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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."
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.
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
There are, but they don't look much different from the men, if you know what i mean.
First Post confirms that a big part of the problem is that women are judged by their appearance rather than engineering skills.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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..
How is it that nobody bitches when there are so few female trash collectors?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
He asked the question. The problem is that he also tried to answer it.
God forbid scientists try to actually answer a question if the answer might be politically incorrect. Everyone knows that if your data suggest something that's not PC, massage the data, or at least don't have the nerve to publish, right? Everyone rants about how the Religious Right wants to make certain scientific subjects off-limits, but the Left is just as bad. In fact, Sweden has already banned research into gender differences in mental characteristics.
And his answer("Women aren't as good at men at math and science,") was offensive and incorrect, and rightly struck a blow to his reputation among the faculty.
It pisses me off to no end that everyone thinks Summers said women weren't as smart on average as men. He explicitly did not say this. What he did say is that there is evidence the standard deviation (not the mean!) for intelligence for men appears to be higher than the standard deviation for women. He proceeded to discuss the implications of this (more male morons, but also more male geniuses).
Go find a transcript of what Summers actually said (the whole damn thing, not a soundbyte), read it, and stop slandering the poor man.
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.
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.
To shout down a legitimate question on the grounds not that it is provably false, but that it is merely distasteful, is thus not merely reprehensible in the full sense of the word, but contrary to the interests of both sides of the debate. The star chamber that fired Summers has therefore likely done far more harm by this action than he did by raising his question.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I am all for women attempting to improve in the scientific, mathematic and engineering fields, but I would be lying if I said they had the same potential as their male counter parts. But this is really no different than saying males do not have the same capacity for child birth, because, guess what, regardless of what science comes up with, females will still be better suited for this task. And yes the brain and the uterus are complete comparable as they are both cellular structure formed by information provided by DNA.
If men and women had the same potential there would be know reason for men to carry a Y chromosome. This in itself is an interesting topic since the Y chromosome is both benefit and detriment to Males. because Males contain only a single chromosome of each type they are incapable of regenerative replacement when a sequence is damaged, while women have a back up copy which can be used to repair each other. I'm sure it's ok for me to point out the male weakness, which in this case is very rarely disputed, but you are probably already offended by my support that male and females have different mental capacity, even though it makes logical since regardless of the evidence (which in this case happens to support the idea of gender difference) Maybe what this women is asking is "Given the evidence that there are less women undertaking the work necessary to be successful in engineering fields, is there a genetic or gender specific reason for this."
I don't know about anyone else, but the day Men an Women are identical (as compared to equal) is the day I give up on humanity completely.
Coz girls are smarter than guys?
;).
They pick jobs that can't easily be outsourced to India
I definitely see more ladies going in Law, Medicine, Accounting/Finance than Engineering or IT.
These jobs pay pretty well.
With all this, why bother encouraging uninterested women to go into IT?
There's no great scarcity, so it's a waste of resources. Better for them to do something else.
Why not encourage more men to do Nursing? Stronger = easier to carry/move patients around etc.
It pisses me off that "offensive" is used as a blanket term of condemnation. Any serious idea can offend someone. The fact that a comment is deemed "offensive" is irrelevant to the truth of the comment.