> According to the Harvard Business Review, 41% of women working in tech eventually end up leaving the field (compared to just 17% of men) […]
> Because of the high attrition rate for women working in tech, teaching more girls and women to code is not enough to solve this problem.
Well that’s not true, because it’s pretty easy to imagine that once we get more women in the field through the pipeline, the environment becomes better for them (as they will represent a higher % of the “environment”) so the attrition rate should naturally drop.
Also AFAIK in general women leave fields more than men, because it is more typical for the woman to stay at home once they have a child. I would like to see the numbers relative to other fields.
If the environment is bad because of the shitty behaviour of some men, the most expedient and appropriate corrective course of action is to change the behaviour of those causing the problem rather than to assume that's just the way men are and waiting for more women to join the environment to balance them out.
The burden shouldn't be placed on the women entering a bad environment to put up with it until they gain sufficient numbers to fix it themselves.
The majority of those in an environment can have preferences that lead to a bad environment.
That's like saying that Jim Crow laws weren't "good or bad" because a majority of people supported them at some given time.
The plain truth is that many work environments including tech are worse for women than men. The cause of that reality is the behaviour of some men in that environment, as a result of the larger culture having a significant degree of misogyny that has only gradually being eroded through massive effort over decades.
Cultures evolve and it's bullshit for men who are not faced with the disadvantages in the workplace to avoid responsibility since it doesn't affect them directly. Everyone should have the humility to acknowledge that even though they may feel that they have good intentions, that they as an individual component of the larger culture, may to whatever degree be contributing to the problem and conscientiously think through what role they can play in improving it.
The only honest alternative position is to either hold the belief that there is no actual problem at all, or to be openly misogynist and think that the existing inequality is the way things should be.
Bringing up Jim Crow laws in this discussion is pretty repulsive, to be honest. You're obviously wanting someone to argue with. Good luck finding that person.
Apologies if it came across as exaggerating your point, I didn't mean to equate what you wrote to Jim Crow laws at all but rather to provide an extreme example to illustrate how preferences of the majority are not related to whether an environment is good or bad.
I'm also not looking to argue really. I just find it frustrating when women raise what strike me as some pretty valid points and it gets shot down immediately (such as this original post being flagged and having pretty defensive/dismissive comments immediately).
The original link has a references link for each point, which point to things such as the National Science Foundation rather than personal opinion blogs. Nothing on that page is a big rant about how all men are evil, etc., and I think the sources provided are pretty solid. The reaction is telling and as another commented noted, does to some degree prove the point.
Humans are not exemplars of their race, sex, education level or any other group identity you wish to paint on them.
"it's bullshit for men who are not faced with the disadvantages in the workplace to avoid responsibility since it doesn't affect them directly"
Do you ever just sit and listen to how fucking stupid you sound? A man did something bad, you're a man, therefore you're responsible. This logical fallacy is called "guilt by association".
The record will probably remain broken while women spend huge amounts of time building up education and careers and then have an unfair additional burden of crap to deal with that their male peers don't.
I don't see how it sounds stupid (maybe I'm THAT stupid) to say that men who don't face the results of misogyny in the same way as their female colleagues are generally less inclined to even think it's an issue or to put effort into doing anything about it.
Nothing at all I wrote said "A man did something bad, you're a man, therefore you're responsible".
A more accurate reading would be;
1. Culture is complex and we are all a part of it.
2. Our current culture has some elements of misogyny that unfairly impact women in the workplace.
3. We can all contribute to improving things even if it doesn't affect us directly.
Now, point 3 depends on agreement that there is a problem so not sure if you agree with that or not.
I think the challenge is thinking of the issue as a cultural issue rather than on an isolated individual basis. When thinking about it while limiting the scope to a single individual then you think that person is either good or bad, and most people assume they're not the bad ones, so they get defensive if they think someone is lumping them in with the bad people.
Culture is complex and more nuance is required. It takes an open mind to realize that you may have biases that contribute to the issue, such as the second example on the site, with the elementary school teachers. The original site author, as well as the linked NY times article, do not say all those teachers are terrible misogynists at all because that isn't the point.
This is a strawman argument. I never said that trying to change the behaviours of men isn't important or more important. I was only refuting the author's claim that fixing the pipeline would not contribute to fixing this issue.
I don't see anything on the original site where the author claims that fixing or improving the pipeline would not "contribute" to fixing the issue so maybe a bit of straw from your end as well.
My understanding of the author's motivation is that it was in response to positions others are taking in saying that the root cause was the pipeline, and the central premise of the site (clearly by its URL) was that even if the pipeline was 100% fine, there are more significant issues that are the causes of the problem that are not taken as seriously as they should when people present the pipeline as being the central problem. Not sure who's making that claim so maybe some straw from the original author of the site as well. Strawmen all the way down sometimes.
Maybe isitONLYapipelineproblem.com might have been more clear.
Maybe I misunderstand the term "pipeline problem" [1], but these quotes seem to confirm rather than refute that there is a pipeline problem.
In my experience, boys and girls start out equally interested in male and female fields. But the number of girls/women is slowly whittled down until you reach the discrepancies you have e.g. in tech [2].
One factor I rarely see discussed is that technical / natural science fields are "default" study choices for young men. My male friends who didn't know what to study chose physics or computer science, my female friends mostly chose something else. It's funny that I saw an opposite whittle-down effect during my physics studies: the gender ratio became much more balanced as time went on, from just a handful of women when we started to about 1/3 when I was in grad school. I think the reason is that we have a high quitter's fraction (I think 40% in the first two years), and all the boys who chose physics because they didn't know what else to take were pushed out, whereas all the girls who started were talented and interested to begin with.
Another factor is that it seems to be uncool to be interested in math and science as a girl (even more so than for boys). I did some outreach / ask a scientist events, and when girls asked a question, they often got really strange looks and rolled eyes from their peers. It's the same social pressure that prohibits boys from doing "girl" things (and the same reason I never learned an instrument. The music club was mostly girls, the kids considered it "gay" to join, and I was not confident enough to join anyway).
[1] I suspect "it is a pipeline problem" is just a codified figure of speech meaning "I think there should be no women's quotas or affirmative action". Which is of course silly, there is a leaky "pipeline" due to a multitude of social pressures, and one way to fix this is to steer against and have quotas or formalized procedures to make sure you don't discriminate further against women. Ideally give women a second chance to not fall through the leaks, and to become a role model - because the kids need to see role models.
[2] Another problem is the "boys club" mentality, especially in higher management. You can give girls all the tech education you want, it doesn't matter if women are excluded from relevant positions. This is not an either-or (e.g. "pipeline" or "sexism"), you have multiple mechanisms that contribute to the gender bias we have.
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[ 8.7 ms ] story [ 59.8 ms ] thread> Because of the high attrition rate for women working in tech, teaching more girls and women to code is not enough to solve this problem.
Well that’s not true, because it’s pretty easy to imagine that once we get more women in the field through the pipeline, the environment becomes better for them (as they will represent a higher % of the “environment”) so the attrition rate should naturally drop.
Also AFAIK in general women leave fields more than men, because it is more typical for the woman to stay at home once they have a child. I would like to see the numbers relative to other fields.
The burden shouldn't be placed on the women entering a bad environment to put up with it until they gain sufficient numbers to fix it themselves.
That's like saying that Jim Crow laws weren't "good or bad" because a majority of people supported them at some given time.
The plain truth is that many work environments including tech are worse for women than men. The cause of that reality is the behaviour of some men in that environment, as a result of the larger culture having a significant degree of misogyny that has only gradually being eroded through massive effort over decades.
Cultures evolve and it's bullshit for men who are not faced with the disadvantages in the workplace to avoid responsibility since it doesn't affect them directly. Everyone should have the humility to acknowledge that even though they may feel that they have good intentions, that they as an individual component of the larger culture, may to whatever degree be contributing to the problem and conscientiously think through what role they can play in improving it.
The only honest alternative position is to either hold the belief that there is no actual problem at all, or to be openly misogynist and think that the existing inequality is the way things should be.
I'm also not looking to argue really. I just find it frustrating when women raise what strike me as some pretty valid points and it gets shot down immediately (such as this original post being flagged and having pretty defensive/dismissive comments immediately).
The original link has a references link for each point, which point to things such as the National Science Foundation rather than personal opinion blogs. Nothing on that page is a big rant about how all men are evil, etc., and I think the sources provided are pretty solid. The reaction is telling and as another commented noted, does to some degree prove the point.
Humans are not exemplars of their race, sex, education level or any other group identity you wish to paint on them.
"it's bullshit for men who are not faced with the disadvantages in the workplace to avoid responsibility since it doesn't affect them directly"
Do you ever just sit and listen to how fucking stupid you sound? A man did something bad, you're a man, therefore you're responsible. This logical fallacy is called "guilt by association".
Fuck you and everyone like you.
The record will probably remain broken while women spend huge amounts of time building up education and careers and then have an unfair additional burden of crap to deal with that their male peers don't.
I don't see how it sounds stupid (maybe I'm THAT stupid) to say that men who don't face the results of misogyny in the same way as their female colleagues are generally less inclined to even think it's an issue or to put effort into doing anything about it.
Nothing at all I wrote said "A man did something bad, you're a man, therefore you're responsible".
A more accurate reading would be;
1. Culture is complex and we are all a part of it. 2. Our current culture has some elements of misogyny that unfairly impact women in the workplace. 3. We can all contribute to improving things even if it doesn't affect us directly.
Now, point 3 depends on agreement that there is a problem so not sure if you agree with that or not.
I think the challenge is thinking of the issue as a cultural issue rather than on an isolated individual basis. When thinking about it while limiting the scope to a single individual then you think that person is either good or bad, and most people assume they're not the bad ones, so they get defensive if they think someone is lumping them in with the bad people.
Culture is complex and more nuance is required. It takes an open mind to realize that you may have biases that contribute to the issue, such as the second example on the site, with the elementary school teachers. The original site author, as well as the linked NY times article, do not say all those teachers are terrible misogynists at all because that isn't the point.
My understanding of the author's motivation is that it was in response to positions others are taking in saying that the root cause was the pipeline, and the central premise of the site (clearly by its URL) was that even if the pipeline was 100% fine, there are more significant issues that are the causes of the problem that are not taken as seriously as they should when people present the pipeline as being the central problem. Not sure who's making that claim so maybe some straw from the original author of the site as well. Strawmen all the way down sometimes.
Maybe isitONLYapipelineproblem.com might have been more clear.
In my experience, boys and girls start out equally interested in male and female fields. But the number of girls/women is slowly whittled down until you reach the discrepancies you have e.g. in tech [2].
One factor I rarely see discussed is that technical / natural science fields are "default" study choices for young men. My male friends who didn't know what to study chose physics or computer science, my female friends mostly chose something else. It's funny that I saw an opposite whittle-down effect during my physics studies: the gender ratio became much more balanced as time went on, from just a handful of women when we started to about 1/3 when I was in grad school. I think the reason is that we have a high quitter's fraction (I think 40% in the first two years), and all the boys who chose physics because they didn't know what else to take were pushed out, whereas all the girls who started were talented and interested to begin with.
Another factor is that it seems to be uncool to be interested in math and science as a girl (even more so than for boys). I did some outreach / ask a scientist events, and when girls asked a question, they often got really strange looks and rolled eyes from their peers. It's the same social pressure that prohibits boys from doing "girl" things (and the same reason I never learned an instrument. The music club was mostly girls, the kids considered it "gay" to join, and I was not confident enough to join anyway).
[1] I suspect "it is a pipeline problem" is just a codified figure of speech meaning "I think there should be no women's quotas or affirmative action". Which is of course silly, there is a leaky "pipeline" due to a multitude of social pressures, and one way to fix this is to steer against and have quotas or formalized procedures to make sure you don't discriminate further against women. Ideally give women a second chance to not fall through the leaks, and to become a role model - because the kids need to see role models.
[2] Another problem is the "boys club" mentality, especially in higher management. You can give girls all the tech education you want, it doesn't matter if women are excluded from relevant positions. This is not an either-or (e.g. "pipeline" or "sexism"), you have multiple mechanisms that contribute to the gender bias we have.