Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Er... A Modest Proposal? Perhaps we should eat some of the male engineers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modest_Proposal
Why does it matter? What is the business reason for developing more female engineers? Do computers designed by women run quicker?
Computers designed by women may be more attractive to women; that will let you tap a market currently underserved and increase your customer count. That directly translates into more cash, so it matters.
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.
How is it that nobody bitches when there are so few female trash collectors?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
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?
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".
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.