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."

Comments

An intentional allusion?

[Nicholas Bishop]

Er... A Modest Proposal? Perhaps we should eat some of the male engineers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modest_Proposal

Re:Its Software Programmer!

[jgeeky]

You're looking at the wrong meaning of the word. Engineer doesn't come from the word engine as in Internal Combustion Engine, it comes from the latin word for creation. So, an engineer is one who creates something. Since software engineers create programs, they are, in fact, engineers.

Re:Cultural or Biological?

[Bluesman]

This type of study has been done, ad infinitum. And any parent will tell you what will happen:

Most of the time, with no prompting, the girls will cuddle and mother the trucks that you give them, and the boys will throw the dolls.

There are inherent differences between girls and boys. And why wouldn't this be true? Every other species on the planet seems to recognize this fact.

Think of it this way. If the differences between male and female humans were arbitrarily decided by society, then how is it that every separate human culture on earth arrived at a similar result?

The experiment you describe happened thousands of years ago before there were baby dolls, footballs, and ovens. You can see the results of it by looking around you.

Such a program exists for both women and men

[Ellen Spertus]

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.

Re:facial hair

[Maxo-Texas]

Axiom: Men and Women are identical mentally.
Query: Why are they different with regard to engineering?

Problem: Axiom is insane. No rational conclusion can be drawn from insane first premises.
Conclusion: As long as political correctness pervades our universities, any science they produce in these areas is warped.

Actually, there's a formal study on gender & F

[paroneayea]

...And it influenced the GNOME project to open the Women Summer Outreach program and so on...

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-Ge nder_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf

Along with their recommendations...
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-Ge nder_Policy_Recommendations.pdf

A bit dry perhaps, but still a very interesting, and informative, read full of thorough investigation and professionally collected statistics.

Re:facial hair

[bzipitidoo]

A variety of reasons have been kicked around. Some off the top of my head:

1. Nature: Men are better at the mental skills that happen to be good for engineering.
2. Entrenched: Because men are so dominant in engineering, men have inadvertently advanced the disciplines in ways that are easier for men to understand, thus unwittingly making it even harder for women to break in.
3. Nurture: The stereotypes of engineering and math as professions for men are self-fulfilling. Although women are just as good, they are subtly discouraged from even trying, and are steered away from it starting at an early age.
4. Discrimination: It's because men discriminate against women.
5. Side effect: It isn't the engineering that puts women off, it's the competitiveness and style of competitiveness of the male engineers. Or it's the lack of socializing-- more so than average, engineers are loners, with neither desire to socialize nor skill in socializing.

Obviously, a big problem is that the debate is so charged that dispassionate, impartial discoveries and testings of hypotheses are very difficult. Even good unbiased studies will be regarded with suspicion.

In the US, Computer Science is possibly the most lopsided discipline of all. But in Israel, CS is about 50/50. I heard speculation that it was because CS is a relatively new discipline, so there aren't a bunch of crusty old prejudiced men putting up barriers like in all the other disciplines.