Women in Tech aren't a hive mind. Like the author states out everyone is different. Heck, there even differences in companies, regions, industries, ect. The reason I point this out is because these threads sometimes devolve into users taking one comment and using it to derail conversations. Like claiming that X is invalid because it can also affect men, therefore Y and Z are also invalid.
I am a woman and recently moved from San Francisco to Portland. The tech community feels totally different here. I've gone to a few meetups and haven't dealt with any of the small (but annoying, insulting and constant) issues I'd learned to try to ignore in San Francisco. It's really re-energized my love for the industry and what I do. If I had taken this survey before and after my move my answers would have been drastically different.
San Francisco in particular has really visible "bro" culture it feels to me. It's probably just a reflection of the kinds of perks the industry provides, and of the "gold rush" itself. Smaller cities have a far more inclusive experience, for sure. Watch a Bay area bus drop all its people on an evening, it's a bunch of young men pouring back into the city. Friends of mine who commute say no-one speaks to anyone, ever. I find that really sad and can certainly say if there were at least 30% women on those buses nearly everyone would know each other a little.
Can we learn from other industries that are facing similar challenges? I'm certainly impressed with the medical and legal professions for dramatically improving the gender balance in the past 30 years[1]. Can we adopt some of the strategies learned there? Google's changes in maternity leave [2] dramatically increased their retention of new mothers but retention is different than attraction and promotion. The "sexual harassment" training at my old fortune 500 job certainly didn't have any helpful information about encouraging diversity aside from don't do anything that could you sued...
The cold reality is that the way to increase the gender ratio is to hire more women. That's what happened in the legal profession: law schools made it a point to get gender-balanced classes, and law firms supported that by hiring gender-balanced classes of new associates.
I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. You can say that people shouldn't care about same-gender mentors and co-workers, etc, but at the end of the day, people care about fitting in and they don't want to have to ride against the current their whole career. A bright young woman considering law school, where she'll be in a 50-50 environment, or engineering school, where she'll be in a 20-80 environment, has a natural disinclination to choose the latter.
The gender balance is equal for law/medicine mostly at the school level[1].
And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles."
And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning.
Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently.
And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ?
Retention is directly related to promotion imo. You can't promote someone you can't keep.
Very much agree that learning from other industries should happen, and I've asked myself the same question. Why is computer science moving backwards, when other traditionally male fields have become much more gender balanced?
The notion that ageism might hurt women more than men hadn't occurred to me. Those comments were by far the most worrying to me as a woman in tech. Perhaps some part of me hoped that, after a woman's childbearing years were over, she'd be seen as more desirable to an employer, not less. (Not that it would be fair either way.)
I've definitely seen this. It's probably a consequence of how women are depicted in our society: women in movies/TV are either young and beautiful or matronly old crones. The period between 40 and 60 just doesn't exist (presumably women are busy raising children then?) Any actresses whose careers are fortunate enough to survive turning 40 are usually because they either naturally look younger or have a good plastic surgeon. Men, on the other hand, don't shed their "boyish good looks" until their late 30s and can be considered sex symbols well into their 60s. Thus how you get stupid romantic comedies with a 25 year old woman falling in love with a 50 year old man.
But you're right, it's not fair. But I don't think this particular problem is isolated to tech.
Here's something easy you can do at your company, that will help everyone, but especially women: let everyone choose any username they want, and make it easy to change if needed.
Personal example: I'm recently married, and you wouldn't believe the time my wife has had getting her username changed to reflect her new last name (an issue because her employer bases usernames/emails on their first + last names). This means she gets to explain every single time she gives out her email (internally) why its not the expected pattern, but rather a seemingly arbitrary string.
Its not the end of the world of course, or even that big of a deal when you consider it individually. But its one more thing that's not accessibly designed, and its hard to get a male dominated culture to care.
FWIW, I changed my last name too, but I own my company, and we use first names for our emails anyway, so I was lucky.
If you own your company, make sure you're getting this right. If you let people choose their usernames, and change them easily, you can cover this case and many others. [1]
It's helpful to have predictable names. Imagine you have to @ someone or add them on a code review by name or send them a chat by name. @fruitloops123 is a lot harder to remember than @mark[Teamname] or @marklastname.
When you are large enough first names no longer work.
I don't know why this is so hard nowadays. I administered a large VMS system in the 80s, and we regularly changed usernames (and email names, which were the same thing in those days) for women who requested it. Contrary to another replier, I never received a request to change someone's username to something inappropriate.
Allowing anything is a non-starter, since people will most certainly choose inappropriate names. And, once you make it a subset of anything, that means there's someone who arbitrates, and that will cause friction (why did so and so get their choice but I didn't get mine?).
There are responses in here that say they are in a healthy environment where they "feel great, valued, treated equally, competent and successful". What's the magic ingredient to a healthy working environment for everyone? Or is it just an environment where implicit/explicit bias towards minority groups in tech just doesn't exist? How do you make someone who is a minority on the team feel like a valued and vital member of the team?
There are so many little things you can do to make everyone feel welcome and comfortable, a lot of companies do these things for women and minorities but everyone benefits.
-regular checkins
-coaches/mentors
-make sure that everyone participates in meetings/dev huddles. Often toxic environments stem from just a few individuals who are louder than everyone else. No one else is ever heard and doesn't feel like part of the team.
-make sure people feel empowered to do their job and more. get rid of micromanagers.
-management should be open to feedback and act on it.
Feedback is the key ingredient. Make sure employees have a channel to voice their opinions and that it is acted on.
I don't think it's realistic to strive for an environment where bias does not exist at all. Biases are implicit, part of human nature, and built into our subconsciousness. What makes me feel more comfortable is a place where people _admit_ their biases, where leaders say and act like they want the team to be more inclusive, and we all at least _try_ to make a more diverse workplace.
An inclusive work place also points out and immediately acts when teammates do things that are NOT inclusive e.g. racist or sexist jokes. That's a way of showing that you care about your teammates and their work environment.
>Probably because that’s how it was in my family, I had no sisters, but 3 brothers
early socialization is key, be it puppies or children. The fact of life is that tech is statistically male populated environment and by the college graduation time it is just too late (after 20 years of separate pink cuteness for girls and blue coolness for boys one can only wonder what synergy would get unleashed once a pink cutie venture into the blue pack territory). Girls should be exposed to sciences/tech and working together with their male peers on complex projects very early in the K-12 system. That would also naturally adjust males behavior too. And thus just 20 years down the road ...
>Girls should be exposed to sciences/tech and working together with their male peers on complex projects very early in the K-12 system. That would also naturally adjust males behavior too. And thus just 20 years down the road ...
Can I ask for some opinions on this...
What if we took this approach, which is one I personally support as I don't think trying to retrofit equality into the industry by way of gender quotas is right at all, but yet the outcome is the same? What if, after investing time and effort into getting children into technology at a very young age, regardless of demographic, we still see white and asian males dominate the field 20 years down the line?
Do we accept that outcome? Or how much harder will we push to force equality in this area?
>Girls should be exposed to sciences/tech and working together with their male peers on complex projects very early in the K-12 system.
I think most people here agree with that statement. The problem is realizing how difficult that is to accomplish when the field is almost in a paradox of male control. The key will always be early exposure to STEM and people that aren't like yourself, but currently this is difficult for women because they are forced into lower self esteem on average than men.
Once women feel like they have the same amount of power in society as men, that's when we start to focus on social adjustment at an early age. Until then, it remains very hard for female-identified persons to "adjust themselves" when they lack adequate role models.
It would be nice if the results got some UX love (at least sort answers by popularity).
Correlation between the answers to "If you were to leave tech" question also wn't hurt.
Finds:
- The most frustrating thing is not seeing the career path. I guess it's for men too.
- Around half of respondents need help in fighting imposter syndrome. This is weird. I mean, we all sometimes doubt ourself, but there's nobody better than us there.
",hbmnbvh" provided as an employer - any luck in decoding that? I thought this is cyrillic in the wrong keyboard layout but it resolves to garbage too.
Imposter syndrome is totally expected when you have no public role models doing what you do, and all of your teachers are "not like you" as are all the books and education materials. Speaking for myself, it gets easier as I grow older and in fact I find myself ticking the "I want my own company" box. But that took years, while my male colleagues founded companies of their own in their 20s.
>EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT AND PEOPLE THINK LOTS OF DIFFERENT THINGS
That's always the first thing to go out the window unfortunately. Everyone wants their opinion to be more than just their opinion, so they pretend it is the opinion.
This is a job posting for at administrative assistant position, which is generally not considered a prestigious or high-paying role.
While the attitude displayed in that discussion is very frustrating and disappointing, it's not really equivalent to women getting passed over for high-paying engineering or management roles.
[+] [-] alukima|11 years ago|reply
I am a woman and recently moved from San Francisco to Portland. The tech community feels totally different here. I've gone to a few meetups and haven't dealt with any of the small (but annoying, insulting and constant) issues I'd learned to try to ignore in San Francisco. It's really re-energized my love for the industry and what I do. If I had taken this survey before and after my move my answers would have been drastically different.
[+] [-] marquis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chuckcode|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women-... [2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/28/google_mater...
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. You can say that people shouldn't care about same-gender mentors and co-workers, etc, but at the end of the day, people care about fitting in and they don't want to have to ride against the current their whole career. A bright young woman considering law school, where she'll be in a 50-50 environment, or engineering school, where she'll be in a 20-80 environment, has a natural disinclination to choose the latter.
[+] [-] pinkyand|11 years ago|reply
And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles."
And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning.
Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently.
And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ?
[1]http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/
[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seei...
[+] [-] johnny99|11 years ago|reply
Very much agree that learning from other industries should happen, and I've asked myself the same question. Why is computer science moving backwards, when other traditionally male fields have become much more gender balanced?
[+] [-] frostmatthew|11 years ago|reply
I'm equally impressed but do we a) know what they did and b) is their solution transferable to other professions?
[+] [-] BadCookie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exelius|11 years ago|reply
But you're right, it's not fair. But I don't think this particular problem is isolated to tech.
[+] [-] qeorge|11 years ago|reply
Personal example: I'm recently married, and you wouldn't believe the time my wife has had getting her username changed to reflect her new last name (an issue because her employer bases usernames/emails on their first + last names). This means she gets to explain every single time she gives out her email (internally) why its not the expected pattern, but rather a seemingly arbitrary string.
Its not the end of the world of course, or even that big of a deal when you consider it individually. But its one more thing that's not accessibly designed, and its hard to get a male dominated culture to care.
FWIW, I changed my last name too, but I own my company, and we use first names for our emails anyway, so I was lucky.
If you own your company, make sure you're getting this right. If you let people choose their usernames, and change them easily, you can cover this case and many others. [1]
[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
[+] [-] arturnt|11 years ago|reply
When you are large enough first names no longer work.
[+] [-] dded|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alukima|11 years ago|reply
-regular checkins -coaches/mentors -make sure that everyone participates in meetings/dev huddles. Often toxic environments stem from just a few individuals who are louder than everyone else. No one else is ever heard and doesn't feel like part of the team. -make sure people feel empowered to do their job and more. get rid of micromanagers. -management should be open to feedback and act on it.
Feedback is the key ingredient. Make sure employees have a channel to voice their opinions and that it is acted on.
[+] [-] mwetzler|11 years ago|reply
An inclusive work place also points out and immediately acts when teammates do things that are NOT inclusive e.g. racist or sexist jokes. That's a way of showing that you care about your teammates and their work environment.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] trhway|11 years ago|reply
early socialization is key, be it puppies or children. The fact of life is that tech is statistically male populated environment and by the college graduation time it is just too late (after 20 years of separate pink cuteness for girls and blue coolness for boys one can only wonder what synergy would get unleashed once a pink cutie venture into the blue pack territory). Girls should be exposed to sciences/tech and working together with their male peers on complex projects very early in the K-12 system. That would also naturally adjust males behavior too. And thus just 20 years down the road ...
[+] [-] ripb|11 years ago|reply
Can I ask for some opinions on this...
What if we took this approach, which is one I personally support as I don't think trying to retrofit equality into the industry by way of gender quotas is right at all, but yet the outcome is the same? What if, after investing time and effort into getting children into technology at a very young age, regardless of demographic, we still see white and asian males dominate the field 20 years down the line?
Do we accept that outcome? Or how much harder will we push to force equality in this area?
[+] [-] jolux|11 years ago|reply
I think most people here agree with that statement. The problem is realizing how difficult that is to accomplish when the field is almost in a paradox of male control. The key will always be early exposure to STEM and people that aren't like yourself, but currently this is difficult for women because they are forced into lower self esteem on average than men.
Once women feel like they have the same amount of power in society as men, that's when we start to focus on social adjustment at an early age. Until then, it remains very hard for female-identified persons to "adjust themselves" when they lack adequate role models.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lsiebert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaeluka|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|11 years ago|reply
Correlation between the answers to "If you were to leave tech" question also wn't hurt.
Finds: - The most frustrating thing is not seeing the career path. I guess it's for men too. - Around half of respondents need help in fighting imposter syndrome. This is weird. I mean, we all sometimes doubt ourself, but there's nobody better than us there.
",hbmnbvh" provided as an employer - any luck in decoding that? I thought this is cyrillic in the wrong keyboard layout but it resolves to garbage too.
[+] [-] marquis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fishtoaster|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imanaccount247|11 years ago|reply
That's always the first thing to go out the window unfortunately. Everyone wants their opinion to be more than just their opinion, so they pretend it is the opinion.
[+] [-] icecreampain|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] imaginenore|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] marquis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtracy|11 years ago|reply
While the attitude displayed in that discussion is very frustrating and disappointing, it's not really equivalent to women getting passed over for high-paying engineering or management roles.
[+] [-] Dewie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alukima|11 years ago|reply
It also has nothing to do with this conversation.