Ask HN: How do you reduce the gender gap in technology?
For quite a while, I have been thinking about this issue. Recently, MHacks (University of Michigan's hackathon) made it aware that they were devoting more efforts to bringing more women to their event. Also in the news is Paul Graham's comments about the gender gap in tech. After reading articles (https://medium.com/p/e034a09248c1) and observing discussions in facebook groups (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1384252878496456/), i'm bringing this conversation to the genius hacker news community. Please answer- what do you think needs to be done to bring more women into technology, programming, and CS related fields?
3 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 15.7 ms ] threadWomen are empirically more interested/specialized in "animated" objects (ie, living things and social relatinships), due to human physiology/biology and social operant conditioning.
The premise that such a (non-uniform) distribution is unethical, unproductive, or un-natural lacks evidentiary data to support it.
It may very well make (biological or evolutinary) sense; condider a port-folio effect from social-pair bonds (m,f) with reproductive potency.
In plain english, a team of two specialists may be more powerful than an aggregation of individuals as "jack of all trades".
These are not easily or trivially dismissed complications.
Also, notice this dimensionalization is not along the axis of a "social problem", in the game-theoretic sense, like the prisoner's dilemma.
The only assumptions are two: non-uniform preferences, and non-linear returns to scale from learning-by-doing. neither of these seem overly controversial.
Back home, there were plenty of girls who were math, physics, and computer nerds like me. They were curious and had that hacker mentality. But since moving to USA I haven't met any american girls/women like that. Those I did meet were immigrants like me, or studying here as exchange students from another country.
I've been living here for more than 10 years. Why is there such a difference in the amount of girls interested in technology around the world, and where I'm from, vs here in America?
Now, I could understand that if I lived in a very diverse state like NJ or NY, it would be normal to see lots of girls from other places. But in the state I live, I think the population is 99% white non-immigrant, so it's really odd that the only females are outsiders!
There's something else at play here.
Of course there's going to be a gender gap, because the pool is already filled with men. I've worked with women developers and they are perfectly fine like any other developer. Yes, there were more men than women. HR has more women and they are not at all interested in tech.
Gender is not an issue, it's that relatively compared to men, women seems to be less interested and hence making up a smaller portion of the job pool. I mean does software development need to be segregated like washrooms too so that we can have more women? If so, please do it.
Nobody is suppressing women from getting into technology field. How can you change the nature of the entire gender so that they fit this gap? How can you change evolution and gender specific social expectations?