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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.
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.
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
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.
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
I think some of it may be cultural.
I'd like to take 200 newborns, and divide them into two groups of 100, 50 of each gender in each group.
One group is only allowed to play with dolls and easybake ovens, the other group is only allowed to play with legos.
As a society, we TEND to encourage our female children to play at SOCIAL situations ("Let's have Tea!") and we TEND to encourage our male children to play at building things. This happens when we are really young, when our brains apparently have a much easier time at learning to do things (like languages).
Maybe the problem is that if you don't give a one-to-three year old a chance to play with things like legos and teach their brains to think in three dimensions when the brain is young that they never will be very good at it. And maybe we just happen to provide that education to boys more often than we do to girls.
paintball
Interestingly enough, there was a comment to this effect in the Cap'n Crunch discussion earlier today. It seems as if a lot of engineers enjoy technology and tinkering for its own sake, whereas many others value it for its usefulness--it just has to "work."
I would think it would be much higher than 93% male linux userbase.
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.
I used to think there was some truth to what you say. However, I'm about to have my third girl, and I'm here to tell you that, as many studies have shown, females generally tend to want to do things like play with dolls. Neither my wife nor I buy them any frilly clothes, dolls, etc ... but if they find a doll, they immediately take care of it like it's their own baby. Kids also tend to use their same-sex parent as a roll model, so girls tend to do things like their mothers, and boys tend to do things like their fathers.
:)
:)
Usual disclaimers on generalizations apply.
Luckily, my three year old also likes to help me work on the car.
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
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.
in the immortal words of socrates, "i drank what?"
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.
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.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
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.
How is it that nobody bitches when there are so few female trash collectors?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Many engineers today have to use C, Fortran, Python, or some language of MATLAB to come up with mathematical models for what they use. The requirement of knowledge in a specific area is so high very few people posess the talent and insight needed to write a really good engineering application.
It is possible, though, to be a software engineer in this respect- if you are in Engineering and you have a genuine interest and ability to program, then you can be a "Software Engineer" if you choose to learn more about programming.
I agree! However, the term has been so horrible misused and generalized that those who apply it to software now feel justified to do so. A traditional engineer is rooted in mathmatics and science. All their techniques have a direct relation to properties that exist in nature. The term "Software Engineer" grew out of trying to make software development sound more professional, and thus unjustified title inflation.
I have degrees in both CS and EE (computer specialization). The two are incredibly different, and everyone I know with a traditional engineering degree (and in the software field) resents the abusage. I may have the title "Software Engineer", but I'd prefer "Software Developer" since it fits my job desciption far better. In becoming a better developer, I have never once had to use scientific research. As an graduate student in engineering, every bit related. Even for very logical aspects, such as designing high speed adders, intimate knowledge of physics was necessary (e.g. VLSI, logical effort). You can't escape nature as an engineer.
So to everyone replying to the parent saying 'nay'.. how many of you actually have an engineering background and the ability to make a fair comparision?
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
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
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.
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.
Many places take it one step further. In Canada, an "engineer" is someone who has professional licensure in engineering. IIRC, they were trying to do the same in Texas. I honestly think this is a good idea.
The president of the IEEE gave a talk at my campus a few years back. He suggested that engineers were not respected (and compensated) for their skills because of the public's perception of engineers. This included two parts. First, engineers are usually portrayed as the source of the hero's problem in movies. Now, part of this is because engineers' lives aren't usually that interesting, and little can be done about this. Second, many people call themselves "engineers" who are not actually qualified to be engineers. The argument is that you can train someone to do something complicated, but an engineer has the understanding to invent many complicated things. I've met lots of people who have "engineer" job titles that don't actually do any engineering. Electricians, mechanics, and plumbers are not electrical, mechanical, and hydraulics engineers, respectively. In contrast, a physician is a physician. If a radiology technician tries to diagnose someone, it's going to cost somebody a buttload of cash.
I think a better statement would be "Graduates of a computer science department are not engineers, they are mathemeticians." That said, if someone can prove they know software engineering by getting licensed, they are an engineer. I'm not talking about being certified to administer a database. I'm talking about designing complicated programs, proving algorithmic complexity, and optimizing for the range of applications from embedded to high-performance systems. A lot of that sounds like CS, and if they can prove it, a CS can be a PE (professional engineer).
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Steve Jobs is a woman?
paintball
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).
> Some people are too intelligent for their own good.
Birds of a feather stick together. Women who lack intelligence naturally prefer men who lack it also.
> "Deep thinking?" In tech?
Yes. Doing any kind of technical or scientific work requires a desire to know how things work and how to make them work better. That requires thinking, but more importantly, being interested in thinking about the world. Most women just aren't interested; they only care about the day-to-day stuff that is already there, how they dress, who they know, whey they eat, etc.
> Then you dismiss astrology, religion and a bunch of other interesting parts of life.
Dismiss them categorically as the most mind-damaging things EVER invented. Religion is so drastically anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-thought, that anyone who has a brain would recoil from it with disguist and loathing once he understands what it teaches.
> Dismissing what you never have studied or experienced, just amounts to dogma.
Absolutely correct! This is exactly what religious fanatics do with science and all the other things they don't understand. Scientists do indeed study religion, and discard it when they understand that it teaches people to stop thinking and take things on faith instead. "How do you know something is right? You can never really know anything! Only God knows everything. How can I do X? Blaspheming infidel! Only God actually does things, you just do as you are told and keep your mouth shut unless it is to praise God! Conform! Obey! Believe!" If it were up to me, I'd ground the whole thing out of its miserable existence.
> Did you know Einstein and Newton and most of the deep thinkers in history,
> studied and praised such institutions that you so handily dismiss?
Did you know you are spouting bullshit?
Einstein said the following about religion (Albert Einstein, 1954, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side"):
As for Newton, while he did indeed write much about religion, his views were very much in conflict with the teachings of the church, though perhaps that is not immediately obvious. He definitely believed that the universe was rational and knowable, in direct contrast to the common religious teaching of a sacred and mystical universe that we can neither understand nor are worthy to try to. The only reason he still believed in God after such departure is that he did not follow his premises to their natural conclusions, being concerned with physics more than epistemology. If he had thought to consider it, it would have became obvious to him that a rational universe can not contain a God, whose very definition excludes him from existence.
> An overly sceptical mind will never be the inventor or discoverer.
On the contrary, a sceptical mind is precisely what is required to invent, for scepticism is necessary to discard all those illogical superstitions you religious people hoist upon everyone since childhood.
> It requires faith to do what most cant do.
Faith in yourself and your own abilities, not in God. Faith in God is the exact opposite of the faith in yourself and results in letting God do the things most can't do instad of attempting to do them yourself.
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"
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?
The point I was trying to make is that recent (eg in the last 20-50 years) changes to the schooling system have already disadvantaged boys, certainly here in Australia. One example off the top of my head; smarter boys are picked on by their peers, with no threat of discipline. By doing little to address this, the school yard environment passively encourages stupidity in males.
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