Everyone saying "SV isn't worse than X" is missing the point of the article. Yes, we know plenty of industries are more awful. The point is that SV talks a big game when it comes to taking care of workers (high pay, perks, unlimited vacation), but doesn't always walk the walk when it comes to improving the treatment of female or minority workers.
Relevant quote:
> That the tech industry would prove so hostile to women is more than a little counterintuitive. Silicon Valley is populated with progressive, hyper-educated people who talk a lot about making the world better. It’s also a young field, with none of the history of, say, law or medicine, where women were long denied spots in graduate schools intended for “breadwinning men.”
> “It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”
The answer is obvious: it's bias. I'll never forget the day I removed my picture from my LinkedIn profile and the amount of random spam I received increase substantially.
People don't like the answer, but there's only one: anonymity. Any other solution simply changes who will be discriminated against.
I honestly don't understand how someone can be sexist. I have never thought lesser of the people I've worked with because of gender. I don't know if this is too personal but would you mind talking with me to explain what it's like. ive worked work many females in the past with no issues besides personalities. I just want to really understand and empathize.
I'm above the average looking guy. When I added my picture to LinkedIn the amount of spam increased substantially.
People are really biased creatures. Usually the intent is not malicious, but rather caused by tribalism, evolution, empathy, mirror neurons etc.
One example is ageism, which is actually a systematic bias. For examplem to be a president you have be 35 or older. Let's imagine we created a perfect candidate in a lab which is 29. She's creme de la creme. And we have abolished this law.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but this is a clear case of begging the question. Is Silicon Valley really awful to women? Do we have any comparative data that suggests that SV is any more sexist than most industries? I hear a lot of unpleasant anecdotes, but very little data.
I think that the answer to this question is very important. If we operate on the presumption that SV is uniquely awful, then we may be looking for solutions to sexism in all the wrong places.
"A recent survey called “Elephant in the Valley” found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions."
" I hear a lot of unpleasant anecdotes, but very little data."
Question was asked in the article, ("Where are the numbers?"). [0] For all the posturing on how good SV is at data, the question has to be asked, "Why can't tech companies collect and show data on staff?" [1] The only conclusion I can make is SV tech companies do not see this as an ^authentic^ problem.
It's important to keep in mind when analyzing this issue; SV is not "an industry." There are many companies there across a variety of industries, many of which are tech related. But as much as the media would have us believe otherwise "tech" is not one actual industry. It's a poorly defined category of industries.
My point being, SV companies are so diverse across their actual industries it's probably best to compare them as a region against companies in other major regions.
> Why is [Insert location of choice] So Awful to Male Babysitters?
Culture and everything else that comes along with gender minority work environments. You adapt, like everyone else.
The push for institutionally enforced advantages is just insane:
> “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,”
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Giving a minority share an unfair advantage in the market just because "they're a minority" is not progress. I'm so disappointed at how manipulative these sorts of ideals are in reality. Their proponent's hearts are in the right place, but the outcomes are just so backwards.
Regardless of your gender, if you're in an environment and you're discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it. Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
If there is not equality of outcome, then either: (1) no equality of opportunity exists; or (2) there is some confounding factor.
Ironically, you identify the thing that creates unequal opportunity: the "culture" that "comes along with gender minority work environments." Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't. That's not equality of opportunity.
Acknowledging that the existence of a gender disparity in and of itself creates a hostile culture for the minority gets you halfway to understanding why attempts at eliminating the disparity directly are justified. And such measures are inherently temporary: once you eliminate then disparity that creates the hostile culture, you eliminate the need to take any affirmative measures to keep the new ratio.
You also precisely identify why you can't fix past institutional discrimination simply by no longer doing it. The past discrimination creates a culture that's hostile to the minority gender. That culture is self-perpetuating without active intervention (the "policing" you complain of).
I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think you know the problems of the people affected. I take that just from "discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it".
What are the legal channels for suspecting you're denied a position because of being part of minority X. Sure, the company is all non-X, but does it prove anything? Where do you go when your opinion is being ignored every day - what's the legal channel for that? How much effort and money do you want to spend just to be treated as a normal person. You're not going to crush it. You'll be left on your own.
> Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
Sure, there's got to be a balance. You can't police everything and force anyone to think anything. But promoting going away from the status quo is a positive thing.
Except culture begets the discrimination. The immediate fix is to go through legality. If you want to change things on the long-term to make it a better place for people of all genders, races and religions to work, you have to change the culture. Otherwise it's a problem that will never, ever go away.
For many minorities, by the time they get to work, they're so sick of discrimination that they prefer to quit, as opposed to going through the pain of official channels that are just as discriminatory as the perpetrators that they were going to report.
What you said is like saying "You burnt yourself because the house is on fire? Have you tried applying burn cream? Don't waste your time putting out the fire, just apply burn cream and live with it"
IMO the reason is that most IT wasn't really engineering until fairly recently. Back in the 90s, which weren't long ago, you could make a ton of money without really knowing anything at all.
Nowadays those people are senior leaders. So they do what people do in these situations: gather the tribe. (Aka old boys network) More than in any other line of business that I have seen, IT has lots of old school ethnic and cultural fiefdoms. Bro guys, various south asian groups, school alumni, etc.
The places I have worked at that had more women in technology also had fewer of these networks.
Look at the story about the dude stealing tech from Google, starting a fake company to get bought out by his pals at Uber. In what other industry is bullshit like that even possible!
If you want horror stories, ask lots of intelligent women from western Pennsylvania why they are now sitting in Silicon Valley.
There is a big difference between a couple of socially inept brogrammers making shitty comments and every single relative asking you why you're planning to go to college instead of getting pregnant like your sister.
Nobody should be making shitty comments to begin with, nor should there be a "brogrammer" culture in the workplace, this isn't a frat. Dismissing the problem by comparing with a similar but worse problem doesn't do anything but ignore the problem all together, think you may want to read up on a fallacy called "Relative Privation"
You're not saying SV isn't awful with this comment. You're just saying western Pennsylvania is awful as well. It's not like it's some kind of a race to the bottom.
ask lots of intelligent women from western Pennsylvania...every single relative asking you why you're planning to go to college instead of getting pregnant like your sister.
I was born in western PA. Yes, this was a thing there when I was growing up. In both cases, people are probably just being subject to their culture. They may not even think they are being aggressive or doing harm. They may even be virtue signalling from their point of view.
>“Workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled” are the main reasons women leave tech.
Based on what I've seen over the last 10 years working at a variety of software companies: both men and women get mistreated, roughly equally, at least at the places I've worked. People often assume the reason they are being mistreated is due to some factor of themselves (race, gender, etc), but this is the fundamental attribution fallacy (see social pyschology) that colors our perceptions.
But, i haven't worked at every company. Perhaps, there are some where egregious conditions do exist, as mentioned in the article.
As long as the talent oversupply exists, it will be hard for men & women affected by these adverse conditions to move to companies with better cultures.
I was watching the "Silicon Valley" TV show and was surprised how women are presented. Whether they are coders or non-tech, the theme went like this:
Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
Women who can't code: generally presented either as stupid, dumb or as assistants of men who knew better.
It seem that Hollywood is also complicit in presenting women as sex object. But I wasn't sure if this really is the truth about the culture in general in SV.
> The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.
In an environment that's over 80% male, not to mention largely young and/or single, women will have a rough time. I don't think SV is necessarily any worse than any other similar environment (e.g. infantry, oilfield work), but that's not high praise.
"In an environment that's over 80% male, not to mention largely young and/or single, women will have a rough time."
I wonder if we ask the same questions about men in female dominated careers such as nursing, and ones where men have almost been driven out of, like K-12 education.
ok, just to start let me acknowledge that sexism is pervasive in tech as well as elsewhere.
but maybe Silicon Valley is awful to everyone. the reality distortion field that sustains the notion that these people are special, in fact gods among men, twists the normal social contract into something unrecognizable.
put that in the context of a fairly sexist society, add a healthy dose of people who are in tech because they couldn't hack it in the normal world, and voila
Everyone has a bias, plain and simple. You don't overcome the bias with programs or incentives, it takes a fundamental change of attitude among the people perpetuating the bias. Its something that should be acknowledged and pointed out but not forced down people's throats.
Because Silicon Valley can't even agree there is a problem.
Just look at this thread of all the people whining for more data on this supposed "problem". Some of the folks won't be happy until there are secret Amazon Echo's tabulating all the shitty comments and passive aggression in every office or emails being scanned and categorized for domineering and condescension.
and even then you'll get a bunch of "correlation doesn't equal causation, dummy!"
I don't get why this isn't obvious. Software is seen as the wild west of engineering. Exciting, competitive, reckless, sometimes brutal.
It's like Wall Street, selling cars, working oilfields. The popular perception has been fuelled by megafounders who struck gold, becoming the richest people in the world by their mid 20's. SV is in a 40 gold rush for the next big thing and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.
For all sorts of reasons that have been beaten to death, most women won't stick around in such a field.
For gender balance to return in our lifetimes software engineering would need to lose much of the existing culture
Silicon Valley is awful to many groups. From Spanish speakers, to non-homeowner natives, to women.
I feel like maybe we ought to give some attention to the situation of the masses of Spanish speakers in the bay area. They're certainly facing far worse than women in tech companies, and it's a much more fundamental problem.
[+] [-] sudosteph|9 years ago|reply
Relevant quote:
> That the tech industry would prove so hostile to women is more than a little counterintuitive. Silicon Valley is populated with progressive, hyper-educated people who talk a lot about making the world better. It’s also a young field, with none of the history of, say, law or medicine, where women were long denied spots in graduate schools intended for “breadwinning men.”
[+] [-] steeef|9 years ago|reply
> “It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”
[+] [-] _m8fo|9 years ago|reply
People don't like the answer, but there's only one: anonymity. Any other solution simply changes who will be discriminated against.
[+] [-] oconnor663|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbhatab|9 years ago|reply
feel free to reach out at [email protected] if youd be so kind
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
Was it the picture or just bots picking up on activity changes?
I agree about anonymity though, it's the only solution that adds a degree of fairness.
[+] [-] ed_balls|9 years ago|reply
People are really biased creatures. Usually the intent is not malicious, but rather caused by tribalism, evolution, empathy, mirror neurons etc.
One example is ageism, which is actually a systematic bias. For examplem to be a president you have be 35 or older. Let's imagine we created a perfect candidate in a lab which is 29. She's creme de la creme. And we have abolished this law.
No dice. She would not win.
[+] [-] jdietrich|9 years ago|reply
I think that the answer to this question is very important. If we operate on the presumption that SV is uniquely awful, then we may be looking for solutions to sexism in all the wrong places.
[+] [-] sdflkd|9 years ago|reply
If you read the article there is data too, btw.
[+] [-] MilnerRoute|9 years ago|reply
-- from the article (which includes a link)
[+] [-] bootload|9 years ago|reply
Question was asked in the article, ("Where are the numbers?"). [0] For all the posturing on how good SV is at data, the question has to be asked, "Why can't tech companies collect and show data on staff?" [1] The only conclusion I can make is SV tech companies do not see this as an ^authentic^ problem.
Reference
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13880515
[1] Staff numbers, pay, diversity, disciplinary actions taken, reported, etc.
[+] [-] ebbv|9 years ago|reply
My point being, SV companies are so diverse across their actual industries it's probably best to compare them as a region against companies in other major regions.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheLilHipster|9 years ago|reply
Culture and everything else that comes along with gender minority work environments. You adapt, like everyone else.
The push for institutionally enforced advantages is just insane:
> “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,”
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. Giving a minority share an unfair advantage in the market just because "they're a minority" is not progress. I'm so disappointed at how manipulative these sorts of ideals are in reality. Their proponent's hearts are in the right place, but the outcomes are just so backwards.
Regardless of your gender, if you're in an environment and you're discriminated against in an illegal way, go through the appropriate legal channels and crush it. Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
/rant
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
Ironically, you identify the thing that creates unequal opportunity: the "culture" that "comes along with gender minority work environments." Men have the opportunity to go into programming and be in a culture that is not stacked against them. Women don't. That's not equality of opportunity.
Acknowledging that the existence of a gender disparity in and of itself creates a hostile culture for the minority gets you halfway to understanding why attempts at eliminating the disparity directly are justified. And such measures are inherently temporary: once you eliminate then disparity that creates the hostile culture, you eliminate the need to take any affirmative measures to keep the new ratio.
You also precisely identify why you can't fix past institutional discrimination simply by no longer doing it. The past discrimination creates a culture that's hostile to the minority gender. That culture is self-perpetuating without active intervention (the "policing" you complain of).
[+] [-] viraptor|9 years ago|reply
What are the legal channels for suspecting you're denied a position because of being part of minority X. Sure, the company is all non-X, but does it prove anything? Where do you go when your opinion is being ignored every day - what's the legal channel for that? How much effort and money do you want to spend just to be treated as a normal person. You're not going to crush it. You'll be left on your own.
> Stop wasting our time trying to police culture.
Sure, there's got to be a balance. You can't police everything and force anyone to think anything. But promoting going away from the status quo is a positive thing.
[+] [-] fao_|9 years ago|reply
For many minorities, by the time they get to work, they're so sick of discrimination that they prefer to quit, as opposed to going through the pain of official channels that are just as discriminatory as the perpetrators that they were going to report.
What you said is like saying "You burnt yourself because the house is on fire? Have you tried applying burn cream? Don't waste your time putting out the fire, just apply burn cream and live with it"
[+] [-] jazoom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
Nowadays those people are senior leaders. So they do what people do in these situations: gather the tribe. (Aka old boys network) More than in any other line of business that I have seen, IT has lots of old school ethnic and cultural fiefdoms. Bro guys, various south asian groups, school alumni, etc.
The places I have worked at that had more women in technology also had fewer of these networks.
Look at the story about the dude stealing tech from Google, starting a fake company to get bought out by his pals at Uber. In what other industry is bullshit like that even possible!
[+] [-] bsder|9 years ago|reply
If you want horror stories, ask lots of intelligent women from western Pennsylvania why they are now sitting in Silicon Valley.
There is a big difference between a couple of socially inept brogrammers making shitty comments and every single relative asking you why you're planning to go to college instead of getting pregnant like your sister.
[+] [-] HoppedUpMenace|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|9 years ago|reply
I was born in western PA. Yes, this was a thing there when I was growing up. In both cases, people are probably just being subject to their culture. They may not even think they are being aggressive or doing harm. They may even be virtue signalling from their point of view.
[+] [-] eli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pascalxus|9 years ago|reply
Based on what I've seen over the last 10 years working at a variety of software companies: both men and women get mistreated, roughly equally, at least at the places I've worked. People often assume the reason they are being mistreated is due to some factor of themselves (race, gender, etc), but this is the fundamental attribution fallacy (see social pyschology) that colors our perceptions.
But, i haven't worked at every company. Perhaps, there are some where egregious conditions do exist, as mentioned in the article.
As long as the talent oversupply exists, it will be hard for men & women affected by these adverse conditions to move to companies with better cultures.
[+] [-] A1phab3t|9 years ago|reply
I read or skimmed every comment up to this moment, and every single one sounds like it's written by a male.
Perhaps I'm silly but I feel a female commenting here would have mentioned their experience-- and nobody so far does as far as I could tell.
[+] [-] Main_|9 years ago|reply
Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
Women who can't code: generally presented either as stupid, dumb or as assistants of men who knew better.
It seem that Hollywood is also complicit in presenting women as sex object. But I wasn't sure if this really is the truth about the culture in general in SV.
[+] [-] username223|9 years ago|reply
> The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.
In an environment that's over 80% male, not to mention largely young and/or single, women will have a rough time. I don't think SV is necessarily any worse than any other similar environment (e.g. infantry, oilfield work), but that's not high praise.
[+] [-] justincormack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrnichols|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if we ask the same questions about men in female dominated careers such as nursing, and ones where men have almost been driven out of, like K-12 education.
[+] [-] convolvatron|9 years ago|reply
but maybe Silicon Valley is awful to everyone. the reality distortion field that sustains the notion that these people are special, in fact gods among men, twists the normal social contract into something unrecognizable.
put that in the context of a fairly sexist society, add a healthy dose of people who are in tech because they couldn't hack it in the normal world, and voila
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HoppedUpMenace|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] supercanuck|9 years ago|reply
Just look at this thread of all the people whining for more data on this supposed "problem". Some of the folks won't be happy until there are secret Amazon Echo's tabulating all the shitty comments and passive aggression in every office or emails being scanned and categorized for domineering and condescension.
and even then you'll get a bunch of "correlation doesn't equal causation, dummy!"
[+] [-] mgarfias|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysbdi|9 years ago|reply
It's like Wall Street, selling cars, working oilfields. The popular perception has been fuelled by megafounders who struck gold, becoming the richest people in the world by their mid 20's. SV is in a 40 gold rush for the next big thing and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.
For all sorts of reasons that have been beaten to death, most women won't stick around in such a field.
For gender balance to return in our lifetimes software engineering would need to lose much of the existing culture
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13872689 and marked it off-topic.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ue_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobdole1234|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mrkabuki|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sctb|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] _m8fo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candiodari|9 years ago|reply
I feel like maybe we ought to give some attention to the situation of the masses of Spanish speakers in the bay area. They're certainly facing far worse than women in tech companies, and it's a much more fundamental problem.