
I find it funny that many were trying to say men and women were the same. Now it seems those same people are saying not only are men and women different..but the men are doing it the wrong way. I guess we are different after all.
Many people get into the tech industry because of the money..and end up leaving because they don't realize it's many times time consuming, humiliating, and mind-numbing labor. You really have to love it to stick with it. I've been in the industry for 20+ years and I almost never get bored.
"Some flexibility on hours/location when children come."
As long as men can also work remotely and have flexible hours. Nobody wants to live at work. You also have to realize that when you are in the office less, you will be passed up for promotions. This isn't sexism, it's just how things work, regardless of your race or gender.
Interesting article. I think one thing to also consider is that women can also be toxic, so the question isn't really how to retain technical women or men, but rather, how can you promote leadership practices to women (and men) that retain women (and men).
The most important for me is directing social conversations. Most people think that social event is a time for everybody to talk freely about whatever topics, but no. The point of social event is inclusiveness. I see this scenario happening over and over again:
Social event starts off friendly. Gradually, the conversation starts turning very technical or very sci-fi, then women turned away and formed their own social group. Worse, the only woman engineer on the team spends the night sipping on her drink quietly wishing she found these topics more interesting or wishing she took more CS classes so she could appreciate the intensity of the conversation. (Note, I'm using women as an example because of the posted question. But this applies just as much to the minority race, age group, etc.)
I think it is important for the manager (or any teammate in general) to make social inclusivity their top priority in a social environment. Look around, if you see that someone in the group is not engaged, steer the group conversation towards the interests of that person. Its a hard skill do develop, but its a skill managers should be actively working to improve.
Yes, but how else would you build empathy and diversity amongst your team? Say you hired a minority who has different interest with the majority on the team. If left unchecked, the minority will always feel excluded (unless they have a strong personality).
If I were on a team where management tried to micro-manage conversion toward some ideal of "diversity", then believe me, "empathy" would not be the emotion I would be feeling.
Okay, make me unhappy. I'm just another toxic male. I can go, right? My leaving will just make the rest of the team more vibrant or whatever.
Well, I produce 10x more code than the rest of the team put together, so good luck.
Hi, please take the time to self evaluate and see if your approach will lead you to where you want to be in life, whether it be having alot of money, being happy, being a great parent, etc. From your comment, I'm getting this vibe "If people don't like me, fuck it. I'm better than everybody else."
It sounds like you are a very intelligent and motivated person , so lets think about this logically.
Here's an alternative scenario: lets say you take the time and effort to get your team to like you and inspire them to improve to your skill level. If you are the 10x engineer, then produce code at 1x and spend the other 9x learning and doing what it takes to inspire the rest of the team to get to your productivity. If it takes the team 1 year to get to your productivity and the team has size of 10, then the team collectively will have 100x productivity by the end of the year. You would be able to accomplish way more than what you could have accomplished yourself. (Obviously, I generalized the math. But you get the point).
Counter argument:
"I don't plan to stay in the company for that long to reap the benefits"
Fortunately, if you inspire somebody to become 10x the person they were, you would have made a lasting impact in their lives. Companies come and go, but relationships stick around. If you leave to do your startup, chances are these 10x engineers would be more than happy to join (at various stages of success during the life of the startup).
This is all I have time to write. I hope this helps. Good luck.
Why would a work group be going to a happy hour in the first place? That's bad because it assumes everyone is OK with drinking alcohol. Now you're alienating Mormons, ex-alcoholics, people who choose not to drink, and people who get physically ill from drinking alcohol. How about keeping workplace socialization at the workplace instead? Or perhaps at a decent sit-down restaurant where people can order food instead of getting liquored up and potentially saying or doing something embarrassing or harassing?
A "chip"? So what's your answer to people who get physically ill when consuming alcohol? Don't get a job? Because in American drinking culture, they're going to look bad if they don't drink with everyone else at one of these stupid happy hours.
Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.
I sit out the usual Friday bar nights and have to turn down the occasional offers of alcohol from coworkers that don't interact with me frequently (and thus either don't know or have forgotten that I don't drink)
They get to go get wasted at the local bar. I get to enjoy my Friday night playing video games alone. Win-win. If they do something like GoKarting I get dragged into something I'd rather not be doing since I feel obliged to attend since I sit out of the many alcohol-related events.
I'm agreeing with Chris2048 here. Sounds like a chip. They can enjoy their alcohol without me being a downer about it or forcing the majority of the company to comply with my wishes of non-alcoholic expenditures.
If they have fun drinking, let them have fun I say. I'll go home and play some video games.
Right, and then you miss out on important work dealings and decision-making, you're seen as "not a team player", you're passed over for promotions, etc. Staying out of all work "team-building" events eventually looks really bad for you and will work against you.
Maybe I've been extremely fortunate - but that just hasn't the case at where I work. I'm very clear about why I don't attend these things and people are very understanding.
Perhaps it is because I have a very visible impact on my department or maybe because all decision making is done during office hours. The bar is for play and karaoke - not to talk about work. The company culture treats any work discussion during team outings as taboo. You won't be punished for it but you'll be told kindly to shut up and have fun - work will be back again next Monday. Talk about it then. :)
If I had to guess, that probably plays a huge part into why the company doesn't have those sort of problems.
>The company culture treats any work discussion during team outings as taboo. You won't be punished for it but you'll be told kindly to shut up and have fun - work will be back again next Monday.
If you deserve promotion for a non-social role, but aren't because you don't go out with the team, that is not good, but that's a tangent to banning work related drinking events.
Another question is, do you go to non-alcohol related work events?
> So what's your answer to people who get physically ill when consuming alcohol
My answer is it's a rarity, and a distraction that you included it.
> Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.
Does it? Strange given I neither binge drink (which isn't the same as a drink after work anyway, and so I reiterate that you have a chip) nor am I American.
I couldn't care less if people don't want to participate, I'm not going to suggest they be forced - unlike your suggestion that people be forced not to.
When your team visits this hypothetical restaurant, will you ban anyone from ordering steaks, because because a baby can't chew it...
And if someone in tech isn't interested in tech and doesn't like conversations about tech and feels excluded when others talk about tech...
remind me again why they are in tech?
"Tech" is a very broad and very diverse term. If an employee is design focused and a group is having conversations about the latest Linux kernel API change there is a very good chance the design focused employee won't be able to follow the conversation making them feel left out. Not to discourage design field, they have their own deep technical niches.
Not everyone can participate in every thread of a conversation but it's important to change the topic often enough to allow people to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.
> the only woman engineer on the team spends the night sipping on her drink quietly wishing she found these topics more interesting or wishing she took more CS classes so she could appreciate the intensity of the conversation
Women might have different interests than men, but why do you think they might be stymied by technical conversation? She's an engineer the same as the rest, unless she was hired because of tokenism she should absolutely be able to hold her own in a technical conversation.
A friend graduated from a bootcamp and she loves coding. But sometimes there are conversations that goes deep into SSDs vs HDDs, bitcoin mining, and other topics unrelated to work that alienated her and she couldn't participate.
I was trying to share what I learned from speaking with a few of my friends. Put yourself in the shoes of a woman who wanted a career change and joined a bootcamp. You learned the necessary skill and took an engineering job on a predominantly male team. Already, you are self conscious about not having a 4 year CS degree. Now they consistently talk about cryptography, hardware, that doesn't seem to relate to your work. As if gender wasn't an issue already, now there is also a technical exclusion.
I am also open to suggestions. Is this an okay scenario?
OK, that makes sense, I thought you were talking in the general, not discussing a particular subset. But I'd argue the issue is more due to not having a 4 year degree than being a woman in a male-dominated field, though that certainly doesn't help. I don't know the statistics, are women in tech more likely to be from bootcamps than men?
However, this does remind me of a phenomenon in child psychology, where girls in a classroom setting are much more likely to participate in class if it's an all-girl class vs a mixed-gender setting. I believe the literature says this is largely due to some learned cultural behavior in early childhood, but I can't remember the specifics. I don't know if this phenomenon persists into adulthood to some degree, but your example reminded me of that.
The percentage of bootcamp grads that are female is much higher than the average across tech (~30% for bootcamps v ~15% across industry/university). I don't think bootcamps make up a large enough group for that to make it 'likely' that any given woman is from a bootcamp, but it probably means there's a few pockets where all the women at a company went through a bootcamp.
Are there stats that there are more women who career change and come from bootcamps or don't have as rigid technical backgrounds? Are bootcamp graduates not technical enough or interested in technical subjects? These generalizations are unsettling to me.
There's a general flow of conversation in any social situation that organically arises from the composition of the group of people involved. Unless your friend's teammates are jerks, she should be able to easily influence the direction of the conversation. Perhaps instead of suffering from an issue because she is a woman, she is simply too shy. Maybe this industry or society at large is bad at including shy people general.
How would a manager even know where to direct the discussion if the person who feels alienated doesn't speak up during the conversation? The last thing I want is a manager to try to point the discussion to movies, pop music, fashion, makeup, or whatever else women are supposed to like. I would absolutely be offended.
I think this can happen to a lot of people, depending on the discussion. Personally, I've taken almost no CS classes; I'm a EE by degree and moved into programming (mainly embedded) on-the-job.
So when people start getting into heavy CS discussions about algorithms or whatever, that can alienate me to an extent too. I've read the basics and all and picked up a lot, but only what I really needed to know for this kind of work. I'm more interested in getting hardware to work and programming near the hardware level than some B-tree or whatever.
Another thing that really alienates me: when men at work talk about sports. I don't give two shits about spectator sports, and I think they're a complete waste of time. I'm a male, of course, but unlike many men I really hate sports and sports fanaticism. I don't see this too much at work (as it seems my attitude toward sports isn't that uncommon among men in tech), but I do see it now and then, especially with older and more outgoing/managerial type men.
So I don't think it's entirely a male vs. female issue: certain groups of people working together will frequently have certain common interests, which will not be shared by other people in that workplace. If I worked with a bunch of women and they all started talking about some current TV show, I'd also be alienated, because I don't own a TV or watch any current TV shows (except Game of Thrones...). Should I insist that women refrain from talking about TV shows? That seems a bit extreme.
Someone else already addressed the issues with your "woman = less technical" implication, but I think the meat of your topic is actually going in the right direction.
People who are good at socializing know how to have conversations with anyone of any background. Many know when people are being left out and will go out of their way to shift the topic or make it more inclusive to the person being left out. If you've ever been at a party where you didn't know anyone, and someone who you didn't know before introduces themselves and is able to make you feel more comfortable being there, then you probably know what a relief these natural socializers can be.
Unfortunately, many engineers (myself included) are not natural socializers or otherwise well-practiced in the "manners" required for creating positive social situations. Folks like me are much more interested in topics I know a lot about and have strong opinions on, so it can be hard to break away once one of those conversations start, even if I know people are being excluded by having this conversation.
I think the important thing here is that socialization should be organic, and if one person is obviously uncomfortable or left out, the polite thing for anyone to do is to bring them in somehow. Every person on the team should strive to improve their ability to make people from different backgrounds feel included, and you're right in saying it's a skill that can be improved through work. This applies equally to women, minorities, immigrants, new people, anyone who doesn't feel like an "in-group" in a particular situation.
The pay factor is definitely something that should be looked at more. I should not have find out, after talking to any woman in tech who has a passion for it, that they're basically just barely able to make it when others with the same duties at the same or other companies make a livable wage.
While the salary trend in new hires out of school is an encouraging sign, your comment seems rather selective: the rest of the article you linked points out that in every situation other than "just out of college with no experience" the pay gap is real:
> Overall, women hired for jobs in technology, sales and marking were offered
> salaries that were 3% less than what men were offered, but at some companies the
> gender pay gap was as high as 30%, the study showed.
> Men received higher salary offers for the same job title at the same company 69%
> of the time
it seems the pay gap is more an age thing. When we say give women equal pay, we should be saying "give older women equal pay" . This makes me think its a lagging metric that will be solved as todays 20 somethings become 40 and 60 year olds. If we want to accelerate the solution its not to give young womena a raise, but older women.
Its also hard because depending on how the numbers are calculated it maybe fair to pay older women less once you account for a lifetime of choosing lifestyle over earning potential as many note women vs men typically do.
Wow. So in the name of getting women women into tech, we need to abandon
* Code reviews, design documents, and anything else that might provide a forum for "chest thumping"
* Opportunities to express one's love of traditionally geeky things
* Organic conversation during happy hour
* Meritocracy (since diversity pushes end up being affirmative action in practice)
Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech. Maybe that's okay, and people like you are doing significant damage trying to create an unnatural situation of exact equity that nobody really wants.
No one said anything about removing code reviews. They said remove the culture of aggressive and mean code reviews.
No one said to remove the opportunity to express one's love of geeky things or organic conversation during happy hour. They said to tone that down, and be more inclusive, so other members of the team can express their love of things they like.
Meritocracy is a red herring. We do not have objective measurements for what is good work and what is not good work, or what work is better than others. At the end of the day, a person, with all their biases, is going to be choosing who is better. And quite often, that doesn't have much to do with the work at all.
"Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech."
And likely, fewer women want to be in tech because of the sexist attitudes, and this attitude of dismissal and "it's not a problem; if you were really 'passionate', you'd get over it".
> No one said anything about removing code reviews. They said remove the culture of aggressive and mean code reviews.
In practice, that means making code review comments unclear and extremely passive aggressive. I'd rather have plain, clear statements than statements that on the surface are pleasant and helpful but that are actually meant to be emotional and professional shivs. I've been both.
> No one said to remove the opportunity to express one's love of geeky things or organic conversation during happy hour. They said to tone that down, and be more inclusive, so other members of the team can express their love of things they like.
The proposal is to prevent conversations flowing naturally according to the normal implicit rules of conversation and instead steer the conversation to "inclusive" topics. You know what I'd do in that situation? Grab a bunch of my coworkers and head off to the nearest pub to have the conversation we want to have. Congratulations, you've tried to help and made things worse.
> Meritocracy is a red herring.
This idea is both trendy and dangerous. Some ideas are better than others. I don't want to be around people who think that asbestos and plastic are both perfectly good materials for medical devices and that we should reach a compromise position to ensure that everyone is heard. If person A consistently proposes ideas that work and person B is genial, but constantly proposes ideas that don't work, A has more merit.
> And likely, fewer women want to be in tech because of the sexist attitudes
This argument is circular. You're defining literally anything that might make women choose to not come to "tech" as being sexist. Never mind that women get all sorts of preferences; never mind that women are paid more these days. It's all about how there are more men than women, therefore we have a "problem" that we need to "fix".
"In practice, that means making code review comments unclear and extremely passive aggressive."
No, it doesn't. It only means that if the only way you can express yourself is by being mean.
"I'd rather have plain, clear statements than statements that on the surface are pleasant and helpful but that are actually meant to be emotional and professional shivs. I've been both."
Again, you can have plain, clear statements without being mean. Just because you aren't capable of writing them doesn't mean the rest of us aren't.
"he proposal is to prevent conversations flowing naturally according to the normal implicit rules of conversation and instead steer the conversation to "inclusive" topics. You know what I'd do in that situation? Grab a bunch of my coworkers and head off to the nearest pub to have the conversation we want to have. Congratulations, you've tried to help and made things worse."
No, you've just proven that you aren't willing to include other coworkers in your discussion. You've also proven that you aren't able to have a discussion about anything that isn't a few topics that you care about, and aren't willing to listen to others talk about what they care about. You're the one that comes out looking bad here.
"This idea is both trendy and dangerous. Some ideas are better than others. I don't want to be around people who think that asbestos and plastic are both perfectly good materials for medical devices and that we should reach a compromise position to ensure that everyone is heard. If person A consistently proposes ideas that work and person B is genial, but constantly proposes ideas that don't work, A has more merit."
Again, you're making false choices here. The idea that you have to choose between someone being nice but not good, and someone who is good but mean. There is absolutely no reason for that.
"This argument is circular."
No, it really isn't. And you haven't provided anything to claim that it is.
That comment didn't say these things, and this heads into the repetitive RAPL (read-anger-print-loop) pattern that we're trying hard to stay out of here. So please don't post like this.
Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech.
Regardless of the parent poster, if it's a natural tendency of women to not want to be in tech, why did the percentage graduating CS drop from 37% in 1985 to 18%? I don't think women's intrinsic nature changed in the last 30 years, do you?
Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech.
A bit of advice to any of you youngsters blowing it off as "maybe women just don't want to be in tech": I worked with plenty of women in this field in the 80s. Not so many now. And of those women in the field currently, they're a different breed than those I worked with 30 years ago. (To put it gently, they strike me as women more suited to put up with mens' bullshit.)
So, no, I don't buy the "maybe women don't want to do tech" excuse, unless you're willing to argue that all the women got together at their annual conference and announced that they're not doing tech anymore. I propose a simplistic explanation: women don't want to be in tech for the same reason I'm tiring of it, and this is having to put up with a constant stream of alpha male man-children. We, as an industry, used to be professionals. Now it's just a big frat party. (The issues are much deeper, IMO, and I admit to vastly oversimplifying.)
Get everyone focused on thinking about the team's mission, role, and what it takes to get the job done. Drill that into everyone's head and stick to it. Let everything else go.
A mentor once told me that business fundamentally revolves around making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. I like thinking about work that way, as it has nothing to do with religion, sex, gender, age, height, phase of the moon (maybe you employ werewolves), etc.
Focusing on work can be hard though, because it might mean you will encounter a conflict when it comes to supporting a cause with good intentions. Say the MinorityCodingClub wants to host an event in your office. Personally, I think promoting diversity is generally a healthy thing. But what if MinorityCodingClub doesn't allow people not in that minority to participate in the event? You may find part of your staff wants to allow it, and part of your staff opposes it (perhaps silently).
Staying focused on making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. It's hard enough to get people to come together on doing that, so don't tolerate a culture that gets in the way of making that happen.
This is a wonderful message for those for whom the Status Quo works. It's what we'd like to hear and allows us to ignore tiresome issues.
Eventually it's Versailles time and everybody has to have their heads cut off. So you need to balance this "focused" (i.e. ignore the problem) approach with a longer term plan.
Or rather someone needs to. Or maybe we should just accept getting our heads cut off.
Wait, how does your advice answer your question about the event? Are you saying that you shouldn't host a diversity event because it doesn't explicitly match the four things you listed? Because someone might not like the event? I don't get it.
It seems like what he's saying is that you shouldn't allow it to happen because it's not strictly work-related but I find it hard to agree with that thinking.
I think this thinking is discouraging. Bot to men but even more to women and it might be the reason why there are so few women in STEM fields.
I think generally work places should be much more well rounded. We spend a considerable amount of time there, so why not allow it to be a place where we expand our lives instead of a place where we only "make money, save money, save time, and make customers happier"?
That's completely fair. But my proposition was not about your preferences. I conjectured that a shift to a more whole view of employers (rather than just machines) would be beneficial for most people.
The purpose of my life outside of work right now is dating women so I think you are treading dangerous waters by asking people to bring a more "whole" view of themselves into the workplace when that is perceived to be the problem in the first place.
Again, a "more whole view" is not a complete view. I didn't suggest that we bring in all aspects of life. Why is it that people purposely misunderstand my words / does not see the scope? (I talked generally, not individually, and I did not talk about bringing all aspects in)
Careful. Plenty of STEM fields have much better gender parity than tech. Tech is singularly bad among the STEM fields; only physics is competitively bad. Mathematics, molecular biology, stat --- all have strong female participation. Worth noting: all these other STEM fields are also heavily dependent on software and computer technology, and women do fine in them.
Are you sure math is doing much better than tech? The others I know are much more balanced but I thought that women were underrepresented in math as well.
I just said CS isn't the sole outlier. But exclusion of women is an anomalous state for STEM, whether or not you include "generic engineering" in the mix.
I went to Georgia Tech for Mechanical Engineering, I think generic engineering has approximately the same set of sexism problems as CS. I wouldn't try to use it as a way to say that CS doesn't have a problem
My sister and I(male) are both engineers, she is a mechanical engineer and has related to me a lot of the difficulties she has faced with this career.
I think engineering is probably worse than CS because there is discrimination from technical as well as non technical peers.
Among non technical peers (Operators, fitters, boilermakers etc) side of things there is a tendency for people to assume female engineers lack physical capabilities I see it out on mine/construction sites etc workers will refuse to let female engineers carry tool bags etc. They won't look twice when I heft a bag full of Stillson wrenches around yet I've seen on occasions they'll almost snatch the bags out of female colleague's hands.
As a male I'm pretty much left to my own devices when I'm out on site the workers assume I'm competent. For females there is a tendency for workers to "hover" they won't trust her ability until she demonstrates it. The culture out on construction sites etc is not really all that female friendly in general. I mentioned it to my sister once and she was pretty dismissive her response was something along the lines of "That's just the way things are they assume I'm just a clueless girl until I prove to them I know what I'm doing".
On the technical side I see it a lot with external clients when they visit the office sometimes they'll do things like assume a female engineer is a secretary.
Most of the diversity efforts are focused on technical side of things around inclusive office culture and things like that. There are not a lot of initiatives targeted towards non technical peers other than very token stuff like "Don't put up pornography in site sheds and crib rooms".
My sister ended up quitting her job at a power plant and works in government now she seems much happier there.
I think this is spot on. But I also think it is a structural thing: We have always been told "children and women first to the lifeboat, then men". I think this is a bi-product of the spare-the-women culture we are living.
Maybe men are more trying to be polite than hostile when they won't let women carry heavy loads?
Well, that's a whole different rant but, really, you read about grown men texting their female coworkers incessantly with crude sexual propositions and you have to wonder how they ever came to believe this was acceptable behavior.
I'd say that the reason why sexual harassment is such a problem at SV unicorns is because of the SV startup culture, not despite it.
SV encourages people to move fast, be aggressive, don't be afraid to break things, ignore regulations, disrupt all the things, etc. There are substantial similarities to the way a VC-funded startup operates and the way a pick-up artist operates.
You'll notice that Susan Fowler's blog post also goes into detail about the Game of Thrones-esque culture with middle managers constantly and openly plotting to overthrow their superiors and take their jobs. A culture that encourages you to figuratively fuck your boss also encourages you to literally fuck your subordinates. It's a culture of aggression and proving your dominance.
Big traditional conservative companies on the other hand... well, they just don't have that culture. Their culture discourages people from taking risks at every level. In order to get anything done, you have to go through several layers of bureaucracy, put everything in writing, make sure your is are dotted and your ts crossed. It discourages aggressive, disruptive risk-takers from coming near the company. And without aggressive, disruptive risk-takers, you don't have nearly the amount of sexual harassment. Yes, it still happens on occasion, but it isn't nearly as systemic or as blatant as in a VC-funded startup.
So it leads to the seemingly-paradoxical situation where the best companies for women and LGBT people to work at are the kind of "conservative" companies that you can imagine Ned Flanders working at. But culturally conservative isn't the same thing as politically conservative; I've said this before, but I have a lot of politically liberal friends (most of them enthusiastic Clinton voters) who live in the suburbs, work 9-5 at traditional large corporations, and have traditional families.
You might be shocked at the amount of misogyny men in their 30s and 40s think is acceptable. (Also, contra 'amyjess - some of the conservative fields, in particular finance and law, are also hideously sexist & contain a ton of harassment.)
I am positive that many (But not all) of these firms put their managers through sexual harassment training. I went through it before I received reports.
The problem is that it only takes one idiot to cause a problem... And the odds of at least one manager being an idiot approach 100%, as your company grows.
(In a place like Uber, though, the problem seems systemic.)
"Staying focused on making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier."
To be perfectly honest, that sounds like a recipe for a dull ass, penny pinching, unenjoyable work environment. The kind where you're treated as a cost center.
This is the mentality that leads to drama explosions like at Uber. They were all focused on making money and building a big company. Because of this, they ignored the "little things" like building a HR department that could support women when they were put in bad situations.
I think a part of "don't tolerate a culture that gets in the way of making that [making money] happen" is not tolerating sexism, juvenile behaviour, harassment, or bullying in the workplace.
All of those factors make some of your employees less productive.
Totally agree. The distinction I'm trying to make is that it's easy to let these things happen when you're focused on building and selling a product. I'm positive that no CEO wants their business to be a place where women are harassed or personnel problems slow down progress. However these things can and do happen without a lot of careful effort spent early on, focused on preventing them. By the time the problems become visible (e.g. through a shocking public blog post), it will be significantly harder to fix the underlying causes, which is very costly to the company in terms of attracting and keeping talent and maintaining focus on objectives.
You would think so, but people are very often willing to damage their own financial self-interest in favor of prejudices, especially when the former is long-term and the latter short-term.
Office dating is dicey but, I think, workable, but the issues with a superior asking a subordinate out on a date are so obvious that I don't see how you can think it's OK.
No, of course I do not assume there is an ulterior motive behind "every" invitation, but there is a strong sexual undercurrent to the invitation we're talking about.
You don't need to see an agenda behind every invitation to recognize the agenda behind this one.
For those genuinely unclear, it's a combination of things - the individual nature of the invitation, the private nature of the venue, the timing and explicit involvement of libations whose effects often include the lowering of inhibitions - all in all it's just a super sketchy thing to all of a sudden pop up in a previously professional relationship. Any one of those would be fine; any two would be a little questionable but probably okay; all three at once constitute a great big flashing neon sign that spells out "YOUR BOSS IS TRYING TO LAY YOU".
I mean that's the thing, I don't deny that if this a purely professional relationship then this comment is incredibly out of place. But often times professional relationships become less professional and more friendly. I don't deny that it is creepy from your perspective.
I mean sure, but if that's the nature of the relationship, nobody's going to be made uncomfortable by the invitation - that's probably why the context in which it was mentioned makes clear that's not the case in this hypothetical. My comments are addressed more toward the "what could possibly be wrong with that?" kind of response it seems to have elicited, and intend to supply that question an answer.
And if said boss isn't trying anything, he still ought to understand the signals it sends sufficiently well to either 1) not do it, 2) invite more people (and make that clear in the e-mail), or 3) make it something much more casual than drinks on a Saturday night.
If he doesn't understand that, he'll be the kind of manager that creates liabilities by leaving e-mail trails of questionable invitations that might get caught up in discovery if/when something happens.
I agree that there isn't enough context. The example doesn't even specify that it's being sent to a female employee (that's an assumption everyone is making) and I can imagine plenty of scenarios - with context - where it wouldn't necessarily be inappropriate.
The context here includes the parent comment to the one setting out the scenario, and the reaction of sending a message copied to the boss's boss complaining about it.
They make it clear that it was sent to a woman, and that the scenario at the very least was interpreted by the recipient as inappropriate.
Yes, there are scenarios where it could be acceptable, but consider that they are (much) narrower than you might think:
* Men can be sexually harassed too.
* Sexual harassment is not the only problem with an e-mail like that. It may also create drinking pressure, or a feeling that you are forced to socialise with your boss. Of course that is context-dependent too, but for my part, as a man who doesn't enjoy drinking and doesn't want to spend my Saturdays with the boss, I'd fell put under inappropriate pressure by an e-mail like that as well, because I'd be concerned that a rejection could impact work.
A lot of behaviour like that is fine when it is not between subordinates, and can be fine with subordinates too if it is someone you know very well.
But even then you need to consider that e.g. it may negatively affect team dynamics or may be unintentionally discriminatory or become seen as discriminatory purely by e.g. including only those the manager knows well too.
> or a feeling that you are forced to socialise with your boss
Would you feel you'd be fired? Because sometimes getting to know someone is an appropriate pathway to success.
Scenarios like this are more common at start-ups, aren't they? If you just want to drone through work, with no social connections, the average american mega-corp might be more appropriate.
My experience is that it seems less common at start-ups, with the caveat that it's my experience and so definitively biased. At least the startups I've been in have been small, tight-knit groups where any socialisation have tended to be group activities, and where there's been little implicit imposing hierarchy, and standing up for yourself tends to be appreciated.
In larger companies, on the other hand, you get all kinds of weird little fiefdoms where getting on your managers bad side is potentially far more damaging because if your boss has sufficient support he will be able to musster a much bigger support system.
People hear what they want to hear. As a boss, you can choose to say what you want and see what happens. It might be wiser to choose words carefully, so your subordinates don't get the wrong message.
That reads to me more like a pass. If a boss made a pass at me, you better believe I'd be looping in someone higher up on that, too, because that whole territory is extremely fraught no matter the response.
If this was not a pass, the manager should have explicitly invited the employee's S.O. and indicated a venue that has no beds in it (bar or restaurant).
Too much vague-ry here, which, on a sensitive topic, is asking for trouble.
Nope. Uber case was plain simple case of sexual harassment. My question is, would Uber have arbitrated in same manner if female employees were accused of harassment? yes, they would have. It's not about women,men or trans. It's about equality at workplace. Should one be more sensitive to women employees concern than men? If yes, where is the equality?
I don't see what popping into stairways in the company building to have sex has to do with making money. From the outside, Uber seems to have gotten focused on a blatantly unsustainable, ultra-exploitative business model and on frat-boy hijinks at the office.
A level headed manager asserts that the goal of a business is to make money and outreach isn't the primary goal of a for-profit company. Such activities are fine as long as they don't create secondary conflicts. This triggers a fusillade of virtue-signalling Internets.
It works well for delivering your MVP and maybe the first version of your product. But then you want your employee to be empowered, to feel relevant and be able to take matters into their hands. Otherwise it doesn't scale. But happy and satisfied worker could step up to this level. Unsatisfied and soldier like employees cannot do that, they will be just soldiers that fear for their position. And not having even patriotism (that is what bond soldiers) work for them, the best will leave your company, the worst will stay.
That's one of the differences between being a manager and being a leader. A leader takes the hard questions into his hands.
But don't trust me, there are years of research in company organization saying that. Go out and read any article on HBS on the topic of leadership, workplace organization or CSR and you'll see that.
Based on your statement, if the company gets more money by doing all sorts of terrible things to its contractors and employees then that's the right thing to do? There's going to be a ton of local minima in decisions and gray areas in things that you can't accurately value if you reduce it all to money. I think you haven't quite thought through this one completely.
This is either ignoring the problem, or circular reasoning. "Oh well of course don't allow that kind of behaviour; it makes employees uncomfortable and that doesn't help make money." Ok, but how do you define that?
Sounds like the convenient POV from someone already well represented in the industry. Dismissing issues of diversity as being tangential to the core business of, well, business, is sensible from an, ahem, business-perspective. And from a human perspective, really flawed and problematic.
From a human perspective, humans are really flawed and problematic.
That extends to even the most well-meaning diversity initiative. If nothing else, diversity initiatives create implicit filters for the types of people that are excited-to-ambivalent about diversity initiatives.
no, that's how you get status quo bias. the current system makes money, so if that's all you focus on, you'll never address the fact that it treats some demographics worse than others.
also, this sort of "extrapolate to the absurd" list ("religion, sex, gender, age, height, phase of the moon (maybe you employ werewolves), etc.") is a classic red flag for someone not caring about the very real inequalities in the system - the most common variant is "i don't care if you're white, black, green or purple...", but what it really works out to is "i think we can just brush any black-person-specific problems under the carpet and everything will be fine".
Except all of this fallout is because Uber HR determined employee x with a harassment issue is valuable enough to making money that the potential to lose employees y and z is an acceptable risk.
Ethics do not logically fall into place magically because the ultimate goal is making money. It's easy to say "ignore those factors in favor of making money" but the reality of the world isn't that simple. Uber didn't tolerate a culture that got in the way of making money, and now they're here.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Focusing on work and allowing harassment is polar opposites. Harassment is by definition something personal and not professional, and outside of those supporting hazing there is not much support that harassment has any place in the work place.
Reading the stories about uber, I keep hearing that the woman wanted to focus on work but the harassing person interfered. That is exactly what amorphid suggest that a company should work to prevent, fostering a culture that focus on making customers happier and getting people working together for that a common goal.
As long as the demand for engineers stay higher than supply, everything should fall magically into place, actually, according to economic theory.
Developer turnover is very costly.
What I got from these womens' answers is that their motivations are pretty much exactly the same as men's. Maybe with the exception of serial harassment cases.
I'm not so certain. I agree, it should. But engineers don't like to talk about their salary; I have no idea what my peers earn, and it isn't easy to find out. Researching data such as discussion on HN, Glassdoor, BLS data, surveys from companies that are more open, etc. yield absolutely ludicrous ranges; I might ought to (depending on who and how you ask) be earning anywhere from 60k to 250k+ as an engineer; that includes throwing out some high & low figures. The situation is made worse by the huge disparities in cost of living between various geographies, making it hard to translate salaries in one area into anything sensible in the next. (You're lucky to get a breakdown to one of a geographical area, or actual line of work, but not both. I want to know what a backend vs. mobile vs. PM makes in Boston vs. NYC vs. SF; and ideally, along even more dimensions. Alas, it seems that blog-studies never release the data.)
If you think that interpersonal and morale issues don't affect how effectively a company functions, I kind of think you don't get how companies function.
These are both ridiculous. (1) can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Women should be just as passionate about the work. (2) There's such a thing as a stay-at-home-dads and men that take care of their children. What ever happened to the chant of 'equality'?
If you feel like being controversial, at least do everyone the courtesy of responding to the most obvious counter arguments ahead of time. We all know what they are, and no one wants to rehash the same stuff over and over, unless we're going to hear something new.
Posting inflammatory or snarky comments on divisive topics ends up turning threads into flamewars. That's effectively trolling even if you don't intend it to be, so please don't comment this way on HN.
Comments should become more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Then we avoid the downward spiral into internet hell.
1. Heat is not the same thing as passion. It's possible to be passionate, but still run into problems when discussing technology with people who are so convinced of their correctness that there is no actual debate taking place. This happens much of the time with younger devs coming out of college who are, for instance, absolutely convinced that the best way to do [x] is to use [y] technology or [z] paradigm.
As a senior dev on a team of scala/haskell programmers, we see this often. Speaking over someone is not the same as being passionate. People speak over women all the time - I have been on the receiving end of it from devs fresh out of college as someone who's published papers.
2. They were talking biological imperatives. Women's ability to have children dies at ~40. If they want to have kids, they need to get on it. No one said anything about women being only mothers and men being only breadwinners.
Reading you're comments, I'm supposing you're probably the redpill type.
Perceived or real? I'm yet to hear about a company that has policy to pay women less. Most have personally-discussed salaries though. If some ladies are paid less, they probably don't haggle as well. What should we do? Deny custom salaries and personal raises?
Yeah, no kidding, nobody has a policy to do that. But there are several factors, including:
1. Women tend to negotiate less aggressively
2. Women who negotiate aggressively tend to be perceived worse than men doing the exact same thing
3. Implicit bias affects the amount of money an employer sees fit to offer in the first place
As to what to do, here some ideas:
* Massachusetts' law barring employers from asking about previous salaries as part of negotiations seems like a good idea
* More transparency about salaries would help
* Maybe a "Costco auto club" model, where the price is set up-front with no haggling, would be a good idea. Reddit tried to do this but it was kind of tied up with all the other issues they had. Not 100% sure on this one.
> Maybe a "Costco auto club" model, where the price is set up-front with no haggling, would be a good idea. Reddit tried to do this but it was kind of tied up with all the other issues they had. Not 100% sure on this one.
The negative to that is (unless every company plays by those same rules) you're limiting yourself in who you can hire. The more expensive (and, presumably, more skilled) developers will go work somewhere that will pay them more (based on that skill), while the cheapest (and, presumably, lowest skilled) developers will come work for you because they know you'll pay them more than others will.
There are benefits to being able to pay people what you feel they are worth to your company. Is it worth losing those benefits.
I don't know. Maybe you just offer competitive salaries for everyone and everyone wants to work for you. Maybe your superstars actually get a different title and responsibilities and you're just more upfront about how you decide. I think there are plenty of companies out there with a pretty narrow band for any given position and this way of doing things eliminates the anxiety about whether you negotiated well or not.
Also, I think most companies can't really hope to attract the world's very best programmers anyway. If everyone says they're hiring the best they can't all be right.
There will always be some companies paying more and some paying less. People who are not as good at getting a better salary in current system, would probably fail to get into better paying companies then. And we're back at square 1.
How do you figure? If they're able to pass whatever company's interview and negotiation is no longer a factor it seems more likely that salaries will become more equitable. I'd guess the correlation between negotiating skill and technical skill is small at best.
HN doesn't allow to go that deep in comment thread, thus replying there...
> How do you figure? If they're able to pass whatever company's interview and negotiation is no longer a factor it seems more likely that salaries will become more equitable. I'd guess the correlation between negotiating skill and technical skill is small at best.
In 2-tier (technical + negotiation) interview, candidates have to show they're good enough technically first. Then they negotiate their worth. In what you propose, they'd have to negotiate their worth right away. If company isn't willing to pay, why would they hire said person for higher wage?
Even purely technical job interview is sort of haggling. Well, aside from bullshit whiteboard tests which suck left and right.
The way the system is set up now puts the candidate at a disadvantage because he or she has no idea what the company is willing to pay or what their criteria are. In a situation where the cards are laid on the table -- here is the position or positions and here is the salary or salaries -- both parties have the same information and are free to focus entirely on the question of competence. A lot of the negotiation process now involves irrelevant crap like finding out your current salary -- so that then the candidate has set the lowest acceptable offer and the company can negotiate from there.
Besides penalizing candidates for lacking knowledge that isn't really relevant to work performance (like how to dance around offering a current salary, for instance), the current system also tends to perpetuate whatever disparity already exists by tending to base offers at least in part on current salaries, and also will reflect the gender disparity shown in responses to salary negotiations which I mentioned above.
I don't guarantee such a system would make things better but I do think there are some reasons to think it might.
IMO negotiating is part of relevant skillset. Especially for more senior (= better paid) positions. One has to know not only how to write code, but back up his decisions as well. Or prevent others from causing issues.
That skill has little to do with salary negotiation. And you keep on asserting that salary negotiation has nothing to do with gender, which seems to me to be skipping most of the work of refuting my arguments, based as they are on the premise that one's gender affects one's success in salary negotiation.
Also, I think that these changes would likely benefit male workers too, but not to the same degree as women.
Yes, you're correct, I think we shouldn't discuss this as a gender issue.
IMO you're mistaking correlation for causation. As you say yourself, changing current salary setup would affect both women and men. This is not gender issue and this should be discussed on other points than gender. Making it about gender is counter productive.
Looking at this form economical perspective, as long as we don't have objective way to measure programmer's productivity, I don't think we can get away from salary negotiations.
1. That's not the problem of anybody except the person who does not negotiate aggressively.
2. People respond differently to men and women (a fact that seems to be true across all species). We don't have a clear, testable model for why this happens.
3. Implicit bias is not scientific and not relevant. Sorry for the lengthy write-up, but this should be called out for being farcical and/or psychologically dangerous.
Implicit bias scores have no meaningful correlation with actual actions and the scores themselves will vary wildly for the same person for reasons that are unknown and unaccounted for. This lack of correlation turns it into a baseless accusation.
Lots of people accept IAT (which has a super low predictive validity) as true while rejecting IQ which has an amazing amount of predictive validity in all kinds of areas. Interestingly, higher IQ is linked to lower rates of racism and other bias. Given that programmers have on average significantly higher IQ scores relative to the general population, you would expect such things to not be the primary issues of the field.
Even if we assume implicit bias exists, does it matter if you cannot prove it has any real world effects (and such effects have not been proven). If we assume even further (against good evidence) that such implicit bias exists AND has real world effects, is there a solution?
Lots of companies force their employees to undergo implicit bias training. There are ZERO studies proving that the training works. Much more scarily, we don't know if it has other negative psychological impacts. Companies messing around with peoples heads without any supporting studies and clinical trials is EXTREMELY dangerous.
Finally, let's examine the theoretical framework for fixing implicit bias (under the assumption that it exists and that the individual does not consciously desire to be biased). We must start by either assuming that implicit outweighs explicit (radical behavioralism with no free will) or that explicit outweighs implicit.
If explicit outweighs implicit, then teach people the golden rule, tell them discrimination is bad, and call it a day because that's all you can do. Implicit bias training is sold on the basis that this is not enough and will not work. It thus carries the implication that you cannot choose to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc, but if you give them your money, they have the magic incantations to "pray the <bias> away".
How do you change the subconscious? The first option is new age garbage. The second is hypnosis (we can't prove hypnosis even exists). The third is operant and/or classical conditioning of the most extreme variety (to reach past the conscious and modify the subconscious -- hopefully without ripping the individual apart in the process) may be enough to do the trick (immersive re-education camps are a must in order to ensure all aspects of the subject are controlled for). Basically no other ideas exist.
TL;DR
With no solid supporting science behind the idea of implicit bias, there remains only moral panic and ideological fanaticism attempting to sell either snake-oil cures or barbaric, unethical psychological experiments of a most Stalinesque variety.
Well I suggested a handful of measures that don't involve "implicit bias training," which I agree is unlikely to work, but I question your claim that there isn't any evidence for implicit bias.
If you want to conclude that either women are just inherently inferior or else that they aren't but it's ok to systematically underpay them then I guess that's your prerogative but I'm not really interested in going down such a rabbit hole.
I would argue that women and men are different both physically and psychologically and have different interests arising from these differences.
I would further argue that negotiation is a skill that some people have and others do not. Should we refuse to reward someone for their skill in negotiation? Should we even try?
On the first count, the brains of men and women are structurally different (women have drastically more white matter and men have drastically more gray matter). The observation that men and women view the world very differently is universal. When looking at the big five personality traits, men and women consistently show far different norms. If all observations both casual and professional tend to indicate significant differences, the possibility should be seriously entertained.
If men and women are identical, why do we need women in STEM? The men we have would work just as well. If one is making the case for more people overall in STEM, then they are making an economic argument (and one that doesn't favor STEM workers -- only employers of STEM workers). If one makes a case for different life experience, then there is an acknowledgement of difference. If men and women are different, then there is a distinct possibility that one group is better or more interested in a particular field than the other. In either situation, there seems to be little case for drastic change (except for employers suppressing wages by increasing the supply of workers).
As to the second count, let's say we put two people (of the same gender for sake of limiting differences) with the same qualifications into the same job with the exception that one is more skilled at negotiation. We then force both to work for the same pay. Will that end the advantages of the more skilled negotiator? The better negotiator will still be better at getting the good projects or a faster promotion.
In the long term, the negotiation skillset will simply turn into more profit in other ways and the level of control required to prevent this from happening is so draconian as to be unthinkable.
> If men and women are identical, why do we need women in STEM? The men we have would work just as well
Because it is inherently unjust to discriminate against people because of characteristics that have no bearing on the job, such as their race and their gender. If you don't accept this premise I don't think we can have a productive discussion because it's the basic principle I'm basing my argument on.
> In the long term, the negotiation skillset will simply turn into more profit in other ways and the level of control required to prevent this from happening is so draconian as to be unthinkable.
Maybe. So what? Careless drivers are still more likely to injure themselves than careful ones even if we make everyone wear a seat belt; it does not follow that making everyone wear a seat belt is pointless.
I accept the premise of equal opportunity, but you are insisting on equal outcome (and asserting that it is a foregone conclusion). Everyone is equal under the law, but that does not mean that everyone has the same qualities or qualifications.
If you can show me a company that is refusing to hire a woman, then I'll be right there with you opposing them. If a company is forcing a woman to work for lower pay because she is a woman, then I'll be right there with you opposing them. When you ask me to discriminate against someone because they are better at negotiating, I cannot offer support.
Blind moral assertion IS NOT FACT.
You assert that we must have the same number of men and women because it is the moral thing to do. You further assert that this moral imperative is so absolute that the use of force to compel other people is perfectly fine.
At its basis, this is no different than relatively small things like prohibition or large things like the inquisition or communist re-education camps.
EDIT: to answer your first statement in more concrete terms, I believe men and women make different choices because they are different (as stated at the top of that post). If you are insistent on forcing women into STEM whether they like it or not, there should be more to that argument than symmetry. What you quoted addresses one part that line of thought.
Yes, if you take it as a given that implicit bias is fake or irrelevant then very few companies could be described as discriminatory. I didn't assert that we "must have the same number of both genders" either, or that any means are permissible to achieve greater gender equality. You're letting your imagination run wild.
> Because it is inherently unjust to discriminate against people because of characteristics that have no bearing on the job, such as their race and their gender. If you don't accept this premise I don't think we can have a productive discussion because it's the basic principle I'm basing my argument on.
Is it ok to discriminate based on one's personal characteristics?
I'm pretty sure woman who is technically good as well as good negotiator gets equal salary as man with same abilities. Women (and men) who are bad negotiators are discriminated because of their personal characteristics, not because of their gender.
Or are you saying that certain skills should not be valued in job market, because they're less prevalent in one of the genders' iconic image?
If you want to reply to a comment further downthread you can click on the timestamp. I do not know why it works that way but replying to a common parent is confusing.
That article just says women negotiate less/worse. I'm saying good negotiator will get paid regardless of gender. Wether women can negotiate as good as men is another question. But as I said in another comment, this is skill issue, not gender issue. Wage gap studies that have controls throughout the board show there's no significant pay difference. My anecdata confirms that.
We can cross "negotiate less" off the list, since the article controls for that and finds women who do negotiate are less successful. It is possible that women are three times worse negotiators across the board but it strikes me as far more likely that the well documented tendency of assertive women to be perceived as "shrill" or "bossy" is a significant factor.
I find that in these topics, people jump to the problem solving step before problem formulation.
In the best case, there might be a response of "because sexism/racism" to "why this problem".
We have a limited amount of "diversity funds". If the appeal is emotional and one of righteousness, we should use the funds to aid the category of people with the most disadvantages.
That would be foreign immigrants because their native language is not English (almost all documentation, code and communication is in English) and they do not have a good understanding of American culture which cripples them in politics and communication.
Comparatively, the upper middle class white girl or african american is privileged.
No, I don't think so. Understanding English is germane to the job; your gender is not. Besides that, why exactly are you talking about "foreign immigrants" as a distinct category from women?
If only men predominantly "haggle well", is it possible that the ideal wage negotiation is modeled around an alpha male? It feels like rewarding productivity and giving equality in wage could be easily tied together, and benefit nearly everyone.
Claudia Goldin, Harvard economics professor, has some really interesting info on this I heard on a Freakonomics podcast a while back [1].
A big takeaway for me was that the data showed men and women being largely equal in pay for the earlier parts of their careers when you control for various things. When families start entering the equation, women often prioritize different things in their job, or consider changing jobs that offer these things. One of the big new priorities is...surprise...flexibility. When you have a family, flexibility because worth its weight in gold. If women are still predominantly the primary caretaker at home, it makes sense that they would need to optimize for whatever gives them the best balance there.
However the dark side of this, as discussed int he podcast, is that it can often lead to things like bosses not giving out choice assignments with lots of travel for example, because they don't think the employee would want that or be able to manage it. That sort of thing compounds over time and leads to slower progression, less leverage when asking for raises, etc.
The episode was a real eye opener for me because it brought some interesting data to the table.
At its most basic: Is a voice that isn't shouting heard and valued?
Is someone who seeks consensus from the team before moving forward rewarded? Or is someone who just goes out and does something rewarded more? You have to see what kind of styles are promoted within the organization, and if there's a place for the less aggressive/assertive within it. For those that may struggle with impostor syndrome, and not just assume they know everything.
It also really helps to see women on the team, especially in more senior positions, doing code reviews, etc. If there's a layer of men who are subtly sexist, the organization really as a whole won't retain, ever. A double standard is incredibly demoralizing.
But seriously, look at who gets listened to in meetings. Who takes up the time, is it just people who are loud and willing to argue about things, while those unwilling to interrupt never get acknowledged?
Why are we talking about women here? Anything particularly special about them?
Managers should focus on retaining top talent that allows organization to move forward. Interacting with others productively is one facet of top talent - regardless of what personal traits (love of geeky things, particular choice of hobbies or whatever else) ultimately allows for team fusion.
The moment management starts socially engineering the team on any other metric than team's ability to contribute to company cause, they are harming their organization.
Commercial entities are not avenues of social justice. They are instruments of making money.
the perspective of women is really valuable and we should be thankful to hear from this group of women, speaking honestly about their experience.
HOWEVER...
it was remarkable how little of the issues they discussed had anything whatever to do with their gender. I think this is really important and should be a good clue for followups. How about YC opens up the question series to engineers from all backgrounds? I expect to see a remarkable similarity in answers about what constitutes a good (or bad) work environment.
Absolutely! But I think that's actually a point worth making.
I hear all the time that higher-ups think that the key to retaining women is hosting diversity events, adding parental leave / mother's rooms, or other stuff specifically catered to women. Not saying those aren't good things to have, but for the most part, if you listen to your employees and treat all of your engineers well, you will see gains to retaining everyone, including women.
Women being so "in demand" for tech companies looking to improve diversity numbers also gives some of us the opportunity to be pickier with what kind of work environments we'll accept.
To answer some questions regarding the comments about how these things are different from men to women. They may not be. The reported answers may be the same and related to issues both men and women struggle with.
However, I think theres been some more chatter in the industry trying to get to the bottom of some issues that have come up recently with gender in tech one not so recent and more general. Here's what I mean
Particularly data scientists and computer scientists and economists who are skilled at teasing out data in large and seemingly choatic data sets cannot figure this out, which is ironic considering they are the group in which this gender disparity occurred which such a dramatic and relatively sudden dropoff.
6. Female leaders: Founders, CEOs, CTOs receive far more public criticism AND HOSTILITY than male CEOs and CTOs ie.e Ellen Pao as leader of reddit, Marissa Meyer, Sheryl Sandberg
* The things that have been said about these women and their bodies and how evil they are I have never ever heard with male CEOs no matter how evil, nor have I seen criticism as harsh, unrelated to the business issue, cruel and emotionally punishing as these women have faced. Dear god, how could any women aspire to be a leader when the women who aspire to are bombarded with a nonstop barage of sexual and emotional humiliation 24/7 on the internet male CEOs never face. It's ridiculous.
* I am not saying these things happen (the disparities by gender noted above) because men are sexist and evil. I don't think anyone knows why this is happening, which is why more women who are in tech are being asked to open up and speak out to get their personal perspective since all the data and studies in the world don't seem to be providing these answers
* My personal opinion for what its worth: I have to say as a woman in tech, an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science who now does graphics engineering and GPU software layer dev, I do...
The common thread running through all of this was that what seemed to drive these women from their own roles in tech were the incompetence or inexperience of management.
I'm young enough (born in the late 1980's) that during my entire time in the work force, I feel like I've only ever met ONE "real" manager. I've known many people in management roles, but I think we've definitely lost sight of what good management even looks like. If you're under a certain age, I wonder if you've even met a real manager before. From today forward, many of the people in management roles may never have met a real manager before too - how are they supposed to fill a role they've never seen before.
I think we need some good management role models, and we need to find a way to encourage people in management roles to grow to fill this.
I don't have any studies or hard facts to cite, but consider this - I feel like part of the role of a manager is to bear responsibility and deadlines, manage the workers and give them the access and tools they need to succeed. But what I see most often is managers (not doing the work) acting like slave drivers, pushing all of the responsibility and pressure of meeting the deadlines on the workers to stress about. I see lower level workers staying late after work, taking 'ownership' of their manager's responsibilities out of fear they will get fired. That's not what it's supposed to look like but unfortunately for most millennials it seems to be the common experience.
I found the same, but consider it to be bias. Once you have had a really good manager, you compare everyone else to them, and of course the rest fall short.
I agree. I've seen this same thing too many times.
My conclusion is that maybe the whole concept of "software manager" is deeply flawed. Upper management likes to have a single person they can pressure and blame. But the reality is that making good software on a schedule is incredibly difficult. Upper management doesn't seem to recognize that you can't just "bolt on" a good manager and just "force it to work."
Making good software in a way that's responsive to market pressures is not like running a lemonade stand. It's almost impossible to get right, even with a big budget, because upper management puts too many idiotic constraints on it.
Why do we need to try to attract women to technical role?There are plenty of other people to fill the role. This is America they are free to go to another job if they want. I think discrimination should be harshly punished, but trying to get a certain person (color, ethnicity) into a certain role just seems anti SV.
But even if it were about attracting them, your question is a non-starter, because this isn't about hiring women over and above hiring men, it's about hiring women at all and those women then staying on and not quitting due to culture issues. "This is America," so, what, we shouldn't bother picking the best candidates and retaining them? Or do you not believe there's ever cases where a woman was the best choice for a job, but she chose not to take it?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadhttps://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-4/
https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-3/
https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-2/
https://blog.ycombinator.com/introducing-ask-a-female-engine...
;-)
Instead they get a detailed, industry standard, multi-stage plan that has everything they need to start, as well as access to an architect that can check on their work and when things go wrong a process for change management is included. And no-one expects a house to be built well over a weekend.
You can quote a long paragraph that is represented as one big line very simply like this:
> That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting ...
I cut and pasted my own paragraph above. I typed a single > character in front, a space, and a pair of asterisks around it.
>You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting
Not much work, just a handful of keystrokes with the right software, and that's without optimizing the flow much. Could get it down more by making a macro.
>making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow
While true, if the quote is indeed lengthy, wouldn't this serve the reader better than a line of text that wraps many times? Those are hard to follow.
>plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.
Yes, this improves readability by making the barrier between quotation and response more readily visible.
The only downside seems to be that the block may clamp down to a horizontal scrollbox before some reader wants it to do so. For the record, on my computer (3440x1440 raw, some HiDPI settings make effective resolution significantly smaller), I never run across such blocks that require manual scrolling. On my phone, I do need to scroll horizontally, but I think that's nice. I have not yet seen it actually break a page or make it unusable.
I don't think it's a good technique for short line snippets, but yes, I do think it improves readability for long (paragraph-length or longer) quotes.
No, it's designed to preserve alignment and line breaks by using a monospace font and not wrapping, specifically for the purpose of presenting source code. It's modestly useful for tabular data for the same reason. It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.
I mean, I disagree. It looks and seems better to me. I understand that the font is monospaced but I don't see that as a problem. I understand that the text is put inside its own horizontal scrollbox instead of wrapped automatically, but again, I also don't see that as a problem for a lengthy block of text. I agree it would be annoying to have to scroll on every quotation anyone made.
When I say long blocks of text, I mean a snippet that is 60 lines by 60 columns, like the transcript excerpt I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13976410 . Personally, I would rather scroll past that than scrolling past a long italicized, autowrapped block every time I came to the thread.
People keep saying it breaks the layout in some cases, and if so, then they are right to ask that people refrain from using it until the bug gets fixed. However, I haven't observed such breakage happening, and no one I've asked has shown it. At the moment, it appears to be a personal preference thing.
Taken individually, you'll find folks all over any given spectrum, but if we're going to address "Women in Tech" vs the implicit "Men in Tech" then we can't just say "well the two are exactly the same and therefore there's no discussion to be had."
Of course there's differences between men and women. Different values, different priorities, different sensitivities. Maybe there are issues in nursing and education which men are more sensitive towards, and that's why there's such a larger opposing gender disparity in those fields? That doesn't mean that either gender is necessarily "weaker", just "different".
If we want to help technical managers retain women, then it would be helpful to determine which issues women are generally more sensitive to, even if they're the same issues men have faced for however long but which have not driven them away from the industry.
Most of the common ones seem to be a company or manager's words not matching their actions. The sample sizes I've experienced may be fairly small so far (very few female colleagues, as ever), but I've seen men and women leave in equal measure for that type of transgression.
The only point I'm trying to make is the obvious one: men and women are different. It's a stupid point, taken at face value, but it's one that seems to get lost every time someone says "but men face those same issues" or "that doesn't seem like a gendered issue to me".
The reason I bring it up though, is that I don't see or experience any particular bias around most of the the issues in the article. Most of the points raised really don't seem like gendered issues.
If the issues listed are largely the same issues faced by men, and if the issues have an equivalent impact on male engineer retention, then the answers are incomplete or we're asking the wrong women. Maybe we should ask female former engineers why they left the industry?
Isn't this kind of the point? Am I missing summat?
It isn't so much a biological difference (there may be some of that) but one that is likely a byproduct of how we socialize children [1].
Fixing this issue in adults is a hell of a lot harder to fix than it is in kids.
It doesn't help that software engineering as a whole, is to varying degrees, broken. From how we interview to how we manage projects [2]. We simply have no idea how to build something effective and repeatable within the constraints of the current system.
[1] I could put a million different links here, lets just use this one and you can do your own research after that: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-girls-bo...
[2] Again illustrative example, pick your own poison here as well: https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-experience-trap
Nobody's born with bias or opinions.
Indeed, both men and women have a superset of human concerns.
The union is never instantiated.
Susan Fowler's team, for example, a bad manager thought it was a good idea to save costs by not purchasing leather jackets for women on the Uber DevOps team. Spare the few hundred or thousand dollars (even if it were in the thousands) and make your employees feel equal and like they are a part of the same tribe. It's common sense. Pocket change to Uber and it makes people feel comfortable around their coworkers, and they will enjoy being part of a team and being passionate about their work-unit, co-workers and take pride in their company.
Here's some anecdotal evidence. I had a product manager last week tell me she thought it was great that our company bought women's jackets for the team instead of making them wear bulky men's sizes like so many companies she has worked for in the past. That cost me less than $150 for them to set up the plates/screens/whatever with the printer but it bought me thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in good-will. Great investment. For me, this was a small gesture on my part and the companies behalf. But, it went a long way. The ladies on my teams are strong contributors, and it's table stakes for me to make sure they feel included and part of the team. Even if I have to tailor to them. Pun intended.
My direct management of every employee is a little bit different based on who they are, their communication style, how they receive feedback and their work-style. I assume that gender goes a little bit into how I interact with each person on my team and I am willing to admit I probably have some biases but overall if you're already managing your team with a high eq, you'll fare well and create an inclusive team.
Here is the gender breakdown of MD's:
http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/
Women comprise 34% of MD's to 66% men. That is a statistical skew, but nowhere near the 93% male that programmers face. In essence when you reply to a comment here on HN you could carelessly say "he" referring to an OP without referring to their first name, whereas if this were a forum for physicians you would not make that assumption because it's not skewed enough for you to do so. (Here on HN there are lots of female engineers but they don't usually announce themselves explicitly.)
So software engineering has a gender problem. Now we're getting an interview about what some people cite for leaving an industry in which they can make six figures within their first five years, with nothing more than an undergraduate education or the equivalent self-learning of 25% of one.
So it is important to read the interviews extremely carefully and with a very open mind.
For example, what are some of the worst things about being a software engineer: insane hours; intense mental focus (it is impossible not to take your work home with you and I am sure many programmers routinely dream of the tasks they are working on); coupled with bull-pen open space offices:
However, open office plans[1] were not cited by the women in this interview. Zero mentions as far as I can see (I re-skimmed and also searched inline for "open').
The word hour or hours does not occur a single time.
So even though it appears that the issues cited are independent of gender, it is imperative to read these interviews very deeply. There could be more to them than meets the eye.
I don't know what it is, but it has to be in these interviews, lurking beneath the surface. Read more deeply.
[1] such as the monstrosity pictured here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan
It is no secret that women in nations where software engineering is likely to be a significant source of employment are far more socially attuned than men are; whether this is by nurture or nature is grist for another mill at another time. It is also no secret that software engineers rank lower on social validation than doctors. Empirically, look at a sampling of org charts, and statistically, pure software engineers (not counting Fellow-type positions, for example) rarely call the shots. Not that they should as a rule: I'm pointing out the reality.
Regardless of the US reality for doctors, with the constraints imposed upon them by the dysfunctionally-broken US healthcare policies, the social perception of doctors is "doctors call the shots". The phrase "doctor's orders" carries enormous cultural weight behind it.
To empirically test a weak form of this hypothesis, compare the number of women managers who were originally trained as programmers to women software engineers. If there is a statistically significant deviation, then some Maxwell's Demon-like mechanism at work performs a sorting function that emerges this deviation, gradually exerting an inexorable pull upon women programmers into management. A stronger experimental confirmation of this hypothesis would require someone with far more training in such psycho-social factors discrimination to devise an experiment to empirically test.
I'm not discounting the very real challenges women software engineers face. Personally, I have not witnessed first-hand any of the workplace vibe-killers described, and I've been in a lot of different workplaces by dint of my wandering consulting career, but I can believe it happens because I've also seen some really bad behavior in the species, and generally I tend to attract clients with pretty solid corporate cultures. But women tend as a statistical aggregate to pay attention to the nuances of social rankings far more than most men realize, and especially men in software engineering realize.
Also, a phrase like "doctor's orders" is common, because most members of the public will have occasion to see a doctor, the profession having existing for a long time. There's no saying "CTO's orders", yet this is obviously a position of power.
Also, your observances wrt men and social ranking could easily be confounded if you don't have a complete knowledge of the filters on the men & women you see in IT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_emotional_i...
Saying "C-level's orders" doesn't carry anywhere the same weight as "software engineer's orders". Given a technical decision, what weighting is the CFO's decision given over the software engineer tasked with understanding the problem domain? I deliberately chose CFO because it is a common refrain on HN and elsewhere that software engineers are summarily overridden by non-technical management on technical decisions. How frequently are doctors overridden on medical decisions by non-medicine-trained hospital administrators? I don't know the precise answer to that, but doctor/nursing friends don't complain about it.
I'm pointing out a possible line of inquiry that doesn't seem to come up in these discussions. Given the relatively low status of IT in most non-tech companies I work with, compared to Sales and Finance for example (where women are better represented than in coding and technical IT, yet sales and finance cultures can be notoriously misogynist in many orgs), it isn't an unreasonable question to pose whether or not that relative low status of programming turns off women in the general non-tech business world, which vastly outweighs our small echo chamber of strongly-tech-focused companies.
An observation I've been chewing upon. The US pharmaceutical /medical sales environment is heavily represented with women, with a blatantly cynical unspoken industry practice of hiring easy on the eyes women. This is an openly misogynist atmosphere, with getting hit on just a part of their daily sales calls, but women are not driven away by it to the point where beautiful medical sales women no longer is a cliche. Incentives matter. Might there also be the possibility the programming world's negatives outweigh the compensation, and at some point, the compensation can outweigh the negatives?
A related question is why, with so much money on the line, and as direct revenue generators, are so many women programmers in tech-focused companies relating consistently depressing stories of exclusion? In other words, are there no financial consequences for managers mishandling such valuable revenue generators in general, or is it only when the revenue generator are women?
No thank you, I'd sooner someone qualified do that.
> it is a common refrain on HN
> I don't know the precise answer ... doctor/nursing friends don't complain about it.
My point is, that this is weak subjective evidence. I do not see the same trends you do.
> it isn't an unreasonable question to pose whether or not that relative low status of programming turns off women
Isn't it? Lets establish that it is true first.
> are there no financial consequences for managers mishandling such valuable revenue generators in general
Does "so many women programmers in tech-focused companies relating consistently depressing stories of exclusion" mean that most women in tech are excluded, or that these stories bubble to the top?
At San Francisco General Hospital, At least 50% of the Administrator(s)-On-Duty are women. It's a mixture of MDs, and nurses. In fact, I've only personally met one AOD who is male (nurse). The AOD calls the shots on a daily basis.
BTW one recent CEO, Susan Currin is a nurse & the current CEO Susan Ehrlich, MD are both women.
IMO It's not a validation issue. Companies (Tech or otherwise) have the culture they reinforce, dysfunctional or not.
Parent comment says: if `(former programmer) turned manager` is more equal in gender than `programmer`, that might mean there is a sorting function that is pulling women out of engineering and into management.
His/her hypothesis is that being a "regular dev" is not very socially respected, and thus, pushes women to want out at a higher rate than other professions, like say, Doctor.
The fact that Doctor gender ratio is similar to Manager Doctor gender ratio, actually fits his hypothesis.
Not saying I disagree with either of you, just re stating.
The two are not mutually exclusive (and, indeed, can be mutually reinforcing.)
It's entirely possible that I am extrapolating from my own naivety, but do young men really get into software development for the money? I don't think any of my friends were thinking about our future salaries when we started programming after school. It's just this hobby that people will inexplicably pay us money for. I know this sounds like a cliché, but I've never seen data to the contrary.
But then I got married, had children, the kids grew up and needed braces and cars and college. I really need work that pays well right now, whether or not I like the work.
[...]
> The final straw has typically been something like my manager making an off-hand remark that is thoughtless and rude, or perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise, or someone I care about at work is sexually harassed or gets fired.
To me these sound like issues that women are more likely to encounter.
Women more likely to encounter this? This stuff happens all the time to everyone. I'm not sure how this is something a woman is more likely to encounter.
> "If she wept, wasn't it too extravagant; if she laughed, how odd that she should do so at her brother's funeral; if she spoke, he whispered that she was frenetic; if she fell silent, wasn't she grown strangely gloomy? And you could just watch men begin to see what he told them they were seeing, whether it was there or not. Toward the end of his visit there, he even said such things in her hearing, to see if he could frighten and enrage her, and then accuse her of becoming an unbalanced virago."
(The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold.)
Career meritocracy is, more or less, a myth. In technical fields, there is a merit baseline that has to be cleared, but after that, any further relationship between merit and position evaporates. That is inescapable. People sometimes think they've escaped it and found the promised land of meritocracy, but they haven't. That usually just means they have a politically-skilled manager who is good at keeping their belief in the fairy tale alive.
I agree that a good engineer is not necessarily a good engineering manager, but I don't believe there are good engineering managers who are not also good engineers.
The more accurate version of this is "women find less value in tech." It deserves more consideration than it gets. There are differences that aren't just cultural between genders, and its something that should be taken into account when forming a judgement on these issues.
Historically, your argument has been used to suppress women and minorities. It's weird that every time a group doesn't fit into an industry or a culture, that group is not white men.
Teaching, nursing, child care. Care to take a guess which group doesn't fit into those industries?
My comment was out of an interest in not being lied to more than anything else.
The subconscious forces that shape the way people think about these issues are the most pernicious.
"Men fail to enter [teaching|nursing|child care] at a rate much higher than other industries. The only conclusion is that [teaching|nursing|child care] is a hostile environment for men, or that men are intrinsically unable to perform in [teaching|nursing|child care]."
Which is it, in the areas I listed?
Source: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp133.pdf
This is a tedious point, and it gets made every single fucking time there's a thread like this.
Use a search engine. You'd find, within a few moments, programmes across all of these industries to correct the gender imbalance.
And yet the number never budges, and we don't hear the president and the media blasting said industries over their shameful employment ratios day after day.
Instead it's just "hmm yes, that's curious. Well we're working on the problem. Carry on..."
Whereas in tech if the ratio isn't 50/50 there's hell to pay. In comparison there isn't a damn thing being done to address the imbalance in the industries I've listed. Yet women in tech, that's a national crisis.
Yet those are professions where sex-diversity has a real impact on society. It's far more serious than the sex of the person writing the code for a fucking social network.
There has been about 1 story in the NY Times about this issue in the past 10 years.
And tech sex-disparity? A near constant stream of articles.
By the way, 1% of carpenters are women and 98% of dental hygienists are women.[1] Is that catastrophic? Does it warrant NY Times articles or endless pontification?
[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...
Are you arguing that tech hasn't developed into a somewhat hostile environment for woman because men face difficulties in some industries as well? Because if so that's a poor argument. It's completely possible for both to be true for the same reason while have different underlying causes
Yeah...no. That's such a distance that "leaping" to conclusions doesn't quite cover it. How about: women are (statistically) less interested in tech? So there is less intrinsic motivation, so extrinsic factors become much more important.
Not entirely coincidentally, that is exactly what surveys starting at high-school age right through professionals leaving the profession show. And "leaving" tech is often "getting promoted to management".
UPDATE: Note that even if this explanation were not the correct one (though I think it is the one that's most correct), it would still invalidate your assertion about other explanations being the only conclusions.
Seems like a terrible thing that needs to change.
The vector here is predictable and therefore uninteresting; most of us have been through it a zillion times and live in hope of being spared another. Therefore, please just don't.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13968549 and marked it off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's always alarming to read stories such as Susan Fowler's, that remind you sexism is still out there in force, in places. But it's great to read things like this, which implies at least a good chunk of fellow female devs are having the freedom to leave because their company doesn't care about software quality.
As you said, progress!
Engineering is a hard job, there's no two ways about it. Tech managers have a doubly hard job, having to navigate a tech stack well enough to lead their team and the people skills to manage all their special snowflake devs on one hand (nothing gender or age related, I love all my lil babies, even the ones with gandalf beards and strong opinions on Richard Stallman) and some very difficult strategic objectives on the other. People who can be effective in that role are hard to find.
While not completely gender specific, I think that speaks to difficulty managing up.
2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.
I've been in plenty of hostile reviews with completely harmless, introverted, soft spoken INTJ-types who simply can't get past some nitpick because it doesn't fit into their perfect, logical world view and refuse to budge an inch.
Our industry has a personality problem as much or more as it has a sex problem.
Unreasonable people come in all shapes and personalities.
I've also been on the reviewing end of plenty of types who think all small things are inconsequential nitpicks which excuses them from having to change anything. Then people moan about a lack of standards and consistency between teams...
I've also died in a ditch over naming conventions for unit tests - whilst not my proudest moment - it drives home one of the key points in the article, that good managers work with all their people to make a cohesive team. Everyone has things to improve on and can benefit from constructive criticism. Management is far harder than technical work as humans always have state, there's no such thing as a pure function for humans. Knowing how to coach, mentor, advocate for, protect, encourage etc is not something you are born with, and you can't really spin up an AWS instance of a team of humans to practice on.
The data suggests our industry has a massive sex problem. Refocusing the debate onto yourself is a blocking factor in solving this problem.
Also paid maternity leave, funded by taxes.
The issue is when code reviews become a competitive sport, and more about technical oneupmanship than they are about improving code quality and team knowledge.
Pointing out a buffer overflow isn't sexism. It's pointing out a buffer overflow.
Get a fucking grip. Pointing out a buffer overflow isn't sexism. It's pointing out a fucking buffer overflow.
You could have communicated your point without the aggression. That's what I presume is gedy's original point.
Who hurt you? I suggest you find greener pastures if you truly believe that.
Yes this can apply to males too, but my empirical observation is mostly more applicable to females.
This is a very sexist statement, do you have any evidence for that other than your anecdotical experiences?
there is that..
then there are managers and engineers who tell ppl to 'f off' or to 'gtfo' .. and thats deemed acceptable by culture - that needs to be dealt with.
I've found myself finding more common ground with young women on my teams than with the young men for this reason, and for the reason that when I do have something constructive to offer during a review then young women generally respond to it in a way that I like (e.g. they make a value judgement about what advice was worth taking and what wasn't and do it).
The kind of men you're describing seem to find a way to turn everything into a sport, and seem to be oblivious to the effect that they have on people whose attitudes toward competition don't match their own. It is frequently embarrassing to watch, and definitely my least favorite aspect of this work.
> young women generally respond to it in a way that I like (e.g. they make a value judgement about what advice was worth taking and what wasn't and do it).
In my only 10+ years experience, I noticed women seem more defensive about their code being reviewed and I have to write long formal arguments if I'm suggesting any more than a trivial change. Then there will be a discussion afterwards and based on that it's 50/50 whether it gets done. Now I pad reviews with positives about the work to soften it in some probably transparent attempt to placate the reviewee.
With men, I review the code, make a suggestion, I usually get a note "sounds good, will do." That's not all men of course, there's always at least one guy who doesn't want his code reviewed at all, too good, doesn't see the point, etc.
This is me, but not at first. I think it took me a while to realize most arguments aren't worth it and not rocking the boat has a lot of social value, especially from a "get on with my day and let bygones be bygones" perspective. I suck up some really questionable criticisms from my boss on the regular. Its not a big deal. I find women in the workplace seem to learn this lesson much later than their male peers. I think female social culture is often argument and verbal heavy and that translates poorly into the workplace. I feel this is the downside of being more socially aware earlier on than boys. Girls seem to become very sensitive to perceived slights and that hyper-sensitivity doesn't translate well into the workplace.
I work with women in their 40s who will argue about the something trivial thing until they're blue in the face. I almost never see a man act like this, especially past age 30 or so. I think older men are just taught to take arguments and conflict more seriously and take on a certain level of stoicism, if not a strong level of emotional repression, at work. In the world of men a conflict could turn into violence quickly while women on women violence is much more rare and with much less serious consequences. A 110lbs girl isn't going to be able to murder me but a 200lbs guy could easily or accidentally do so. I think subconscious knowledge of that permeates our work life and affects how we develop. By the time we enter the workplace we've internalized certain attitudes, if your attitude is 'conflict is everywhere and needs to be constantly addressed' then you'll have a hard time at work, regardless of gender.
I remember being the only man in a group of girls at my first professional job and the gossiping and negativity was extremely high with them, now I can't ever imagine socializing like that at work. It just seems crazy and a guaranteed way to ruin your day and hate your coworkers and bosses. Some of it was absolutely justified but dwelling on it was counter-productive (no one went to HR or went to resolve things, they just seethed endlessly).
Nowadays, I've picked up the 'male stoicism' that always bewildered me about older guys when I was first starting to work a 'real job.' Now it makes perfect sense to me as it limits conflict, drama, and seething resentment. Meanwhile many of my female peers never made this advancement so we have to make special exemptions and treat them with kid gloves if they're even on the receiving end of anything they'll perceive as a slight. Its exhausting, frankly, and I wonder why women, with their ultra-refined social skills, don't see that this kind of behavior is ultimately self-defeating.
That said, the above is a generalization, but its definitely an 80/20 kind of things. 80% of the women I've worked with are like this, with 20% being the exception.
I'm sure whatever you'd like to replace these processes could be described in equally sweeping sexist terms going the opposite direction, you know.
Frankly this is something I'd welcome too.
I get what you're saying but at the same time... code reviews and conversations not debates/arguments are important regardless of gender. You're saying you want to built a tech org without that being a central idea to the way men and women on the team should work?
You mean passionate engineers and developers discussing ways of getting the job done most efficiently? It's a little crazy to ban this rather than encourage women to get into the discussion. If they aren't as passionate, then maybe they should be in a different career.
I find it funny that many were trying to say men and women were the same. Now it seems those same people are saying not only are men and women different..but the men are doing it the wrong way. I guess we are different after all.
Many people get into the tech industry because of the money..and end up leaving because they don't realize it's many times time consuming, humiliating, and mind-numbing labor. You really have to love it to stick with it. I've been in the industry for 20+ years and I almost never get bored.
"Some flexibility on hours/location when children come."
As long as men can also work remotely and have flexible hours. Nobody wants to live at work. You also have to realize that when you are in the office less, you will be passed up for promotions. This isn't sexism, it's just how things work, regardless of your race or gender.
Social event starts off friendly. Gradually, the conversation starts turning very technical or very sci-fi, then women turned away and formed their own social group. Worse, the only woman engineer on the team spends the night sipping on her drink quietly wishing she found these topics more interesting or wishing she took more CS classes so she could appreciate the intensity of the conversation. (Note, I'm using women as an example because of the posted question. But this applies just as much to the minority race, age group, etc.)
I think it is important for the manager (or any teammate in general) to make social inclusivity their top priority in a social environment. Look around, if you see that someone in the group is not engaged, steer the group conversation towards the interests of that person. Its a hard skill do develop, but its a skill managers should be actively working to improve.
You want the manager to micro-manage a happy hour? Sounds like torture.
Okay, make me unhappy. I'm just another toxic male. I can go, right? My leaving will just make the rest of the team more vibrant or whatever.
Well, I produce 10x more code than the rest of the team put together, so good luck.
It sounds like you are a very intelligent and motivated person , so lets think about this logically.
Here's an alternative scenario: lets say you take the time and effort to get your team to like you and inspire them to improve to your skill level. If you are the 10x engineer, then produce code at 1x and spend the other 9x learning and doing what it takes to inspire the rest of the team to get to your productivity. If it takes the team 1 year to get to your productivity and the team has size of 10, then the team collectively will have 100x productivity by the end of the year. You would be able to accomplish way more than what you could have accomplished yourself. (Obviously, I generalized the math. But you get the point).
Counter argument: "I don't plan to stay in the company for that long to reap the benefits"
Fortunately, if you inspire somebody to become 10x the person they were, you would have made a lasting impact in their lives. Companies come and go, but relationships stick around. If you leave to do your startup, chances are these 10x engineers would be more than happy to join (at various stages of success during the life of the startup).
This is all I have time to write. I hope this helps. Good luck.
And what about people who choose not to go to restaurants?
Seems like you have a chip on your shoulder about drinking.
Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.
I sit out the usual Friday bar nights and have to turn down the occasional offers of alcohol from coworkers that don't interact with me frequently (and thus either don't know or have forgotten that I don't drink)
They get to go get wasted at the local bar. I get to enjoy my Friday night playing video games alone. Win-win. If they do something like GoKarting I get dragged into something I'd rather not be doing since I feel obliged to attend since I sit out of the many alcohol-related events.
I'm agreeing with Chris2048 here. Sounds like a chip. They can enjoy their alcohol without me being a downer about it or forcing the majority of the company to comply with my wishes of non-alcoholic expenditures.
If they have fun drinking, let them have fun I say. I'll go home and play some video games.
Perhaps it is because I have a very visible impact on my department or maybe because all decision making is done during office hours. The bar is for play and karaoke - not to talk about work. The company culture treats any work discussion during team outings as taboo. You won't be punished for it but you'll be told kindly to shut up and have fun - work will be back again next Monday. Talk about it then. :)
If I had to guess, that probably plays a huge part into why the company doesn't have those sort of problems.
Many places are not like this.
If you deserve promotion for a non-social role, but aren't because you don't go out with the team, that is not good, but that's a tangent to banning work related drinking events.
Another question is, do you go to non-alcohol related work events?
My answer is it's a rarity, and a distraction that you included it.
> Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people who don't participate in American drinking culture and binge drinking.
Does it? Strange given I neither binge drink (which isn't the same as a drink after work anyway, and so I reiterate that you have a chip) nor am I American.
I couldn't care less if people don't want to participate, I'm not going to suggest they be forced - unlike your suggestion that people be forced not to.
When your team visits this hypothetical restaurant, will you ban anyone from ordering steaks, because because a baby can't chew it...
Not everyone can participate in every thread of a conversation but it's important to change the topic often enough to allow people to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.
Women might have different interests than men, but why do you think they might be stymied by technical conversation? She's an engineer the same as the rest, unless she was hired because of tokenism she should absolutely be able to hold her own in a technical conversation.
I was trying to share what I learned from speaking with a few of my friends. Put yourself in the shoes of a woman who wanted a career change and joined a bootcamp. You learned the necessary skill and took an engineering job on a predominantly male team. Already, you are self conscious about not having a 4 year CS degree. Now they consistently talk about cryptography, hardware, that doesn't seem to relate to your work. As if gender wasn't an issue already, now there is also a technical exclusion.
I am also open to suggestions. Is this an okay scenario?
However, this does remind me of a phenomenon in child psychology, where girls in a classroom setting are much more likely to participate in class if it's an all-girl class vs a mixed-gender setting. I believe the literature says this is largely due to some learned cultural behavior in early childhood, but I can't remember the specifics. I don't know if this phenomenon persists into adulthood to some degree, but your example reminded me of that.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3050171/where-are-the-women-in-t...
There's a general flow of conversation in any social situation that organically arises from the composition of the group of people involved. Unless your friend's teammates are jerks, she should be able to easily influence the direction of the conversation. Perhaps instead of suffering from an issue because she is a woman, she is simply too shy. Maybe this industry or society at large is bad at including shy people general.
How would a manager even know where to direct the discussion if the person who feels alienated doesn't speak up during the conversation? The last thing I want is a manager to try to point the discussion to movies, pop music, fashion, makeup, or whatever else women are supposed to like. I would absolutely be offended.
So when people start getting into heavy CS discussions about algorithms or whatever, that can alienate me to an extent too. I've read the basics and all and picked up a lot, but only what I really needed to know for this kind of work. I'm more interested in getting hardware to work and programming near the hardware level than some B-tree or whatever.
Another thing that really alienates me: when men at work talk about sports. I don't give two shits about spectator sports, and I think they're a complete waste of time. I'm a male, of course, but unlike many men I really hate sports and sports fanaticism. I don't see this too much at work (as it seems my attitude toward sports isn't that uncommon among men in tech), but I do see it now and then, especially with older and more outgoing/managerial type men.
So I don't think it's entirely a male vs. female issue: certain groups of people working together will frequently have certain common interests, which will not be shared by other people in that workplace. If I worked with a bunch of women and they all started talking about some current TV show, I'd also be alienated, because I don't own a TV or watch any current TV shows (except Game of Thrones...). Should I insist that women refrain from talking about TV shows? That seems a bit extreme.
People who are good at socializing know how to have conversations with anyone of any background. Many know when people are being left out and will go out of their way to shift the topic or make it more inclusive to the person being left out. If you've ever been at a party where you didn't know anyone, and someone who you didn't know before introduces themselves and is able to make you feel more comfortable being there, then you probably know what a relief these natural socializers can be.
Unfortunately, many engineers (myself included) are not natural socializers or otherwise well-practiced in the "manners" required for creating positive social situations. Folks like me are much more interested in topics I know a lot about and have strong opinions on, so it can be hard to break away once one of those conversations start, even if I know people are being excluded by having this conversation.
I think the important thing here is that socialization should be organic, and if one person is obviously uncomfortable or left out, the polite thing for anyone to do is to bring them in somehow. Every person on the team should strive to improve their ability to make people from different backgrounds feel included, and you're right in saying it's a skill that can be improved through work. This applies equally to women, minorities, immigrants, new people, anyone who doesn't feel like an "in-group" in a particular situation.
Where does this pay gap start to come into play?
it seems the pay gap is more an age thing. When we say give women equal pay, we should be saying "give older women equal pay" . This makes me think its a lagging metric that will be solved as todays 20 somethings become 40 and 60 year olds. If we want to accelerate the solution its not to give young womena a raise, but older women.
Its also hard because depending on how the numbers are calculated it maybe fair to pay older women less once you account for a lifetime of choosing lifestyle over earning potential as many note women vs men typically do.
[0] https://thewomenintechshow.com/2016/08/23/retaining-women-in...
* Code reviews, design documents, and anything else that might provide a forum for "chest thumping"
* Opportunities to express one's love of traditionally geeky things
* Organic conversation during happy hour
* Meritocracy (since diversity pushes end up being affirmative action in practice)
Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech. Maybe that's okay, and people like you are doing significant damage trying to create an unnatural situation of exact equity that nobody really wants.
No one said anything about removing code reviews. They said remove the culture of aggressive and mean code reviews.
No one said to remove the opportunity to express one's love of geeky things or organic conversation during happy hour. They said to tone that down, and be more inclusive, so other members of the team can express their love of things they like.
Meritocracy is a red herring. We do not have objective measurements for what is good work and what is not good work, or what work is better than others. At the end of the day, a person, with all their biases, is going to be choosing who is better. And quite often, that doesn't have much to do with the work at all.
"Maybe women in tech are less common than men in tech not because of some fundamental unfairness, but because fewer women want to be in tech."
And likely, fewer women want to be in tech because of the sexist attitudes, and this attitude of dismissal and "it's not a problem; if you were really 'passionate', you'd get over it".
In practice, that means making code review comments unclear and extremely passive aggressive. I'd rather have plain, clear statements than statements that on the surface are pleasant and helpful but that are actually meant to be emotional and professional shivs. I've been both.
> No one said to remove the opportunity to express one's love of geeky things or organic conversation during happy hour. They said to tone that down, and be more inclusive, so other members of the team can express their love of things they like.
The proposal is to prevent conversations flowing naturally according to the normal implicit rules of conversation and instead steer the conversation to "inclusive" topics. You know what I'd do in that situation? Grab a bunch of my coworkers and head off to the nearest pub to have the conversation we want to have. Congratulations, you've tried to help and made things worse.
> Meritocracy is a red herring.
This idea is both trendy and dangerous. Some ideas are better than others. I don't want to be around people who think that asbestos and plastic are both perfectly good materials for medical devices and that we should reach a compromise position to ensure that everyone is heard. If person A consistently proposes ideas that work and person B is genial, but constantly proposes ideas that don't work, A has more merit.
> And likely, fewer women want to be in tech because of the sexist attitudes
This argument is circular. You're defining literally anything that might make women choose to not come to "tech" as being sexist. Never mind that women get all sorts of preferences; never mind that women are paid more these days. It's all about how there are more men than women, therefore we have a "problem" that we need to "fix".
No, it doesn't. It only means that if the only way you can express yourself is by being mean.
"I'd rather have plain, clear statements than statements that on the surface are pleasant and helpful but that are actually meant to be emotional and professional shivs. I've been both."
Again, you can have plain, clear statements without being mean. Just because you aren't capable of writing them doesn't mean the rest of us aren't.
"he proposal is to prevent conversations flowing naturally according to the normal implicit rules of conversation and instead steer the conversation to "inclusive" topics. You know what I'd do in that situation? Grab a bunch of my coworkers and head off to the nearest pub to have the conversation we want to have. Congratulations, you've tried to help and made things worse."
No, you've just proven that you aren't willing to include other coworkers in your discussion. You've also proven that you aren't able to have a discussion about anything that isn't a few topics that you care about, and aren't willing to listen to others talk about what they care about. You're the one that comes out looking bad here.
"This idea is both trendy and dangerous. Some ideas are better than others. I don't want to be around people who think that asbestos and plastic are both perfectly good materials for medical devices and that we should reach a compromise position to ensure that everyone is heard. If person A consistently proposes ideas that work and person B is genial, but constantly proposes ideas that don't work, A has more merit."
Again, you're making false choices here. The idea that you have to choose between someone being nice but not good, and someone who is good but mean. There is absolutely no reason for that.
"This argument is circular."
No, it really isn't. And you haven't provided anything to claim that it is.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969315 and marked it off-topic.
Regardless of the parent poster, if it's a natural tendency of women to not want to be in tech, why did the percentage graduating CS drop from 37% in 1985 to 18%? I don't think women's intrinsic nature changed in the last 30 years, do you?
A bit of advice to any of you youngsters blowing it off as "maybe women just don't want to be in tech": I worked with plenty of women in this field in the 80s. Not so many now. And of those women in the field currently, they're a different breed than those I worked with 30 years ago. (To put it gently, they strike me as women more suited to put up with mens' bullshit.)
So, no, I don't buy the "maybe women don't want to do tech" excuse, unless you're willing to argue that all the women got together at their annual conference and announced that they're not doing tech anymore. I propose a simplistic explanation: women don't want to be in tech for the same reason I'm tiring of it, and this is having to put up with a constant stream of alpha male man-children. We, as an industry, used to be professionals. Now it's just a big frat party. (The issues are much deeper, IMO, and I admit to vastly oversimplifying.)
You don't buy it, but you don't apparently have reason to reject it either. Seems you only have an observation without explanation?
A mentor once told me that business fundamentally revolves around making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. I like thinking about work that way, as it has nothing to do with religion, sex, gender, age, height, phase of the moon (maybe you employ werewolves), etc.
Focusing on work can be hard though, because it might mean you will encounter a conflict when it comes to supporting a cause with good intentions. Say the MinorityCodingClub wants to host an event in your office. Personally, I think promoting diversity is generally a healthy thing. But what if MinorityCodingClub doesn't allow people not in that minority to participate in the event? You may find part of your staff wants to allow it, and part of your staff opposes it (perhaps silently).
Staying focused on making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. It's hard enough to get people to come together on doing that, so don't tolerate a culture that gets in the way of making that happen.
Eventually it's Versailles time and everybody has to have their heads cut off. So you need to balance this "focused" (i.e. ignore the problem) approach with a longer term plan.
Or rather someone needs to. Or maybe we should just accept getting our heads cut off.
I think generally work places should be much more well rounded. We spend a considerable amount of time there, so why not allow it to be a place where we expand our lives instead of a place where we only "make money, save money, save time, and make customers happier"?
Generic "Engineering" is just as bad as CS. In fact, CS is slowly approaching the Engineering level (from the top).
What's interesting is that the graph that's often bandied about left off engineering, to show CS as the sole outlier.
Things that make you go "hmmm...."
I think engineering is probably worse than CS because there is discrimination from technical as well as non technical peers.
Among non technical peers (Operators, fitters, boilermakers etc) side of things there is a tendency for people to assume female engineers lack physical capabilities I see it out on mine/construction sites etc workers will refuse to let female engineers carry tool bags etc. They won't look twice when I heft a bag full of Stillson wrenches around yet I've seen on occasions they'll almost snatch the bags out of female colleague's hands.
As a male I'm pretty much left to my own devices when I'm out on site the workers assume I'm competent. For females there is a tendency for workers to "hover" they won't trust her ability until she demonstrates it. The culture out on construction sites etc is not really all that female friendly in general. I mentioned it to my sister once and she was pretty dismissive her response was something along the lines of "That's just the way things are they assume I'm just a clueless girl until I prove to them I know what I'm doing".
On the technical side I see it a lot with external clients when they visit the office sometimes they'll do things like assume a female engineer is a secretary.
Most of the diversity efforts are focused on technical side of things around inclusive office culture and things like that. There are not a lot of initiatives targeted towards non technical peers other than very token stuff like "Don't put up pornography in site sheds and crib rooms".
My sister ended up quitting her job at a power plant and works in government now she seems much happier there.
Maybe men are more trying to be polite than hostile when they won't let women carry heavy loads?
It might be, as is repeatedly suggested; but it probably isn't. If it was, we'd see more women study STEM in the first place.
SV encourages people to move fast, be aggressive, don't be afraid to break things, ignore regulations, disrupt all the things, etc. There are substantial similarities to the way a VC-funded startup operates and the way a pick-up artist operates.
You'll notice that Susan Fowler's blog post also goes into detail about the Game of Thrones-esque culture with middle managers constantly and openly plotting to overthrow their superiors and take their jobs. A culture that encourages you to figuratively fuck your boss also encourages you to literally fuck your subordinates. It's a culture of aggression and proving your dominance.
Big traditional conservative companies on the other hand... well, they just don't have that culture. Their culture discourages people from taking risks at every level. In order to get anything done, you have to go through several layers of bureaucracy, put everything in writing, make sure your is are dotted and your ts crossed. It discourages aggressive, disruptive risk-takers from coming near the company. And without aggressive, disruptive risk-takers, you don't have nearly the amount of sexual harassment. Yes, it still happens on occasion, but it isn't nearly as systemic or as blatant as in a VC-funded startup.
So it leads to the seemingly-paradoxical situation where the best companies for women and LGBT people to work at are the kind of "conservative" companies that you can imagine Ned Flanders working at. But culturally conservative isn't the same thing as politically conservative; I've said this before, but I have a lot of politically liberal friends (most of them enthusiastic Clinton voters) who live in the suburbs, work 9-5 at traditional large corporations, and have traditional families.
The problem is that it only takes one idiot to cause a problem... And the odds of at least one manager being an idiot approach 100%, as your company grows.
(In a place like Uber, though, the problem seems systemic.)
To be perfectly honest, that sounds like a recipe for a dull ass, penny pinching, unenjoyable work environment. The kind where you're treated as a cost center.
All of those factors make some of your employees less productive.
Boss: "Hey, my partner and I would love it if you'd like to join us for drinks at my place on Saturday night."
Employee (replies & CC's boss's boss): "I'm here to work, and this is making me extremely uncomfortable."
^^^ strive for that.
A bit passive-aggressive for a friendly gesture isn't it?
Is your default position to assume there's an agenda behind every invitation?
For those genuinely unclear, it's a combination of things - the individual nature of the invitation, the private nature of the venue, the timing and explicit involvement of libations whose effects often include the lowering of inhibitions - all in all it's just a super sketchy thing to all of a sudden pop up in a previously professional relationship. Any one of those would be fine; any two would be a little questionable but probably okay; all three at once constitute a great big flashing neon sign that spells out "YOUR BOSS IS TRYING TO LAY YOU".
If he doesn't understand that, he'll be the kind of manager that creates liabilities by leaving e-mail trails of questionable invitations that might get caught up in discovery if/when something happens.
"Hey employee #333 want to sex"
See? No context necessary
They make it clear that it was sent to a woman, and that the scenario at the very least was interpreted by the recipient as inappropriate.
Yes, there are scenarios where it could be acceptable, but consider that they are (much) narrower than you might think:
* Men can be sexually harassed too.
* Sexual harassment is not the only problem with an e-mail like that. It may also create drinking pressure, or a feeling that you are forced to socialise with your boss. Of course that is context-dependent too, but for my part, as a man who doesn't enjoy drinking and doesn't want to spend my Saturdays with the boss, I'd fell put under inappropriate pressure by an e-mail like that as well, because I'd be concerned that a rejection could impact work.
A lot of behaviour like that is fine when it is not between subordinates, and can be fine with subordinates too if it is someone you know very well.
But even then you need to consider that e.g. it may negatively affect team dynamics or may be unintentionally discriminatory or become seen as discriminatory purely by e.g. including only those the manager knows well too.
Would you feel you'd be fired? Because sometimes getting to know someone is an appropriate pathway to success.
Scenarios like this are more common at start-ups, aren't they? If you just want to drone through work, with no social connections, the average american mega-corp might be more appropriate.
In larger companies, on the other hand, you get all kinds of weird little fiefdoms where getting on your managers bad side is potentially far more damaging because if your boss has sufficient support he will be able to musster a much bigger support system.
> Boss: "Hey, my partner and I would love it if..
So, you think the partner being there is just a premise?
Surely inviting a female employee, alone, is the unusual aspect that would make it appear suspect?
> the individual nature of the invitation, the private nature of the venue
also:
> You don't need to see an agenda behind every invitation to recognize the agenda behind this one.
How does "that guy" know what agenda there is?
If you can't explain any better then I can't accept your argument.
I would have replied saying I will be coming with my partner and look forward having a good time.
Too much vague-ry here, which, on a sensitive topic, is asking for trouble.
That's not a solution, it's what most places are already doing.
It works well for delivering your MVP and maybe the first version of your product. But then you want your employee to be empowered, to feel relevant and be able to take matters into their hands. Otherwise it doesn't scale. But happy and satisfied worker could step up to this level. Unsatisfied and soldier like employees cannot do that, they will be just soldiers that fear for their position. And not having even patriotism (that is what bond soldiers) work for them, the best will leave your company, the worst will stay.
That's one of the differences between being a manager and being a leader. A leader takes the hard questions into his hands.
But don't trust me, there are years of research in company organization saying that. Go out and read any article on HBS on the topic of leadership, workplace organization or CSR and you'll see that.
So, your mentor was wrong, sorry about that.
That extends to even the most well-meaning diversity initiative. If nothing else, diversity initiatives create implicit filters for the types of people that are excited-to-ambivalent about diversity initiatives.
also, this sort of "extrapolate to the absurd" list ("religion, sex, gender, age, height, phase of the moon (maybe you employ werewolves), etc.") is a classic red flag for someone not caring about the very real inequalities in the system - the most common variant is "i don't care if you're white, black, green or purple...", but what it really works out to is "i think we can just brush any black-person-specific problems under the carpet and everything will be fine".
Ethics do not logically fall into place magically because the ultimate goal is making money. It's easy to say "ignore those factors in favor of making money" but the reality of the world isn't that simple. Uber didn't tolerate a culture that got in the way of making money, and now they're here.
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Reading the stories about uber, I keep hearing that the woman wanted to focus on work but the harassing person interfered. That is exactly what amorphid suggest that a company should work to prevent, fostering a culture that focus on making customers happier and getting people working together for that a common goal.
Developer turnover is very costly.
What I got from these womens' answers is that their motivations are pretty much exactly the same as men's. Maybe with the exception of serial harassment cases.
I'm not so certain. I agree, it should. But engineers don't like to talk about their salary; I have no idea what my peers earn, and it isn't easy to find out. Researching data such as discussion on HN, Glassdoor, BLS data, surveys from companies that are more open, etc. yield absolutely ludicrous ranges; I might ought to (depending on who and how you ask) be earning anywhere from 60k to 250k+ as an engineer; that includes throwing out some high & low figures. The situation is made worse by the huge disparities in cost of living between various geographies, making it hard to translate salaries in one area into anything sensible in the next. (You're lucky to get a breakdown to one of a geographical area, or actual line of work, but not both. I want to know what a backend vs. mobile vs. PM makes in Boston vs. NYC vs. SF; and ideally, along even more dimensions. Alas, it seems that blog-studies never release the data.)
If you feel like being controversial, at least do everyone the courtesy of responding to the most obvious counter arguments ahead of time. We all know what they are, and no one wants to rehash the same stuff over and over, unless we're going to hear something new.
I see the White Knights have already started the down-voting process.
Comments should become more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Then we avoid the downward spiral into internet hell.
If you enjoy being an ass, at least have the decency to be honest about it and own it instead of pretending that it's "passion".
Being aggressive is not being passionate. Don't confuse the two.
If you can't get your point across without being aggressive or mean, then you have no business making it.
As a senior dev on a team of scala/haskell programmers, we see this often. Speaking over someone is not the same as being passionate. People speak over women all the time - I have been on the receiving end of it from devs fresh out of college as someone who's published papers.
2. They were talking biological imperatives. Women's ability to have children dies at ~40. If they want to have kids, they need to get on it. No one said anything about women being only mothers and men being only breadwinners.
Reading you're comments, I'm supposing you're probably the redpill type.
Please steer clear of personal attacks. This direction leads nowhere good.
Perceived or real? I'm yet to hear about a company that has policy to pay women less. Most have personally-discussed salaries though. If some ladies are paid less, they probably don't haggle as well. What should we do? Deny custom salaries and personal raises?
1. Women tend to negotiate less aggressively
2. Women who negotiate aggressively tend to be perceived worse than men doing the exact same thing
3. Implicit bias affects the amount of money an employer sees fit to offer in the first place
As to what to do, here some ideas:
* Massachusetts' law barring employers from asking about previous salaries as part of negotiations seems like a good idea
* More transparency about salaries would help
* Maybe a "Costco auto club" model, where the price is set up-front with no haggling, would be a good idea. Reddit tried to do this but it was kind of tied up with all the other issues they had. Not 100% sure on this one.
The negative to that is (unless every company plays by those same rules) you're limiting yourself in who you can hire. The more expensive (and, presumably, more skilled) developers will go work somewhere that will pay them more (based on that skill), while the cheapest (and, presumably, lowest skilled) developers will come work for you because they know you'll pay them more than others will.
There are benefits to being able to pay people what you feel they are worth to your company. Is it worth losing those benefits.
Also, I think most companies can't really hope to attract the world's very best programmers anyway. If everyone says they're hiring the best they can't all be right.
> How do you figure? If they're able to pass whatever company's interview and negotiation is no longer a factor it seems more likely that salaries will become more equitable. I'd guess the correlation between negotiating skill and technical skill is small at best.
In 2-tier (technical + negotiation) interview, candidates have to show they're good enough technically first. Then they negotiate their worth. In what you propose, they'd have to negotiate their worth right away. If company isn't willing to pay, why would they hire said person for higher wage?
Even purely technical job interview is sort of haggling. Well, aside from bullshit whiteboard tests which suck left and right.
Besides penalizing candidates for lacking knowledge that isn't really relevant to work performance (like how to dance around offering a current salary, for instance), the current system also tends to perpetuate whatever disparity already exists by tending to base offers at least in part on current salaries, and also will reflect the gender disparity shown in responses to salary negotiations which I mentioned above.
I don't guarantee such a system would make things better but I do think there are some reasons to think it might.
IMO negotiating is part of relevant skillset. Especially for more senior (= better paid) positions. One has to know not only how to write code, but back up his decisions as well. Or prevent others from causing issues.
Also, I think that these changes would likely benefit male workers too, but not to the same degree as women.
IMO you're mistaking correlation for causation. As you say yourself, changing current salary setup would affect both women and men. This is not gender issue and this should be discussed on other points than gender. Making it about gender is counter productive.
Looking at this form economical perspective, as long as we don't have objective way to measure programmer's productivity, I don't think we can get away from salary negotiations.
2. People respond differently to men and women (a fact that seems to be true across all species). We don't have a clear, testable model for why this happens.
3. Implicit bias is not scientific and not relevant. Sorry for the lengthy write-up, but this should be called out for being farcical and/or psychologically dangerous.
Implicit bias scores have no meaningful correlation with actual actions and the scores themselves will vary wildly for the same person for reasons that are unknown and unaccounted for. This lack of correlation turns it into a baseless accusation.
Lots of people accept IAT (which has a super low predictive validity) as true while rejecting IQ which has an amazing amount of predictive validity in all kinds of areas. Interestingly, higher IQ is linked to lower rates of racism and other bias. Given that programmers have on average significantly higher IQ scores relative to the general population, you would expect such things to not be the primary issues of the field.
Even if we assume implicit bias exists, does it matter if you cannot prove it has any real world effects (and such effects have not been proven). If we assume even further (against good evidence) that such implicit bias exists AND has real world effects, is there a solution?
Lots of companies force their employees to undergo implicit bias training. There are ZERO studies proving that the training works. Much more scarily, we don't know if it has other negative psychological impacts. Companies messing around with peoples heads without any supporting studies and clinical trials is EXTREMELY dangerous.
Finally, let's examine the theoretical framework for fixing implicit bias (under the assumption that it exists and that the individual does not consciously desire to be biased). We must start by either assuming that implicit outweighs explicit (radical behavioralism with no free will) or that explicit outweighs implicit.
If explicit outweighs implicit, then teach people the golden rule, tell them discrimination is bad, and call it a day because that's all you can do. Implicit bias training is sold on the basis that this is not enough and will not work. It thus carries the implication that you cannot choose to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc, but if you give them your money, they have the magic incantations to "pray the <bias> away".
How do you change the subconscious? The first option is new age garbage. The second is hypnosis (we can't prove hypnosis even exists). The third is operant and/or classical conditioning of the most extreme variety (to reach past the conscious and modify the subconscious -- hopefully without ripping the individual apart in the process) may be enough to do the trick (immersive re-education camps are a must in order to ensure all aspects of the subject are controlled for). Basically no other ideas exist.
TL;DR With no solid supporting science behind the idea of implicit bias, there remains only moral panic and ideological fanaticism attempting to sell either snake-oil cures or barbaric, unethical psychological experiments of a most Stalinesque variety.
If you want to conclude that either women are just inherently inferior or else that they aren't but it's ok to systematically underpay them then I guess that's your prerogative but I'm not really interested in going down such a rabbit hole.
I would further argue that negotiation is a skill that some people have and others do not. Should we refuse to reward someone for their skill in negotiation? Should we even try?
On the first count, the brains of men and women are structurally different (women have drastically more white matter and men have drastically more gray matter). The observation that men and women view the world very differently is universal. When looking at the big five personality traits, men and women consistently show far different norms. If all observations both casual and professional tend to indicate significant differences, the possibility should be seriously entertained.
If men and women are identical, why do we need women in STEM? The men we have would work just as well. If one is making the case for more people overall in STEM, then they are making an economic argument (and one that doesn't favor STEM workers -- only employers of STEM workers). If one makes a case for different life experience, then there is an acknowledgement of difference. If men and women are different, then there is a distinct possibility that one group is better or more interested in a particular field than the other. In either situation, there seems to be little case for drastic change (except for employers suppressing wages by increasing the supply of workers).
As to the second count, let's say we put two people (of the same gender for sake of limiting differences) with the same qualifications into the same job with the exception that one is more skilled at negotiation. We then force both to work for the same pay. Will that end the advantages of the more skilled negotiator? The better negotiator will still be better at getting the good projects or a faster promotion.
In the long term, the negotiation skillset will simply turn into more profit in other ways and the level of control required to prevent this from happening is so draconian as to be unthinkable.
Because it is inherently unjust to discriminate against people because of characteristics that have no bearing on the job, such as their race and their gender. If you don't accept this premise I don't think we can have a productive discussion because it's the basic principle I'm basing my argument on.
> In the long term, the negotiation skillset will simply turn into more profit in other ways and the level of control required to prevent this from happening is so draconian as to be unthinkable.
Maybe. So what? Careless drivers are still more likely to injure themselves than careful ones even if we make everyone wear a seat belt; it does not follow that making everyone wear a seat belt is pointless.
If you can show me a company that is refusing to hire a woman, then I'll be right there with you opposing them. If a company is forcing a woman to work for lower pay because she is a woman, then I'll be right there with you opposing them. When you ask me to discriminate against someone because they are better at negotiating, I cannot offer support.
Blind moral assertion IS NOT FACT.
You assert that we must have the same number of men and women because it is the moral thing to do. You further assert that this moral imperative is so absolute that the use of force to compel other people is perfectly fine.
At its basis, this is no different than relatively small things like prohibition or large things like the inquisition or communist re-education camps.
EDIT: to answer your first statement in more concrete terms, I believe men and women make different choices because they are different (as stated at the top of that post). If you are insistent on forcing women into STEM whether they like it or not, there should be more to that argument than symmetry. What you quoted addresses one part that line of thought.
Is it ok to discriminate based on one's personal characteristics?
I'm pretty sure woman who is technically good as well as good negotiator gets equal salary as man with same abilities. Women (and men) who are bad negotiators are discriminated because of their personal characteristics, not because of their gender.
Or are you saying that certain skills should not be valued in job market, because they're less prevalent in one of the genders' iconic image?
If you want to reply to a comment further downthread you can click on the timestamp. I do not know why it works that way but replying to a common parent is confusing.
This is jumping ahead of ourselves.
The first step is problem formulation. Is this a problem in the first place? Why? How do we quantify the problem? How do we quantify a resolution?
I find that in these topics, people jump to the problem solving step before problem formulation.
In the best case, there might be a response of "because sexism/racism" to "why this problem".
We have a limited amount of "diversity funds". If the appeal is emotional and one of righteousness, we should use the funds to aid the category of people with the most disadvantages.
That would be foreign immigrants because their native language is not English (almost all documentation, code and communication is in English) and they do not have a good understanding of American culture which cripples them in politics and communication.
Comparatively, the upper middle class white girl or african american is privileged.
A big takeaway for me was that the data showed men and women being largely equal in pay for the earlier parts of their careers when you control for various things. When families start entering the equation, women often prioritize different things in their job, or consider changing jobs that offer these things. One of the big new priorities is...surprise...flexibility. When you have a family, flexibility because worth its weight in gold. If women are still predominantly the primary caretaker at home, it makes sense that they would need to optimize for whatever gives them the best balance there.
However the dark side of this, as discussed int he podcast, is that it can often lead to things like bosses not giving out choice assignments with lots of travel for example, because they don't think the employee would want that or be able to manage it. That sort of thing compounds over time and leads to slower progression, less leverage when asking for raises, etc.
The episode was a real eye opener for me because it brought some interesting data to the table.
[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
Is someone who seeks consensus from the team before moving forward rewarded? Or is someone who just goes out and does something rewarded more? You have to see what kind of styles are promoted within the organization, and if there's a place for the less aggressive/assertive within it. For those that may struggle with impostor syndrome, and not just assume they know everything.
It also really helps to see women on the team, especially in more senior positions, doing code reviews, etc. If there's a layer of men who are subtly sexist, the organization really as a whole won't retain, ever. A double standard is incredibly demoralizing.
But seriously, look at who gets listened to in meetings. Who takes up the time, is it just people who are loud and willing to argue about things, while those unwilling to interrupt never get acknowledged?
Managers should focus on retaining top talent that allows organization to move forward. Interacting with others productively is one facet of top talent - regardless of what personal traits (love of geeky things, particular choice of hobbies or whatever else) ultimately allows for team fusion.
The moment management starts socially engineering the team on any other metric than team's ability to contribute to company cause, they are harming their organization.
Commercial entities are not avenues of social justice. They are instruments of making money.
HOWEVER...
it was remarkable how little of the issues they discussed had anything whatever to do with their gender. I think this is really important and should be a good clue for followups. How about YC opens up the question series to engineers from all backgrounds? I expect to see a remarkable similarity in answers about what constitutes a good (or bad) work environment.
I hear all the time that higher-ups think that the key to retaining women is hosting diversity events, adding parental leave / mother's rooms, or other stuff specifically catered to women. Not saying those aren't good things to have, but for the most part, if you listen to your employees and treat all of your engineers well, you will see gains to retaining everyone, including women.
Women being so "in demand" for tech companies looking to improve diversity numbers also gives some of us the opportunity to be pickier with what kind of work environments we'll accept.
Almost every tech company I've been in, I've seen people of both genders move in and out constantly.
Programmers have been complaining about management since forever.
Is there any evidence that women in particular are facing different issues from men when it comes to job satisfaction?
However, I think theres been some more chatter in the industry trying to get to the bottom of some issues that have come up recently with gender in tech one not so recent and more general. Here's what I mean
1. In the 1980s, for reasons everyone can quantify but noone can understand why, is why women stopped going into computer science in the 1980s: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
Particularly data scientists and computer scientists and economists who are skilled at teasing out data in large and seemingly choatic data sets cannot figure this out, which is ironic considering they are the group in which this gender disparity occurred which such a dramatic and relatively sudden dropoff.
2. On top of the dramatic drop of women in computer science, 41% of the women who do go into tech leave compared to 17% of men: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...
3. A number of studies have shown that identical job applications, resumes AND VC pitches are evaluated differently based on whether they are labeled with a male or female name. https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...
4. High acheiving women, and particular women in tech show
http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...5. Alot of women get into entry level tech jobs, but far fewer climb the ladder/wages stagnate
https://qz.com/645587/a-mckinsey-report-on-female-leaders-fi...
6. Female leaders: Founders, CEOs, CTOs receive far more public criticism AND HOSTILITY than male CEOs and CTOs ie.e Ellen Pao as leader of reddit, Marissa Meyer, Sheryl Sandberg * The things that have been said about these women and their bodies and how evil they are I have never ever heard with male CEOs no matter how evil, nor have I seen criticism as harsh, unrelated to the business issue, cruel and emotionally punishing as these women have faced. Dear god, how could any women aspire to be a leader when the women who aspire to are bombarded with a nonstop barage of sexual and emotional humiliation 24/7 on the internet male CEOs never face. It's ridiculous.
* I am not saying these things happen (the disparities by gender noted above) because men are sexist and evil. I don't think anyone knows why this is happening, which is why more women who are in tech are being asked to open up and speak out to get their personal perspective since all the data and studies in the world don't seem to be providing these answers
* My personal opinion for what its worth: I have to say as a woman in tech, an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science who now does graphics engineering and GPU software layer dev, I do...
I'm young enough (born in the late 1980's) that during my entire time in the work force, I feel like I've only ever met ONE "real" manager. I've known many people in management roles, but I think we've definitely lost sight of what good management even looks like. If you're under a certain age, I wonder if you've even met a real manager before. From today forward, many of the people in management roles may never have met a real manager before too - how are they supposed to fill a role they've never seen before.
I think we need some good management role models, and we need to find a way to encourage people in management roles to grow to fill this.
I don't have any studies or hard facts to cite, but consider this - I feel like part of the role of a manager is to bear responsibility and deadlines, manage the workers and give them the access and tools they need to succeed. But what I see most often is managers (not doing the work) acting like slave drivers, pushing all of the responsibility and pressure of meeting the deadlines on the workers to stress about. I see lower level workers staying late after work, taking 'ownership' of their manager's responsibilities out of fear they will get fired. That's not what it's supposed to look like but unfortunately for most millennials it seems to be the common experience.
My conclusion is that maybe the whole concept of "software manager" is deeply flawed. Upper management likes to have a single person they can pressure and blame. But the reality is that making good software on a schedule is incredibly difficult. Upper management doesn't seem to recognize that you can't just "bolt on" a good manager and just "force it to work."
Making good software in a way that's responsive to market pressures is not like running a lemonade stand. It's almost impossible to get right, even with a big budget, because upper management puts too many idiotic constraints on it.
But even if it were about attracting them, your question is a non-starter, because this isn't about hiring women over and above hiring men, it's about hiring women at all and those women then staying on and not quitting due to culture issues. "This is America," so, what, we shouldn't bother picking the best candidates and retaining them? Or do you not believe there's ever cases where a woman was the best choice for a job, but she chose not to take it?