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The Hidden Engineering Gender Gap
ifindkarma writes "Joyce Park, CTO of invitation site Renkoo.com, has written a two-part essay exploring why there is no pipeline of self-taught female engineers entering the tech industry via Open Source or other individual efforts. In The Hidden Engineering Gap, she asks why there are so many self-taught male software engineers in startups, but no similar pool of women. In A Modest Proposal, she discusses a potential short-term fix to the problem: a one-year, co-op, certificate-granting program for women set up and sponsored by Silicon Valley companies."
Joyce Park, CTO of invitation site Renkoo.com, has written a two-part essay exploring why there is no pipeline of self-taught female engineers entering the tech industry via Open Source or other individual efforts.
There are, but they don't look much different from the men, if you know what i mean.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I think complaining there aren't emough women in tech is disingenuous and a little condescending towards women. There has been a wide open door for women for years, self-taught, or otherwise. To claim otherwise ignores so many other attempts and programs.
The reason there aren't more women in tech, self starters or otherwise is because they don't want to be and aren't interested! No program, encouragement, coersion or other methods will change that.
Consider a telcom I worked for... In the mid-80s a memo was circulated admonishing IT for the "underutilized" women. An IT policy was thus implemented picking women from myriad other jobs (call centers, anywhere!). These women were given free training, often at universities and were given 6 weeks and more to be trained. Most of these women were looking at more than a doubling in salary, all they had to do was "participate"...
Even with that policy, we could not even approach fifty percent of women in the IT work force.
(As an aside, an unexpected (to management) side effect of this monumental effort was a flood of women (those that signed up), only a small fraction of whom had any interest at all in tech, and only a fraction of those hitting stride in any reasonable time join It without even close to the skills necessary to contribute. We burned a lot of money to skew a population and saw productivity tank.)
It is no reflection of women's abilities. I know it's really cliche, but some of the very best IT people I worked with were women. But, as in the male population, many women were incompetent as were men. The difference isn't in ability, it's in the proportion choosing a field... For some reason men choose computers, women don't.
Ultimately, if you build it (the program), they will come, but not in droves. Like it or not, there seems to be a difference in wiring between the sexes. And, as in any large population, there will always be exceptions. IT welcomes (at least in my experience) women as much as men.
In the meantime, these old harangues only condescend to women who have chose not to enter IT as a career choice. They do have the options today... they're still not choosing it. Nudging them with these initiatives somehow implies their non-IT choices weren't valid, or good.
This hand-wringing is as silly as wondering why more police officers don't enter the tech fields (and some do as a recent /.
article pointed out -- a state trooper wrote a traffic ticket
application). They didn't/don't because they like being police
officers better.
I cannot believe it. This is truly shocking news.
This is purely subjective and anecdotal (this being Slashdot), but haven't males always tended to be the ones who liked to play with complicated, shiny toys? Even in an era with scores of brilliant female scientists in many fields, the majority of inventors still seem to be male. I have no idea if this is cultural or a difference in the way male/female minds work. Any ideas?
Wouldn't co-op and training defeat the purpose of being self-taught? I think it could be that men are typically more interested in engineering than women are and so they are more likely to go out of their way to teach themselves.
Geez...why is it women seem to need a special program, book or group session to discuss shit to do ANYTHING??!?!
If men can take the self initiative, or just be interested in something enough to devote time to it and learn it...why can't women?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What's hidden about it? I am a heterosexual male who just recently finished my B.S. in computer science and I can certainly say there were almost no distractions whatsoever in any of the engineering classes I took. The gap does not qualify as "hidden" in my opinion.
Why does it matter? What is the business reason for developing more female engineers?
Do computers designed by women run quicker?
Does software written by women take up less memory?
Do processors designed by women emit less heat?
Certainly we shouldn't do something that inhibits a particular gender's ability to participate in the profession of their choice. But an engineer is an engineer - why should we care what their gender is?
Maybe there are not so many self-taught female engineers because women mature socially earlier and thus don't spend as much time talking to their monitors. Maybe women tend to be emotional thinkers and engineering doesn't jive well with emotional thinking. Maybe there's just a shortage of women who are nerds.
And maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
paintball
Are we still trying to prove that the sexes are equal? I'm sorry, they aren't. Male != Female. It is noble to make them indistinguishable by most measures, like compensation (equal pay for equal work) and so forth. Even so, the efforts mentioned in the story summary are too little, too late. What is not already accounted for by genetics ("nature") is well programmed in by external factors (parents/family, education, all other inputs, mainly the cultural ones, i.e. "nurture") long before such programs would make a difference. See what you can do about that if you actually want to be successful (but wait... that's much harder, isn't it?).
Theory: What I think will ultimately be determined is that a great deal of what the sexes are good at and therefore want to do with their lives are already defined by nature... many generations of tuning that made it more desirable for the existing stereotypes to prevail.
Men and women are different. If you look at geek-dom, which populates most of the pool of self-taught software engineers, you will find many have been interested in the concepts for years.
Although efforts like this are well-intentioned, I have to question whether the result will pan out. Proposals like this may turn up individuals with the talent to program, but they probably lack the interest level. Most self-taught software engs have a genuine interest in the art and science of the craft. These folks have an interest in continued training.
So, the question isn't whether programs like this would be useful. The question is how do you find the type of woman who could use an opportunity like this as a launching pad into a life-long learning exercise?
julie@ElRambo:~/src/omgponies-0.3# ./configure /usr/bin/install -c
checking for a BSD-compatible install...
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for g++... g++
cheking for penis... ERROR: Penis not found.
Sadly, a lot of women really aren't interested.
I think this is wrong: this is interesting stuff, but there is so much garbage floating around on the subject, up to and including the ridiculous notion that computer stuff is intensely mathematical (say what?!), and that mathematics is Something To Be Avoided (BULLSHIT!).
Another sad truth is the fact that self-taught women generally need not apply for jobs that might use their skills. Somehow, self-taught men are OK, as is. But self-taught women need a piece of paper with magic letters on it.
Sigh.
- somebody who wishes things were different
Why is that if women are not exactly like men in all areas it is considered a 'problem?' Who is going to fix the 'problem' of me not being able to have a baby?
If the IT industry actively discouraged women from entering then such measures would be appropriate. But as it stands, the majority of university graduates are now women. At my university there is a 4:1 women to men ratio in their medial program. So the real problem is that women do not want to go into IT. They would rather make more money as, for example, a doctor. I can hardly blame them...
And a side note - regardless of gender, if you don't want to do IT you won't do a good job. You have to have a certain passion for the work. No amount of financial incentive can change this..
Er... A Modest Proposal? Perhaps we should eat some of the male engineers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modest_Proposal
Seriously, there are only manpages in unix, no womanpages.
I am so sick of hearing about software 'engineers'. An engineer is a graduate of an engineering school. Their degree will sound something like mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, or chemical engineer. A graduate of the computer science department is not an engineer, they are a programmer. Now we have the whole software part being completely stripped away from the faux title to simply 'engineer'. Can you possibly call anyone an engineer who has no training at all in anything close to an engine?
/Mad ChE
This post has been filtered for sanity.
I would think it would be much higher than 93% male linux userbase.
I take issue with your statement that all men can do what you say. This only applies to Whites, Jews, and certain types of Asians. Males of the lower races are just as helpless - if not worse - than women.
as far as a woman is concerned, if there's nothing in it to be gained then what's the point?
I think choosing less qualified/talented people on the basis of their gender/race is the solution, especially in fields such as medicine where talent and ability aren't really that important.
Having a piece of software work or surviving an operation are less important than Diversity(TM)
In TFA, the author notes:
Women often seem to gain self-confidence by pursuing institutional affiliations, credentials, and clear career goals -- rather than simply pushing forward as "lone wolves" driven by individual curiosity.
Firstly, I think this statement discredits the true innovators of this world(past & present) who are driven by a passion to solve problems(sometimes at significant personal and social cost). These people are not just fulfilling some curiosty.
Secondly, and this is the crux of the whole article, females, by "pursuing institutional affiliations, credentials, and clear career goals" are giving themselves the access to a future raising a family.
By exposing themselve to this environment enhances the chances of finding a more desirable mate.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Every single time I see this exact same kind of story posted, I always wonder, what does it matter? Is it so hard to accept that maybe women are not as interested in the engineering fields as men are? I don't see why there is this cry to bring women into the loop when the doors are wide open. It is not like they are not allowed in.
Also, if we really want to think about gender gaps in professions, why are there not more male nurses? I had to spend a decent amount of time in ICU when my father was hospitalized because of his heartattack. He is very overweight and it was no small challenge for the staff there to help move him when it was required. I think there was one male nurse there who helped but he wasn't always on duty. Would it not make sense to make this position more appealing to men since it would be a boon to both patients and staff alike? Just something to think about.
Brendan
Computers are a significant means of escape for social misfits without a sex life. Since even an ugly woman will find it easy to get laid with the proper application of alcohol and sufficient display of willingness, there's less need for women to escape in this manner. The same behavior seen in men usually ends with said men in jail.
Men and women are different. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. And those who think that men and women need to be exactly equal in every area of life need to get over it, and stop trying: There's a few hundred thousand years of evolution working against you, and you're going to lose.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
First Post confirms that a big part of the problem is that women are judged by their appearance rather than engineering skills.
Obviously, their strategy is that if they blend in, they'll be judged the same as men.
New shoes.
Why do women need special treatment? Everyone acts like there needs to be sort of 'affirmative action' type of deal. What advantages do men have that women dont?
When I was an CS undergrad in college I remember hearing constantly about how 'women have it tougher in cs' and so forth. In my view exactly the opposite is true. I never once saw a female getting a worse grade because of her gender. I did however see one of the schools deans go ask professors for explanations when a female was doing poorly in a class. The result of that was that professors were under pressure to make sure that female students got through which resulted in unfair grading.
If women want to become engineers they should be allowed to and have the same opportunities as men, but preferential treatment just makes the ones that are legit look bad.
Men like computers because they do what you tell them to.
Women dislike computers because they don't do what you want them to.
The paucity of women in engineering is not solely an artifact of lack of opportunity, nor of cultural conditioning, though both of those things obviously have an impact. In a typical Silicon Valley tech company, you'll find far more Chinese and Indian women than white women in engineering, even though the white population is much larger than the Chinese or Indian populations in the area. So clearly culture matters, and to that extent there's a problem we can and should address. But you'll find even more Chinese and Indian men than women in those same companies -- it's not clear that culture alone can explain the gap.
So by all means, provide good opportunities for girls and young women who would be interested in engineering (or physics, or...) but for the lack of exposure. We all benefit from that. But please don't try to force the issue beyond the levels they'll naturally settle at when everyone has the appropriate opportunities -- even if those levels are still male-dominated.
I can point today at exactly the reason I did not go into electrical engineering. I attended a two day long university-sponsored Women in Engineering outreach program, and it was nothing about the program that scared me off, it was THE OTHER POTENTIAL FEMALE STUDENTS. Good lord, they were a pushy, stuck-up, title and prestige obsessed lot. I made the mistake of showing active interest in the electron microscope demonstration after the other girls in my tour group made it more than clear through whispering and shifting around restlessly that they thought it was incredibly boring, and no one in my group spoke to me again the rest of the day- which made the mandatory team-building engineering project contest later that evening more than a little awkward. (Do guys have mandatory team-building at their engineering recruitment events?)
So I went into biology instead, because I liked trees, and for some reason it was more OK to be a reclusive female biology student than engineer simply because these young ladies were so obsessed with breaking down stereotypes.
YMMV, of course.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
"Joyce Park, CTO of invitation site Renkoo.com, has written a two-part essay exploring why there is no pipeline of self-taught female engineers entering the tech industry via Open Source or other individual efforts."
I'm not sure about the male vs. female angle here, but I think it's a myth that there's a lot of self-taught individuals who have established a viable, sustainable career in software development without a college education (at least for those under 50).
Why does our society insist on making women do things more like men?
There seems to be some sort of predisposition by the academic elitist camps that are always suggesting, if women are not doing the same things as men they are repressed or are not given the chance.
I am getting tired of listening too it primarily because the topic always seems to be about how much STUFF a women can purchase vs a man can as a comparison to wealth. I think we have enough consumerism thank you very much to draw my own opinions.
Which is quite simple, women do not enjoy analytical thinking as much as men do. Men also do not enjoy organizing social groups as much as women do.
Thats my experience, and this fact has nothing to do with how much a women can buy to make her happy.
I would like to suggest, perhaps there is a DIFFERENCE between men and women, that is fundamental here in thinking styles and that what men enjoy isn't what women enjoy and vice versa.
I tried pointing this out once while I was an undergrad at the UW Madison campus and I was almost kicked off campus.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
How is it that nobody bitches when there are so few female trash collectors?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But at least at my school, Computer Science was in the Engineering college.
paintball
And here I was thinking it was simply because there aren't as many women nerdy enough to get excited by the fact there are genders to connectors, which means .. gulp .. female connectors!(!!!)
oh gosh, oh golly, gee whillikers!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A woman who doesn't enjoy math problem, doesn't naturally feel like tinkering with computers and enjoys lots of social interaction will be neither productive nor happy as a programmer. Or if she feels she must become an engineer to support herself and her family, let her enroll in college and apply for a scholarship like anyone else. I don't see how society or most individuals benefit by setting up programs that encourage people to go into fields they don't like and are not good at.
I will be blunt: the real reason why there aren't more female techies, self taught or trained, is because most girls are raised to be image consious and being a techie is thought by most non-techies that same as being a nerd. Male techies don't care about how we are percieved. We're too busy showing off to each other to be bothered with how "normal" people view us. It's the same in Science Fiction Fandom; a vast majority of SciFi geeks are male.
If you want to have more female techies you need to destroy the pre-conceived notions about techies on the global level (tell Mattel to stop making the Barbie dolls, etc) and wait for society to catch up.
Just my $0.02 worth.
The grand parent is correct that Computer Science is different than Software Engineering but SE is a valid engineering field. Now stop insulting the engineers who went through a degree program every bit as valid as your own.
//on the other hand feel free to complain about non-engineers insisting they deserve the same title.
No. Gay men aren't women either.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Get this through your head:
Software engineering != Engineering!
You didn't take anything related to thermodynamics, you were barely required to take physics. How many labs do software engineers take in their department (Not physics; not chemistry, etc)?
an oxymoron? Im assuming that in the U.S. atleast our institutions are the ones with the authority to declare who is and isn't an engineer.
I think a more relevant worry is why my university and several others are known to be around +60% female and most of the males are engineering. Shouldn't we be more worried about the fact that guys seem to be dropping out of school entirely then whether or not we have enough girls in engineering? I mean, I'm in engineering, so I'm not complaining about getting more girls, but our priorities seem to be.... scewed.
Because the thing about America is that we were born with a revolution whose basis was that the status quo was not efficient, and just because someone was not born to the proper family, and we can extend that to the proper color or gender, does not mean that the person does not have anything to contribute. Everyone of our founding fathers was forced to fight the respect they deserved, because every englishman in power assumed that anyone not of the proper family were automatically morons. No amount of money or education could change that
It also reminds me of some people I knew and know. They were always complaining that they could not get into a good school because of affirmative action. The reality was that they were lazy spoiled gits, and the 'minorities' were just willing to work harder. Of course, now it matters not how smart you are, or how hard you are willing to work. As long as you're family has money and can hire a good lawyer, you can get into a good school. We are back to the aristocracy being more important than ability. Not that smart people don't get rejected from school, but America is very competitive. Competitiveness is one reason why america is so great, and corruption, graft, and nepotism is why much of the rest of the world is in the piss pot.
So here is the deal. At my engineering high school there was no shortage of girls, and the valedictorian was a girl. I know a few that made it to advance degrees. In college there was a good number of women in engineering school, significantly less in the sciences. Texas A&M, along with most schools, work hard to attract women because they know what our founding fathers knew. That talent does not depend solely on how you were born, but also on the effort you are willing to make to master and apply a skill. And that throwing away a significant percentage of the population just because they were not traditionally in the trade.
Everyone is different, and the differences, if we treat it as a benefit and an annoyance, can be a great benefit. Although I don't like the movie, many of the posts on this topic reminded me of the kids in the 'freedom writers'. They all live in fear of those that are different, and all believe that the world would be a better place if they didn't have to deal with 'the others'. I really enjoyed working for and with the women engineers and scientists.
I will leave on a more positive note. The main impediment with attracting women engineers and scientist is that women often are not exposed to such things. This is the same of the majority of the population. Most have not been exposed to the possibilities of the art, so do not understand it. In schools boys are still more likely to be exposed to the technology, while girls will be moved to cosmetology. While there is nothing necessarily wrong with this, we again need to ask if our competitiveness can stand not fully utilizing human resources just because they do not meet our preconceived notions. There are those that want to protect their family by limited the competition, i.e. limiting the opportunities to those outside their family. This is not good for the country. Just like so many other things, they want to profit at the expense of the country. The graft in the contracts for Katrina and Iraq show just how willing engineering firms are to trade their profit for the good of the country.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It's simple. There's a body of people who want the T-shirt to be true. They want Chix to dig Unix. Which is why I tagged this article chixdigunix.
Also, it made me laugh out loud.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
I've talked to quite a few tech-oriented women who aren't in tech jobs simply because they don't feel like dealing with the male geek mentality. It's no secret that the average male geek is socially maladjusted, and many are egotistical, domineering, and dismissive of women. Given that sort of a social climate and its side-effects--a difficulty in obtaining proper regocnition for work done or getting assigned meaningful work in the first place, not to mention problems simply putting up with male coworkers--and it's no wonder many choose other professions. In fact it's easy to make a comparison between the tech industry and with other male-dominated fields... disc jockey, automobile racing, even graffiti art. In each case the relatively few women who do participate often have difficulty overcoming the stigma of being a woman. Interviews often focus on how it feels to be the only one around who can have babies even though the issue is completely irrelevant, and they have to work much harder for the same recognition that a man with equivalent talent would receive. I saw other posters making comments about how gender has no relation to productivity so workplace diversity should not be an issue, but that dismisses the idea that there are capable women who might be interested in the profession if the environment were less hostile. And I realize I'm making generalizations with the above. In fact, I work at a software company with a pretty reasonable male/female ratio even among the programmers. But I think this is not characteristic of the industry as a whole.
I direct just such a post-baccalaureate program at Mills College in Oakland, California, not far from Silicon Valley. It is coed, although the majority of students are women. Many successful graduates have gone on to industry jobs and CS PhD programs. The application deadline is February 1, if any Slashdotters want to apply.
There was a recent article about the program in the San Francisco Bay Guaridan. For more information, see http://ics.mills.edu and/or contact me.
Thankfully embedded Linux will soon find its way into washing machines, microwave ovens etc. When that happens most Linux users will probably be female!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...another bleeding heart that will want me to take on staff that can't do the job. I want a person that has the skill set required to fullfill a set of tasks. If they have green skin, two heads and shag sheep at the weekend so be it or if they are exactly the same as all the otehr people I hired then perhaps people that are "like that" do a good job. I realy don't care if you are boy, girl or politician so long as you can take a pile of "to do" lists and return a pile of "done deals" then you are on my team. I can see the next ten years being one long trek of finding new ways to tell this type of freakish misfit with a gender related chip on his/her shoulder exactly what politically incorrect part of themselves they can insert their ideas into.
Oh hell, never mind. It'll be a different cause célèbre next year, with exactly the same false premises, and exactly the same "fight fire with fire" proposals trotted out.
I graduated as a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the College of Science of CSUPomona.
Having said that, my current job title is Software Engineer, and it correctly describes the function I perform.
"Scientist" applies to the focus of my training. Some universities place Computer Science in their College of Engineering, often calling it Computer and Electrical Engineering (my sister's degree, incidentally). The result is that the programmers who train there have more of an engineering outlook. I was able to pick up a minor in Physics with just a few extra courses. This illustrates the scientific focus of my education.
"Engineer" is a term that describes what I do in my current job. The Romans were very good engineers, but not very good scientists at all compared to the Greeks. Scientists are after knowledge, engineers are after results based on that knowledge.
"Programmer" is a more general term, which would apply (in addition to Computer Scientists and Engineers) to those who dabble in programming. You wouldn't call someone a carpenter just because they swing a hammer.
Calling a "Scientist" or "Engineer" a "Programmer" is like calling a human a primate. It's technically true, but it has negative connotations, and robs them of the dignity that is rightly attributed to the more specific term.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
For whatever reasons, the software culture has evolved in a way that many women (and many men, but not in as large numbers as women) find it unattractive. That is not so say that they find computer software unappealing; rather, they never get close enough to find out. They see nerds lacking hygiene and basic social skills congregating to learn the arcane details of some system -- or combative video game -- with little thought to how the system might be used to do something useful, artistic or social. Their first exposure is, likely as not, through members of that demographic group.
Women in general tend to be unimpressed by those whose ego exeeds their abilities -- a personality that is all-too-often rewarded in this information economy.
Lots of people (men) want to attract women to computing but have no idea how. Bill Gates came (here) to Waterloo to try to attract non-hard-core-nerds to study CS. My daughter was very keen to see him but after he demo-ed his XBOX 360 and a fingerprint-reading PDA and a Napoleon Dynamite video she came away saying "what a dweeb!" She may end up studying CS, but if she does, it'll be in spite of efforts like that. And two year of high school CS in which she was top of her class, but learned nothing. More likely she'll study math or physics or something that she feels is more challenging and useful, and less associated with dweebs.
It used to be that there not enough women in law or medicine either. Now, those fields are pretty equal. Why is it that some fields (programming, engineering, physical sciences...) can't get this right?
There are lots of little reasons (time demands, male oriented, no role models...), but the big root reason is that these are just not good jobs. All those little reasons were there in law and medicine, and were overcome. Rather than ask why no women want these jobs, ask why any person WOULD want these jobs. Most reasons women have for staying away from these areas should probably keep men away as well.
Even if you don't buy that women should be more or less equally represented in most jobs, it can be very educational learning exactly why they're staying away.
If the girls are old enough to cuddle the dolls, and the boys are old enough to throw them, they're old enough to have had gender roles crammed down their throats. Gender roles are VERY powerful. How many women carry purses? Is that also genetic? I don't think so.
Genetic behavioral differences were also 'proven' when early twentieth century decided that inborn differences accounted for the difference between the rich and the poor. In other words, whatever so-called study 'proved' that was a stinky pile of bullshit.
When I do my off the clock surfing, I see all sorts of women participating in the internet economy. In fact they tend to be the real stars of the sites I visit.
Since when did some anonymous group of "Silicon Valley companies" become an accrediting body for engineering schools? Forgive me for being a bit old-fashioned (at age 58 I think I've earned the right), but as someone who worked his butt off to earn a genuine engineering degree (BSE/EE, Arizona State '74) I'm inclined to wave a BS (the other one) flag on this whole discussion. One may be a self-taught programmer/coder/hacker/bit-twiddler, but never a self-taught engineer of any flavor -- regardless of gender.
If memory serves me correctly, it used to be unlawful for anyone to call themselves an "Engineer" in Oregon unless they have earned at least a bachelor's degree in engineering from an accredited college or university. I remember they went after Novell under that law for conferring term Certified Novell Engineer on anybody who bought some books and took a test. In most states use of the term Professional Engineer is legally restricted to those who have passed the Engineer-In-Training exam (an all day bugger) and served what amounts to a four-year apprenticeship working as a true engineer. Only a PE can certify blueprints and other design documents, and one must be a PE to give expert testimony in court.
Just my $0.02.
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/coffee-lounge/643 3-sex-call-wow-sounds-wrong.html?highlight=call+po ll
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/coffee-lounge/524 63-gender-poll-2006-a.html
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/coffee-lounge/805 53-gender-poll-2007-a.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/poll.php?d o=showresults&pollid=1099 http://www.gridter.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?s urvey_name=survey http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=287852&hi ghlight=gender+poll
http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showto pic=8935&hl=gender+poll
By the way, some females might be tetrachromats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy [wikipedia.org]
I demand a program so I can be one too !!!
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
238 people (16%) of those polled said there were too many distributions. I am far too lazy to count the number of distributions there that got 0 votes, but that list certainly doesn't help matters. How many of those are defunct, extremely targeted (Damn Small Linux and Edubuntu for instance), or otherwise intentionally unsuited to the typical linux user? I also note that they include BSD distributions on the list, so they should have said "Free Software poll" instead of "Linux poll".
KANOTIX 36 0.02
Ubuntu 357 0.24
Fedora 121 0.08
Debian 188 0.13
KNOPPIX 36 0.02
2X 1 0
Arch 3 0
BackTrack 1 0
"BIG LINUX" 1 0
BinToo 1 0
CentOS 1 0
CRUX 1 0
FreeBSD 12 0.01
Freespire 5 0
Gentoo 98 0.07
GentooTH 2 0
Gentoox 3 0
Grafpup 4 0
Knopperdisk 2 0
Kubuntu 11 0.01
LFS 2 0
Mandriva 71 0.05
MCNLive 4 0
MEPIS 48 0.03
Mint 2 0
NetBSD 4 0
"Novell SLE" 8 0.01
nUbuntu 1 0
Olive 1 0
OpenBSD 14 0.01
openSUSE 71 0.05
ParallelKnoppix 8 0.01
PC-BSD 5 0
PCLinuxOS 4 0
Quantian 3 0
"Red Hat" 30 0.02
redWall 12 0.01
ROCK 2 0
Sabayon 8 0.01
Slackware 73 0.05
SLAX 3 0
"SME Server" 4 0
Sorcerer 1 0
"Source Mage" 56 0.04
StartCom 10 0.01
"Symphony OS" 21 0.01
"Ubuntu CE" 64 0.04
Ututo 7 0
"White Box" 2 0
Xandros 10 0.01
Xubuntu 7 0
Zenwalk 5 0
ZoneCD 16 0.01
This is the same chart with all the 0's taken out. I'll do a bit more numbercrunching on this, and will reply to my post with a couple of links to charts and stuff in a few minutes.
Care about privacy? Read this!
How many 'software engineers' have taken the FE, and have taken steps towards the PE?
None, because no software engineer could even begin to stumble through the FE, because they don't have ANY of the background information that any of the other engineering disciplines (civil, mechanical, chemical) do.
At the risk of sounding misogynistic, I think it is pretty obvious why there are fewer self-taught female engineers, and why there are fewer female engineers period, and fewer females in the work force in general.
Women have boobs, which greatly decreases the need for and benefit of scientific disciplines. There I said it.
Women are too smart to fall into that rathole!!!
Have women also evolved to carry purses, wear high heeled shoes, watch soap operas, and braid their hair? Tell me, how did natural selection work that one out? Yeah, men and women are different, but besides minor hormonal issues, I'd have to say that difference is dominated by values society rams down everyone's throats. Don't give me that, 'Well, studies have shown that when given the choice, children gravitate toward the activity proper for their sex' crap. If a kid is old enough to play with a doll, gun, whatever, unless that kid has live a life isolated from all outside forces, any and all results are invalid.
You know, I distinctly remember hearing people at another point in history try to explain behavior in genetic terms, now who were they? Oh, yeah, they were the early eugenicist movement loons. They also managed to prove that there were inborn genetic differences between two groups of people, those groups being white middle/upper class people and the poor, immigrants, non-whites, ect. I'm not accusing anyone of sexism of any kind, but you'd have to be delusional to deny that the maximum role genetics play is negligible.
Oh yeah, that'll help. First thing I look for when someone wants an engineering job is whether they've got a fistfull of certs. :-/
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is a chart I made with the linux (and BSD) distros from the poll, ignoring the approximately 300 that didn't have any results.
Care about privacy? Read this!
The president of Harvard ask this question and ultimately got fired for trying to find the answer.
He had the gall to suggest that there may actually be a gender difference that makes men more interested in technology than women. His only crime was to suggest that the subject needed hard research rather than slogans and politically correct proposals.
What if women just aren't interested in technology?
Uhm, plenty of tech guys actually do participate in life fully,
act as modern day renaissance men,
have wives (heavens!) and children (not genetically engineered - built the old fashioned way...)
Just because a certain subsegment of the human population - having
difficulty dealing with other humans - find working with things much more enjoyable -
well that is as old as the blacksmith, mechanic, plumbers and electricians.
Plenty of tech people enjoy things/thinking more than people/socializing.
But the ones who can talk the talk, walk the walk, and really enjoy people tend to go
very far in Sales, and earn the big bucks.
I think the original poster confuses the term "self-taught" with "industry-taught". Personally, I became a "self-taught" programmer long before I became an "industry-taught" programmer.
Each on its own doesn't mean much, but it's only when you combine both kinds of experience that you might get something worthwhile. A "self-taught" hobby programmer is like an artist in title -- but not in income. There is no glamor in it, no respect in it, there is just inner drive and inner satisfaction (at least at the beginning). I can't speak for my entire gender, but for me at least, I think I went into that direction because that's the only thing I could excel at.
I used to stutter for a good part of my youth and my writing skills weren't that great (and even my math skills weren't as good as my female peers). And for me at least, in a female dominated school, dominated by female teachers (and dominated by emasculated male teachers), and out-shined by excellent female students, I had to go outside of school to find a learning outlet I could be good at.
I became "self-taught", but there was no design in it -- no plan. And really, I'm not sure how you could replicate such an experience with an "industry-taught" approach. One approach is driven by inner desire and the other is driven by external forces. One approach is unplanned and unstructured, the other is planned and organized. And one is based on hobby, interest, and inspiration, and the other is based on the hobby, interest, and inspiration of five years ago. And really, that's the crux of the matter, whether it's school or industry, both types of environments lag behind the passions of early adopters and early tinkerers.
And don't get me wrong, an "industry-taught" program can be a very valuable experience, but this kind of experience is especially valuable for those who are already "self-taught". Those are the ones who need it the most and those are the ones society will benefit the most from going into such programs.
Computing was traditionally taught bottom up. At one time, the first step was to learn binary arithmetic, then AND and OR gates, and maybe on to the half and full adder. Then came the concept of the CPU, memory, program counter, and instruction execution. People tend not to start that low any more; Java is now considered the bottom level, unless you're going into hardware architecture. But one starts out with "Hello, World" in Java and goes up from there.
There's another approach. Start out with a web page. Teach HTML. Then the mechanics of building a web site. Go on to how databases and back-end processing are used. Teach some scripting language. Then go down a level and look at web servers and browser clients - what are they actually doing. Below that is the level of hard-coded languages, resource management, and talking directly to the operating system. Then down to how an operating system and compiler really work. And finally, what a CPU does and how simpler ones actually do it.
The idea is to turn off fewer people in the early stages.
Calling it a "A Modest Proposal" is stupid, because the namesake by Jonathan Swift was a satirical piece about eating Irish babies to quell overpopulation in England. It was meant as an indictment of English attitudes towards the poor and the Irish. If this is meant to be taken seriously, it would do well to avoid such an allusion.
Recently, some scientists gave a group of young boys access to a chest full of dolls and toy cars and balls and pots. In another room, a group of girls got access to an identical chest.
...the boys and girls were both young vervet monkeys. Oops.
u -tca121002.php
The boys eschewed the dolls and pots in favor of the cars and balls, and vice versa for the girls.
Now, as the feminists screech about "gender bias" and "socialization" and "male patriarchy"...
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-12/ta
Sorry feminists. Guess men and women ARE wired differently, after all. Men are drawn to engineering and science, women aren't. Women are drawn to hearth and home. It's in our wiring. Nothing wrong with that, just don't try to say that the lack of women in engineering is because of some "male patriarchy".
The 70's called and they'd like their feminism-and-every-inbalance-in-percentage-of-gend er-doing-X-must-be-manipulated-to-redress-balance back.
I don't therefore I'm not.
As my sig says, "fair is the enemy of free". A free society tends to be a fair society. But in order to get to a state of perfect fairness, freedom must be destroyed. It's like a grass lawn. The more level and uniform you want the lawn, the more often you need to ruthlessly mow down the tall blades.
We've done an admirable job as a society in removing coercive legal barriers against genders. Most of the remaining gender based barriers do not come from the state, but from nature and culture instead.
We can do nothing in regards to nature based barriers, lest we end up a pathetic dystopia. The unavoidable fact is that men and women are differnt. But what about cultural barriers? Indeed, many radical feminists act strangely similar to radical cultural conservatives. Therein lies the danger. Trying to mold culture through laws is a perilous activity. We can attempt to modify culture through voluntary persuasion, but once we get the government involved, we are headed down the path to tyranny.
If there are laws that act as barriers to women, they must be repealed. But we cannot go around punishing parents who encourage their daughters to be nurses instead of doctors. We must change that part of culture through the slow process of voluntary persuasion.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I've been in IT for 27+ years, first as a COBOL programmer on a Honeywell DPS/8, then as an SCO Unix developer, and now as a Windoze developer/lead. I'm female. EVERY STEP OF THE WAY I have been discouraged, disparaged, talked down to, brushed aside. Granted, it's been less in the past 10 years than it was earlier, but it's STILL there. It's run the gamut, from my parents (who leaned on my heavily to become a secretary or bank teller), to fellow (male) students who pointedly excluded me from study groups, to clients--sight-unseen. One potential client, when told by my boss that I would be on site the next day to troubleshoot their problem, told him in a crestfallen manner "...can't you come out instead? She's just a woman..." They'd never even heard of me before - this was not related to my performance, but simply to my sex. This was NOT an isolated incident.
YES, I love to tinker. I work on my motorcycle (CBR600RR, thank you very much) in my spare time.
YES, I love to code, AND I'm self taught (from the time I was 12, using Basic on a CP/M system).
NO, I wouldn't be doing this if I had listened to ANYONE who sought to "help" me by steering me toward a more "suitable" career. I know MANY women who gave up and left pursuing a computer-related career because of the discouragement. I'm too thick-headed, I guess.
YES, it still is like this for women. I recently went back to university to pursue an advanced degree - last semester, I took an undergraduate course; the first week, one of the other women in the class was lamenting the fact that so many male students were always telling her she shouldn't be in CSE because she was a girl, and it was a "man's field." Excuse me!? This is 2006... in the United States??
I had hoped, when I was young, that by the time I was in my mid-40s the playing field would be a bit more level. Judging from the comments here, there's still a loooong way to go.
So in once sense, you're right...we shouldn't try to force people to take careers in equal numbers...but this definitely does NOT mean that everything is peaching keen in the treatment of sex by the workplace.
The cake is a pie
...as long as the women are hot!
Nobody taught men to be interested in IT any more than they taught women. In fact, women had a leg up in IT in the beginning. The men were off fighting WWII, and it was the women who ran the first computers. During the same period, women also took over many clerical roles in many organizations. If it was solely a matter of exposure, one would come to the conclusion that the gender ratios would be proportionally the same now, as they were then. However, history has shown that women remained in he clerical roles, and abandoned the IT roles.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Neither.
The cake is a pie
Interesting article, but I remain unconvinced that any extra effort should be expended encouraging young women into engineering/science than young men. Granted, both fields have exhibited either overt or covert sexism over the years, no argument. However, if I look at my own generation (I graduated high school in 1989 and university in the mid 1990's) and the girls I went to school with, none of them were told that they couldn't or shouldn't pursue a career in the sciences or engineering disciplines. I believe that the current generation of girls will have just as many career choices as boys and that this will continue. There were at least as many girls as boys winning the prizes in maths, physics, chemistry etc, so it's not a matter of gender differences in aptitude. Girls can clearly do this stuff as well as boys.
Yet, many of the girls chose to do a humanities subject at university. Why is that? Could it be that they are more interested in those subjects than mechanical engineering or have they been socially programmed to shy away from the hard sciences? The flip side is that there is a disproportionately high group of females now studying Law and Medicine. In fact, apparently in some Western countries (like Australia, my home), more women than men study these disciplines and there could be a time when they outnumber men in the profession itself. Once again is this a problem and that we should be encouraging more guys to take up law or med? I don't think so...
One thing that was interesting to observe in my time as a HS and then undergrad student was that there were far more Asian girls doing engineering than westerners. In fact of the female population in my eng/sci courses, 95% of them were Malaysian/Sinagporean/Indonesian Chinese (I studied in Australia). Even now, I work in an engineering company and most of the female engineers are of Chinese or Indian origin (we have about 20% female engineer population). The exception are the Scandinavian countries, where there there appears to be a higher proportion of female engineers than in other Western countries. The female engineers I've worked with are no more or less competent than the guys, so once again it's not a matter of aptitude.
I think like any job or vocation, to be any good at it, you have to want to do it and do the hard work associated with it. This applies equally to pursuing a qualification or teaching yourself. If you don't have the passion for it, then you aren't going to have the single minded and borderline anti-social drive to be the best at it you can possibly be. Guys seem to do this more in the technical disciplines, particularly in the after work or school hours. Maybe girls and woman don't have the same passion for it and that their interests lie elsewhere? Should we be coercising girls into be interested in stuff like this? Hell no, in my opinion. If they are interested, they'll gravitate towards it just like some boys do.
At the end of the day, this all starts from early childhood. In modern times, how many rational parents are going to stop girls from playing with trucks or LEGO etc if that's what they like? I'm a parent of a girl and boy (both the same age) and it doesn't worry me in the slightest. If my daughter grows up and becomes an engineer or physicist I'll be just as happy as if she pursues a career in law. She's a smart kid and will most probably be good at either.
I agree completely. However, I would also like to see a convention of psychologists debate the merits of Red Hat and Debian, maybe that could be arranged somehow.
Because being a man is AWESOME.
Having a big cock (or even a small one) is AWESOME.
Having strong muscles is AWESOME.
Not having to deal with childbirth TOTAL RULES.
Need I say more?
There was a young male child that had an accident while being circumcised. He was brought up to be a female and forced (yes, this is the correct usage) to play with dolls and wear dresses. The doctor cited this as proof of nurture over nature....though all evidence was to the contrary. Scientists skewing results to further a personal agenda...perish the thought.
As Nature Made Him
I'll suggest why. Men don't like competition, at least, not from anyone that could possibly get away with wearing a skirt. It's rather simple, but overlooked. Personally, I'm self-taught, and I'm really good at what I do. Frick, I'm frequently asked to teach others about technology, programming, and everything else in my time, but whenever I keep applying for jobs in areas related to my best skills (programming, largely anything to do with computers), I either get laughed at, or I'm ignored, while less qualified and far less skilled men easily glide through the process.
;b
It's not that there "is no pool" of skilled women in these fields, it's that it doesn't matter if there is a pool or not. Most of the other women in the field that I've been friends with have similar problems with getting people (it's not just men who believe in such god-awful stereotypes that only men can understand technology to any sufficient degree) to take them seriously. But I've been fired a number of times simply because men (who were obviously less skilled, considering I was told to keep an eye on them and make sure they weren't screwing up the project) would complain that a women would be put in any position of peer or leadership and would threaten to quit if I was allowed to keep working.
There've also been a number of times when (all-male, almost tech-illiterate) management pressured me to completely undermine the already compromised stability and security of a project (I was brought in to correct the apparent incompetence of predecessors), even when I've been ahead of schedule to get things fixed *and* implement new features that users had been requesting for years (for which management had already preapproved). Mind, the pressure was for a feature that only one person had requested, and it was dubious as to why anyone would need such a thing in the next few years. Even when I proposed a revised timetable to include the feature sanely "down the road" by several months, it just didn't matter.
Is it much of a wonder why there isn't necessarily overwhemling interest once someone has any experience? It's akin to traversing the Iron Curtain to even get a job in the first place, and even if you get it, there's a huge chance you will be treated with extreme prejudice and hostility, no matter how hard you're expected to work (or how much unpaid overtime you put in just to meet arbitrary irrational demands). It doesn't necessarily matter how many hours I have to work to get something done, but constantly getting flak or fired for no reason doesn't exactly sit well. Though, the hoops I've been expected to jump through for arbitrary reasons often makes others look bad in their own job performance, the double standard gets to be bloody absurd. If any man did that, they'd get the hell promoted out of them. Hell, I've had to watch men who mostly spend around 20-30 minutes a day doing actual work get promoted multiple times in a short period of time, while I had to demolish through mountains of work, plus arbitary demands which aren't even in my job description, to not even be granted a raise or a day off during a serious family emergency. Also, tending to get blamed for lots of things that have nothing to do with me (including things not even related in the slightest to the department I was working in, let alone my work personally).
The so-called "Gender Gap" isn't at all in the possible pool of candidates, it's how women are often treated in the sector. Nevermind that in my experience (though often mirrored by others) sexual harassment is considered about 'the norm', and trying to bring any complaints, even about the most obvious and flagrant violations, gets you fired very quickly. Men and women *are* rather completely different, but being unwilling to give a 'class' of people in a profession much (if any) respect because they don't have a penis is just absolutely insane. It's insult to injury to then claim that there simply ARE no candidates. Supposedly, prejudice is blinding, but this is ridiculous.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Before claiming the engineering gender gap is 100% biological, if you're a man, ask yourself: am I interested in the nursing profession? After all, it's a good job. The world needs more male nurses. Why not? How can we explain the lack of men in nursing?
:-)
Is it because:
(a) since you're a man, you brain just isn't wired correctly to be a good nurse? (Really? Considering the number of male doctors?)
Or is it more likely that
(b) our culture says nursing is a traditionally female profession, and so you were never encouraged to go into nursing?
Unless you think gender bias completely disappeared the day Oprah got a TV show, I wouldn't be so quick to hang it all on biological differences. Just because there are obvious psychological differences between men and women doesn't mean there's no such thing as cultural bias. Culture matters. Women don't want to be engineers--that's the whole point. That doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and let 51% of the smart people get away.
All I'm saying is, anyone who doesn't think geek culture is male-dominated has obviously never read the jokes on Slashdot.
Thank you for the insightful post.
Majority privilege needs to be recognized.
I say this as a middle-class heterosexual white male.
Women mostly don't need to be self-taught. Colleges and educational institutions are happy to educate women. Meanwhile there's an increasing bias in educational institutions against males:
Schoolboy's bias suit
Where The Boys Aren't
Why boys can't be boys
The Trouble With Boys
and especially
How the Schools Shortchange Boys
It's not a big factor in this particular case, but one reason some guys are self-taught is because they've learned education isn't for them -- rather it's against them.
You're not a medical doctor. You better not have any opinions regarding the problem of medical expenses then. You're not qualified to speak on the matter.
....
You're not a mechanic. You better not have any opinion regarding the $3000 bill to fix your radiator.
You're not a politician. You better keep it shut when it comes to talking politics.
You're not a
Yes. You're an a-hole.
Yes, that's right. Us, the unwashed illiterate masses, are too stupid to understand. Leave it to the scientists - after all, they're the ones who are insisting that yes, the emperor is fully clothed. Can't you see?
There's nothing stopping anyone from pursuing their interest in their free time. Einstein was told he'd never amount to much by a math teacher. He took private math lessons and worked on relativity in his free time. Most of the world's great writers and artists didn't write/paint/draw for a living. Most did it in their free time to start, and usually enduring mockery of their work. I personally flunked out of computer science, but that doesn't stop me from writing command prompt programs. I've made small machines out of screws, wire, string and pulleys. They've usually been weak or clumsy; people have told me I shouldn't try to make any more, but that's never stopped me from trying to create the next one I think of.
So women are discouraged from pursuing engineering as a career. This article is about self taught engineers. Why does women being discouraged from pursuing engineering training reduce the number of self-taught female engineers? Being terrible at mechanical engineering doesn't stop me from trying. Being terrible at math didn't stop Einstein from trying. Being terrible at art or writing didn't stop ump-teen writers or artists from trying.
If it truly is discouragement that's stopping women from going into engineering the first thing you need to ask yourself is why are women so susceptible to being pushed around by the whims and opinions of others?
The only geekier grouping than a Linux convention that I've ever seen, was last night at midnight when the WoW expansion went on sale. At the outlet I went to, there were about 60 young men and zero women. Zilch.
GREAT!!!
:-S . Therefore we turned a society of phaqhots.
Yet another gender/sex flame-bait article. Can we leave this topic alone? Let women do what they do and men do what they do. By making this types of comparisons is like belittling women because it is saying that they can't perform on a certain area. So whatever opposite they do and on the contrary not entering tech fields is just lower job? Give me a break.
And those incentives to get them start into those fields I think are a mistake. I read an article a little bit awhile that EU was concerned about statistics of women not reaching the same level of men in the working ladder, and that they always earned less. So again the response of EU policy maker was just the same as this one. They thought they needed to create incentives to put women in par to men in the labor market.
Will it work? I think not. And this is an ongoing obsession driven I don't know by what kinda ideology. Well the ideology is supposed to be NO DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE. That's the bottom line. It is an extremely simplistic proposition that is among one of the pillars of Western though. However WE ARE FUCKING DIFFERENT, shieet. 'Cmon I've got a dick, they've got tits and pussy, it all comes down to this, period.
This types of policies want like turn, women into men. If we men do certain things it's because so it define us, women do things that define them, and we can't force change this.
Otherwise there are other solutions for this. Let's just create a single universal gender!!! That's it problem solved!! Since women can't do this, don't do that, aren't in that other field, can't can't can't can't. So first we have to device a way to frame their minds like men since they are born with differences in the brain!!. For this we would have to create some psychological classes in school that will make women act, think like men. Ok this is the first step. But now we have the pregnancy problem!! Ok since pregnancy is just another BURDEN and an obstacle to fulfill completely the "NO DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN MAKE AND FEMALE" clause; and rearing children is another hindrance for women, oh because it forces them to STAY AWAY FROM JOB, unlike men. It's being established that spending time with children, raising them, IS NOT A PRODUCTIVE STATE OF BEING, that's why there are nannies or?. To solve this with current medical, surgery, biotechnology we could reproduce children outside women. Like a recent article we can harbor fetuses inside pigs and cows with genetics technology, brilliant!! We are a step closer to reach full equality between women and men. But still, OH there are physical differences OMG, teh noes!!! We GOT, GOT, GOT, to change that to because women are not entering men's fields. Moreover a BBC article said that women during the sex act assumed a psychologically submissive state. IIRC some brain scans proved that. NOO!! Still differences, we can't let this happen, it goes against "NO DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN MAKE AND FEMALE" pillar of Western though. Women should enjoy sex just like men. So again we change some genes. we get rid of their tits pussies and insert the dick gene. Change everything until women are like men. Since we are growing children inside pigs and cows we can get rid of those nuisance physically differences in women that are just a burden. Better yet we just create a SINGLE GENDER out of harbored sperm and ovuls!! Now women can be generals, scientist, mathematicians, in fact equally enter every male dominated field. And in order to satify our sexual urges we still have one whole left,
Anyway I hope I've achieve to highlight the sheer stupidity of this type of comparisons. Fucking annoying as hell.
So please let this be the last post because every time there is a gender/sex article spans up to 800 posts!!
Ok I've read that a lot of posts just tired of this silly comparisons. Hey Slashdot editor, after reading the threads you could do a little bit better by posting an article about A PERSON WROTE AN
Be very wary of anyone pushing a social agenda based on "hidden" this or "glass" that. The real battles for equality have been fought long ago. I'm not saying racism and sexism don't still happen, but that the systemic problems have been eliminated. Now it's just sexists/racists pushing their agenda to maintain victim status for their "own." Or corporate business interests guised as tolerance/diversity.
If you *really* care about justice and equality, then fight for *human* rights.
Tons of jobs require certs and/or degrees, and even say so in the job ads. It has nothing to do with sex. You need to find a job with a company that has good hiring practices, where the people hiring are actually capable of telling qualified individuals from unqualified ones. This is the same for self taught men or women.
I feel bad for your situation, but where I go to school there is one girl in my junior EE class of 21 students and we all do homework with her, respect her etc. because she's a nice person. I don't know you personally but I can tell you that the girls who do "male" things like engineering and have an attitude about it like "I should be respected for this," it makes me not respect them. For the engineers that tell you that it's a "man's field," tell them they're right, you should be at home cooking something. They'll probably laugh and never bug you about it again. You women need to learn a sense of humor sometimes =) . Even if they're serious, there's no denying the fact that you've accomplished a lot in your career. They'll realize this if they have any brains at all and if not, why care what they think anyways? My mother was a mechanical engineer at UMass back in the late 70's, the only girl in her class, and all the guys enjoyed having her in class and respected her. Things are different for everybody, I wouldn't take your own situation and make a gross generalization from it, although what you describe is sad.
The reason is genetics!!! The XX doesn't have the same interest in nerdly endeavours as the XY.
The Harvard President was correct!
There are thing jobs and people jobs. A thing does what you tell it to. You don't have to coddle it's feelings, and it doesn't care about yours. The thing is perfect in that it always reacts the same given a particular stimuli. Person jobs are quite different in that they require that you deal with the complex inner-worksings of the human psyche. It's no secret that tech people tend to be lacking at least slightly in social skills. IT is a thing job. It is a job which is more suited for people who are thing people. Women, bio-evolutionarily speaking, are very social beings and tend not to be suited for thing jobs. There are exceptions of course just as there are men who excel in very social jobs. This isn't to say that women don't have the same IQ as men, but IQ is measured in many different ways. I believe it is more the personality traits inherent in the sexes which create the disparity here.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
All the discussions about technical issues are clueless slashtards who have no experience in the tech being discussed blathering on and on as if they know anything. Slashdot is full of loudmouth idiots, get used to it.
Good luck changing that one.
Nobody wants to share a restroom with the male-to-female uh, thing. You know, the result of surgically chopping off a few parts. Fortunately for us men, the thing doesn't want to use the men's restroom. The women aren't too happy though.
Heck, I'd rather not share a restroom with other guys. Some of them might be fruits or nuts.
So why is Portugal's percentage high and Japan and the US's percentages low? My opinion is that it is partially culture based. Just turn on the TV in the US and you'll see all of these commercials toward women advertising clothing, jewelry, and beauty products. In TV shows the scientists are almost always men. The engineers are almost always men. The geeks are almost always men.
If you want a neutral preference on gender in workforces, you're going to have to disassociate the cultural links between gender and professions. But that will never happen because the marketing departments will always choose the best role model for gender when they want to sell a product to a group of people.
Programs that may attempt to include bonuses for women to enter into male dominated fields don't work in my opinion. It's like saying you're entering a one sex dominated field and you probably won't feel as welcome just because you're surrounded by guys, but hey, to make up for it we'll offer you a scholarship of some sort. Every girl I talked to when I was in school I asked "why did you choose cs?" and the answer was never "because it's dominated by guys and I can get this cool scholarship." It was either the girl was actually interested in it, she had friends that were going into CS, or her parents influenced her decision. STRANGELY, those answers aren't all that much different from guy answers...
Want your kid to be more interested in sciences and engineering? Take away the doll and give her Legos. And don't turn on the TV to let her see all those commercials of "girl" toys either. It starts when they're kids, not when they're 18 and have already been influenced by so many outside inputs.
Women normally have a strong desire to be physically attractive to men. (for men, being powerful and wealthy is more critical, and anyway "attractive" would mean something different) This is genetic.
Being physically attractive means showing off the curvy hips. This too is genetic.
Showing off the curves means that bulging pockets are out. It may even mean a dress. Well, without pockets, what are you going to do? You carry a purse.
If some of your clothes lack pockets, you need a purse. If you often need a purse, you get in the habit of stuffing it with things and bringing it with you. You'll bring it even when you do wear clothes with pockets.
What I saw is that some large multi-national firm that have a surprisingly large portion of female staff in their IT departments (relative to other IT firms in the same area), and rumor has it that they intentionally hire more female to avoid discrimination charges. Unfortunately, the only way to hire more percentage of any sub-population than the market can supply is to lower the bar for that sub-population, so the result is many female IT staff that got hire is, frankly speaking, sub-par. So, the end result of that is eventually people inside the firm "knows" that female IT staffs are sub-par.
Oliver.
...And it influenced the GNOME project to open the Women Summer Outreach program and so on...
e nder_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf
e nder_Policy_Recommendations.pdf
It was a report commissioned by the European Union of all things. Have you every checked out the FLOSS Policy Support page?
http://flosspols.org/
Very interesting stuff.
And here's the article on their on gender findings:
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-G
Along with their recommendations...
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-G
A bit dry perhaps, but still a very interesting, and informative, read full of thorough investigation and professionally collected statistics.
http://mediagoblin.org/
First of all, this "Margaret Mead" surely didn't have an unbiased way to objectively measure these qualities. She sees what she desires to see. (or worse, but let's assume she tried to be honest)
Second of all, the gene pool of these isolated populations may well be different from normal. There is a tribe in Africa (pygmy?) where the people only grow to 3 or 4 feet tall, and a set of Pacific islanders (Samoan?) who are really tall -- we don't claim it to be culture or even diet; social norms need not be any different in this respect.
Notwithstanding it's way easier for women to get into programs dominated by men due to affirmative-action policies as it is. You're going to ruin it for the ones that do want to be there by coaxing in a bunch of people who don't really want to be there.
Unfortunately, I understand that there are some who do, and I agree with some here that it does both the company and the individuals involved a disservice in the end.
Also the ratio of men to women in university is way out of whack. There are more and more women in university than men. So, this kind of program merely exacerbates the problem.
Of course, it is only a problem if you want a healthy society where men and women are equal. If you believe in the right kind of discrimination, more women at the expense of men are good.
The NYT just had an article on the fact that more women are unmarried than married. This isn't by choice for many women. If you take more and more men out of the college educated pool, there will be less suiters for the college educated women. And, women tend to marry up not down. They may date a bad boy, but they ain't marrying him. Old and childless or single parent, these women aren't going to be happy.
For some reason men choose computers, women don't.
May I suggest because in the science fields you usually get a right or a wrong answer for a predetermined reason. In the humanities the "right answer" usually involves merely parroting back your professor's bias. Men look at the cost of university ($100k for 4 years in a private US university) and ask what vocational training they can get. They ask "what is my return on investment?" For some reason, women don't really ask that. The educational system has treated women well, as result they demand less from it.
Also, the "right answer" effect allows men to get away from the BS and bias they have been subjected to in the educational system form the K-12 period. When computing the voltage across a resister you don't get constantly told that you are a rapist and abuser because you have a deficient chromosome.
You want to fix the problem of non-equal male/female representation in universities? The answer is simple.
"Title IX For the Classroom". Because equality shouldn't end at the sports field.
Federally mandate that there be a 50/50 male/female split in all majors except those where we are giving out H1B Visas (IIRC my visa codes). If we are loosening up the immigration requirements to boost a career we can loosen up the equality standards.
See how education improves when the universities have to get 50% of male English majors. Kiss those "Womens Studies" programs good bye, just like we did for men's swimming. You won't expect to get 50% Jews in a Hitler Youth program, and you won't get 50% male enrollment in today's Women's Studies programs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"she discusses a potential short-term fix to the problem: a one-year, co-op, certificate-granting program for women set up and sponsored by Silicon Valley companies." How is having less female software engineers a problem? Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with female software engineers but does having less female software engineers really pose a problem for the industry or is this just another rant by some feminist hack to try and garner more publicity?
find / -iname life 2>
40 years ago the number of women in both Law School and Engineering School was about 5 - 10 %. Today Law School is 50 % or more women, but Engineering School is still 5 - 10 %. Are Engineers more sexist than Lawyers? Does the vocation of Engineering discriminate against women more than the field of Law. I really don't think so.
I will no doubt be called a Neanderthal male chauvanist by somebody here, but I don't think the low numbers of women in Engineering can be adequately explained by systemic discrimination.
According to what I have read, the harassment portrayed in that movie "North Country" was for real. Construction, mining, and some other fields really hate women working in their fields, and they actively work on keeping women out.
I have never seen that in IT. In fact, I have seen just the opposite. If anything, guys in IT are overly polite to women, and wish their were more women in IT.
As such, I don't see any justification for any special program. Women just don't want to work IT. Why force the issue?
Anyone who doesn't show interest in IT will regret it greatly this century.
Why do we care how many of what type of human do this that and the other thing while others doen't? What difference does it make? Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe smart white guys like hanging with other smart white guys and so they take the same courses and go into the same fields of study and end up being the dominate type of person in that field. Why are there groups of people that INSIST that there be some rediculous parity in the type and sex of people in every field of endevour. It's just stupid!! Maybe men are smarter! Ooooo can't say that. Maybe for girls "Math is hard" as Barbie used to say. Maybe women just like to avoid jobs that require you to sit in a cube for 8 to 14 hours day, work for (mostly) jerks and idiots, while making yourself think reeeeally hard and make only moderately good pay (some of us) for your effort.
If computer scientists were (and they're not) 99% white males why would that be a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that about 85% of pro basketball players are black? Is it bad that 80% (maybe 90%) of hollywood script writers are gay and liberal? Maybe we should be pushing for more staunch conservative heterosexuals in the hollywood screen writers guild. How about more fat white guys on the fashion run way?
Let's face it. These discussions are inately sexist or racist and should be considered bad. If women want to be in the technical fields they have AT LEAST as much opportunity as anyone else. I would go further to say, considering the number or pimply undersexed geeks in this field, a good looking babe with half a brain will do just fine without even trying (unlike a pimply undersexed geeky girl who will at least have to try). In 7 years as a manager I've hired the only three women I've ever interviewed and both were mediocre at their jobs at best. The biggest advantage I've seen with women (in software anyway) is that they tend to be easier to work with and have less ego associated with their work than many of the guys. I would attribute that, though, to not taking the job quite as seriously. With only three data points that's just personal experience and certainly not a general judgement.
Anyone that thinks there's some dark force keeping women out of engineering or technical fields doesn't know women or men very well.
Why in God's name would I want to do dishes and knit and gossip all damn day long before faking an orgasm and crying myself to sleep?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
What the hell? A Modest Proposal ?
I just can't believe this. The survey is trying to say that if you asked people at random whether or not they used Linux, until you found 100 who said yes, then seven of those people would be female. Absolutely no way. You'd be lucky to find one girl among two-hundred who actively installed and can use Linux in a capacity that extends beyond "my brother put it on and I can run Solitaire so I'm a Linux user."
I know we're trying to move towards being equal in regards to computer users, but when Linux is concerned, we're a LONG way away.
Perhaps if the Engineering field becomes more abundant with Technosexuals, it might attract more females.
Who comes up with these terms anyways?
In Soviet Russia (where I live) we have an educational system where people get enrolled in universities / college equivalents on the basis of exams, not their school record. Before any exams take place, females already are absolutely not interesting in any kind of engineering, they're prepping themselfs for non-engineering colleges. Keep in mind, that at this point no selection or aptitude tests were performed and they have not been exposed to how engineering crowd treats women. That's purely a matter of what they like and what they don't like. They don't like engineering. The idea to trick them into the field they don't like doesn't seem sensible to me.
For the human race to survive, women must average about 2.1 children in their life time. Given that the historical 25% childless women has climbed to close to 40%, the the abundance of families with 1 child, most child bearing women need to have more children so that that 60% that has kids averages 3.5 children/woman.
Encouraging women to sacrifice families/personal times, put off marriage and family for their career, etc., puts the species survival in jeopardy.
And the worst part is? Our most intelligent women are encouraged to get an education, and put off family, and have 0-2 children. Our least intelligent women tend to start families younger, and have more children. Well, if the low end of the intelligence sector has 5 children, from age 20-30, and most intelligent sector as 2 children, from age 35-40, well, over the next 100 years... we're deselecting intelligence as a genetic trait... THAT'S NOT GOOD. People complain that kids today are less intelligent, as test scores indicate... well they are, because we have socially deselected it over 2 generations (on the intelligent side, 3 on the less so).
The even more insane thing? Women are encouraged to start their careers first, because if they don't they can't enter the workforce later. The silly thing, all the young mothers that I know (age 22-25, intelligent, but religious) are back at work in 2 months because their families need the income. The ones that are older and "started their career first" (ages 32-36), are all taking years off, leaving altogether, etc., because it's freaking exhausting to deal with small children when you are mid to late 30s, the young twenty somethings don't know any better...
Perhaps using those years when you are full of energy to start your life instead of drinking yourself to oblivion would eliminate a lot of the gender issues...
Who cares? Management and sales are where the money is at, not sci/tech. With globalization, an already volatile career path is even more volatile. I will not encourage my daughter to pursue sci/tech. I will tell her to pursue what she likes and study it well, whether it is computers or interior decorating. If you are the best in a given field, you can do well.
Why some give sci/tech a magic status on one hand and flood it with H1B's and offshoring on another, I have no fricken idea. Contradiction city.
Table-ized A.I.
Just make school as hostile for girls as it is for guys. Have every class taught by the coach of something and give extra credit for framing the subject (history, art, geography, etc) in terms of a famous game from years past. Replace "home ec" with "gun safety". Replace "homework checks" with pop quiz. Replace subjective grades like "making a powerpoint" with standardized tests. Etc.
Most guys I know did independent study in CS or thinking-related fields because they got absolutely nothing out of school. I contend that the disparity in these fields is because of the large effort to making an unequal playing field in K-12 favoring girls.
Women have a lot more options open to them now, and I think a lot of people say - "Why do all that hard work to become an Eng/Sci, when I can do marketing or sales or something else that pays bettr, isn't treated with contempt and is less arduous?" I work in a research lab, the chemistry section has many women, the IT section has many women, the engineering section has very few. The most recent woman engineer to join left for a higher pay in a non engineery position! I actively discourage people from studying engineering and science ( unless it is what they really really want to do) because all the fun (R&D) type work is not done in this country! That leaves the regulations and inspection type jobs left - not all that exciting. Women are just as capable if not moreso than men at engineering - they maybe just taking a more lucrative/rewarding career path
#include "std_employer_disclaimer.hpp" "Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast"-Ace Rimmer
This thread is useless without pictures!
oh wait, this is slashdot not fark.
Steve Jobs is a woman?
paintball
It is interesting that so many of the Slashdot posters are giving 'reasons' why there is this gap, but rarely anything that gives an answer beyond what is already understood. Firstly, the argument that women are simply 'different' doesn't actually explain the disparity. People are not trying make men and women the same sort of being, but rather they are trying to understand what really is the difference. By the same logic, you could claim that since Australians eat Vegemite at a much higher frequency than Americans, that it must be due to inherent genetic differences between the populations. Additionally, to say that "being different" is enough to cause a gap, that there probably has only been one reason or motive to cause anyone to go into IT or engineering fields, ever; that only one sort of of very specific personality can allow a person to become interested in those fields. This is simply not true. Secondly, if you use the argument "Women simply don't want to!" as some sort of explanation, you are missing a lot of contextual implications here. It does not help that the argument in question, in a historical context mind you, has always been used as a justification of men (and women, no doubt) as a reason for why there has ever been a societal gap between the sexes in anything. Inherent reasons even! Granted, there may be some reasons due to the enhanced burden of child rearing that women face or some effect of estrogen/testosterone on the brain, but is that the reason? Is there really enough of an inherent advantage or disadvantage on either side to really make a difference? Is a career in IT necessarily more demanding on a woman's life than one in medicine, theater, art, music, etc? I mean, this is the same sort of conversation people were having about women voting and to a large extent (even today), being in politics altogether. And the whole importance of this sort of question isn't derived from it's specific usefulness, but rather the understanding of the disparity in the first place. Finding out answers to these questions gives us further understandings to ourselves, and to what is truly different between men and women, and what is truly the same. There may still be something, outside of our general inherent genetic natures that we have yet to fully reveal that may yet explain this. Keep in mind that humans are the least instinctual animals on the planet and are therefore the most malleable. Also keep in mind that when you say 'inherent' in regards to humans, you are saying that it is a genetic propensity derived from natural selection in homo sapien sapien's environment of evolutionary adaptation, or at least accidentally related. Unless we happen to find a gene, or a set of genes that regulate who becomes someone in the IT field, it doesn't stand to reason to jump to that conclusion. Realistically, women are still an underrepresented group, in America, and much more so outside of the 'western world'. Historically, women have been infrequent participants in the workplace in general and have increased their frequency in it after many feminist and civil rights movements, only to show that in most of these cases, there wasn't a particularly good reason women were not involved. I'm not going to say that there isn't a good reason for women not to be in the IT and engineering fields, what I'm saying is that there's really little to no evidence suggesting a good reason for it exists. The fact that people (men?) are so readily jumping on these old unjustified phrases should be raising red flags here.
I hate to say it, but in my personal experience, most women just don't seem to want to put in the hours it takes to have a successful career in IT, Engineering, and other technical fields. Now before you jump all over me, that's MOST women, some certainly are able to burn the midnight oil just as well as men.
;-)
But just look at your average college campus. Where are the women? Engineering? Computer Science? Physics? No, for the most part they're in Literature, Journalism, Communications, Foreign Language, Education, Business and all its related majors, etc, etc. And which majors are easier? Having both a liberal arts and a science degree, and having seen scores of my peers dropping technical majors for liberal arts degrees, I can say without hesitation that things are a LOT easier on the artsy side of campus. When's the last time you saw someone in the lab until 4:00am working on a philosophy essay? Only when they didn't start until 2:00am....
There's a reason they call them the "hard" sciences.
Low effort in, low reward out. Technical fields will rarely make you rich, but they're a safe bet for an above average salary. Most liberal arts will be on the lower end. Certain fields like business/marketing/finance can be hit-or-miss.
It's like the age-old silly statistic of "women make on average 70% of what men make." That's a BS number until you correlate specific jobs, specific levels of education, etc. The reality is that most women are just in lower paying fields. Which isn't to say that there isn't descrimination out there, there certainly is, but it's nowhere near as sweeping as taglines might have you believe. In fact, I believe technology feilds are known to have the least discrimination, as the criteria are usually very objective.
I personally believe there is NOTHING holding women back from technical careers except their own aprehension. It can't be the male-oriented culture, otherwise women wouldn't be making the gains that they have in previously-male-dominated fields like business, finance, and law, where the culture is a LOT more intimidating than in technology. You think you'll get hit on by the geeks in the cube farm? That's better than being blatantly sexually harassed by most of your bosses.
As a matter of fact, I don't think it's unfair to say that it's actually *easier* for women to have successful technology careers. With all the diversity initiatives floating around most companies, a woman will usually beat out a similarly-qualified man for a tech job any day. Plus all the programs for women in technology at the high school, college, graduate, and early-career levels. There's no Men In Technology day at schools, there's no Society for Male Engineers. There's no specific encouragement, there's no targeted mentoring for men in technology fields. They do it the way they always have: they want it, they work hard for it, they achieve it.
And there's no reason in the world why women can't simply do the same thing -- unless they don't want it, or don't want to work hard for it.
My sister is an Electrical Engineer. She didn't need any program like this to get into the field. She just wanted to do it, learned it, and got a job, just like anyone else would.
What's next they have a program to try to get more white males into pro basketball?
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
First, the engineering gap is not hidden. It's extremely obvious. In 10 years of sysadmin/IT work, I've never had another female in the IT/systems groups I've worked in. I've worked in edu, consulting, high tech start ups. I have a BSCS and noticed that there were only 10 other females in my graduating class (out of ~100). I have also noticed that it is a very western thing for females not to be interested in CS/EE. I have met many, many Indian and Chinese women in engineering with CS or EE backgrounds. They seem not to have any of these "inborn" differences than western women have.
So what if baby girls like to play with dolls and baby boys play with trucks. That says nada about future aptitude for CS or EE. I am the mother of a girl, and she loves playing trains and trucks and thinks dolls are a lot of fun to throw down the stairs while yelling "uhoh, my baby!". Basically, even if the brains are wired differently, I don't think it's enough of a difference to make technical work a non-starter for all females. There are some advantaged being socialized female brings to technical work; such as the ability to enjoy taking showers on a daily basis. As a sysadmin, I have noticed that users are often relieved when I work on their issues, instead of the BOFH type who is smug and condescending in his treatment of users.
I am a self taught sysadmin, I worked for 6 years before going back to school to get my CS degree. I think the main reason why we lack distaff autodidacts is that they simply do not have the confidence with machines in our culture that males do. I remember learning pascal (yes, i'm ancient) and my dad telling me "Pascal?! What is that crap, if you were a boy you'd be writing compilers in assembly" when I was 14. If that's not one of those hidden sexist cultural things which undercut one's self confidence, I'm not sure what is. I have been a linux user since 1997, and have attended several LUGs only to be hit on, disregarded, or publicly sexually harassed when giving presentations (on vi of all subjects!). It doesn't really make me want to have a lot do with LUGs.
Another issue I have observed is that males are protective of their in-groups in a professional and scholastic setting. These in-groups tend to make up the talent pool which upon which future start-ups are formed. In school we had several group projects, and none of the males in the top 2/3s of the class wanted me on their team, despite the fact that I usually placed in the top 5 on coding assignments(in class sizes of 60). It was like the third grade all over again. So there is a lot of self-segregation taking place. In fact, I'm not even sure why I'm writing this as these threads usually turn into a misogynistic circle jerk among the dominant male in-group of slashdot (and yes, I've seen many of these types of threads over the years around here).
FWIW, I totally disagree with changing classes to be more "girl" friendly as TFA suggests, that's bogus. Algorithms and computational models were my favorite classes, despite being "dry" or "boring". Math departments didn't paint math pink to get up to 30% female (3x higher than CS/EE by most counts). It's a cultural issue which must be addressed. And you can start by taking down the pr0n in the computer labs(yes, there was pr0n printed out and posted in my undergraduate computer labs, boys will be boys, right?!)
OTOH, I've found my career in IT to be satisfying and worth the trouble. It has the flexibility and high pay that a new mom needs, ironically enough. Try finding that in "women's work".
As far as I know, all evidences suggest that there are indeed inherent psychological differences between male and female. Personally I consider David Reimer to be a prime example of this. For those that don't want to read the wikipedia entry, David Reimer was a man that had his genital accidentally destroyed during infancy. He was then raised as a girl per the suggestion of Dr. John Money, who belived that psychological differences in genders are developed, not inherent. To summarize the long story, it completely failed. David Reimer resumed to live as a male once he discovered the truth and later commited sucide (which may or may not be related to his experience at youth).
You know, people have a model of their world in their heads. They judge what they experience on this model. The thing is in that model the idea of gender specific jobs, intrests, hobbies, etc is still present, although somewhat weaker than previous generations.
If you were born a generation or 2 earlier, your upbring and enviroment would have made it pretty much impossible to reach what have so far, without being an exeptional strong (and stubborn) person. This has changed for a large part, but people's world view tends to lag a bit behind.
You'll probably spend your carrier fighting this, but your (hypotetical) daughter would have it a bit easier and your (hypotetical) grand daugther would have it even easier. Just compare to voting: About a century ago, women couldn't vote. Now does anyone look strange if they seen a woman in line for passing her vote?
In my department we are making out 98% of the female IT population of Germany. I work for a IT system (mainframe) for airline RES (reservation),TKT (ticketing), WAB (weight and balance) and CKI (check-in) systems and we have a proportion of 2 male for 12 female in my department. I am the only male developer out of the 5. But the bottom line is that all of those started in the airline industry and only later went in development. We have *NO* persons which studied IT. We have mathematics, Physics, Philosophy, Religion (!), Biology, Business administration, Nurse, Smith(metal worker) formaly educated people but nobody which come from pure IT.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I don't get it [i.e. I get it, I just don't want to get it] why we should pick a group of people, now women, and a) suggest they are at a disadvantage because in a particular area males are in higher numbers and b) try to artificially generate higher proliferation just because some people think more woman presence would be nicer [hell, I'd really love to see more women at my workplace, that would be nice, for the morale and for the soul]. Despite what some extra-equality preachers say, there are areas of life where the distribution of men and women are just not equal, and why should they be ? People have much more freedom of choice these days in choosing their ways of life and their presence in some particular field, we should let them act accordingly. If we begin to artificially "help" to increase some numbers, imbalance could occur which would be harder to counter. Then, if we pick a group of people, what's to stop us from picking another later, and then another, and what we end up with is money spent in vain.
There were times [somewhat still existent] when women just could not get into some fields, but today this has changed enormously. Today even pregnancy doesn't count that much since most women have children at a much later age nowadays than they used to be one or two decades ago and they have time to establish themselves to ensure they will have a continuing career after pregnancy.
So, where do I got with this ? I don't really know. All in all, I wouldn't mind seeing a higher number of IT women, but I don't think we should treat them as being at such high disadvantage.
Ladies, please feel free to argue otherwise, I'd - and I think many of us would - really like to see whether such studies really reflect your status and wishes.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
...and does no one think that a lot of women won't get involved in engineering-type stuff because they think they'll have to constantly deal with people like the stereotypical slashdotter? Either that, or the sterotypical knuckle-dragging construction worker? We're not just talking computer-based engineering here. Or that maybe they'd just prefer sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office, rather than crawling around under a desk in 30C heat because some luser has kicked their network lead out for the 50th time? :)
Women are social creatures. They like to talk and interact. I am sure they can think of lots better things to be doing than working with guys who are convinced that they are a lot smarter, and/or who have limited social skills and/or spend all their time trying to get into said woman's pants. Well, ok, I guess all of those happen anyway, anywhere.
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
This is a tech website, so I'm going to assume that most of the readers (like myself) are male. Given that, I'm not surprised to see that most of the top rated posts as of this writing are something along the lines of "So?", "who cares?", "of course men and women are different and they'll want to choose different fields.", "why should women get special treatment?", and so on.
And you're all looking at it the wrong way.
Yes, there is are physiological and psychological differences between men and women. As children, most girls like dolls and most boys like tonka trucks. That's not at issue. The question we should be asking is this: is there *anything* in the IT industry that intrinsically and unintentionally turns girls away? And if you think that in a traditionally male-dominated field there isn't, you're not thinking. Whether its the geek version of the "old boys club", a side-effect of male-dominated engineering and science disciplines going back hundreds of years, the general attitude that women in IT are rare and "different than other women" somehow, the stench of unwashed programmers, or something else entirely, there may be reasons beyond the obvious "women prefer nurturing careers" for the gross under-representation.
As another poster mentioned, children look to their same-gendered parents as role models. The more women with careers in IT, the more young girls will look on computers from a very young age as something appropriate for them to do with their lives. So maybe it doesn't *really* matter what the gender profile of the IT worker pool is, but its hard to argue that women (at least in the US) aren't at least traditionally or culturally steered away from technical fields. That's what we need to fix. Joyce (the author of the essays) has noted that there aren't as many self-taught women, and suggested that maybe we can do something to change that. It might not work. But maybe it will. And I think it is ridiculous that so many of the people here have dismissed this as an over-reaction, unimportant, or simply being politically correct. When there's a woman president in this country, a woman quarterback playing in the superbowl, women in combat leadership positions in the military, and women's salaries in most fields are within the same range as men's salaries across the board, then you can make those arguments. Until then, look around and make sure you're not just trying to ignore the problem.
There is already a shortage of woman to geek out over things with in this field. To use a phrase I heard on discovery , "They are hunted to extinction". I don't know about everyone else, but having a 50/50 class would be nice in college, it makes "studying" so much more fun
Most women don't like engineering because it doesn't satisfy any of their desires: fashion, gossip, social status and easy money. Most are highly social, and thus, they waste their time on useless (as in "non-functional") things and don't focus. And while there are very good points in some comments regarding how men unwittingly made things easier for them and harder for women, and social conditioning/traditional role models, for example, any mind that has not been tainted by political correctness will realize there's a difference between genders besides what we have between our legs, and Summers was right. And this difference plays against engineering for women, so you'll have a many brilliant female engineers in the world wondering why they are so alone, and political correctness has atrophied their minds (especially leftists', which, as pointed out, are as bad as the religious zealots) to the point they will be unable to reason over it.
Just think of what the average random males and females talk about, even at technical jobs: for males, it'll be the newest Linux, electronics stores, geek jokes, etc. For females, it'll be fashion, fashion stores, and "I saw Rose the other day, she was with a new guy" type crap.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
In such a male dominated field women feel like they have to get qualifications in order to be seen as competent by any potential employers. Whereas men are just assumed to be competent. In one of my previous jobs I'd answer the tech support line only to be asked "Can I speak to someone technical?" whereas when my male colleague answered he never got questioned.
I don't agree that low numbers of women in engineering is in itself actually harming the software industry as a whole somehow.
Why should women get given an artificial positive advantage just because of their gender?
If anyone (man or woman) isn't competetive with their peer engineers an equal basis then they wouldn't do as good a job anyway so don't deserve a place.
From my own work experiences, female engineers do actually get treated at least as well as male engineers already. The harm done to the industry by having an uneven playing-field based on gender would be far worse than any current gender imbalance.
You need to want to be a software engineer. Its a knowledge industry. We all had to work to get to know enough to be good. In this respect, everyone already has an equal chance. why should anyone get a free leg-up based on some aspect of their DNA? This was exactly what Martin Luther King was fighting against.
The only thing holding anyone back (men or women) from entering engineering is their own misconceptions and their own wish to do something else instead.
"should not get you fired by a community that prides itself on allowing people to hold radical or controversial viewpoints."
This is a common misunderstanding. You may hold viewpoints that are considered "radical" or "controversial" by *other* segments of society.
...is plain geekiness. It is a very male preserve - I.e. favoring interaction with things and abstractions over interaction with other people. Geekiness is a rather low-status trait in today's society, unless it bears fruit in the form of cash.
Why aren't there more male nurses entering the workforce? And why is it when they try to, they find that they are demeaned by the male coworkers (doctors, etc.), their female coworkers (forced to have a matron shadow him even though he is fully qualified) and discriminated against by the patients (the right to demand a female nurse)?
Maybe it's just one of those things and we have to accept it? Most women I know have other things to do with their free time than contribute to Open Source projects. It's made worse by the fact that in a lot of marriages or long term parternships, the woman does more than 50% of the work around the house. Where does this leave her time to write free code, even if she wanted to ?
"Women in general tend to be unimpressed by those whose ego exeeds their abilities"
Really? I would like some hard evidence for that - preferably some really hard evidence.
My take is rather that women are impressed with alpha males, not by the betas that mostly make up the geek population. Geeks are simply more interested in tech than alphas (who like to manage, not going deep into a single subject). Hence, geeks are generally the ones who advance technology, while alphas rule the roost.
Marry me :-)
There are quite a few programs to encourage men to become nurses.
The internet is not inside the US.
the stench of unwashed programmers, or something else entirely
/not saying women do prefer daintier environments naturally //just pointing out that geeks-make-good-programmers ///women can be geeks, saying that geeks turn them away from such fields is equivalent to saying they don't prefer the field ////yes I'm using fark slashies /////they feel good
I've noticed this a lot. The stereotype (correct as it may be) of the computer programmer. Socially dysfunctional, bad hygiene, etc. Well guess what, perhaps that comes hand-in-hand with an occupation that requires such time and focus on one thing. Saying that this is somehow unfair because women prefer "daintier" environments and thus claiming that it is discrimination is a contradiction in concepts.
It is amazing just how many people still deny this basic fact. That individuals, not the group they belong to, are responsible for their own achievements.
Eugenics is still alive and well in today's society. It's arguably even stronger now with more and more people citing genetics, medical science and above all statistics to show that group A is inferior/superior to Group B. Women are "not as good" at mathematics and the sciences. Men are "not as good" at raising children.
Sweeping statements like this are an insult to hard working and high achieving individuals in every group. If my ethic or gender group is found to score highly on some metric, does that mean that somehow my performance has increased overnight? How many people would argue that my abilities increase when others in my "group" perform better? Should I be paid more because my neighbour works harder?
And yet, people do make these decisions in the negative direction. If my group is found to score lower on some metric, then, invariably, my performance and abilities have been deemed to decrease overnight. Hard working individuals are penalised every day by misconstrument, and indeed in many cases, deliberate misinterpretation of basic probability and statistics.
Consider the following. Toss a coin and let it land on the ground. What is the probability that the coin is heads up?
If you answered 1/2, you do not understand basic probability theory, or statistics.
Now, consider that you have two candidates for an engineering/CS/science/mathematics position standing before you. One of the candidates is a woman, the other is a man. What is the probability that the man is a better candidate than the woman?
And that is why modern eugenics is fundamentally flawed.
May the Maths Be with you!
Excuse me, but how to take women seriously when they are so superficial? their interests are about fashion, who is in love with who, what the neighbour did etc. Granted, there are lots of superficial men, guys who are only interested in sports and cars and the latest tech gadgets, but usually these men have something to say when they are part of a serious discussion. Have you ever been in a discussion where women have a deep analysis of a subject? any subject...it is no coincidence that most great philosophers were men.
And this view is not racist or trolling. I am not saying that women are not capable of deep analytical thinking; I am saying that women do not choose to think in a deep way.
If you check all the big TV hits worldwide, lots of them are soap-opera looking-through-the-keyhole types of shows: the big brother, survivor, etc. The latest TV fashion is the 'Maria the ugly' with incredibly huge numbers in many countries. And guess what gender is the audience? mostly female! the TV is flooded with garbage because women like that garbage; that garbage is emotional pleasing for them, and of course the men that are behind those shows know very well how to take advantage of it.
Furthermore, religion, astrology, taro cards etc are things that are mostly propagated by women.
Very few women read a political newspaper everyday. Out of the few people that read a newspaper, most are men.
Women, perhaps by nature, perhaps due to how the society has worked so far, are only interested in the emotional side of things, which is usually superficial, and very non-scientific.
I am not saying that women are incapable of doing so, perhaps they are victims.
I would also like to say that I have worked with female software engineers. They were very capable people, but they lacked the capability to do anything outside of the norm; a situation like programmers from India, if you know what I mean. They lacked the fire, the spirit, the joy to solve a difficult problem, to make the perfect design, to design a good API, a good UI, a good program.
Personally, until women stand up and reject the garbage thrown at them, I will look at them in a not-very-serious manner. CS/IT/programming are fields that require discipline, logical thinking, analytical capability, synthesizing capability, and most importantly the spark to make the world a well-ordered place. If you don't have those attributes, or don't exercise them, if you happily accept everything thrown at you without criticism, then you get no respect from me and people like me.
And a note to those women that read this: being logical and analytical does not mean to be emotionless. Showing joy when you see a friend, smiling to good news and being sad to bad news is part of our everyday experience for all people. Many women reject us programmers because we tend to shatter their illusion of how the world ticks through our logical and analytical comments...that does not mean we are emotionless of incapable of love.
I have been subject to most of the problems which you list. Its just life. Everybody has to put up with that shit. The "She's just a woman" remark is pretty bad, I agree.
Shit happens. Sorry about that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
99% of condom wearers are male.
Most women prefer to be with men that are not stuck in their own heads. Some people are too intelligent for their own good.
"Deep thinking?" In tech?
Then you dismiss astrology, religion and a bunch of other interesting parts of life. Did you know Einstein and Newton and most of the deep thinkers in history, studied and praised such institutions that you so handily dismiss?
Dismissing what you never have studied or experienced, just amounts to dogma. That is the superficial way, and hardly scientific.
An overly sceptical mind will never be the inventor or discoverer. It requires faith to do what most cant do.
My studies also indicate that very few eskimoes from Cambodia enter the field of Engineering. I propose that IBM offer full-time internships and guaranteed jobs to all.
The sheer volume of clothes that she seems to be able to fit in the closet is an engineering feet *I* could never duplicate.
I doubt she could write software though, because there is no celebrity gossip in gcc. Fix that and I'm sure many female programmers will emerge.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I'm guessing you weren't taken seriously because (and this is where you get all pissed off), you just weren't that good at it. You just didn't have that intuitive feel for seeing the problem and understanding what it will take to solve it. You didn't have that drive to make something better no matter waht.
This field is not terribly sensitive to things like degrees and training, and people who push that kind of stuff usually just aren't cut out of the field. It's a field very much like music where you either are really good or your suck. And you suck until you're really good. That's terrible on egos. It breaks people. I see it all the time.
This isn't a women/man thing, it's an aptitude & desire thing. The people who do well in IT are not only smart in a very peculiar way, they love it so much *they can't imagine doing anything else*. I've run into some women like that, I've run into slightly more men like that.
The only way women are discriminated against is by being helped more, this similar to affirmative action which does not discriminate against the minority but the majority. The fact is that most women are interested in different fields it has nothing to do with them being steered into a different field, higher level high school math classes have as many women as men so they are introduced to the same things but are not be interested in the same fields.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I used to be a true Geek, but 1 day I snapped and realized that I was more talented and motivated by the social sciences. I did the switch, trying to go back to school I was trying to find funds to pay for my schooling. I could easily find grants for women going in Technology, But couldn't manage to find 1 for a guy going into the a "women program". Anyhow... had to drop out of University, even tough I had student loans I could not afford to pay for an apartment, tuition, food, and maintain sanity.
My uncientific survey duggests I am 6'4", drive a Porsche 356, and I once stuck gum under a table when nobody was looking.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
While discussing to Harvey Korman's tagline in "Blazing Saddles"
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Has anybody ever thought that maybe there is only a small percentage of women that WANT to work in engineering and IT fields?
A lot of people are saying that the sexes are inherently different, and we shouldn't try artificially to force them to become the same. If we were talking about nursemaids or prison guards, that might be a valid point. It's conceivable to imagine that, despite the fact that humans come with immensely flexible brains, there is just enough evolutionarily-inbuilt predisposition to, say, nurturing in one case, or violence in another case, that we should expect these careers to be gender-inbalanced. Of course, there is no scientific evidence to support this, but it's at least plausible.
Engineering and computer science, on the other hand, are just white collar jobs like any other. If you look at people who are at the top of any such field, they're all pretty much the same: they are smart, they are good at solving problems, and they enjoy what they do. So maybe some people enjoy making money, and some enjoy making programs, and some enjoy making businesses, but there's no reason to imagine that evolution has predisposed certain genders to care more about certain fields. That's like saying girls "naturally" prefer pink over blue; the only thing that could possibly influence that choice is culture.
What may be true is that women prefer jobs that involve more job security, more social aspects, and more respect from their coworkers. But surely nobody thinks that being antisocial is a requirement for being a good programmer? The culture of computer science is a result of the field being dominated by men, and is in no way related to the actual practice of computer science.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
Offering a one year program to (ideally) give women the skills to get a job in tech is awfully fuzzy sounding... But you can't build the skills in technology you need in one year. I don't think the barrier is that trivial. Nor do I think it's cosmetic, or based at the employers. Generally, it seems that girls aren't ever encouraged and/or interested in technology starting at a young age. The girls who become women who are phenomenal techs followed much the same path as the men who are phenomenal techs; they started young, pursued what they liked, and became good at it.
last semester, I took an undergraduate course; the first week, one of the other women in the class was lamenting the fact that so many male students were always telling her she shouldn't be in CSE because she was a girl, and it was a "man's field."
Engineering undergrads are not really known for their social grace. What you witnessed was their clumsy, inept attempt at a mating ritual.
>>In such a male dominated field women feel like they have to get qualifications in order to be seen as competent by any potential employers. Whereas men are just assumed to be competent
That statement is simply not true. I have worked in IT for 27 years. I have eight years of college, degrees in math, comp sci, and business admin, and half a dozen certs. And even with that and all of my experience, I have, at times, been out of work for several months at a time. Nobody just assumes I'm competent for any particular job. Nor have I ever seen any case where men are just assumed to be competent.
When equal numbers of people are as concerned about equal male representation in teaching and nursing as they are about equal female representation in engineering and science then I'll believe that equality is the actual goal. Until that time, there is no issue.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Since the gender gap in engineering is caused by self-selection, one must conclude that women are sexist.
Women are more social then men are, it is their nature.
This is not a problem, it is how we are, and it doesn't need 'fixing'.
It is one thing to be able tp get the same jobs men have(and a good thing), it is another thing to want to be like men.
Anyone who thinks men and women are the same is foolish. Neither is greater, just different.
I would like to see more women engineers, but because they would be different and have unique view points.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> she asks why there are so many self-taught male software
> engineers in startups, but no similar pool of women. In A
> Modest Proposal, she discusses a potential short-term fix to
> the problem: a one-year, co-op, certificate-granting program
> for women set up and sponsored by Silicon Valley companies.
Interesting... So the solution to the lack of self-taught females is... to teach them.
I surely hope this person won't be getting a new grant next year.
You seem to have the conclusion that only legos teach 3-d thinking. Watch a child layout the positions of horses, and other farm animals and you will relize that they are also thinking 3-d.
However, matel has been trying to get boys to want there dolls and easy bake ovens for years. It has not had any change in sales to males.
My daughter has full access to Lego. She perfers not to play with them. Her desire to play with animals and dolls comes from her. Her desire for pink is all her.
ON a side note, I conducted an informal survey. Less then half the engineers I talked to played with legos seriously* as a child. Granted , it was only 150 engineers, but it does support what I believe is the myth that Lego has some magic ability to create engineers.
*Built anything more then tall stack of bricks or some sort of gun.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's funny, i've never seen any such research. Have you? I don't even see why you could assume such a ridiculous thing. Women and men aren't separate species, first off. Second, men all carry an X chromosome passed on by their mothers, which they in turn pass to their daughters. Women carry two X chromosomes, one of which passes to both their male and female offspring. So your premise is ridiculous. There's so much intermingling between male and female genetics, that it's absurd on it's face.
Please, go read a basic textbook on biology.
There are lives at stake here!
I notice that the math and comp-sci departments are smaller and more close-knit, it might create a more hostile envirement?
Want your kid to be more interested in sciences and engineering? Take away the doll and give her Legos.
....
Yeah, that's great parenting. She can't have both? My girls do.
What a weird culture we've become. Yeah, take away their dolls, because we don't want to encourage mothering. When the girls grow up, they can just hire some other woman to take care of their children.
Except that oops; *their* parents took away their dolls too, and they all want to be in business, science, etc., not daycare. So now we don't have enough day care providers, and the ones we do have are too expensive (because in high demand). So now we need a big government program to pay for daycare
Does anyone else find this whole premise hysterical?
Problem: There aren't enough self-taught female engineers.
Solution: pour money on the problem to establish a "coop" whose goal is to pay for other people to teach female engineers.
Self-defeating and stupid. The reason there aren't more self-taught female engineers is because even the female engineers who claim to be self-taught favor creating programs where others teach females as their de facto first solution to the "problem."
I have an idea! Since there aren't enough self-motivated female engineers, we just need to offer them financial incentives and then they, too, will be self-motivated!
:)
And since when has the gender gap in engineering been hidden? And at my university, of the women who WERE engineers, it looked like someone had come through the department with the ugly stick...
If you're feeling offended right now, you need to stop and realize that you COULD have thought "this doesn't apply to me", but that's not what you thought... Do something to boost that self-confidence
My girlfriend does. Not happily: she curses and yells a lot, especially when one of her friends has a link to a Flash 9 Damned Thing, but she uses it.
Mostly that's because her anti-spyware-infested Windows machine refuses to connect to my network, but hey, that's not MY problem... and we illustrate yet again part of why women don't like IT so much.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I honestly don't see the point of this. Self-taught engineers tend not to bother with certifications.
It's because of interest, which can easily be checked. Watch girls and boys play. Girls will have "Mommy and baby trucks" and boys will have Barbie fights even if you switch their favorite toys around.
Women find social aspects of technology fascinating and useful. Your average 17 year old girl will be quite adept at customizing her MySpace profile, texting her friends, etc. but utterly disinterested in the differences between Linux and Windows. Because her goal is a means to socializing with her friends not the technology as a tool in and of itself. Women in Law and Medicine (arcane and difficult fields) make up either the majority or near majority of Law and Med students. Undergrads in many Colleges are skewed female 55% and male 45%.
Men follow tech as a rule because the rewards of abstruse, isolated, individual problem solving give them positive feedback. "I solved it! I rule!" Which is far different from "I hang out with my friends, and do good things for people by finding out what's wrong with them."
This can be seen with women loving Medical shows and men liking problem-solving crime shows.
Trying to get more women into engineering is useless. The profession itself demands individual focus and little group interaction and thus has little appeal for MOST (certainly not all) women. Some women will pursue a career in Engineering or other individual-oriented tech fields. Some men are as tall as Shaq. That doesn't mean that all men can play Center in the NBA.
Social interaction is extremely important for women, less so for men. There are likely important cultural and evolutionary biological differences for this disparity. Which are pretty obvious if you think about it. Women require a large support group for children, men face competition with other men in producing descendants. Unless Darwin got it wrong or evolution applies to every other living thing except humans (I know, icky science wasn't supposed to teach us anything just kill God) these sex differences are likely to remain.
Regardless of how many useless programs there are to turn women into problem-obsessed individualists and men into socialized group-oriented people.
[Reality check -- how many young men customize their MySpace pages, and how many young women want the latest Linux Distro?]
Let's make friends with black people too!
(PS. I can't believe I need to say this, but that site is satire, ie, it is a joke... It's not making fun of black or white people, but of racism itself :P)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Statistically, when you look at female and male intelligence, women have more scores in the middle three standard deviations. Men are more prone to occasional extremes. This doesn't mean that there aren't women at those extremes, who are every bit as spatially talented as their male counterparts; their just aren't as many. And those extremes are rarefied enough that they should not affect percentages in the workplace to the extent seen in science and technology.
Now, going from the broad to the specific, speaking as a woman: I have an IQ five standard deviations from the norm. 182-WAIS, 188-Binet, 230-Cattell; higher than 99.999998% of the population, male or female. (My hands validate the testosterone-in-the-womb theory, btw.) I'm a white female in Texas who's learned programming on punch cards, has been putting together systems for ages, studied math and physics, self-taught in sys admin, programming, a guru of information science who's been consistently ahead of the curve in cognitive data design. But I'm a middle-aged white female. Middle-aged white females aren't tech gurus in Texas; and while I'm a little heavier now than ten years ago, ten years ago I was extremely attractive (at least judging from male responses), which made it worse.
Things I've been told:
- Why does a pretty girl like you want to study physics? [from a PhD.]
- A face like yours belongs in sales, not the lab [at a medical service job where I wanted to apply my technical skills]
- I don't think the girls need to worry about updating the computers [at a job where I offered to perform the simple task of updating Windows machines that hadn't been updated in over a year. Adding insult to injury, I was 40 at the time; far from a "girl".]
- You're a woman? Wow, you're really good at this [speaking of basic IT support; two months ago at a major semiconductor corporation. Frequently coworkers who only know me via email think I'm male because my first name can be applied to either gender; everything is great till they find out I'm female. This also happens while job hunting.]
There are fewer self-taught female engineers in the field because we can't get hired! I've been trying for years to get a job that used most of my tech skill set, and I've seen self-taught males with less experience get senior management positions while I'm told "there's just nothing available right now". I'm told I interview well when I can get that far; in the lower-end tech jobs I can get, I'm typically evaluated as professional, with great people skills, exceptional problem-solving abilities, and an outstanding work ethic.What's sad is that I think some of the people who don't hire me for the jobs I'm qualified to do are posting on
*sigh*
Women also are going into grooming, farm veterinary, even ranching because they tend to like animals. These jobs pay poorly.
Women dominate child care, which is extremely low paying, because many of them like children.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Well, I wish I worked in your area. While when I get a tech job I'm typically treated well, I'm also (a) not promoted as much as men, (b) seen less-experienced, less-skilled men get offered high-end positions, (c) repeatedly encountered people who are surprised that their competent technical support was female, (d) been actively discouraged from pursuing a science career, (e) been asked why someone as attractive as me was working in an IT job. And those same guys who treat me nicely also (for the most part, not always) offer to help me much more than they do each other, as if I would need it more. Despite this, reality frequently finds me being the person doing the helping, because I'm underemployed and therefore more skilled than my team members.
Statistically, when you look at female and male intelligence, women have more scores in the middle three standard deviations. Men are more prone to occasional extremes. This doesn't mean that there aren't women at those extremes, who are every bit as spatially talented as their male counterparts; their just aren't as many. And those extremes are rarefied enough that they should not affect percentages in the workplace to the extent seen in science and technology. Without paying attention to gender, the average IQ (WAIS) of MDs and PhDs is a mere 125; there are tons of women well over that level with more than enough spatial ability to handle computer engineering.
Now, going from the broad to the specific, speaking as a woman: I have an IQ five standard deviations from the norm. 182-WAIS, 188-Binet, 230-Cattell; higher than 99.999998% of the population, male or female. (My hands validate the testosterone-in-the-womb theory, btw.) I'm a white female in Texas who's learned programming on punch cards, has been putting together systems for ages, studied math and physics, self-taught in sys admin, programming, a guru of information science who's been consistently ahead of the curve in cognitive data design. But I'm a middle-aged white female. Middle-aged white females aren't tech gurus in Texas; and while I'm a little heavier now than ten years ago, ten years ago I was extremely attractive (at least judging from male responses), which made it worse.
Things I've been told:
- Why does a pretty girl like you want to study physics? [from a PhD.]
- A face like yours belongs in sales, not the lab [at a medical service job where I wanted to apply my technical skills]
- I don't think the girls need to worry about updating the computers [at a job where I offered to perform the simple task of updating Windows machines that hadn't been updated in over a year. Adding insult to injury, I was 40 at the time; far from a "girl".]
- You're a woman? Wow, you're really good at this [speaking of basic IT support; two months ago at a major semiconductor corporation. Frequently coworkers who only know me via email think I'm male because my first name can be applied to either gender; everything is great till they find out I'm female. This also happens while job hunting.]
There are fewer self-taught female engineers in the field because we can't get hired! I've been trying for years to get a job that used most of my tech skill set, and I've seen self-taught males with less experience get senior management positions while I'm told "there's just nothing available right now". I'm told I interview well when I can get that far; in the lower-end tech jobs I can get, I'm typically evaluated as professional, with great people skills, exceptional problem-solving abilities, and an outstanding work ethic.What's sad is that I think some of the people who don't hire me for the jobs I'm qualified to do are posting on
*sigh*
[Note: I tried to post this as a thread and it didn't take, but a comment reply did afterward. If it reappears below, my apologies for the repetition.]
Right there with you! I can't tell you how many times I've been congratulated on how skilled I am "for a woman" (even though I'm better than all the males in my dept.) or been asked why I'm interested in science/technology, because isn't that strange for a woman? My ideas are dismissed, but praised when stolen by men; my accomplishments are diminished; my skills are ignored. Being a techie female is not something you do for anything except love of tech, because the hurdles thrown in our way are significant.
Grrr. Argh.
Who says women *must* be forced into engineering if they don't want to enter on their own?
It makes about as much sense as limiting the number of men who can be in Marketing.
BWilde
Did you even read that link? Sweden hasn't banned any research, not according to that story. What they've done is they've engaged in censorship of research they disapprove of for political reasons. Also, I'm a bit fuzzy on how the county government is threatening "no money and no book". It sounds more like the county was involved in the book's publication, and is threatening to pull support, which is different. (The article is vague, and I don't speak Swedish.)
So, to recap: Sweden bans research! Well, no, but they're censoring a book! Well, no, but they're threatening to cancel a book they were going to publish!
Hey, it's the Massive Conspiracy Involving the Entire Scientific Community! Shouldn't you be out denying climate change or something?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I hope you'll be kind enough to point out your history of protesting legacy admissions to prestigious universities, as they serve only to fluff the egos of descendants of alumni, and take valuable space away from more talented students who could fill the same spot. Or do you only get all high-horse about discrimination when you sense that you might be losing some of your privilege?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Schools are biased against girls. By all means, let's not do anything to change that; it might hurt boys!
That's a pretty jaundiced, zero-sum view of things, isn't it? Shouldn't it make sense that there might be some sort of compromise? Or perhaps that what you think of as innate differences in learning style might not be so innate?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yeah, why should women become engineers? Maybe their inherent biologically-given talents are more suited to pushing a vacuum cleaner, or picking up my dirty socks, or scrubbing pots and pans. Certainly I've never had a burning desire to do any of those things, and women have historically spent a lot of time doing them. I guess women choose to be sock-picker-uppers. Because they're better sock-picker-uppers. I mean, that's an important profession. Whatever. Just so long as I don't have to put up with those goddamn skirts at work. Probably all want to sue me for some sexual harassment PC bullshit.
Shit, did I say that out loud? I meant to say something smugly Dave Sim-ish about "emotional thinking", possibly with reference to the Male Light and the Female Void.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It sounds like you'd enjoy the soothing sounds of Dave Sim. At least you're pretty up-front about thinking that ownership of a uterus and tits prevents one from being an intellectual.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm thinking of setting up Linux for my significant other. I'm a bit worried about the learning curve, but all the applications on the current Windows machine are portable (Firefox, Gaim, Gimp) and really, I'd be quite willing to be local tech support.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yes, by gum, I couldn't think of a reason why nobody's clamoring to get men into low-paying, non-prestigious jobs the same way they're trying to get women into high-paying, prestigious careers. I mean, it's just a total mystery to me. I mean, where's the cry to get men into housework? Damn it, someone's going to have to pick up my dirty socks!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Maybe a metaphor will help you understand the implications of what you're saying.
Here, let's pretend that instead of saying that women are inherently nurturing (and by implication suck at high-paying, prestigious jobs outside the high-end call girl industry), you said that black people are inherently inclined to hilarity, musically talented, and athletic (and by implication suck at high-paying, prestigious jobs outside the entertainment industry).
Black people are more entertaining than whites are, it is their nature. This is not a problem, it is how we are, and it doesn't need fixing. It is one thing to get the same jobs whites have (and a good thing), it is another thing to want to be like whites. Anyone who thinks blacks and whites are the same is foolish. Neither is greater, just different. I would like to see more black engineers, but because they would be different and have unique view points.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It's been pretty well established, I think, that there's either no significant biologically gender-based aptitude difference, or that it's so small as to be irrelevant to this discussion.
That leaves us with only one answer: social considerations. There are two pieces to this:
First, as several of the comments on this thread make obvious, the science and engineering fields are still very sexist. Any woman who enters these fields has, as a result, a tougher time gaining the respect of her peers. And within science particularly, respect of one's peers is a major motivational force.
Second, women -- whether through biology, socialization, or some combination of the two -- tend to have a greater need for positive social interaction than do men. The general perception of the scientific and engineering fields is that they are inherently anti-social. When people unfamiliar with the fields imagine, say, an engineer, they conjure an image of a guy hunched over a model (or computer, or drawing board, etc.), deep in thought.
If you're a person who values social interaction, that image is likely to turn you away; and if you're technically/mathematically inclined, there are other more "social" careers (like medicine and law) to turn to.
Perhaps if the engineering and science communities want to attract more women to their fields, they should concentrate on putting the collaborative, interactive qualities more into the public consciousness. And maybe, just maybe, that includes actually being more collaborative as well.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
I had previously applied for an IT job at an area women-only college (which, on a side note, offers absolutely no computing-related classes). I perfectly matched the requirements (it was entry level -- pretty much glorified help desk), followed up with a call on my application, the whole shebang. Everything I've done since then to get every job I've applied for.
But no, I didn't get the job. Instead, they hired a woman with virtually no qualifications (school, work, etc..). I figured that she may have had extensive undocumented experience that came out in an interview or something. My girlfriend attends this college, so one night I was given the opportunity to go to their IT department to explain an issue she was having with her laptop. Of course, I got to talk to the woman that they had hired.
And she had no. freaking. clue.
She even said, "if you'd like to leave it, we can have Mark look at it tomorrow", where Mark is the only male employee in their IT department.
I really had absolutely no problem with them hiring a woman, PROVIDED she had a better skill set than I did. Not only that, but she was a complete b*tch about helping with the issue. My guess is she just wanted to get us out of there, before her incompetency became too apparent. Too late.
It wouldn't have bothered me that much if I hadn't wanted that job as much as I did. I really feel like I was discriminated against.
And really, if the same thing is happening to women at other places in the IT field (with preference being given to men instead of women -- the inverse of the story above), I know how it feels. You have my utmost sympathies.
So, discrimination in hiring should be prosecuted. Ah, but how do you fight something like this? Evidence of discrimination, right? But how could that be shown without doing the sort of controlled survey that the researchers did? How could you counter that? What's your solution?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I can't tell you how many times I've been congratulated on how skilled I am "for a woman" (even though I'm better than all the males in my dept.) or been asked why I'm interested in science/technology, because isn't that strange for a woman?
Well, it is unusual for a woman to be so skilled, and it is an unusual field for women to be interested in. That's what the article is about. So what's the problem? Why shouldn't they congratulate you on your skills, or wonder why you chose tech?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Legal or not, are you or are you not of the opinion that it's equally immoral to give preference to legacy applicants as it is to give preference to women or minorities?
My "major malfunction" is that your definition of meritocratic seems to be offended solely by offenses against your (I'll eat my hat if you're not) male privilege. The idea that a fellow man might get a leg up through no merit of his own doesn't seem to bother you at all. If the idea of the skirts taking up all the spaces at college gives you the vapors, then say that, but don't dress it up in this nonsense about being a prejudice-free paragon of equality.
Well, no, because not all white people are offspring of Harvard alumni. What does that have to do with anything? There are female and non-white legacy applicants to Harvard. Do you understand how the legacy system works? Legacy status, like minority status, does not provide anyone with guaranteed admission and a free ride; it simply moves them up the line, putting them ahead of people who scored higher on purely meritocratic metrics.
You're not employing me, reviewing my college application or selling me a house; do you even know what discrimination means in this context? But if you're going to namecall, you could at least have the courtesy to address my points. Legacy admissions are, in your system of reckoning, exactly as immoral as lowering admissions requirements for women or racial minorities. You're dodging the question here; do you or do you not oppose the legacy system, and if so, could you point out where you've inveighed against it in the past?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Millions of years of evolution lead the way toward dying from violence, illness or infection before thirty, toward falling apart after fifty and toward forming in-groups and out-groups for the purpose of dehumanizing the latter, and committing atrocities on them. Also toward women spending most of their time pregnant, with a truly staggering infant mortality rate. These things "are natural", as you say. If you're going to argue for biology implying destiny, you're going to have to start complaining about the unnatural distortions of our true human nature induced by antibiotics, birth control, clothing, and democracy.
Either that, or you're using biology as a thinly-veiled excuse for misogyny. Hmm, I wonder which it is. Given that you're not off nakedly eating roots and rabbits in the forest, I'm going to stick with the misogyny thing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Because behind all these comments lies the erroneous understanding that men belong in the field more than women. Instead of being compared to women who don't work in my field, I should be compared to men who work in it. Instead of being compared to women who aren't interested in tech, I should be compared to others who are. "What's a pretty girl like you doing studying physics/doing sys admin/programming/lab work?"(pick any one, I've heard versions of them in all areas) is not a compliment or a joke. It's particularly not funny when it comes from someone in charge of my ability to be promoted or graded, and who promotes men I've trained above me because "they're just better suited" - no further details to be provided.
It comes as no surprise at all to me that women don't want to have serious conversations with you, though.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
...is to say that somebody has no right to complain about something because they are not complaining about something else.
Hence, people whining about how Larry David's wife complains about people driving hummers, when she rides in personal jets. And other people complaining about how Scott Adams lampoons middle management, while he supposedly "extolls" upper management and corporate crime. And now your post.
If you don't have something meaningful and useful to say, don't say anything at all.
People generally look down on females as IT people because the large majority of females tend not to grasp more complex IT-related concepts (or so people generally assume). My girlfriend (who ran linux with fluxbox wm as her main OS for quite a while) is the only one out of all the females I know who don't simply use their computer for The Sims, email, web surfing (myspace) and chat, if not even less than that.
/.'ers here can relate.
As a result of people having this sort of stereotype in their head about females not knowing or caring about "techie stuff", any girl who IS adept with IT-related things is guaranteed to be met with total resistance, doubt and ignorance.
In fact, it's very simply narrowed down to the fact that when you do something that is uncommon or "different", people tend to approach that with caution, doubt, disbelief and/or hostility.
What you have described in your post is a type of situation essentially all people face constantly as the unique portions of their personalities collide against peoples' idea of "societal norms" and so on. Unfortunately, no matter how much you complain about it or get pissed off, people are going to keep doing it for the rest of their lives. I assure you I've experienced the same thing basically my entire life, and I'm sure pretty much all of the
I'd suggest you lurk, rather than post, because you just reinforce the "Americans are stupid" meme. It's fine to listen to the grown ups talk, but don't pipe in.
It's not a diversionary tactic, it's pointing out rank hypocrisy. In your examples: Larry David's wife is a hypocrite. This does not mean that her causes are without merit; it's a statement on how much these principles really mean to her. Scott Adams' unwillingness to piss off his corporate overlords by limiting his critiques to local annoyances of office life and remaining mum on the larger structural injustices doesn't mean his observations aren't valid; it does mean he's not a clear-eyed, serious critic of our society.
Likewise, I never said he had no right to complain. I stated that it seemed unlikely that Lord Ender has, as he claims, a pure desire for a meritocratic society which is informing his position against these programs. Rather, I hypothesized that he might be acting out of prejudices he himself was unaware of, and might be indulging in a sort of hypocrisy. Of course, this says nothing at all about whether affirmative action is good; my point is only that under his purported system of morality, both should be equally offensive. I asked if he agreed with me because I wanted to know if he really did hold the morals he claimed, or was using them as a fig leaf to cover something more distasteful.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm a bit confused about what this has to do with schools being made friendlier to girls, and how addressing the problem of pervasive anti-intellectualism and bullying in schools would hurt girls' chances. (Girls have problems with bullying too, though it's expressed differently.) I'm quite interested in your thoughts on the issues you've brought up, though.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Overall, I think that the nature vs. nurture argument on this question is done. Yes, men and women think differently. No, this doesn't predispose us to certain occupations because all problems can be looked at and solved from different perspectives. Yes, there is still some sexism (and racism) in many fields. No, not all men in IT are sexist.
Finally, I think that history has shown that affirmative action programs and quotas do not solve cultural problems. While we shouldn't ignore these problems, education is what fixes them, not laws or mandates. Statistics show us that sexism still exists and that it is less than it was 25 years ago, and then it was less than it was 25 years before that. How many people have you met under 40 years old that were sexist? How many people over 40?
The problem won't fix itself, but people will fix it. We have been fixing it my entire life. It's time to give people credit for shaping culture, as we have been doing for millions of years, and stop trying to foist our responsibilities off on governments and corporations. I imagine that by the time my five year gets a job, discrimination in the IT field will be virtually non-existent, because people will ensure that.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mohandas Gandhi
Yes, biology is powerful, :)
but don't discount the power of television brainwashing.
Have you tried PINK legos? PINK mathematics?
I haven't seen so much crap posted since the last global warming/creationism article. At least half of slashdot thinks it's still the 1950's but with iPods.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I agree that there are cultural/societal biases about what boys and girls should be interested in (at least in the US, and I believe elsewhere, too, although I only have firsthand experience in the US).
However, my personal estimation of how much external factors (i.e., nurture, like parents, friends, siblings, etc.) affect what kids are interested in has dropped a lot since having kids myself and seeing my nephews grow. My wife and I have both been amazed at how much of their interests and personalities are built in right "out of the box".
Are there things we can do to make IT more approachable to females? Almost certainly. But even if we were completely equitable in how we treated male vs. female, I don't think we should necessarily expect 50/50 in any field, including IT.
The only reason that I'm responding to you is to let you know that talking about stay at home moms vs. going back to work is a huge pandora's box and a flamefest waiting to happen. Every woman seems to have an opinion on this, and whatever hers is, it must be the only One True Way for every other woman. Huge flamefests ensue.
The bottom line is that some women want to be stay at home moms. Some women want to work. Both situations have their advantages and disadvantages; yet very few people recognize this.
And as a counterexample to your "every woman wants to get knocked up so she don't have to work no more" theory, my wife will readily acknowledge that she is not cut out to be a stay at home mom. She finds her job to be very exciting; and if she had to stay home with the kids, she'd go nuts. In fact, I know quite a few stay at home moms who absolutely hate it, but don't have a choice because they don't make enough to pay for daycare, or their husbands pressure them to stay home with the kids, etc. You should see what happens when daddy gets home in those households: Daddy gets all the kids shoved into his hand, and Mommy walks straight out the door to get out of that house and regain her sanity.
My wife would be one of those people, if she had to stay at home. Fortunately, my wife and I both earn enough that paying for daycare is not a hardship. Otherwise, she would be miserable.
Moral of the story: before you get married, you might want to see what your potential spouse's views are on the subject (and about kids in general). It could save you from a lot of stress down the road.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Can you tell me what the benefit is in giving a little plus to someone who is underrepresented?
I'm not trolling here, but I just feel compelled to ask folks who value diversity why they do. I have been around the block a few times, and I have worked on teams that were all white males. I have worked on teams where I was the only white male. And I've worked on everything in between. My personal experience is that a team's diversity level is not a positive factor, and neither is it a negative factor. In fact, I've found the team's diversity makeup to be completely irrelevant to the productivity and success of the team.
So this is why I like to ask people who value diversity why they do. I have not found it to be something worth going out of my way to achieve.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Let's see - boys are less socially driven, to the extent that they are drugged to act like girls in the grammar and middle school. Boys have more trouble in social situations, including a much higher percentage classified as Ausbergers. Engineering schools have an unusually high percentage of high-performing Ausbergers - which includes an ability to obsess on problems like algorithm design. The complement is an disability in reading the social scene, in interpreting emotions from looking at faces that maleffects performance in social scenarios. Many high-performing ausbergers have trouble perforing many social scenarios. In extreme cases, their symptoms sound an awful lot like...the overwight bearded nerd living in Mom's basement described above. But don't worry, by medicalizing the character attributes that lead to sucess in professions that require obsession, the schol psychatrists should be able, in a generation, with apropriate early and agressive use of drugs, entirely to eliminate the tendency of men to go into these professions. We will then acheive balance, and be able to out-source the rest of this troubling profession abroad. Or perhaps, instead of treating the boys, society can agressively drug the girls until they get Ausbergers [male brains]...but I'm not holding my breath.
I felt bad about my reply so I'm apologizing. You were insulting me, wrong and I hadn't had my coffee yet. I generally don't snap like that.
You didn't address my point that the article was written by Americans about Americans. I work all over the place, including the US, but my citizenship is Canadian, like you. Finally, I suggest a more tolerant approach about the topic in general. I used to be sort of confrontational about US-centrism until someone pointed out this faq
Man, you really need that seminar!
Same thing happened to me, and I'm male. I'm just sayin'.
Regarding your suspect career advice, remember that a lot has changed in the last 30 years. I can't imagine a parent, in 2007, advising his or her daughter to be a bank teller. I have certainly not offered this advice to my daughter.
Ok, here are some of the many things I got to deal with in school:
- In early primary school, my teacher told me I was learning-disabled because I couldn't write legibly. Even had me tested for disability, and I cheated on the test because I didn't really feel like being tossed into special ed. Now we know that boys' development of fine motor coordination lags behind that of girls. I wonder what would have become of my life had I not cheated on that test?
- My fifth grade teacher was ruthless to all the boys in her class. She would make at least one cry on a daily basis (myself included). All of the girls, of course, were her little angels.
- My seventh grade composition teacher routinely gave better grades to stories written about ponies, etc., than, say, sports.
- My eleventh grade American Literature teacher constantly derided authors that she considered to be "dead white males". She routinely made derogatory comments toward men, in general.
- My school's entire history curriculum could be renamed from "history" to "awful things white males did and continue to do, and why the world would be better ruled by women".
- My state's boys' gymnastics program was eliminated because of Title IX. My college's baseball program was eliminated for the same reason.
I could go on, but I really don't feel like it. Know why? Because, like you, I am too thick-headed to let the behavior of jerks define my life.My point is this. People are cruel--sometimes even the well-intentioned (like the one who wanted to put me in special ed... never mind just how silly that idea sounds given what eventually was my academic performance in high school). It happens to white males too, so don't take it so personally.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I've not seen any such studies, and I'd be interested in reading them. Do you have any links? I tried searching scirus.com and only came up with links like this one and this one. (That is, not particularly relevant.)
Actually, using Google Scholar, I did find this PDF (from a law school professor) that suggests what you mention. From that article, I was able to use scirus to find this abstract (from the journal Neuroscience) which supports your position.
I guess it is somewhat indicative of the nature of the beast that although I've also published in Neuroscience, I've never heard of these studies.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?