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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.
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
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.
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..
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
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
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.
Please, its a compliment: Who would you rather trust your system with? The clean-shaven guy from ITT Tech who knows how to install Windows and that's pretty much it? Or the bearded overweight dude from his mom's basement from whom Linus stole the original source code (or so he claims?) Bearded dude for the win!
How is it that nobody bitches when there are so few female trash collectors?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
In a Dwarven way.
"It's true you don't see many Engineering women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for engineering men!
And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no engineering women, and that engineers just spring out of holes in the ground!"
(Blatant Two Towers Gimli reference)
First, have you read his speech? Here it is. Your characterization of it is at best overy simplistic and possibly just wrong.
Is it not even worth considering the possiblity that there is a difference? I have heard a lot of people talk, and a lot of theory, conjecture. and speculation as to why there is such a gender gap in science and engineering, but no answers. Over the past 50 years, the gender gap has dramatically decreased in many fields requiring intelligent, technical people, but much of science and engineering has resisted diversification. It seems that speculating on the range of validity of the initial assumption should not get you fired by a community that prides itself on allowing people to hold radical or controversial viewpoints.
I personally think it is unlikely there is a siginificant difference in inherent aptitude, largely based on anecdotal observation that the gap is smaller in many european countries. Furthermore, I think that at least in the case of science researche (only because this is what I am familiar with) even if there is a gender disparity in the number of exceptionally qualified people, it is worth putting some serious effort into getting more women into those jobs. First, this provides a role model for other women who aspire to those jobs, but perhaps more importantly, if there is a real difference that means it is likely women will be able to provide new ideas and directions that men might be less likely to come up with. Said another popular way, monocultures are dangerous, if not necessarily bad.
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.
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Boobs & Control. That's what it comes down to. Men - easily controlled by boobs. Even when not on a full "control" level, chemicals released in the brain increase chance that the man will act/react favourably when there's a hint of boob. Computers - see, they're not so bothered. Even when they're pushed right up against the screen, they just go "they're not gonna work on me, now enter the correct license key or I'm shutting down". So men, they like computers because they can control them. Women, they can control men without even trying, and controlling people's much more fun, so why'd they need computers?
Maybe if we could get computers to recognise and respond to boobs, some kind of "boob input device" or something, more women would be interested in working with them? After all, if men can be controlled with boobs, but computers could be controlled with boobs, keyboard AND mouse, then computers could be controlled much better than men - who lack the keyboard and mouse interface - then the computers are going to be much more fun!
I'm a genius!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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.
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".
A variety of reasons have been kicked around. Some off the top of my head:
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.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.