There's an overlap in articles like this. There's many things I relate to and some thing I don't. For instance, in the piece she talks about micro aggressions:
Being spoken over or interrupted at meetings.
Sharing an idea that gets no traction, only for a man to share the same idea ten minutes later and be applauded.
Being asked to supply lunch at a partner meeting when I am the only woman in the room.
Other than the last point (I've never been given access to order lunch for my team, though I have a purchase card, my use of it is regulated to hell and fear mongered), the rest of these points are not only salient but relatable. It's what's driven me mad some days; the only defense I have with people like this is that I got good at finding a way to tell people they exhaust me in the most kind manner possible. If I don't, I'm looked at like an asshole regardless of what led up to the event.
What she says about promotions is the same. On paper, I'm a very successful and young-for-my-level engineer. I've also never been promoted. I've driven multiple operating system transitions across multiple companies, I've led the way with higher coding standards, focuses on developer experience that had discernable improvement in productivity and happiness. Yet, not a single promotion.
I can go on, but my point is, if you pay attention to what she's saying and you solve the things women are talking about then the impact you'll feel is going to be pretty universal.
> Women developers hoping to move into management have far fewer role models who look like them than their male counterparts. That’s because for every 100 men who are promoted into a managerial role, only 72 women are promoted.
Trying to understand what this means. If women are a minority in technical roles wouldn't it be strange for these numbers to be parity? Proportionally I'd expect parity, so like, x% of men and x% of women move into management, but these absolute numbers don't make sense to me - you wouldn't expect 100 women to become managers for every 100 men, unless women and men made equal portions of the technical workforce which they don't.
I suppose I don't see how this is a lack of representation. 1:1 would be an overrepresentation. If you account for the existing distribution across the workforce it's closer to an equitable representation. You'd expect women in management roles to be roughly proportional to the percentage of women in tech.
I don't think so. Also, 72 to 100 is "far" fewer? If a division has 10 male managers and 7 female managers, it's not ideally equal, yes, but I think both genders have plenty of role models to choose from.
If anything 10 male to 7 female manager ratio would only encourage female devs to move manager positions because developer ratio is closer to 10 to 1-2 at best
What I've never received is an explanation of why we expect women and men to equally represented in all positions across the economy, but are ok with prisoners being close to 10:1 in favor of men.
Research shows that when there is more gender equality in countries, the self selection for certain occupations by gender increases. This could lead you to believe there is something fundamentally different about men and women that makes them on average choose different careers.
The thing on average that's different between men and women is that women bear children and are then flooded with hormones that make them want to stay home, whereas a male sexually imprinted on a woman with a child wants to shower resources on the mother. Research has shown how both sexes hormones change with respect to having a child, and this is pretty much how things work. Why we should expect this to not have societal implications is beyond me. Too many articles talk about sex without talking about children, which is ridiculous, because children are an incredibly common human experience.
It'd take a bit to find specific examples but I feel like I've seen a lot of research over the past few years that says various dimensions of gender inequality are statistically non-existent prior to motherhood, and open up wide at precisely that point.
I don't think anyone sees the gender disparity in incarceration and thinks "this is fine and normal". There is a lot of research going into understanding the causes, and effort going into programmes that combat young male delinquency etc... .
How does having a role model change one’s ability to move into a managerial role and how morphologically similar does a role model have to be in order to be acceptable?
Feminists often fall into the trap of "elite feminism": Demanding more women in leading / high paid positions when the basis where candidates are recruited from is mostly male.
It‘s simply one of the many logical fallacies of feminism.
Not too many men go into nursing because caring roles are often ascribed to women and because they have a harder time fitting in (especially in caring jobs that involve children).
We just don't usually make a big deal out of it because society values nursing much less economially (and, arguably, socially - save for a few clapping fits during early COVID).
Please just hit the hide button if all you want to do is deliver snark and even admit to not reading the article.
Considering the order of magnitude higher rate of pedophilia among males compared to females, perhaps it's better that we protect children than we try to eliminate all discrimination.
If that statistic we're true many people WOULD be okay with such a policy. We've moved from a "stereotypes are morally wrong because they're factually wrong," through "stereotypes must be factually wrong because they're morally wrong," and landed in "stereotypes are morally wrong, so it doesn't matter if they're factually right or wrong.". Your values are transient. The truth is not.
It's funny that somebody commented how if you change sex to skin color in your comment, suddenly it sounds very interesting. And then deleted it later.
So, is it fine to apply group punishment based on sex? Shall we apply group punishments in other areas where there's correlation?
IIRC certain sexual orientation also have disproportionally rates of pedophilia. Shall we highlight that and then ban them from anything close to children?
Clearly we need to encourage men to go into nursing!
Yes, we do. When there aren't enough people doing a job we need to encourage anyone who wants to do that job to apply regardless of any stereotypes or biases people have. Male nurses, women dev managers, whatever. We also need to work hard to retain people who are leaving because they feel unwelcome - losing people just wastes talent. That's true for nurses as much as it is for tech.
For one thing, this site is called "hacker news", not "healthcare worker news". Naturally most articles posted here would focus on workplace discrimination in tech, not on workplace discrimination in nursing.
In addition, tech is more prestigious than nursing. A tech job in many cases allows you to afford a home in a good school district in a fashionable part of the country, or maybe even to send a kid to private school. Nursing doesn't. So journalists write more about tech than about nursing. And millionaire socialites and star athletes and Hollywood actors are far more prestigious than techies, of course, so journalists write far more about them than about tech.
Googling "programs encouraging men into nursing" gets 70M results.
Whatever nonsense you are inventing in your head is just that: nonsense. When you calm down and are out of "ridiculous baseless ranting mode" I encourage you to ask why you would spout off such utter falsehoods without first taking 10-20s to find out if you are angry at your imagination or reality.
So glad all these programs have gotten men into nursing and solved the problem. There's a lot of money in solving problems once and for all, unlike non-problems that can never be solved, but will always be just a little bit of funding or "social awareness" from being fixed. /s
My comment was not made in ignorance, but in full awareness of the futility and stupidity of such an approach. It's less "ranting" and more "mocking stupidity," which I will continue to do so long as busybody mid-wits keep thinking they are brilliant for upholding attempts to plan society as if they have discovered some novel brilliant plan on a moral crusade to save us from making our own choices.
Nice backpedal! It's nearly believable, so i give it a 7/10. Next time, if you want to be truly believed you should try this:
1. Include hints you might be joking or presenting a "tongue-in-cheek" argument.
2. When called out, don't go with the "no really om a supervillain and tricked you into helping me make a completely unrelated argument" trope. It's well known as a scramble response to an unexpected retort.
The problem ofc, is that despite paying a little better and being a more open career path for people who aren't traditional students (plenty of programs for working class people) the hours are god awful and the job can be potentially draining if not disturbing at times.
Most people I know rn who are nurses are desperately looking to switch careers.
Nursing shortages really are dire right now. I’m open to any suggestions including altering the female dominated culture of nursing to be more open to male communication styles.
Women leave tech jobs because children are more than a full time job and are more rewarding than twiddling bits around. If they have a husband that can provide for them they will stay out until the children move out. They will only start looking for work again then.
So if you want to have an equal number of women in the work force be prepared to take on 40something and 50something women with a decades long gap in their career.
I'm not sure. Childbirth and rearing is a concern for most women, statistically speaking, so if it were only about childbirth and rearing, we'd see about equal numbers of females dropping out of tech as we do females dropping out of other professions, but we don't see that. (If anything, I'd expect it's less of a factor in tech in the last two years because the main issue there has been the pandemic's effect on childcare, and swinging a remote or odd hours job is easier in tech.)
We'd have to know where in the pipeline the women are leaving to investigate causality.
Anecdotally, I ended up working on my own for most of my programming because while it was fine when I was a child (under the age of about 12 or 13), mostly single-sex spaces of adolescents (including college students) are REALLY hostile. Being a 16-22 year old female in a room full of 20 to 30 something males is REALLY uncomfortable and I felt literally endangered on some occasions. Adolescents are both insecure and new to their sexuality, which they take out on other people. It's gotten much better now that young men see me as old; they don't hate or resent me as much.
I've seen similar dynamics with, for example, men who want to work with young children. There are some young women who really invested their sense of self into being the person who's good with kids, and someone of the opposite sex coming along and being just as good/interested in the topic makes their insecurity and nastiness flare. Teenage boys who want to be camp counselors, babysit, etc.
> If anything, I'd expect it's less of a factor in tech in the last two years because the main issue there has been the pandemic's effect on childcare, and swinging a remote or odd hours job is easier in tech.
Actually I would consider it a bigger factor in tech because a typical tech role, say, of a developer, makes far more sustained intellectual demands than, say, an administrative position. Speaking for myself, even when I'm not working, the problem I'm trying to solve is almost always in the back of my mind. It takes a toll and managing that in parallel with childcare would be super difficult.
This is a fair point. I wonder how common it is to be someone like me: I actually took up a part time retail job to help with my freelancing because zoning out and doing physical work helps me with intellectual problem solving sometimes.
If more people work like you and need the undivided focus time, you'd be right that's a variable to consider.
There's tech and then there's "tech". Tech is getting a phone call at 3am that production is down and your code is where the logger says the problem is at and you need to fix it _now_.
The reason why people fall out of the first one is because you really have better things to do with your life. The reason why they fall out of the second is because it's bullshit and the people are there to be fired when something goes wrong and the gods of the market need blood to be appeased.
You can't raise a child when you're in tech because your social life is secondary. There are a lot more women in "tech".
Leave your personal bones to pick somewhere else. You've still got a dozen other social media sites with similar messages to explain, way before 'incels' became prominent.
Women are generally raised to be better at social manipulation than men, and in those roles, that's more of an advantage. Men are generally raised to be better at shutting up and suffering. That'd be my theory anyway.
Another thing I just thought of is that for a lot of women, they're the one who leave or step back from employment because of economic math: They make less than the cost of childcare and/or the benefit of the second income is marginal and the women earn less so the logical thing is for them to quit.
I'd expect that women in tech earn are more likely to earn enough to be able to take the costs on the chin + are more likely to be the higher earner in a heterosexual couple (unless it turns out bi and het women in tech mostly marry men in tech).
> if it were only about childbirth and rearing, we'd see about equal numbers of females dropping out of tech as we do females dropping out of other professions, but we don't see that
Is that really the case? I don't have any experience in fields other than tech, but it seems to me that tech doesn't like long gaps in one's career, "cause it moves so quickly". Maybe other fields don't have as much of an issue with this?
The converse of that is that you CAN stay up to date on your own time and do tech projects when things come out/make open source contributions, etc. (dependent on specialty, of course). It's also decently easy to freelance or pick up side projects, whereas some other career fields it's very much a 'you're in or you're out' thing.
Some other fields are much stricter in terms of what they'll accept for experience and/or a valid career path. Lawyers, doctors, etc. Academia's pretty punishing as well: Taking a break basically can mean adjunct hell for life depending on the discipline.
Tech is a high paying profession. Women tend to be hypergamous. Thus, their male partner will earn even more than their high paying professional self. This means that they often can drop out because the husband earns a fuck load.
Women who work in other professions might still be hypergamous but because they’re not high paying professionals then they are not attracting very high paying professionals who can afford the SAHM lifestyle.
It’s not really rocket science. If I see a manager then they’re paired with a director. If I see a senior IC then they’re paired with a manager or a staff+. It’s super common even in SV. I rarely see women in higher level/paid roles compared to their husband. At best - the woman will have a higher title but the husband still makes more.
I don't know anyone who left the workforce after their first child and stayed out until their children were out of home. Most often, they started returning to work in the first year after the birth, and repeated the cycle for each child.
Children would have an impact (on every job category), but I don't think it's as extreme as you say.
Part-time roles would be a thing before talking about decade-long gaps, IMO.
I'm not going to deny that looking after children is more than a full-time job, but your assertion applies that only women are going to be capable (or willing) to take on that burden. And when it comes to staying out until the children move out... I have not met anyone who paused their career that long. By age 5, your children are likely to be going to school almost every workday, which means you're going to be with them for equal amounts of time whether you're working or not.
>but your assertion applies that only women are going to be capable (or willing) to take on that burden.
We all know that's true.
If we're going to be playing the 'but minority' game I can always play the nuclear option and ask for a definition of what a woman is.
> By age 5, your children are likely to be going to school almost every workday, which means you're going to be with them for equal amounts of time whether you're working or not.
Unless you're home schooling them. Something that the top performers in programming are wont to do since math and science education is abysmal even in private schools.
Something like 4% of all households homeschool, and most top performers in math and science are the product of school systems, not of homeschooling. Your pleadings are getting more special as your argument is pressed.
I observe this so much in meetings. It happens a lot, it isn't malice, but it keeps happening. I don't really know how to deal with it. I sometimes call it out... only once in a while. But I try not to do too much, because I (through overthinking things, maybe?) don't want to undermine women standing up for themselves and also my callouts just becoming noise.
It's such a widespread problem. In some cases, like yours, it can be extremely gendered against women. In my case, the biggest example is a particular high-ranking woman who constantly talks over everyone and hijacks meetings with 10 minute long monologues. A lot of people need to work on this.
A fundamental issue is that people in management roles are often not evaluated on how they treat subordinates. When this is addressed, it helps everyone, but especially (I think) marginalized groups.
Wow, those findings are really dramatic. Not only the proportion of interruptions in opposite-sex conversations was nearly all by men in the first study, but also the number of interruptions was 4x the same-sex conversations. So on average, just the presence of a woman seems to really trigger men to use a much more domineering style.
I think this is a big reason why sex-segregated settings are often found to be helpful or protective to women, e.g. in middle and high school. Or more broadly, in places like bathrooms and prisons.
It would be interesting to see if the interruptions tend to come from particular men or are broadly distributed.
All that said, everyone who has an issue with hijacking conversations should be incentivized to fix this, regardless of their demographic group.
I don't think being interrupted happens to females only. It happens to everyone. I think author is just assuming that people are interrupting her because of her gender, while in the reality people interrupt each other all the time
My guess is that sometimes people misinterpret it as gendered or racialized, but a lot of times they may actually live in an environment that really does treat them differently. It's hard to know without being in their shoes to see and hear it.
no, but the interrupting itself tends (of course not always, just tends) to be a male habit, and we males are kind of used to interrupting each other kind of like an extension of boyhood rough play, or something, but it's not the same experience as that experienced by many females.
It would be interesting if men and women have a different average tolerance for being interrupted. We would want to be sensitive to that, not just assume that the "male default" is how every group meeting should work.
Why should males be asked to change their communication style to be more feminine? Especially in a majority male working environment? Shouldn’t the women be the ones to adapt? Is there something inherently wrong with how men tend to communicate? It actually seems more sexist to make these changes because supposedly “fragile” women can’t handle the existing environment.
I am very bad at doing this to others IRL and online. But my team has been fully remote for the last few years, so I’ve made a conscious effort to stop myself from doing this, acknowledging and apologizing when I do, and specifically calling out the person I did it to and ask, “you were trying to say something, did you still want to share?”
We have a few women on our team, some in developer roles. I’d like to think I’m doing a decent job, but I’d have to ask them. I don’t even know how to get their honest feedback without being intimidating. I hope it’s as easy as “tell me honestly, how do you feel about your inclusion within the team? Anything I or the team can do better?”
This happens to men too, but nobody calls it out. However, I will often make an effort of repeating the point made by the person in the manner of "As XXXX mentioned, I really like the idea of YYYY". This way the person gets credit (and a co-signer) and the idea is brought back into discussion in case it was just accidentally talked past. And I don't do it in a dickish way that presumes it was done intentionally, so nobody is on the defensive.
I am not sure if the article was very convincing. 72 women being promoted to managerial roles for 100 men doesn't quite support "Women developers hoping to move into management have far fewer role models who look like them than their male counterparts" - the numbers presented imply that 3 out of 7 will be women.
The prescriptions are a bit worse. I have absolutely no interest in sharing details about my private life in a work setting; nor do I like being forced to socialize.
The fundamental problem (in my opinion) remains one that PG mentioned nearly ten years ago:
"If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us."
"It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13-year-old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that."
It is a tiny bit sexist to be honest - not catastrophically so or anything, but a bit.
Getting 13-year-old girls interested in computers turns out to be not that hard. Lots of programs do it. (Maybe it's harder to get them interested at the same rates as boys, but I wouldn't die on that hill.)
> "If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us."
1) Founders are entrepreneurs. The article seems to be focused on non-entrepreneurial roles, which is a very different situation.
2) We don't seem to have the same attitude about other professions such as medicine, law, stock trading, etc. Do successful surgeons have to operate at age 13? Do successful lawyers have to try cases at age 13? No, that's nuts. So why in tech do we have such a fetish about teenage hackers? This already seems like a kind of bias, and maybe we should correct that.
>So why in tech do we have such a fetish about teenage hackers?
Same reason it happens for teenage artists, musicians, etc. It's possible, and where there's a possibility, you can bet there will be a bunch of profiteers and elitists trying to push it as the new normal.
You can bet your sweet dollars if it was possible to do so as surgeons (by changing the culture and opening up possibilities), the same would happen there.
Of course, it also completely discredits that people can become amazing at something starting from nothing in old age.
There does seem to be two different mindsets. In most cases everyone has a combination of both of them. The first is the “shakedown” mindset. This is where you are in a situation where you have to try very quickly to figure out what level a person is at so that you can figure out how much info to give them or how to communicate. Some people take the shakedown mindset to an extreme and use it almost exclusively. They tend to by hyper-competitive.
Then you have the collaborative mindset. This is where a person is in a more naturally open mindset and they more readily assume that everyone around them are contributors, people they can learn from, non-threatening, etc. The prevailing mindset on HN is probably collaborative.
One common misconception, is that what would benefit the group is less shakedown and more collaborative. But that isn’t always true. It is possible that we should teach shakedown skills. How to perform shakedown in a positive way. A way that would naturally lead to the collaborative process. Truly everyone has something to contribute but contribution has to be delivered at the correct collaborative level to be effective.
If surgeons were able to begin honing their craft at 13, they’d probably be better than the ones who started in their twenties. Programming’s low barrier to entry creates issues that don’t apply to other professions. How many virtuoso pianists didn’t start playing until adulthood?
> If surgeons were able to begin honing their craft at 13, they’d probably be better than the ones who started in their twenties.
If you don't count the dead bodies they leave behind on the way.
> How many virtuoso pianists didn’t start playing until adulthood?
How many virtuoso pianists are there in the world? How many professional programmers are "virtuosos"? How many companies even need virtuoso programmers, and how many companies could afford to pay them? I don't think it's a useful comparison.
It's also important to recognize that a ton of kids learn how to play musical instruments, but very few end up as virtuosos. Hacking around with computers as a teenager means very little by itself.
> Regarding pianists, I think you can replace “virtuoso” with “professional” and the point still stands.
Does it? Professional piano playing doesn't seem to be a particularly large or lucrative profession compared to others such as tech. If you're Elton John or Billy Joel, then great, but otherwise not so much. It makes sense that the music industry is populated largely by people naturally attracted to music, because the route to financial stability, much less financial success, is very precarious.
Depends on what you mean by "skill". There are songwriters, indeed famous songwriters, who are not particularly skilled technically. Is songwriting a skill? Is it inspiration? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The earliest historical opportunity for 13 year olds to program computers was likely with the release of the Apple II in 1977. Born in 1964, 22 years old in 1986, 58 years old today. This is at the very earliest. The supply of previous 13 year old "hackers" would have still likely been extremely low for the entire decade of 1986-1996. Mostly a non-factor, I'd say.
For the older generation of programmers, their first access to computers at all would have been in college, not in junior high school.
I agree there was a generation who had to wait for timesharing, but there were something like six million Apple IIs and twelve million Commodore 64s out there (counting mine) by the mid-80s, and users who filtered into the profession had different motivations than the people who grew up on stories of dot-com IPO millionaires.
I think you're missing the point, which is that the earlier generation of programmers did just fine without being 13 year old hackers, and still created incredible software.
How many of those Apple IIs and C64s were actually used for non-trivial, proto-professional programming by 13 year olds? Certainly not millions.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. It seems like nitpicking on points that no one was making in the first place.
If people are interested in something and can start practicing early, you can see big differences in skill early on that affect who is found in the occupation later and how successful they are. Professional musicians and programmers are both examples of this. Surgeons aren't.
1) Starting early is no guarantee of anything. You see big differences in skills from different kids who start at the same age.
2) To become a virtuoso, you do have to practice obsessively, many hours a day every day. (I remember Steve Vai saying he practiced 10+ hours a day.) Again, this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to achieve virtuosity.
3) Do virtuoso musicians have start young? I don't know. Kids have the most free time and the fewest responsibilities and other distractions. (It probably helps to start before you're old enough to date.) Few adults have the time or inclination to practice to the obsessive level required.
4) Most "teenage hackers" do not practice obsessively at the level of virtuoso musicians.
5) Most professional programmers are not virtuosos.
6) The music industry is not like the tech industry. And anyway, most of the money is made by songwriting, not by virtuoso performances. The analogy between tech and music (or between tech and sports for that matter) is not a good or useful one. The music industry is practically speaking a bad career choice. Only a lucky few do well. There's a reason it's filled with people who have no life except for music.
Okay. It seems to me that you've provided a list of differences between tech and music and on this basis say it's a bad analogy. But analogies are by definition a partial resemblance. The point of an analogy is to make a comparison on a relevant dimension. The relevant dimension here is what my GP post tried to explain.
Phrases like "no guarantee" also seem beside the point. Nothing is a guarantee of anything in this context. We're talking about factors that influence things.
> How many professional programmers are "virtuosos"?
Technically speaking, I believe that "virtuoso programmer" is the next level up in skill above "rock star programmer", who's typically someone who only learned to code in their rebellious teenage years. So, about 10X less common perhaps.
72 out of 100 (40%) is in fact heavily skewed in the favour of women. The gender ratio for technical degrees is less than 20%, which means half of women are likely promoted over men.
Do you really believe that the majority of software engineers were "hacking on computers at age 13"? Can we stop pretending that everyone coding for a living is a passionate embodiment of the hacker ethos?
Even thinking of myself (for whom open source was very important personally and career-wise), I didn't learn how to program until college.
There are plenty of opportunities to improve diversity in tech at many stages of the pipeline. Hiring and retention are part of that pipeline. I think it's disingenuous to imply that tech companies are not at fault in any way here, and that there's nothing they can do short of time travel or investing in middle school education.
I'm not saying everything in the article is the right answer, but there are a lot of good suggestions.
Historically, most men are forced to work to provide for their family. So basically, you do nothing. If you're burnt out you continue to work to provide for your family. That's pretty much it, and I venture if more females followed this advice, they too would have similar rates as men.
Myself, I like my job, but not as much as some. I've certainly hated my job before. But that doesn't matter. As the sole income earner, I have to keep working. It's not an option for me to 'leave tech', since that's the only career path I can follow at this point that provides as much income. So, when things suck at a job, I find a new one, but I don't have the option of leaving. I joke with my wife that I should probably find myself a husband so I don't have to put up with this shit.
>According to the Kapor Center Tech Leavers Study, unfair treatment is the top reason women leave their tech jobs. Women of color experience unfair treatment at even higher rates
The study she cites contradicts her point and the entire piece. It found 40% of white/Asian men, 38% of underrepresented men, 36% of underrepresented women, and 28% of white/Asian women left because of unfair treatment.
Her statement technically stays within the bounds of facts but it's misleading to the point of being a lie
I hate the conflation of 'POC' and 'underrepresented' as well.
I'm a white female. I'm also gay, disabled, from a rural area, and neither of my parents have college degrees. Yeah, I'm TOTALLY proportionally represented in tech.
Same for say, a blind gay white dude from an Eastern European country.
The heterodox view here is that unfair treatment is not a reason men leave tech jobs because men are more resilient to it. For myself, my wife left her tech job because she didn't like the way she was treated. This leaves me forced to work my tech job whether I like my boss or not, because we have several mouths to feed. I don't really have much of a choice, and I venture many many many men feel the same way.
A women who leaves the workplace is following a socially acceptable script to do so. If she has kids, absolutely no one will accuse her of being a deadbeat, useless, etc. But God forbid, should a man express a desire to leave, it's a big problem, even if his wife is happy providing.
Not saying it's right or it's wrong, but I feel a lot of these articles about women in the workplace ignore the fact that the main reason there's so many men in the workplace is that the men basically have to work, so will stay even in jobs they hate. It's why the stereotypical "do-nothing" employee, the guy who's burnt out but been there forever and no one's going to fire him, is a man -- women leave, men don't.
Leaving tech is not the same thing as leaving work.
Also, the compensation level of the people leaving has to be considered. It makes more sense to leave if you're on the lower level of compensation and promotion than if you're on the higher level (unless you're super rich and can retire early). Frustrated and underpaid is a bad combination for employee retention.
Compensation levels in tech are still higher than most other places. It'd be pretty difficult to change careers into something tech-adjacent later in life and still maintain the same compensation. More likely you'll have to traverse the ladder again and this time with worse compensation. Relative compensation is a different story.
>Leaving tech is not the same thing as leaving work
Article would have to follow up on this either way. Where did the women leaving tech go off to?
From the male side of the perspective, GP is absolutely correct. Men have far more incentive to tough it out in tech than women do once at the point of gaining the financial benefits of living together, for quite a few reasons. Wouldn't be too farfetched to assume this causes tech to further optimize towards men, too, even if not intentionally sexist.
> Compensation levels in tech are still higher than most other places.
Compensation levels in tech vary extremely widely by company, location, etc.
> It'd be pretty difficult to change careers into something tech-adjacent later in life and still maintain the same compensation.
Depends on how much later in life.
> Men have far more incentive to tough it out in tech than women do once at the point of gaining the financial benefits of living together, for quite a few reasons.
One reason would be if tech favors men in hiring, compensation, and promotions. If your wife is making more money than you but leaves anyway, that would be a little different story.
>Compensation levels in tech vary extremely widely by company, location, etc.
And compensating for those variations through medians and averages shows tech still tends to pay better on average. Clear exceptions being fields one can't easily pivot into without many years of study.
>Depends on how much later in life.
Disregarding age discrimination, soft skills will only allow you to pivot so far. That makes age itself rather inconsequential compared to raw experience.
>One reason would be if tech favors men in hiring, compensation, and promotions.
Another reason is that women put far, far more importance on men's wealth and income than vice versa. Several cultures across the globe reflect this.
> And compensating for those variations through medians and averages shows tech still tends to pay better on average.
Nobody is disputing that tech has a high average. But the industry having a high average doesn't help if you're personally below the average.
> Disregarding age discrimination, soft skills will only allow you to pivot so far. That makes age itself rather inconsequential compared to raw experience.
The point is that if you leave tech early in your career, when you haven't established much anyway, then you have more time to start over and gain experience in other areas. Maybe you can even go back to school.
> Another reason is that women put far, far more importance on men's wealth and income than vice versa. Several cultures across the globe reflect this.
You quoted one sentence of mine but not the following sentence: "If your wife is making more money than you but leaves anyway, that would be a little different story." If one spouse quits, and the other becomes the main breadwinner, the income of each spouse seems quite relevant, doesn't it?
It's not about total money, it's about quality of life too.
I made enough money to support everyone.
Of course five years later I now make more than my wife did.
I wanted (and still do) to stay home with my kids (my brother does), but my wife doesn't want to work when the kids are little. Plus, if we both worked we could easily afford daycare. In fact if my wife worked I think we could probably retire in a few years since she was bringing in quite a bit.
But the idea that if only we could pay women more than men they wouldn't leave is silly. Families don't just value money or even early retirement or whatever. There is no amount of money to replace your child's early years.
First: "my wife left her tech job because she didn't like the way she was treated. This leaves me forced to work my tech job whether I like my boss or not, because we have several mouths to feed."
Now: "Then we had a baby and she wanted to stay home." "my wife doesn't want to work when the kids are little."
Theoretically, both could be true. But plenty of people leave their jobs because they don't like the way they were treated, and then get a new job without leaving tech. It sounds like leaving tech for a number of years was about children rather than mistreatment though. Which goes against the claim that "men are more resilient".
Both are true. She quit her job without a backup (something I never do), because of the way she was treated. She got pregnant. Thought she'd have the baby, take some time off and go back. But she loves spending all her time with our daughter.
> Which goes against the claim that "men are more resilient".
I never said men are more resilient. That's a bit of a value judgement. I don't claim men are better at this. I just think that male resilience looks like a man not quitting, because men have no option. Female resilience is other things, but we need not discuss them here. A man has no option to leave a job. Thus he stays.
"The heterodox view here is that unfair treatment is not a reason men leave tech jobs because men are more resilient to it."
> I just think that male resilience looks like a man not quitting, because men have no option.
Men quit their jobs all the time, without a backup. I quit my job without a backup. Maybe you never do it, but your anecdotal feelings do not apply to men in general. You keep saying that you have no option, that men have no option - that's just false. Everyone always has an option. Taking that option may have significantly negative financial consequences, but so it goes. It sounds like your wife quitting her job already had significantly negative financial consequences on your family: "In fact if my wife worked I think we could probably retire in a few years since she was bringing in quite a bit." You have the option to divorce your wife if you're angry and bitter that she won't go back to work. It's really strange to suggest that women have options but men don't. You think you have no options, but it seems that only your own mind is holding you back. I'm not saying you should divorce your wife, but you could. Or you could quit your job and tell your wife it's her turn to support the family while you stay home. A man has options.
The argument seems to be that men have no options because of what "society" thinks. But there is no societal hive mind. Society is actually bitterly divided on these issues. There are some ultra-conservative types who want women barefoot, pregnant, and subservient, but hopefully we can get past that.
My statement is quite clear. It's not a blanket statement that 'men are resilient'. It's that men are resilient to leaving tech jobs (and other well-paying jobs) because we're kind of forced to keep working by how families typically end up being set up. That is not a blanket statement that men are more resilient, which would be a statement saying that all male adults are more resilient than female adults, which is not categorically true.
> It's that men are resilient to leaving tech jobs (and other well-paying jobs) because we're kind of forced to keep working by how families typically end up being set up.
But these two things — (1) men are resilient to leaving tech jobs and (2) men are forced to keep working — are precisely what I'm questioning, not a "blanket statement".
How families typically end up being set up is a result, not a cause. You're not forced to be typical.
Honestly, you make men sound pretty weak, as if they have no agency, and are powerless in the face of society and their spouses.
I think this also contributes to men more aggressively seeking career advancement. I’ve worked with talented women who passed on direct opportunities to move up in the organization because they were secondary breadwinners and didn’t want the added stress.
> Gender-based microaggressions can take many forms:
> Being spoken over or interrupted at meetings.
Sharing an idea that gets no traction, only for a man to share the same idea ten minutes later and be applauded.
Being asked to supply lunch at a partner meeting when I am the only woman in the room.
> When I was an EM at Apple, I regularly attended meetings with my male PM. People who didn’t know us constantly assumed that I was the PM and he had the technical role. This assumption had nothing to do with previous knowledge of us as individuals; it was purely based on gender stereotypes. This happened so frequently that a colleague once emailed me to apologize.
These things suck. Though I hate the term microaggression. You don't have to label it as aggression, even if it is "micro".
(2)
> At the top of my game, I burned out. I walked out of my job as Engineering Manager for the Siri Media Domains team at Apple and straight into becoming a statistic.
> Looking from the outside in, you may not realize how much we are struggling. Many of us build the resilience to put up a shield during the work day. But at night and on weekends, we are suffering silently from the effects of imposter syndrome.
Burnout, fear of failure and imposter syndrome are not unique to women.
(3)
> Reshma Saujani, Founder of Girls Who Code, writes that we raise our boys to be brave; we raise our girls to be perfect. Fear of failure can hinder women’s ability to take risks and self-advocate long before they enter the workforce.
Nurture has an impact, but so does nature. There is a lot of biological denialism coming out of DEI departments. Can we just say that men and women are different? (The answer is no, even though it is true.)
I would rather we discuss how to accommodate women's differences and create an environment for them to flourish from the perspective that, on average, men and women will approach things differently, instead of framing it as a conspiratorial ("society trains us"), sinister ("implicit bias"), or aggressive ("microaggressions").
Not saying that that conspiracy, sinsisterism or aggression are always absent, but issues arising from honest differences aren't really discussed either.
> These things suck. Though I hate the term microaggression. You don't have to label it as aggression, even if it is "micro".
The reason it's labeled as aggression is the theoretical framework people are filtering these interactions through. That framework tells them that race, gender, and other axes of marginalization are extremely important in all interactions, and it is appropriate to reach for marginalizing oppression as a prima facie explanation for anything negative that occurs.
I won't blame the original inventors of the term "microaggression" for this, since I do think it describes a real phenomenon, but it's been abused and overextended.
I really think the term that should have stuck is "unconscious biases". Aggression implies these are hostile and partially intended slights, when they really aren't.
Our early analysis suggests that men and women actually appear to leave engineering at roughly the same rate and endorse the same reasons for leaving. Namely, that there were little opportunities for advancement, perceptions of a lack of a supportive organization, lost interests in the field, and conflicts with supervisors. One key difference between men and women was women wanted to leave the workforce to spend time with family.
I wonder how much of this is intentional behavior by tech companies. They want to select for workers that will tolerate their bullshit and are willing to receive some level of abuse.
If a system is designed to work a certain way it's usually not by accident. I'm not sure tech companies are interested in changing.
I wonder what free market advocates would say should be done about this issue. Why hasn't the free market done a better job of fixing this category of problems? Shouldn't it confer some kind of competitive advantage?
What if all design decisions and actions were deliberate? Or are we really to believe that all these huge corporations full of incredibly brilliant and skilled individuals are somehow too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to fix these problems?
This domain of problems is cursed. It seems similar to how a lot of political issues get mildly shitty solutions no matter what.
I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems or that it's even worth trying. Sorry for being such a downer. It's hard enough to keep myself from being perpetually suicidal.
Most of the recommendations here actually sound pretty reasonable. Has any company implemented them and proven to be successful?
> I wonder how much of this is intentional behavior by tech companies. They want to select for workers that will tolerate their bullshit and are willing to receive some level of abuse.
It is. That said, I don't think tech execs are sexist or racist so much as they are classist and money-obsessed. They don't necessarily want a crappy culture; they just don't care.
> Or are we really to believe that all these huge corporations full of incredibly brilliant and skilled individuals are somehow too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to fix these problems?
The huge corporations may be "full of" brilliant people, but the people at the top are the same schmoozing or generationally-connected mediocrities that have always run things, and they're the only ones whose input matters. Having a team of people in your basement with a 150 average IQ doesn't mean you're magically going to make better decisions, not if you never listen to them.
> I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems or that it's even worth trying.
It clearly is possible, because human systems do get better or worse over time, both on the small scale and the large. Scandinavian countries have better societies than the U.S.; the U.S. is still miles ahead, in this regard, of true autocracies (e.g. Putin's Russia). The vast differences in quality of human systems make it very clear that they can be improved (or degraded). It's just incredibly difficult.
I think of it like voting. Even when everything works and elections are fair, voting isn't really about making the decision. That's not why you do it, because mathematically, you probably won't cast a deciding vote ever in your life. Voting is about holding accountable those who do make the decisions, and at that, it often works very well--black neighborhoods saw improvements in public services after civil rights legislation made it easier for them to vote. Ultimately, of course, you're right: it's still up to forces out of your control whether you win or lose.
I imagine the above is why, although it certainly doesn't require a Western theocentric faith, religiosity (note that I make no claims about whether religion is or is not true) is associated with well-adjustment: it's one of the only ways we have come up with to hold an internal locus of control in a world where, quite frankly, almost everything that happens to us in the objective material world is out of our control.
The truth is that corporate capitalism wasn't built for people like us, people of conscience. It was built by obscenely wealthy ghouls to direct all of society's resources toward themselves. That's it. They will allow technical progress if they believe they stand to benefit; they will oppose it if they think they'll lose. "Meritocracy" is a sham, and corporations aren't built to last... they're built to extract wealth and then wither as invested resources are reallocated. A private company will never be a utopia because it's literally designed to be the opposite (perhaps not a "dystopia" in the classic sense, but one in the realistic sense whereby every dystopia is someone's utopia).
Trying to build a "good" company within corporate capitalism is like building a house on sand. It's not impossible, but it's extremely difficult. You're going to be competing with ruthless bastards and gargantuan institutions that could destroy you just for fun. You're playing a game where evil people win because it's designed that way. The only long-term solution is to destroy corporate capitalism forever.
> Or are we really to believe that all these huge corporations full of incredibly brilliant and skilled individuals are somehow too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to fix these problems?
Yes, indeed. Large-scale organizations are plagued by this sort of pathology; bad treatment of workers is only one of many instances of such. Individual skill does not translate to effective behavior on the larger, collective scale. We put up with large organizations despite these flaws, not because of them.
> I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems
Large, hierarchical, command-and-control structures are what they are. If you want improvement, it must come from designing better ways for humans to cooperate at a grassroots level, such as ordinary or "smart" markets.
Are women maltreated in technology? Yes. Capitalism is classist more than anything else and if you weren't born into generational wealth and connections, you're going to get fucked one way or another. Are women maltreated more than men? Eh, it's less clear, but the evidence on pay seems to suggest so. Still, I don't think that's all of why there's a dearth of women in technology. There are two really big factors that don't get a lot of volume behind them because they're politically incorrect (but keep in mind that I'm a leftist and mostly a feminist and I'm still saying this).
One: more women than men leave tech because they can. For every machine learning researcher getting paid $600k to be a basically a professor-in-residence, there are 250 losers doing Scrum. Whether you're a man or a woman, it's a horrible career; the bullshit and toxicity burn you out after 10 years. Men are socialized to believe that (a) making money is their main value both to society and to the people who will depend on them, and that (b) the market will treat them fairly because "meritocracy". We learn that (b) is false in early middle age, if not before, but can't really say it too loudly because we don't want to be tagged as bitter. It's a lot more socially acceptable for a woman to downshift her career to launch a small business than for a man. There's no intrinsic reason why it should be considered usual for men in heterosexual relationships to earn more than women, but emasculating and odd for the reverse to be the case, but you'd have to undo decades of socialization in billions of people to erase that prejudice. For now, it persists, and the common view is that a woman who leaves tech is brave for no longer putting up with the toxicity; a man who leaves tech is a wimp who couldn't hack it.
Two: smart women are more likely to go into medicine, law, and general management. Why? Look-ahead. A 22-year-old heterosexual woman has dated--or at least has friends who have dated--a few 25-year-old men, and maybe one or two in their early 30s. They see where the various paths lead. They see where most techies end up by age 30, and it ain't pretty... and they realize they don't want to go there. because they're smart. The 32-year-old doctor might still have a tough life--insurance companies are the pits, and residents don't make a lot of money--but at least he doesn't have to interview for his own fucking job every morning or deal with user stories and product managers.
Great post, I will push back on this point though:
“There's no intrinsic reason why it should be considered usual for men in heterosexual relationships to earn more than women, but emasculating and odd for the reverse to be the case”
I think there is an intrinsic reason for this. Women choose partners, at least in part, based on their ability to provide resources. This makes higher earning men more attractive even too high earning women.
I don't think it's intrinsic that (as you said) "Women choose partners, at least in part, based on their ability to provide resources." A hundred years ago, it was considered intrinsic that men were innately violent and needed experience with deadly conflict (hence, each generation "deserving" to "get" a war) or they would rot. We really know very little about what is intrinsic in us; we do, however, know that in the real world we have to deal with generations of toxic socialization.
> smart women are more likely to go into medicine, law, and general management
Smart men are more likely to seek more lucrative fields, too.
Software is sort of a second tier profession. We're constantly trying to dumb things down to the point that we can fill all the open positions with human livestock. At least since COVID, most of us don't have to work in bullpens anymore.
You're absolutely right, of course. I only note this: smart men are likely to seek more lucrative fields if they're informed about the actual odds. Having a high IQ doesn't mean all that much if you haven't got data.
Software plays on male quixotry, yes, but it's able to do so because the average 22-year-old man has friends of the same age group and has never dated anyone older than 22 (because, honestly, he can't... he has nothing to offer women 25+ and they aren't interested). Women, who usually have dated (or at least have friends who have dated) men in their late 20s and possibly 30s, are exposed to high-quality information about which careers actually deliver on their promises; men are not. Men might get advice from their parents, but that's going to be 30 years out of date, in a country where the career game has gone from Easy Mode to Psychopath Mode in a generation.
Just to be clear - the pay gap mostly disappears once you control for field, position, and experience. Women aren’t getting paid substantially less for the same job while having the same credentials. Also - even in fields like medicine… there’s a reason surgeons are overwhelmingly male. Women don’t want to keep doing training and intense hours during their final years of being able to have a kid. Whereas men will plough through and do it anyway. (Mainly because they have no other choice - men would choose otherwise if women would let them)
Women end up choosing a lot of lower paid fields whereas men choose higher paid ones. You can makeup whatever reasons you want for that but that’s just facts - and that’s what the “pay gap” is from.
> Just to be clear - the pay gap mostly disappears once you control for field, position, and experience.
That doesn't mean anything, because controlling for position means you're factoring out huge disparities--although I will not argue that they necessarily benefit men over women; it is more complex than that--in terms of how performance is evaluated, who gets promoted, and who is offered opportunities for high-quality work experience.
The problem in today's corporate America isn't that people deliberately offer better opportunities and favorable treatment to preferred racial or gender categories (although sometimes they do) but that all this happens subconsciously the whole system is set up so that only a small set of people (the generationally well-connected) have a serious chance of getting a fair shake. The system simultaneously has 85% of its decision makers believing they are executing a meritocracy while, in fact, working to drive predetermined and usually anti-meritocratic results.
> Whereas men will plough through and do it anyway. (Mainly because they have no other choice - men would choose otherwise if women would let them)
Sadly, those men who bear down and suffer because women won't "let them" choose other careers are going to end up ill-treated no matter what they do. The winning strategy for them would be to go overseas, but that's another topic.
You're trying to argue that pay gap exists due to societal issues which push women into lower paying professions. I'm not arguing against that. I'm saying that men and women who push against norms will not experience a pay gap.
The pay gap mostly does not exist if you're willing to go against societal norms - e.g. women should be nurses, men should be surgeons, etc. If you are willing to break societal norms - there is no pay gap.
Which is not something the media is publicizing because it doesn't fit well within our identity politics bullshit.
In every place I worked, female to male ratio was a lot higher in management positions as opposed to developer positions. If anything, as a male, I feel like I am being discouraged.
> I didn’t leave Apple in 2018 because of a singular event. I left because of the cumulative toll of microaggressions – what I call death by a thousand papercuts.
Something to check - and I don't think it makes it into the discussion on this stuff enough - is whether the men are actually free of this level of pressure. I suspect most men actually don't want to be working and feel extreme pressure at work. They just don't have the option of leaving because society is really rather harsh to men who give up on a high-status job. I've seen women drop out of CS courses because they didn't like it, and I've seen men power through because while they didn't like the coursework they did need the money to establish themselves. The decisive difference wasn't how they were being treated (although that does exist), it was what alternatives were available.
Based on my observations, I suspect many men would also discover (to their surprise) that if they chose to leave tech they were also choosing to leave their family.
It sounds like you’re describing privilege. As in there are certain social privileges available to each of the sexes and the existence of those privileges lead to different outcomes.
Does anyone have better data on why they leave tech? It seems like there should be a survey, or a summary of exit interviews, or something.
I also wonder what the base rate for women leaving a career path within 10 to 20 years is, compared to the base rate for men.
My personal and possibly untrendy opinion is that tech jobs aren't flexible or predictable enough when you're trying to start a family or raise young kids[0]. Most of the burden of this work falls on women, so you'd expect them to leave in droves for jobs that don't make on-call shifts mandatory and don't ask staff to work on the weekend to get the Frobnizzle project ready for integration testing with the Dunder Mifflin team.
If the way your company works is fundamentally hostile to employees with kids, I don't think any surface-level D&I initiative is going to fix the structural problems of sexism and ageism.
[0] Something which happens around 30 to 40, e.g. 10 to 20 years into an average career.
Men don't leave career paths because men have no choice to leave a career. Ask any man with kids if he can quit his job to stay at home. Most will just laugh at the question. The answer is obviously no.
Women almost invariably marry men with more or at least equal earning potential. For women in tech, one of the consequences is that basically their husbands have the means for them to quit work, and many make that choice.
As a cis-het white guy who is just introverted this is pervasive and annoying as fuck and at one point in my career I felt like I had to do this as well, and you have to get good at interrupting people right as they're finishing because otherwise some other aggressive conversationalist will win the race to start talking next and you'll never get a word in edgewise.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadThere's an overlap in articles like this. There's many things I relate to and some thing I don't. For instance, in the piece she talks about micro aggressions:
Other than the last point (I've never been given access to order lunch for my team, though I have a purchase card, my use of it is regulated to hell and fear mongered), the rest of these points are not only salient but relatable. It's what's driven me mad some days; the only defense I have with people like this is that I got good at finding a way to tell people they exhaust me in the most kind manner possible. If I don't, I'm looked at like an asshole regardless of what led up to the event.What she says about promotions is the same. On paper, I'm a very successful and young-for-my-level engineer. I've also never been promoted. I've driven multiple operating system transitions across multiple companies, I've led the way with higher coding standards, focuses on developer experience that had discernable improvement in productivity and happiness. Yet, not a single promotion.
I can go on, but my point is, if you pay attention to what she's saying and you solve the things women are talking about then the impact you'll feel is going to be pretty universal.
Trying to understand what this means. If women are a minority in technical roles wouldn't it be strange for these numbers to be parity? Proportionally I'd expect parity, so like, x% of men and x% of women move into management, but these absolute numbers don't make sense to me - you wouldn't expect 100 women to become managers for every 100 men, unless women and men made equal portions of the technical workforce which they don't.
Am I misinterpreting this?
Maybe they do, but they're better at getting away with it...
Research shows that when there is more gender equality in countries, the self selection for certain occupations by gender increases. This could lead you to believe there is something fundamentally different about men and women that makes them on average choose different careers.
It‘s simply one of the many logical fallacies of feminism.
https://wiw-report.s3.amazonaws.com/Women_in_the_Workplace_2...
It goes from a 92:100 ratio for hiring to a 72:100 ratio for manager.
We just don't usually make a big deal out of it because society values nursing much less economially (and, arguably, socially - save for a few clapping fits during early COVID).
Please just hit the hide button if all you want to do is deliver snark and even admit to not reading the article.
So, is it fine to apply group punishment based on sex? Shall we apply group punishments in other areas where there's correlation?
IIRC certain sexual orientation also have disproportionally rates of pedophilia. Shall we highlight that and then ban them from anything close to children?
Clearly we need to encourage men to go into nursing!
Yes, we do. When there aren't enough people doing a job we need to encourage anyone who wants to do that job to apply regardless of any stereotypes or biases people have. Male nurses, women dev managers, whatever. We also need to work hard to retain people who are leaving because they feel unwelcome - losing people just wastes talent. That's true for nurses as much as it is for tech.
In addition, tech is more prestigious than nursing. A tech job in many cases allows you to afford a home in a good school district in a fashionable part of the country, or maybe even to send a kid to private school. Nursing doesn't. So journalists write more about tech than about nursing. And millionaire socialites and star athletes and Hollywood actors are far more prestigious than techies, of course, so journalists write far more about them than about tech.
Heres a couple articles about them:
https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/nursing/men-in-nursing/
https://dailynurse.com/recruiting-more-men-to-nursing-school...
Here's the US association for it: https://www.aamn.org/
Here's an academic institution acknowledging the issue: https://www.unlv.edu/announcement/increasing-inclusion-asses...
Googling "programs encouraging men into nursing" gets 70M results.
Whatever nonsense you are inventing in your head is just that: nonsense. When you calm down and are out of "ridiculous baseless ranting mode" I encourage you to ask why you would spout off such utter falsehoods without first taking 10-20s to find out if you are angry at your imagination or reality.
My comment was not made in ignorance, but in full awareness of the futility and stupidity of such an approach. It's less "ranting" and more "mocking stupidity," which I will continue to do so long as busybody mid-wits keep thinking they are brilliant for upholding attempts to plan society as if they have discovered some novel brilliant plan on a moral crusade to save us from making our own choices.
1. Include hints you might be joking or presenting a "tongue-in-cheek" argument.
2. When called out, don't go with the "no really om a supervillain and tricked you into helping me make a completely unrelated argument" trope. It's well known as a scramble response to an unexpected retort.
Most people I know rn who are nurses are desperately looking to switch careers.
Women leave tech jobs because children are more than a full time job and are more rewarding than twiddling bits around. If they have a husband that can provide for them they will stay out until the children move out. They will only start looking for work again then.
So if you want to have an equal number of women in the work force be prepared to take on 40something and 50something women with a decades long gap in their career.
We'd have to know where in the pipeline the women are leaving to investigate causality.
Anecdotally, I ended up working on my own for most of my programming because while it was fine when I was a child (under the age of about 12 or 13), mostly single-sex spaces of adolescents (including college students) are REALLY hostile. Being a 16-22 year old female in a room full of 20 to 30 something males is REALLY uncomfortable and I felt literally endangered on some occasions. Adolescents are both insecure and new to their sexuality, which they take out on other people. It's gotten much better now that young men see me as old; they don't hate or resent me as much.
I've seen similar dynamics with, for example, men who want to work with young children. There are some young women who really invested their sense of self into being the person who's good with kids, and someone of the opposite sex coming along and being just as good/interested in the topic makes their insecurity and nastiness flare. Teenage boys who want to be camp counselors, babysit, etc.
Actually I would consider it a bigger factor in tech because a typical tech role, say, of a developer, makes far more sustained intellectual demands than, say, an administrative position. Speaking for myself, even when I'm not working, the problem I'm trying to solve is almost always in the back of my mind. It takes a toll and managing that in parallel with childcare would be super difficult.
If more people work like you and need the undivided focus time, you'd be right that's a variable to consider.
Then there's "tech": https://www.tiktok.com/@natasha.badger
The reason why people fall out of the first one is because you really have better things to do with your life. The reason why they fall out of the second is because it's bullshit and the people are there to be fired when something goes wrong and the gods of the market need blood to be appeased.
You can't raise a child when you're in tech because your social life is secondary. There are a lot more women in "tech".
I have no idea why.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Women are generally raised to be better at social manipulation than men, and in those roles, that's more of an advantage. Men are generally raised to be better at shutting up and suffering. That'd be my theory anyway.
Both are wildly unhealthy, and both are obsessed with comparing themselves to each other too. It's weird.
I'd expect that women in tech earn are more likely to earn enough to be able to take the costs on the chin + are more likely to be the higher earner in a heterosexual couple (unless it turns out bi and het women in tech mostly marry men in tech).
Is that really the case? I don't have any experience in fields other than tech, but it seems to me that tech doesn't like long gaps in one's career, "cause it moves so quickly". Maybe other fields don't have as much of an issue with this?
Some other fields are much stricter in terms of what they'll accept for experience and/or a valid career path. Lawyers, doctors, etc. Academia's pretty punishing as well: Taking a break basically can mean adjunct hell for life depending on the discipline.
Women who work in other professions might still be hypergamous but because they’re not high paying professionals then they are not attracting very high paying professionals who can afford the SAHM lifestyle.
It’s not really rocket science. If I see a manager then they’re paired with a director. If I see a senior IC then they’re paired with a manager or a staff+. It’s super common even in SV. I rarely see women in higher level/paid roles compared to their husband. At best - the woman will have a higher title but the husband still makes more.
Children would have an impact (on every job category), but I don't think it's as extreme as you say.
Part-time roles would be a thing before talking about decade-long gaps, IMO.
We all know that's true.
If we're going to be playing the 'but minority' game I can always play the nuclear option and ask for a definition of what a woman is.
> By age 5, your children are likely to be going to school almost every workday, which means you're going to be with them for equal amounts of time whether you're working or not.
Unless you're home schooling them. Something that the top performers in programming are wont to do since math and science education is abysmal even in private schools.
I observe this so much in meetings. It happens a lot, it isn't malice, but it keeps happening. I don't really know how to deal with it. I sometimes call it out... only once in a while. But I try not to do too much, because I (through overthinking things, maybe?) don't want to undermine women standing up for themselves and also my callouts just becoming noise.
A fundamental issue is that people in management roles are often not evaluated on how they treat subordinates. When this is addressed, it helps everyone, but especially (I think) marginalized groups.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2017/07/07/men-inter...
I think this is a big reason why sex-segregated settings are often found to be helpful or protective to women, e.g. in middle and high school. Or more broadly, in places like bathrooms and prisons.
It would be interesting to see if the interruptions tend to come from particular men or are broadly distributed.
All that said, everyone who has an issue with hijacking conversations should be incentivized to fix this, regardless of their demographic group.
* https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2017/07/07/men-inter... * https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/study-men-interrupt...
We have a few women on our team, some in developer roles. I’d like to think I’m doing a decent job, but I’d have to ask them. I don’t even know how to get their honest feedback without being intimidating. I hope it’s as easy as “tell me honestly, how do you feel about your inclusion within the team? Anything I or the team can do better?”
Were you looking?
Maybe you mean swap genders?
The prescriptions are a bit worse. I have absolutely no interest in sharing details about my private life in a work setting; nor do I like being forced to socialize.
The fundamental problem (in my opinion) remains one that PG mentioned nearly ten years ago:
"If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us."
"It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13-year-old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that."
He was called Sexist for this.
Getting 13-year-old girls interested in computers turns out to be not that hard. Lots of programs do it. (Maybe it's harder to get them interested at the same rates as boys, but I wouldn't die on that hill.)
1) Founders are entrepreneurs. The article seems to be focused on non-entrepreneurial roles, which is a very different situation.
2) We don't seem to have the same attitude about other professions such as medicine, law, stock trading, etc. Do successful surgeons have to operate at age 13? Do successful lawyers have to try cases at age 13? No, that's nuts. So why in tech do we have such a fetish about teenage hackers? This already seems like a kind of bias, and maybe we should correct that.
Same reason it happens for teenage artists, musicians, etc. It's possible, and where there's a possibility, you can bet there will be a bunch of profiteers and elitists trying to push it as the new normal.
You can bet your sweet dollars if it was possible to do so as surgeons (by changing the culture and opening up possibilities), the same would happen there.
Of course, it also completely discredits that people can become amazing at something starting from nothing in old age.
Then you have the collaborative mindset. This is where a person is in a more naturally open mindset and they more readily assume that everyone around them are contributors, people they can learn from, non-threatening, etc. The prevailing mindset on HN is probably collaborative.
One common misconception, is that what would benefit the group is less shakedown and more collaborative. But that isn’t always true. It is possible that we should teach shakedown skills. How to perform shakedown in a positive way. A way that would naturally lead to the collaborative process. Truly everyone has something to contribute but contribution has to be delivered at the correct collaborative level to be effective.
If you don't count the dead bodies they leave behind on the way.
> How many virtuoso pianists didn’t start playing until adulthood?
How many virtuoso pianists are there in the world? How many professional programmers are "virtuosos"? How many companies even need virtuoso programmers, and how many companies could afford to pay them? I don't think it's a useful comparison.
It's also important to recognize that a ton of kids learn how to play musical instruments, but very few end up as virtuosos. Hacking around with computers as a teenager means very little by itself.
Regarding pianists, I think you can replace “virtuoso” with “professional” and the point still stands.
Does it? Professional piano playing doesn't seem to be a particularly large or lucrative profession compared to others such as tech. If you're Elton John or Billy Joel, then great, but otherwise not so much. It makes sense that the music industry is populated largely by people naturally attracted to music, because the route to financial stability, much less financial success, is very precarious.
For the older generation of programmers, their first access to computers at all would have been in college, not in junior high school.
How many of those Apple IIs and C64s were actually used for non-trivial, proto-professional programming by 13 year olds? Certainly not millions.
If people are interested in something and can start practicing early, you can see big differences in skill early on that affect who is found in the occupation later and how successful they are. Professional musicians and programmers are both examples of this. Surgeons aren't.
What are you disputing about this thesis?
2) To become a virtuoso, you do have to practice obsessively, many hours a day every day. (I remember Steve Vai saying he practiced 10+ hours a day.) Again, this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to achieve virtuosity.
3) Do virtuoso musicians have start young? I don't know. Kids have the most free time and the fewest responsibilities and other distractions. (It probably helps to start before you're old enough to date.) Few adults have the time or inclination to practice to the obsessive level required.
4) Most "teenage hackers" do not practice obsessively at the level of virtuoso musicians.
5) Most professional programmers are not virtuosos.
6) The music industry is not like the tech industry. And anyway, most of the money is made by songwriting, not by virtuoso performances. The analogy between tech and music (or between tech and sports for that matter) is not a good or useful one. The music industry is practically speaking a bad career choice. Only a lucky few do well. There's a reason it's filled with people who have no life except for music.
Phrases like "no guarantee" also seem beside the point. Nothing is a guarantee of anything in this context. We're talking about factors that influence things.
Technically speaking, I believe that "virtuoso programmer" is the next level up in skill above "rock star programmer", who's typically someone who only learned to code in their rebellious teenage years. So, about 10X less common perhaps.
https://wiw-report.s3.amazonaws.com/Women_in_the_Workplace_2...
Even thinking of myself (for whom open source was very important personally and career-wise), I didn't learn how to program until college.
There are plenty of opportunities to improve diversity in tech at many stages of the pipeline. Hiring and retention are part of that pipeline. I think it's disingenuous to imply that tech companies are not at fault in any way here, and that there's nothing they can do short of time travel or investing in middle school education.
I'm not saying everything in the article is the right answer, but there are a lot of good suggestions.
Myself, I like my job, but not as much as some. I've certainly hated my job before. But that doesn't matter. As the sole income earner, I have to keep working. It's not an option for me to 'leave tech', since that's the only career path I can follow at this point that provides as much income. So, when things suck at a job, I find a new one, but I don't have the option of leaving. I joke with my wife that I should probably find myself a husband so I don't have to put up with this shit.
The study she cites contradicts her point and the entire piece. It found 40% of white/Asian men, 38% of underrepresented men, 36% of underrepresented women, and 28% of white/Asian women left because of unfair treatment.
Her statement technically stays within the bounds of facts but it's misleading to the point of being a lie
I'm a white female. I'm also gay, disabled, from a rural area, and neither of my parents have college degrees. Yeah, I'm TOTALLY proportionally represented in tech.
Same for say, a blind gay white dude from an Eastern European country.
A women who leaves the workplace is following a socially acceptable script to do so. If she has kids, absolutely no one will accuse her of being a deadbeat, useless, etc. But God forbid, should a man express a desire to leave, it's a big problem, even if his wife is happy providing.
Not saying it's right or it's wrong, but I feel a lot of these articles about women in the workplace ignore the fact that the main reason there's so many men in the workplace is that the men basically have to work, so will stay even in jobs they hate. It's why the stereotypical "do-nothing" employee, the guy who's burnt out but been there forever and no one's going to fire him, is a man -- women leave, men don't.
Also, the compensation level of the people leaving has to be considered. It makes more sense to leave if you're on the lower level of compensation and promotion than if you're on the higher level (unless you're super rich and can retire early). Frustrated and underpaid is a bad combination for employee retention.
>Leaving tech is not the same thing as leaving work
Article would have to follow up on this either way. Where did the women leaving tech go off to?
From the male side of the perspective, GP is absolutely correct. Men have far more incentive to tough it out in tech than women do once at the point of gaining the financial benefits of living together, for quite a few reasons. Wouldn't be too farfetched to assume this causes tech to further optimize towards men, too, even if not intentionally sexist.
Compensation levels in tech vary extremely widely by company, location, etc.
> It'd be pretty difficult to change careers into something tech-adjacent later in life and still maintain the same compensation.
Depends on how much later in life.
> Men have far more incentive to tough it out in tech than women do once at the point of gaining the financial benefits of living together, for quite a few reasons.
One reason would be if tech favors men in hiring, compensation, and promotions. If your wife is making more money than you but leaves anyway, that would be a little different story.
And compensating for those variations through medians and averages shows tech still tends to pay better on average. Clear exceptions being fields one can't easily pivot into without many years of study.
>Depends on how much later in life.
Disregarding age discrimination, soft skills will only allow you to pivot so far. That makes age itself rather inconsequential compared to raw experience.
>One reason would be if tech favors men in hiring, compensation, and promotions.
Another reason is that women put far, far more importance on men's wealth and income than vice versa. Several cultures across the globe reflect this.
Nobody is disputing that tech has a high average. But the industry having a high average doesn't help if you're personally below the average.
> Disregarding age discrimination, soft skills will only allow you to pivot so far. That makes age itself rather inconsequential compared to raw experience.
The point is that if you leave tech early in your career, when you haven't established much anyway, then you have more time to start over and gain experience in other areas. Maybe you can even go back to school.
> Another reason is that women put far, far more importance on men's wealth and income than vice versa. Several cultures across the globe reflect this.
You quoted one sentence of mine but not the following sentence: "If your wife is making more money than you but leaves anyway, that would be a little different story." If one spouse quits, and the other becomes the main breadwinner, the income of each spouse seems quite relevant, doesn't it?
My wife consistently outearned me.
Then we had a baby and she wanted to stay home.
It's not about total money, it's about quality of life too.
I made enough money to support everyone.
Of course five years later I now make more than my wife did.
I wanted (and still do) to stay home with my kids (my brother does), but my wife doesn't want to work when the kids are little. Plus, if we both worked we could easily afford daycare. In fact if my wife worked I think we could probably retire in a few years since she was bringing in quite a bit.
But the idea that if only we could pay women more than men they wouldn't leave is silly. Families don't just value money or even early retirement or whatever. There is no amount of money to replace your child's early years.
First: "my wife left her tech job because she didn't like the way she was treated. This leaves me forced to work my tech job whether I like my boss or not, because we have several mouths to feed."
Now: "Then we had a baby and she wanted to stay home." "my wife doesn't want to work when the kids are little."
Theoretically, both could be true. But plenty of people leave their jobs because they don't like the way they were treated, and then get a new job without leaving tech. It sounds like leaving tech for a number of years was about children rather than mistreatment though. Which goes against the claim that "men are more resilient".
> Which goes against the claim that "men are more resilient".
I never said men are more resilient. That's a bit of a value judgement. I don't claim men are better at this. I just think that male resilience looks like a man not quitting, because men have no option. Female resilience is other things, but we need not discuss them here. A man has no option to leave a job. Thus he stays.
"The heterodox view here is that unfair treatment is not a reason men leave tech jobs because men are more resilient to it."
> I just think that male resilience looks like a man not quitting, because men have no option.
Men quit their jobs all the time, without a backup. I quit my job without a backup. Maybe you never do it, but your anecdotal feelings do not apply to men in general. You keep saying that you have no option, that men have no option - that's just false. Everyone always has an option. Taking that option may have significantly negative financial consequences, but so it goes. It sounds like your wife quitting her job already had significantly negative financial consequences on your family: "In fact if my wife worked I think we could probably retire in a few years since she was bringing in quite a bit." You have the option to divorce your wife if you're angry and bitter that she won't go back to work. It's really strange to suggest that women have options but men don't. You think you have no options, but it seems that only your own mind is holding you back. I'm not saying you should divorce your wife, but you could. Or you could quit your job and tell your wife it's her turn to support the family while you stay home. A man has options.
The argument seems to be that men have no options because of what "society" thinks. But there is no societal hive mind. Society is actually bitterly divided on these issues. There are some ultra-conservative types who want women barefoot, pregnant, and subservient, but hopefully we can get past that.
But these two things — (1) men are resilient to leaving tech jobs and (2) men are forced to keep working — are precisely what I'm questioning, not a "blanket statement".
How families typically end up being set up is a result, not a cause. You're not forced to be typical.
Honestly, you make men sound pretty weak, as if they have no agency, and are powerless in the face of society and their spouses.
Most agents are women, but male agents are always the highest ranking for sales.
Easy reason... Real estate is a hobby job for well to do women with rich husbands. For men, it's a primary occupation
(1)
> Gender-based microaggressions can take many forms:
> Being spoken over or interrupted at meetings. Sharing an idea that gets no traction, only for a man to share the same idea ten minutes later and be applauded. Being asked to supply lunch at a partner meeting when I am the only woman in the room. > When I was an EM at Apple, I regularly attended meetings with my male PM. People who didn’t know us constantly assumed that I was the PM and he had the technical role. This assumption had nothing to do with previous knowledge of us as individuals; it was purely based on gender stereotypes. This happened so frequently that a colleague once emailed me to apologize.
These things suck. Though I hate the term microaggression. You don't have to label it as aggression, even if it is "micro".
(2)
> At the top of my game, I burned out. I walked out of my job as Engineering Manager for the Siri Media Domains team at Apple and straight into becoming a statistic.
> Looking from the outside in, you may not realize how much we are struggling. Many of us build the resilience to put up a shield during the work day. But at night and on weekends, we are suffering silently from the effects of imposter syndrome.
Burnout, fear of failure and imposter syndrome are not unique to women.
(3)
> Reshma Saujani, Founder of Girls Who Code, writes that we raise our boys to be brave; we raise our girls to be perfect. Fear of failure can hinder women’s ability to take risks and self-advocate long before they enter the workforce.
Nurture has an impact, but so does nature. There is a lot of biological denialism coming out of DEI departments. Can we just say that men and women are different? (The answer is no, even though it is true.)
I would rather we discuss how to accommodate women's differences and create an environment for them to flourish from the perspective that, on average, men and women will approach things differently, instead of framing it as a conspiratorial ("society trains us"), sinister ("implicit bias"), or aggressive ("microaggressions").
Not saying that that conspiracy, sinsisterism or aggression are always absent, but issues arising from honest differences aren't really discussed either.
The reason it's labeled as aggression is the theoretical framework people are filtering these interactions through. That framework tells them that race, gender, and other axes of marginalization are extremely important in all interactions, and it is appropriate to reach for marginalizing oppression as a prima facie explanation for anything negative that occurs.
I won't blame the original inventors of the term "microaggression" for this, since I do think it describes a real phenomenon, but it's been abused and overextended.
https://sites.uwm.edu/nsfpower/gears/
If a system is designed to work a certain way it's usually not by accident. I'm not sure tech companies are interested in changing.
I wonder what free market advocates would say should be done about this issue. Why hasn't the free market done a better job of fixing this category of problems? Shouldn't it confer some kind of competitive advantage?
What if all design decisions and actions were deliberate? Or are we really to believe that all these huge corporations full of incredibly brilliant and skilled individuals are somehow too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to fix these problems?
This domain of problems is cursed. It seems similar to how a lot of political issues get mildly shitty solutions no matter what.
I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems or that it's even worth trying. Sorry for being such a downer. It's hard enough to keep myself from being perpetually suicidal.
Most of the recommendations here actually sound pretty reasonable. Has any company implemented them and proven to be successful?
It is. That said, I don't think tech execs are sexist or racist so much as they are classist and money-obsessed. They don't necessarily want a crappy culture; they just don't care.
> Or are we really to believe that all these huge corporations full of incredibly brilliant and skilled individuals are somehow too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to fix these problems?
The huge corporations may be "full of" brilliant people, but the people at the top are the same schmoozing or generationally-connected mediocrities that have always run things, and they're the only ones whose input matters. Having a team of people in your basement with a 150 average IQ doesn't mean you're magically going to make better decisions, not if you never listen to them.
> I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems or that it's even worth trying.
It clearly is possible, because human systems do get better or worse over time, both on the small scale and the large. Scandinavian countries have better societies than the U.S.; the U.S. is still miles ahead, in this regard, of true autocracies (e.g. Putin's Russia). The vast differences in quality of human systems make it very clear that they can be improved (or degraded). It's just incredibly difficult.
I think of it like voting. Even when everything works and elections are fair, voting isn't really about making the decision. That's not why you do it, because mathematically, you probably won't cast a deciding vote ever in your life. Voting is about holding accountable those who do make the decisions, and at that, it often works very well--black neighborhoods saw improvements in public services after civil rights legislation made it easier for them to vote. Ultimately, of course, you're right: it's still up to forces out of your control whether you win or lose.
I imagine the above is why, although it certainly doesn't require a Western theocentric faith, religiosity (note that I make no claims about whether religion is or is not true) is associated with well-adjustment: it's one of the only ways we have come up with to hold an internal locus of control in a world where, quite frankly, almost everything that happens to us in the objective material world is out of our control.
The truth is that corporate capitalism wasn't built for people like us, people of conscience. It was built by obscenely wealthy ghouls to direct all of society's resources toward themselves. That's it. They will allow technical progress if they believe they stand to benefit; they will oppose it if they think they'll lose. "Meritocracy" is a sham, and corporations aren't built to last... they're built to extract wealth and then wither as invested resources are reallocated. A private company will never be a utopia because it's literally designed to be the opposite (perhaps not a "dystopia" in the classic sense, but one in the realistic sense whereby every dystopia is someone's utopia).
Trying to build a "good" company within corporate capitalism is like building a house on sand. It's not impossible, but it's extremely difficult. You're going to be competing with ruthless bastards and gargantuan institutions that could destroy you just for fun. You're playing a game where evil people win because it's designed that way. The only long-term solution is to destroy corporate capitalism forever.
Yes, indeed. Large-scale organizations are plagued by this sort of pathology; bad treatment of workers is only one of many instances of such. Individual skill does not translate to effective behavior on the larger, collective scale. We put up with large organizations despite these flaws, not because of them.
> I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems
Large, hierarchical, command-and-control structures are what they are. If you want improvement, it must come from designing better ways for humans to cooperate at a grassroots level, such as ordinary or "smart" markets.
One: more women than men leave tech because they can. For every machine learning researcher getting paid $600k to be a basically a professor-in-residence, there are 250 losers doing Scrum. Whether you're a man or a woman, it's a horrible career; the bullshit and toxicity burn you out after 10 years. Men are socialized to believe that (a) making money is their main value both to society and to the people who will depend on them, and that (b) the market will treat them fairly because "meritocracy". We learn that (b) is false in early middle age, if not before, but can't really say it too loudly because we don't want to be tagged as bitter. It's a lot more socially acceptable for a woman to downshift her career to launch a small business than for a man. There's no intrinsic reason why it should be considered usual for men in heterosexual relationships to earn more than women, but emasculating and odd for the reverse to be the case, but you'd have to undo decades of socialization in billions of people to erase that prejudice. For now, it persists, and the common view is that a woman who leaves tech is brave for no longer putting up with the toxicity; a man who leaves tech is a wimp who couldn't hack it.
Two: smart women are more likely to go into medicine, law, and general management. Why? Look-ahead. A 22-year-old heterosexual woman has dated--or at least has friends who have dated--a few 25-year-old men, and maybe one or two in their early 30s. They see where the various paths lead. They see where most techies end up by age 30, and it ain't pretty... and they realize they don't want to go there. because they're smart. The 32-year-old doctor might still have a tough life--insurance companies are the pits, and residents don't make a lot of money--but at least he doesn't have to interview for his own fucking job every morning or deal with user stories and product managers.
“There's no intrinsic reason why it should be considered usual for men in heterosexual relationships to earn more than women, but emasculating and odd for the reverse to be the case”
I think there is an intrinsic reason for this. Women choose partners, at least in part, based on their ability to provide resources. This makes higher earning men more attractive even too high earning women.
Smart men are more likely to seek more lucrative fields, too.
Software is sort of a second tier profession. We're constantly trying to dumb things down to the point that we can fill all the open positions with human livestock. At least since COVID, most of us don't have to work in bullpens anymore.
Software plays on male quixotry, yes, but it's able to do so because the average 22-year-old man has friends of the same age group and has never dated anyone older than 22 (because, honestly, he can't... he has nothing to offer women 25+ and they aren't interested). Women, who usually have dated (or at least have friends who have dated) men in their late 20s and possibly 30s, are exposed to high-quality information about which careers actually deliver on their promises; men are not. Men might get advice from their parents, but that's going to be 30 years out of date, in a country where the career game has gone from Easy Mode to Psychopath Mode in a generation.
Women end up choosing a lot of lower paid fields whereas men choose higher paid ones. You can makeup whatever reasons you want for that but that’s just facts - and that’s what the “pay gap” is from.
That doesn't mean anything, because controlling for position means you're factoring out huge disparities--although I will not argue that they necessarily benefit men over women; it is more complex than that--in terms of how performance is evaluated, who gets promoted, and who is offered opportunities for high-quality work experience.
The problem in today's corporate America isn't that people deliberately offer better opportunities and favorable treatment to preferred racial or gender categories (although sometimes they do) but that all this happens subconsciously the whole system is set up so that only a small set of people (the generationally well-connected) have a serious chance of getting a fair shake. The system simultaneously has 85% of its decision makers believing they are executing a meritocracy while, in fact, working to drive predetermined and usually anti-meritocratic results.
> Whereas men will plough through and do it anyway. (Mainly because they have no other choice - men would choose otherwise if women would let them)
Sadly, those men who bear down and suffer because women won't "let them" choose other careers are going to end up ill-treated no matter what they do. The winning strategy for them would be to go overseas, but that's another topic.
The pay gap mostly does not exist if you're willing to go against societal norms - e.g. women should be nurses, men should be surgeons, etc. If you are willing to break societal norms - there is no pay gap.
Which is not something the media is publicizing because it doesn't fit well within our identity politics bullshit.
Something to check - and I don't think it makes it into the discussion on this stuff enough - is whether the men are actually free of this level of pressure. I suspect most men actually don't want to be working and feel extreme pressure at work. They just don't have the option of leaving because society is really rather harsh to men who give up on a high-status job. I've seen women drop out of CS courses because they didn't like it, and I've seen men power through because while they didn't like the coursework they did need the money to establish themselves. The decisive difference wasn't how they were being treated (although that does exist), it was what alternatives were available.
Based on my observations, I suspect many men would also discover (to their surprise) that if they chose to leave tech they were also choosing to leave their family.
I also wonder what the base rate for women leaving a career path within 10 to 20 years is, compared to the base rate for men.
My personal and possibly untrendy opinion is that tech jobs aren't flexible or predictable enough when you're trying to start a family or raise young kids[0]. Most of the burden of this work falls on women, so you'd expect them to leave in droves for jobs that don't make on-call shifts mandatory and don't ask staff to work on the weekend to get the Frobnizzle project ready for integration testing with the Dunder Mifflin team.
If the way your company works is fundamentally hostile to employees with kids, I don't think any surface-level D&I initiative is going to fix the structural problems of sexism and ageism.
[0] Something which happens around 30 to 40, e.g. 10 to 20 years into an average career.
Women almost invariably marry men with more or at least equal earning potential. For women in tech, one of the consequences is that basically their husbands have the means for them to quit work, and many make that choice.
As a cis-het white guy who is just introverted this is pervasive and annoying as fuck and at one point in my career I felt like I had to do this as well, and you have to get good at interrupting people right as they're finishing because otherwise some other aggressive conversationalist will win the race to start talking next and you'll never get a word in edgewise.