Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

First time accepted submitter occidental writes in about Etsy's push to get more women engineers. "You’ve probably heard of Etsy, the bustling online marketplace for crafters and artists. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most of its customers are women, both buyers and sellers. Ditto that the Etsy team is a pretty good representation of the Earth’s gender ratio. Yet when Marc Hedlund took the helm of Etsy’s Product Development & Engineering department, 97% of the engineering department were men. Hedlund realized that in his nearly two decades in IT, he’s hired no more than 20 women for engineering positions. This began to bother him. Especially after his daughter was born."

Comments

Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Karganeth]

Typically you see a rule like "at least 10% of the workforce m ust be x% female". This means that people will be hired according to their gender - sexism is built into the system. The same applies to many anti racist rules. You can't ever have rules that explicitly favor one gender over another.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Raedwald]

Typically you see a rule like "at least 10% of the workforce m ust be x% female".

But TFA Says

Don’t lower hiring standards, or make exceptions or compromises

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming that the supply of employees is small enough that one cannot afford to choose between several equal candidates of different genders and races.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Quakeulf]

Exactly this. Favoritism is always bad.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[firex726]

Exactly, it needs to come down to who is best for the job, giving one group preferential treatment over another is not any better than any other group.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what exactly changes if they were hiring the best people anyways?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[SJHillman]

Why is it a problem? Not every lopsided gender/race/etc statistic is indicative of a problem. Sometimes it just means that men and women have different interests, or different strengths and weaknesses.

A problem would be if there were plenty of women in the field and employers were intentionally passing over them. However, if the issue is that there simply aren't a lot of women interested in a field, therefore fewer women are employed, then there isn't a problem.

If you try to fix a problem that doesn't exist, you're more likely to make it into a problem.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Sockatume]

And if we lived in a universe where there wasn't an empirically demonstrated bias against women and ethnic minorities (having the same level of suitability) in hiring decisions across almost all fields, you'd have a point. Unfortunately the problem is very real and very well documented, and it's preventing us from hiring optimally, much less fairly.

Affirmative action supposes that the first step to eliminating that bias is to ensure that the individuals making these decisions are representative of the population as a whole.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[jimbolauski]

Candidates are never equal, this is not college admissions, where all you have is test cores and GPA's to compare students too. How they did in the interview, and letters of recommendation are two things that will separate candidates just because they both have 5+ years of experience with HTML5 checked on their applications does not mean they are equal. Lets just say that the candidate pool was deep enough for your fantasy world, women comprise about 10% of the IT field so for every 1 women there are 9 men who are qualified, after the 3rd or 4th company does this the pool will be depleted of diverse candidates.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[jamesbulman]

Expand the pool of candidates applying for the job.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Zapotek]

They get to appear all feminist and enlightened in the media.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[robthebloke]

Well, about a year ago I was working in a games company (~120 employees) that had no female developers, artists, or producers. In total there were three female employees: the office manager, the HR manager, and the cleaner. Over the seven years I worked there, we hired 3 women, but they'd all leave after about six months... possibly as a result of having 50+ horny games devs constantly trying to hit on them (in fairness, they may have left due to other reasons, but I doubt it helped much). It's sad to say, but in the games industry there are a large number of immature men (boys is a more accurate decsription), who think that women are nothing more than boobs on legs. They often act creepily around them, sending them unwanted valentines cards, hanging around their desks like bad smells, etc, etc. In short, these people just don't know how to interact properly in civilised society, especially around women.

I'm now working in a film VFX company, and the difference is night and day. On the software teams, about 20% of the employees are female, and on the art teams, it's about 50%. The female software devs aren't for show either, they are more than capable of holding their own when it comes to C++/SIMD/GPU/Graphics coding, and it's actually been a really refreshing change from the games industry! Really though, the difference between the two comes down to one thing only. In VFX, women are treated with the respect. In Games, they're often treated as the office oddity.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[SJHillman]

The IT department in which I work is currently 67% female and 33% male. One of the women is being promoted to manager of another department, so you're saying that we should only look at male replacements in order to bring the disparity closer to being representative of the population as a whole?

And how come I don't see anything about encouraging more men in fields like nursing and teaching?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[L4t3r4lu5]

American History X, the flashback scene around the dinner table when a young Derek Vinyard is talking to his dad about the Affirmative Action policy at the firestation. If you take out the racial slurs, you can't help but see the guy's point. Would you want someone of lower capability than an other applicant working on your team just because some bureaucrat thinks a quota of $gender/race is the correct way to bring diversity to the workplace? It is even the correct kind of diversity? Diversity of experience, opinion, skillset, or interest is surely something better to strive towards.

On the other hand, we have the Catch 22 of women not working in $Career, so girls don't take an interest in $Career at an early age, meaning women don't apply for jobs in $Career. Is it the fault of society for not making careers in, say, engineering more glamorous? Should we push hard for intellect being more attractive than physical appearance? Should we stop seeing a chosen occupation as inherently masculine or feminine? Is it upbringing or genetic predisposition?

This is why Sociology exists.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

Did they not let women apply before?

This means if they get two similarly qualified candidates they will select a woman if their quota needs one. That means males who apply are being discriminated against.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[__aaltlg1547]

The problem of hiring female engineers happens because there are very few female applicants. I've interviewed one female applicant, ever, in 20 years as an engineer. ONE. I've worked for a number of engineering companies, small and large and I can count on ONE HAND the number of female engineering co-workers I have had, out of hundreds of engineers. They were all good at their jobs. I wouldn't hesitate to hire a woman engineer, if there was one available.

My sister is an engineer and my niece is in engineering school. They are the only two female engineers in my whole extended family, but there are dozens of male engineers, scientists and programmers.

I don't know why, but women, at least in the USA, almost universally lack interest in being engineers. No hiring policy can change that.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

A far better policy would be to do all interviews via written form or phone call with some sort of voice modification.

Select employees without knowing their sex.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[VortexCortex]

Meh, I guess it depends on where you work, and who you work with. IMO, we could benefit from more female gamedevs making games, but they're not non-existant (and they do make games that are just as good (and bad) as males do).

Be careful that when you paint with a wide brush, you don't get paint in your eyes.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[SJHillman]

"Diversity of experience, opinion, skillset, or interest is surely something better to strive towards."

This is what my current and most recent employer both strived for. It was by coincidence that it also led to gender/racial diversity as well (because different backgrounds lead to different skillsets and opinions... who knew?). In the end, we had a lot of really good solutions to problems from people starting ideas with "Once when I..." or "I saw something like this before...". We never had anyone say they had a good idea because their ovaries/testes told them or that the color of their skin allowed them to receive transmissions from a far off alien civilization sharing ideas with everyone the right color to listen.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[drinkypoo]

It's sad to say, but in the games industry there are a large number of immature men (boys is a more accurate decsription), who think that women are nothing more than boobs on legs. They often act creepily around them, sending them unwanted valentines cards, hanging around their desks like bad smells, etc, etc. In short, these people just don't know how to interact properly in civilised society, especially around women.

What's sad is that this is culturally pervasive. It's not just in the games industry. Any time you get a bunch of dicks in the same room the people they're attached to are probably being sexist.

In VFX, women are treated with the respect. In Games, they're often treated as the office oddity.

Artists are squishier people.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[hedwards]

In the games industry you're expected to basically give up any hope of an outside life and probably burn a lot of the time that you would have available for marrying and having children. Unfortunately a woman's biological clock is less negotiable than a man's. It's something you do see in many other industries where the choices about how to handle family life and where the balance is tends to favor women at home and men at work. Regardless of what women's groups suggest, that's ultimately a legitimate aspect that companies look at when hiring, firing and promoting. If an individual shows no loyalty, they're going to be on the short end of things.

Not saying that it had anything to do with it, but women do tend to be more interested in having social lives and such than men are, and men tend to be socialized to be more tolerant of poor working conditions.

Unless there's some evidence that HR isn't hiring the best candidates or the applicant pool doesn't represent the balance in the industry, there's very little that an individual company can do that is going to solve the problem. At best they can discriminate against men to artificially appear like they're interested in treating women with respect.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Sockatume]

As in, if you give the same selection of CVs to two different hiring panels, the only difference between the two sets of CVs lies in the names, the CVs from ostensibly female applicants are consistently rated lower. This is research that has been repeated over and over.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[hedwards]

Sure it is. And you don't see positive discrimination without also seeing negative discrimination at the same time aimed at the same group. If you think that women need the help, then you implicitly view them as inferior and incapable of taking care of themselves.

The healthy approach is to ensure a level playing field, or one that's level enough that women can take care of the problem for themselves. But, forcing employers to hire more women, regardless of qualification, just means there's more resentment and resistance to change.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[hedwards]

If you're talking about the US, then there is no such bias against women.

You see the same lack of women at the bottom of society that you do at the top of society. It's called the Apex Fallacy and it's complete horseshit. You have a different clustering of jobs between men and women and thanks to societal changes that disproportionately reward people at the top, you see a bit of an income disparity between men and women.

Ultimately, if we control for the distribution of income you'll find that the income differences between men and women are quite small indeed, it's just that since income is skewed towards the rich that the men that are poorer than their female counterparts don't add as much to the calculation.

What's more, most college students are female by about a 2:1 ratio and they basically get away with murder. I've sat through many "sex discrimination" lectures over the years which were basically just excuses to bash men for all the imagined slights and to just use sound bite quotes with no understanding of where they came from and why to rationalize it.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between two companies can be the role women play. In one company they may be more administrative than hands on. I've found that when a company hires women to "babysit" developers, it's not a good company for women. Most developers don't respect management and consider them to be clueless in terms of software development.

Unfortunately, the "Women's movement" tends to measure the advancement of women in the workplace by their representation in management positions, but not in well paying worker bee positions, like a game developer.

So, sexist company has many developers that respect neither women nor managers hires female managers. What could possible go wrong?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[KiloByte]

A "positive" discrimination is still discrimination.

Any kind of affirmative action is harmful not only to potential employees involved, but also to the employer as well -- and I'm not speaking about what is "moral", but actual utility.

Try a simulation: assign every simulated person a random ability score, according to some distribution. In most cases, you want the normal distribution, but you may try others as well. Do the simulation twice: once for both groups being equal, once for one of them being on the average better than the other. The recruitment process consists of making candidates pass an exam and adding a bias to one of the groups, then picking X top scoring candidates.

It's obvious that with equal groups any discrimination will decrease the total utility: you'd replace some candidates from the group you discriminate against with worse-qualified ones from the group you give preferential treatment to. It's somewhat less obvious this happens also when there is an actual difference between abilities of both groups -- and if you run such simulations, you'll see this happens for other models of racism/affirmative action as well: flat-out banning the worse group, giving them a penalty, giving them a bonus, enforcing some quotas. You get the most utility for being strictly gender/race/Zodiac sign/colour of underwear/etc blind.

It's an unpopular thing to say around here, but there are actual differences in intelligence between races: Ashkenazi jews > asians > whites > hispanics > blacks, and men > women. Does this mean that the highest measured IQ should belong to an Israeli male? Uhm no, it's a white woman without noticeable jewish ancestry. Comparing the averages for two populations doesn't predict outliers -- and when looking for good engineers, you care about a small portion at the top rather than the bulk of the population. With the normal distribution, though, you can expect a group with lower average to have a smaller representation among the top -- this is natural, and not your fault.

There are some non-genetic causes that can be rectified, like giving "boy toys" to girls, disrupting ghettos/"white trash", etc, but it's far too late to attempt such things by high school or university. At that time, loss of IQ due to development causes is undistinguishable for that due to genetics.

Obviously, this is not a reason not to fire jerks who create a hostile workplace for those women/etc who proved their superiority by passing an unbiased entrance exam. That woman is in some regards better than you, as she rose higher above the average than you did, so do respect her. After both of you passed the same barrier, there is no reason whatsoever to assume one of you is more able, according to statistics. If your employer did the right thing and avoided biases, you don't have a right to introduce biases of your own.

TL;DR: any form of discrimination by anything else than pure ability is not only evil, but also harmful.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[T.E.D.]

"at least 10% of the workforce m ust be x% female". This means that people will be hired according to their gender - sexism

When you get down to a point where you have trouble getting 10% of a group of people who are a majority of the population at large, isn't it a wee bit late to suddenly get all upset about discrimination?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[u38cg]

Yeah, actually I don't care that much. I work in central London and it's painfully obvious that none of our workforce come from local communities. I'd be quite happy to see us lower our hiring standards just a little to bring some of these people in. I don't believe for a second they're actually worse - I think they just don't know how to play the corporate game.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Sockatume]

I'm sorry, your argument is that because the discrimination occurs at all social levels, that means it's okay?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[jythie]

It means examining bais. Changing a name on a resume to change gender or ethnicity often results in interpretations of the resume, with european male names often being rated as seeming more competent even when the exact same resume with another type of name on it is read as less capable.

So the problem is, people think they are hiring the 'best' people in an unbiased way, but statistically they are not. Addressing that in your hiring process leads to better people because there is a significant talent pool out there who are consistently rated lower then their actual abilities reflect.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Bert64]

It's discrimination plain and simple...
And it doesn't solve a problem, it aims to treat symptoms at the expense of other healthy parts.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[jythie]

It is generally not that complicated... when women complain about how they are being treated, listen and adjust. Unfortunately the typical response in the industry is to tell them to stop complaining.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[AmiMoJo]

You are assuming that all the female candidates are of lower quality and that is why they don't get hired in the first place. That assumption is wrong. Sometimes they don't get hired because the person hiring them is biased against their gender (they won't fit in, might generate sexual harassment lawsuits etc.).

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Sockatume]

I shouldn't have to dig up an uncontroversial result from a decade and a half ago, but the classic study would be:

http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

Which of course is the first Google result for "study gender cv name". The remainder of the results will point you to several modern replications. Enjoy.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[quixote9]

"You can't ever have rules that explicitly favor one gender over another." Odd that they're currently almost all men then, isn't it?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[mhajicek]

If they tried that in the machining industry they'd go out of business. I think I've seen maybe one or two percent female machinists and I've never personally met a female cnc programmer as far as i can recall.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[TheRaven64]

If they were predominantly picking the man previously in this situation, then women were discriminated against. If they are picking women if they have under a certain percentage and men if they have over a certain percentage then they are effectively doing round-robin selection.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[frank_adrian314159]

And how come I don't see anything about encouraging more men in fields like nursing and teaching?

I've seen these articles. In fact, there's a definite trend in elementary education (especially K-3) to try to get men into that field, because it's currently thought that much of the rampant diagnoses of ADHD in boys is due to female teachers not understanding gender differences in behavior between boys and girls. Also, men are quite sought after in college programs for nursing and physician assistant training.

Just because it's not on Slashdot doesn't mean it's not happening. Broaden your outlook.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[tofarr]

Could this also be to do with the general level of interest in gaming as an activity among the sexes? I would be willing to bet that as a percentage, less women play games, less still would be considered "hard core". As a child, I thought it would be cool to work as a game dev, because I love video games. As an adult, I see it as long hours and hard work, requiring a level of obsession with the games that most people don't have. (men or women)

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

A better solution is to just pick the best candidate no matter what. If that means having to hide the candidates identity that is fine.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[TheRaven64]

Affirmative action also has some nasty negative side effects. First, if people are aware of it, then there is a perception that anyone in the group that is being discriminated in favour of got there because of it. If you have to hire a woman for a particular job, and the best qualified woman has ten years more experience than the nearest-qualified man, better references, and does much better in the interview, then she will still have to fight the perception from people who weren't directly involved in the hiring that she only got the job because of her gender.

Beyond that, if people in group X have lower standards of entry into job Y, then the average quality of people of group X performing job Y will be lower. People will notice this, and assume that it's because people in group X suck at Y. It then becomes much harder for the ones that are capable and qualified.

You don't get more competent people into a job by fostering the perception that they aren't able to do it.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[HPHatecraft]

American History X, the flashback scene around the dinner table when a young Derek Vinyard is talking to his dad about the Affirmative Action policy at the firestation. Would you want someone of lower capability than an other applicant working on your team just because some bureaucrat thinks a quota of $gender/race is the correct way to bring diversity to the workplace? It is even the correct kind of diversity? Diversity of experience, opinion, skillset, or interest is surely something better to strive towards.

You seem to ignore the fact that discrimination and bigotry exist. What if you had an applicant who was a woman or minority who was qualified for the position, but was deliberately passed over? Yeah, that never happens, does it?

Furthermore, you seem to imply that all women or minorities are unqualified for the positions they are applying for.

Affirmative Action is intended to address people's moral/educational/ethical failings when it comes to racism and bigotry. It does a bad job at it in the same way that democracy is the best worst form of government. If you can find some way to keep people honest, let us know your ideas.

On the other hand, we have the Catch 22 of women not working in $Career, so girls don't take an interest in $Career at an early age, meaning women don't apply for jobs in $Career. Is it the fault of society for not making careers in, say, engineering more glamorous? Should we push hard for intellect being more attractive than physical appearance? Should we stop seeing a chosen occupation as inherently masculine or feminine? Is it upbringing or genetic predisposition?

Genetic predisposition only gets you so far in explaining behavior. It doesn't rule, it is a predisposition, and even that fails when you look at individuals. That's why they call them individuals. It addresses/explains some behavior. Then it stops -- not unlike the model for Newtonian physics works, then begins to break down under certain conditions.

If I were to follow my genetic predisposition, I would have been a football player. In this week alone, I've had two people jokingly ask me if I play football. I did as kid.

But it isn't my profession or even an interest. My profession is Linux admin. I am learning/loving Perl. I like comic books, RPGs, fantasy and speculative sci-fi. I get weird looks for those side interests because, based on my appearance, I'm supposed to behave another way. Oh yeah, and I'm "bi-racial", whatever the hell that means. Another incredibly stupid social construct, race.

When you take away ethnicity and all it implies, skin color is just that -- skin color. Larry Niven was making subtle comment on this when had his character Beowulf Schaefer take melanin pills to defensively darken his skin against the intense radiation of a sun.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Golddess]

WTF is a "womyn-born-womyn"?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[VortexCortex]

Oh! And to prevent bias in the interview they could do them via telephone with voice masking technology.
To prevent sexism in the workplace they can simply tellecommute to work!

Nice try, but you're not addressing the actual problem. You can't fix a people problem with technology.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[TheRaven64]

The problem is that there often isn't a better candidate. There are two candidates who have slightly different strengths. Either can do the job you need, and either will bring something extra (but not the same thing) to the team. So you pick one because of some subconscious factor, which you're probably not aware of. Picking based on some algorithm that attempts to guarantee fairness helps suppress these biases.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

Please elaborate.

I have known women far more masculine than me, and I am the sort to think that only women and children lack beards. So they would not bring any diversity to the work force of all men. In that case an effeminate male might be more different and therefore even more different and qualified.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

You can speak to someone and not know their sex. Smartphone apps exist that do nothing but this task.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

Then use some actual random function. A coin toss should be fine. That will at least be fair.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[L4t3r4lu5]

I tried not to assume anything. I'm asking if women don't attain higher in STEM fields of education because they don't see a career in STEM as a viable target, because there are few women working in STEM. Negative feedback loop anyone?

I do, however, see your point. Saying that, though, if presented with two identical candidates in all but gender / ethnicity / sexuality / $Demographic, do you propose that the hiring party flip a coin? It's certainly fair. However that's not how it's allowed to work, is it? Brass tacks here, but if you don't hire the "minority" in that situation then you're seen as a bigot, because at some time in the past that particular demographic was wronged. You're not even allowed to flip a coin. Further, there are no identical people, so ultimately this is all moot. However, arbitrarily enforcing a quota of a specific demographic is just prejudice against those not in the demographic, regardless of the reasons. It's just basic maths; If 10% of your workforce *must* be $Stereotype, then you're biased towards that group at every opportunity because you're forced to "consider the quota", and in and of itself that will skew a hiring person's opinion of a candidate even before looking at a resume or inviting for interview.

Like I said, this is a topic for people who study society and people. All I have are opinions based upon a very basic understanding of the topics we're discussed.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

The correct solution to that is to remove names from resumes all together.

Again the problem is the process and the solution is not an even worse process but a better one.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[interval1066]

A percentage of a percentage of the workforce must be female?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

Voice masking works fine. To prevent sexism in the workplace you terminate the problem workers.

You are an adult, expecting you to act like on is not outside the scope of what your employer expects.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[ganjadude]

Affirm action is nothing other than racism! If person X scores better then person Y, person X should get the job no questions! however if person Y is the only person who doesnt look like persons A thru X , eventhough person X is more qualified, person Y gets the job? how is that NOT racist?? because something bad happened to person Ys great grandparents??

all affirm action does is reaffirm the victim status of minorities and give non minorities a legit beef against minorities.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[jythie]

I am not sure it really needs to be that complicated. Simply being aware that it is part of one's thought process is often enough to reduce it by a significant margin. Sadly people do not like to think they have bais and many fight the implication. In a way we might actually benefit from de-stigmatizing having bais and focus more on how much the person lets it influence their decision making process.

As for the club affiliation, a common piece of resume advice people are still given today is to remove black/ethnic clubs and activities from their resume, and esp remove anything with an activism feel to it (unless it activism likely to resonate with the HR staff), and apparently people report that this results in more callbacks, though I am not aware of any controlled studies seeing if it is the case or not.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[kick6]

It is generally not that complicated... when women complain about how they are being treated, listen and adjust. Unfortunately the typical response in the industry is to tell them to stop complaining.

Because that's what we tell the men too. So actually, listening to the women and adjusting is being sexist...because nobody affords the men the same treatment.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[jythie]

A while back someone tried that for academic conference submissions and it actually really helped. They had had problems with presenters being mostly while males, disproportionate even to their field. Removing the names resulted in presentations given by a cross section much closer to the actual community.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Karganeth]

No. Look at the top 1000 world strongest people. They're all men. Men and women and physically different (including our brains). It's not sexism that causes the strongest people to all be men, it's just physiology - men just have bigger muscles than women. But when the majority of engineers are male instead of saying "well I suppose the male brain is better suited for engineering tasks" cries of "sexism!" are made. To accuse an organization of sexism you have to find evidence of it (the proportion of females in the workforce is not evidence). It'd be like taking a count of all the letters used in Slashdot posts. a = 23,345,494, b = 12,342,463 etc, and then coming to the conclusion that Slashdot is letterist against the letter 'x' because it's used the least - the underlying belief being that "in any fair system, all letters would be used the same amount". This isn't true. It isn't true of men and women either.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

I am not sure revealing that much about yourself on slashdot was a good idea.
Football or handegg?

Everyone regardless of sex/gender/race/ethnicity should agree that Perl is simply the best sysadmin scripting language there is. Let's just hope you are not a filthy emacs user, those people are basically subhuman.

For those whose genetic or social background makes them humor impaired; the above emacs comment was a joke. You guys are human, just weird.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if they're similarly qualified, then the decision is arbitrary on the individual hire level. All things being equal, they choose the woman to balance out the systemic bias in the system. Which they do because, y'know, there's a massive fucking systemic bias in the system, which that woman had to overcome just to get in the running for the job.

So, it's fair in that situation (given that they're equally qualified, and have to be by design of the law), and it's fair on a macro level, because it's in balance against the proven unfair advantage that males have in the hiring equation. So quit whining.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[BitZtream]

because it's currently thought that much of the rampant diagnoses of ADHD

And this is why I hate teachers ...

Who the fuck thinks teachers (K - 3) are qualified to have any part in a medical diagnoses?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

It should also solve the inherent bias that people with long or hard to pronounce names face. I have seen people not given an interview because the possible interviewer was unsure how to say a name. That was not the only reason, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[BitZtream]

The fact that you have to dig up results from a decade and a half ago should have been enough to shut you up and for you to get the point, but clearly it just whooshed over your head as you proved his point for him in your post.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Sure, in a vacuum where qualified women weren't turned down more often, paid less, and generally discriminated against.

Your "no preferential treatment" environment doesn't exist. Men already get preferential treatment due to societal oppression; the "preferential treatment" you're railing against is an attempt to balance a very tilted scale.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[L4t3r4lu5]

Furthermore, you seem to imply that all women or minorities are unqualified for the positions they are applying for.

You're the second person to state that. Maybe I should clarify: That was the opinion given in the film by DV's father, which I was paraphrasing. DV's father doesn't offer an opinion on whether an equally qualified person covered by Affirmative Action would be acceptable, and DV doesn't think to ask that question and expose the hypocrasy. IMHO that's the hidden message in the scene, and the obvious message of the film entirely; Ignorance is the home of prejudice.

Regarding your "genetic predisposition", though, how do you know it's genetic? You may have just had a more athletic upbringing, or higher protein diet as a child. I could run the 100m in 11.1s at school, but my parents (and therefore I) didn't put much stock in athletic performance and I was never trained or pushed in that direction. You played sports (football) and would have trained, giving you that physique. All off-topic, though :)

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[BitZtream]

A far better policy is to have people doing the hiring who aren't biased.

Why the fuck is every solution here some sort of method to ignore the actual problem?

If you want to change your male/female ratio ... CHANGE THE PEOPLE DOING THE FUCKING HIRING. If they are unable to be 'fair' about the process, change the problem, dont' invent some retarded new hoop they have to jump through so that it just becomes harder for legitimate people to get their job done.

They guy who doesn't want to hire women isn't going to be stopped by your petty little attempts to fool him. Its highly unlikely that we can hold a conversation for more than 10 minutes without me figuring out what sex you are ... ON IRC. I'm sorry you are so completely unaware of the gender cues in the world, but just hiding a name and voice isn't going to do you much good unless the person doing the hiring is too stupid to be qualified for doing the hiring in the first place.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Ambassador Kosh]

So maybe computers should make the hiring decisions and remove the humans from the process if the humans are doing such a poor job of it. I am not saying the computers will do a very good job but it is at least worth a shot to see if they can't do a better job.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[firex726]

If you're referring to that wage gap crap, it's been debunked time and time again.
In terms of education, more women are graduating than men.
Women have the advantage of affirmative action.
Women have the advantage of women only scholarships.

So where is the tilting of the scales for men in nursing, teaching and early child development?
Where are the employment campaigns for more women in dangerous or hard labor jobs?
Where is the outrage that women are only getting 60% of the jail terms men do for the same crimes?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[wild_oscar]

You obviously never had to hire anyone. What you suggest does not work in real life.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

There is no such human.

All humans have biases, some only don't realize it.

Sure some people will not hire women, they are easy to identify and not the real problem. The real problem is that one resume sent out with an ethnic name, a female name and a stereotypical white male name will get more responses for the last case. Even though the content did not change. Very few of those reviewers will be suspected of being sexist or racist, but these sort of things are built into our culture. Shaniqua will be expected to be less competent than Sara who will be expected to be less competent than Steven. Even by people who do not realize they are doing it.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[h4rr4r]

I have probably hired 10-20 people.
None using that method, but I would like to try it one day.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Vaphell]

nobody bats an eye when it's the men who who experience 90% of deaths at work or when homelessness is a predominantly male problem. The shittiest/the most dangerous jobs? All male dominated. Is this kind of discrimination ok? Because i have never seen anybody mention it as something very bad that needs to be fixed asap.

Draw 2 bell curves, one tall and narrow (women) and one low and wide (men) - that's how most traits are generally distributed, with greater deviation for men. Now tell me why it's always the difference on the right that is talked about, and nobody ever mentions the one on the left.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Ben4jammin]

FTA:

Don’t lower hiring standards, or make exceptions or compromises.

Bring in as many candidates as possible.

My take away from this is that while the historical hiring they did was "best candidates available" they realized that there were things they could do to expand the hiring pool that may change how many of the "best candidates available" are women.
Not surprising to see a company try to improve their hiring practices.

Doesn't mean they are going to discriminate against men.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[smooth wombat]

You can't fix a people problem with technology.

You can't? I'm sure I've been told oodles of times on here that software will do just that, that with just a few more programmers, we can fix problems caused by people. See self-driving car, security software of various ilks, the latest and greatest OS from whomever, and so on.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[mcvos]

RTFA. They changed the way they reached out to candidates, and didn't chase away women right away with unnecessarily confrontational questions.

Also, It's not just about getting better individual people, but about ending up with a better mix of employees. Companies with more diversity tend to do better.

They don't hire women because they have to, they hire women because they're better. When a man is better, they hire the man.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[smooth wombat]

I am not sure it really needs to be that complicated.

How is this complicated? The people doing the interviewing would already, supposedly, have had to have read the people's experience before getting the interview, all this does is give them a sanitized version. The only extra step is having the HR person schedule the interview, which is their job anyway.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> "Yet when Marc Hedlund took the helm of Etsy’s Product Development
> & Engineering department, 97% of the engineering department were men."

Huh. That is a pretty low ratio...of men.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Vaphell]

no, not really.
You can't blame nordic countries for sexism or discrimination, yet in Norway they still have only 10% female engineers. Paradoxically, the more people are free, the more likely they are to pursue stereotypical gender roles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2xrnyH2wQ @5:30, 29:30

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[mcvos]

It's a matter of corporate culture. Some companies have a really bad one, some have a good one, and some are working on improving theirs. I think some diversity (men, women, different ethnicities) is likely to lead to a better culture.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[ebno-10db]

I'm asking if women don't attain higher in STEM fields of education because they don't see a career in STEM as a viable target

You mean are women smarter than men. More sensible anyway, in this respect. Whenever anyone talks about more women (or other "minority") in STEM, my first question is, what do you have against these people? Admittedly my daughter is only nine, but she's very good at math and loves to help me with things like car and house repairs. When she is old enough to think about a career, I'll do what I can to discourage her from STEM. Many (perhaps most) other engineers I know actively discourage their teenage sons and daughters from entering STEM these days.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[VortexCortex]

The problem of hiring female engineers happens because there are very few female applicants. I've interviewed one female applicant, ever, in 20 years as an engineer. ONE. I've worked for a number of engineering companies, small and large and I can count on ONE HAND the number of female engineering co-workers I have had, out of hundreds of engineers. They were all good at their jobs. I wouldn't hesitate to hire a woman engineer, if there was one available.

My sister is an engineer and my niece is in engineering school. They are the only two female engineers in my whole extended family, but there are dozens of male engineers, scientists and programmers.

I don't know why, but women, at least in the USA, almost universally lack interest in being engineers. No hiring policy can change that.

What's interesting is that toys like Lego aren't marketed to girls, at least not in the same way they're marketed to boys. When they are pitched to girls, the Lego sets are dumbed down things for making food or hanging out with friends -- Not building cool science and engineering stuff. Oh, I remember the old Lego commercials that had boys and girls playing together building houses and stuff... But nowadays the marketing is totally gender specific: Boys can build and engineer whatever they want with the cool toys -- set their minds free -- but girls can make one exact coffee house or daycare playset, and they don't get the same classic Lego people, girls get bigger, curvier, female avatars.

Not ONE single ten year old boy I've ever met was interested in dollhouses or fake babies that cry and wet themselves, yet some had actual baby siblings to help take care of and are keenly interested in helping out raising a real child. Some men become fathers. Yet we don't market baby raising shit to them as children, and men are stereotyped as being less nurturing than women (whether they actually are or not)... Guess why? You think popping a kid out makes you good at raising it? Hell no, it doesn't. My ex didn't even want to feed the little sucker, and HER TITS were the things making the milk -- She wouldn't even get out of bed or wake up so I just had to figure out how to breast feed a baby with a sleeping woman's breasts. How's that for gender roles? At the minimum we're teaching a bunch of needless bullshit to little girls and they're missing out on mind expanding activities, but IMO the guys are probably missing out on learning a bit of nurturing too -- And, it's for the same reason that there are less women engineers.

Men and women have the same brain structures. Hell, they have the same bodies initially while growing. That's why men have nonfunctional nipples. They have different hormone levels, but the minds aren't vastly different. My mom was in a slide-rule club in high-school. There are plenty of girls in the programming game-jams I attend, as well as the maker spaces & hacker spaces around town. They're not being dragged there unwillingly, they're having fun, and they're as good as anyone else at doing the same stuff. I'm not sure where this "girls hate math and science" BS comes from, but women don't automatically take a disinterest in arbitrary things, nor do men or women automatically like any thing as a general rule.

I mean, Pink used to be a masculine color.

"When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty."

It's just as arbitrary decision to label a color as gender identifying as it is to do so with fields of work, yet folks do it all the time... Still, little girls "like" pink, and more little boys grow into engineers. Marketing is why little girls like pink stu

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[somersault]

So you pick one because of some subconscious factor, which you're probably not aware of

Like you're ever unaware of the cleavage.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[ebno-10db]

emacs user, those people are basically subhuman

And proud of it, we are. Escape-meta-alt-control-shift-q to you buddy.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's sad to say, but in the games industry there are a large number of immature men (boys is a more accurate decsription)

Having problems in a narrow area of social interaction is not "being immature". That's reasonably a minor dysfunction, just like many of the narrow phobias, for example. Having problems with social interaction across the board is being immature.

In short, these people just don't know how to interact properly in civilised society, especially around women.

They may have problems with the latter part, but this "civilized society" of yours is overrated, especially because its significant part is anything but.

I think the important part is that hardcore games people are different, they've always been and they always will.

Really though, the difference between the two comes down to one thing only. In VFX, women are treated with the respect. In Games, they're often treated as the office oddity.

Don't be a hypocrite. They were an oddity in that environment, literally, you said it yourself! I don't think it's easy for people to overcome the subconscious influences of their immediate environment - I observed it myself when I was attending a major EE college with mere 1% of female students. I was seeing hundreds of male students every day, and in all those years, I met something like five or six girls. I suspect that there's some sort of positive feedback look at play in such environments. (Quite undesirable, of course. One of my fellow female students did a nice talk on that in our Rhetorics lessons.)

Oh, and one more thing...

sending them unwanted valentines cards

Setting aside the whole ridiculousness of the "valentine card" idea, does that mean that "mature" people always send "wanted" valentine cards only? That's a novel idea to me.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Anonymous Coward]

that's possible but may not be true at all. Maybe the men were more qualified or were willing to work for less money. just because the woman wasn't picked doesn't mean they were discriminated against. However If they are picked over someone else ONLY because they are a woman then that is discrimination against men.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[drinkypoo]

Help me out here.

If you are socially retarded due to an inadequate upbringing then there is no one-liner or very small shell script which can help you. I was raised by a single, depressed mother who taught me pretty much nothing about how to relate to other humans, let alone female ones. I have had to learn what I know the hard way. The first step is to give a fuck.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[somersault]

For that to work, there would have to be no bullshit on people's resumes..

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[roman_mir]

You are correct, it's important to be able to approach women the right way at work, if you can do it, you'll have all the office romance you can muster. It's a lot of fun (just don't have more than 3 at once, you'll get burned for sure).

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[roman_mir]

I don't understand, why would I want to hire somebody I can't fuck?

(I kid, I kid).

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Alomex]

Did they not let women apply before?

Perhaps their previous hiring practices discriminated against women, as studies have consistently shown most companies unwittingly do.

But no, it has to be reverse discrimination. The poor males that make 98% of the IT departments had it so rough. I'm glad you pointed this out.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Alomex]

Would you want someone of lower capability than an other applicant working on your team just because some bureaucrat thinks a quota of $gender/race is the correct way to bring diversity to the workplace?

I dunno, you seem perfectly comfortable with a bunch of undeserving white professionals who got there simply because they were born in first/second base thanks to past discrimination and they would not have made it at all, had they started from the dug out, like a kid from the ghetto.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[bickerdyke]

From my experience, if you have a 100% homogenous workforce (e.g. all male, or all CS absolvents) adding a single "outsider" will have a negative effect on work environment.

The positive effects of diversity will settle in later, if you established something closer to true diversity.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[kaatochacha]

Having been in almost all male work environments and all female work environments, I've noticed both genders tend to be cruder around their own Gender. But damn, while with all men it's sometimes a little uncomfortable, around women sometimes it's positively offensive. Example: Men in the group might talk about some woman's tits, or some woman they want to sleep with. Women would tell me I'd have to be careful or I'd get raped by them. It seems that in some ways men have already been trained to tone down this stuff, while women have no history in keeping that out of the discussion.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Velex]

A womyn-born-womyn is a person who was assigned the female gender at birth. I think at least this includes normal XX people, XY people with severe enough androgen insensitivity, and certain intersexed people. I'm not certain if it would include men assigned the female gender after a circumcision accident, since I'm not certain if the term actually means having the experience of being raised as a girl or if it means having genitals that are apparently female. Clearly, womyn-born-womyn does not include people who seem to be obviously female such as the Korean pop star Harisoo, Julia Serano, or myself (when I'm not having a bad hair day).

More succinctly, it's a term feminists use to exclude trans women.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[luis_a_espinal]

You can speak to someone and not know their sex. Smartphone apps exist that do nothing but this task.

One could also correspond by snail-mail, too. I doubt that is a reasonable mechanism for interviewing potential candidates unless the whole exercise is done just to prove the point that it can be done. But in that case we are no longer talking about business decisions, and we are entering the realms of the ideological/subreal.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[luis_a_espinal]

A better solution is to just pick the best candidate no matter what. If that means having to hide the candidates identity that is fine.

A better solution is one that the company sees fit within the boundaries of the law. If said company wishes to do some social experiments and court women (a historical dissadvantaged group) more than men, in a male-predominant industry, in a manner that is legal, then good for them.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[luis_a_espinal]

Then use some actual random function. A coin toss should be fine. That will at least be fair.

It is also fair to introduce some bias to ensure a more equitable distribution of jobs among equally qualifiable candidates of different genders. As a man, I don't get why this is so treatening or unfair to some of you guys. Seriously.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[iamwahoo2]

So you acknowledge that we all have biases in terms of the careers we pursue. Consider how similar biases can make a product development team more effective when a diverse group of individuals can look at a problem from different points of view. Etsy is an excellent example. I doubt that the majority of their customers are male engineers. Isn't it obvious that one of the best ways to develop products that their customers want is to find competent developers who are also likely to be users of the product? If I am a competent developer, but I loathe and despise video games and I never play them, would you want me working for your game development company?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Applekid]

However, I got 100 resumes. Only two were female, and the first point on her experience was "able to type 50 word per minute" and the second described herself as a "furry" *in* the resume.

I guess that second one was so she could claim fursecution when not hired.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[stanlyb]

In France they have this rule, and it is actually working pretty well..

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[cellocgw]

I don't understand, why would I want to hire somebody I can't fuck?

OK, explain how you *can't* fuck either sex. Oh, you meant "don't wanna fuck" ? :-) That would rule out rather a large fraction of candidates who are of your desired sex. Unless you're desperate.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[psmears]

Expand the pool of candidates applying for the job.

Did they not let women apply before?

There are other ways of expanding the pool of candidates. Perhaps they'd been advertising their vacant positions in media that were largely read by men?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[KiloByte]

I'm afraid you put political correctness above data. Here's why races being equal is impossible:

There's a vast number of genetical variation between people: some are stronger, some weaker, some have bigger jaws, some blond hair, some... and so on. It's quite obvious at least some mental attributes have genetic variation.

Now let's have two vectors of numbers, one labelled "intelligence", second "skin pigmentation". You can use a more complex graph, of course, but a linear one is enough. Initialize all values to the same number. Now, in every iteration, randomly select an entry, then randomly either put it halfway towards one of its neighbours, or add or subtract a random value. Repeat for umpteen zillion of iterations.

Now check if these vectors show correlation. Unless you are extremely lucky and they happen to zero out by chance, there will be significant correlation, even though there's obviously no causation (at no point values of "intelligence" and "pigmentation" ever depended on one another).

Unlike this simulation, in real life it's possible we have at least common causes: survival in temperate regions that suffer from winters requires more preparation than savannahs and jungles, yet as I've shown above, even in an complete absence of causation correlation is extremely likely.

This doesn't mean a given person from one group is necessarily stronger/stupider/bigger-jawed than one from the other, thanks to individual variation. Yet at least the averages between two groups will show correlation with many unrelated attributes.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[phantomfive]

This is why Sociology exists.

So people can have fun speculating?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[scot4875]

In other words: "you just don't get it. You're the problem but I'm not going to tell you why."

What a constructive and logical response! Bonus points for the additional "socially retarded" shaming.

--Jeremy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[phantomfive]

You are assuming that all the female candidates are of lower quality and that is why they don't get hired in the first place.

Have you ever seen that actually happen in the programming industry?

Because I've definitely seen the opposite happen, where they really really wanted to hire someone just because she was a girl.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[scot4875]

Easily explained: women have never, at any point in their lives, been expected to be sensitive of men's feelings. (Because men don't have any, and if they do then they just need to man up and take it, because they're the oppressor so that makes it ok for the oppressed to do whatever they feel like.)

Men, on the other hand, have had it beaten into them since birth that they need to respect and be sensitive to women's feelings.

--Jeremy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[stanlyb]

I just wonder, if the current process tends to hire the most qualified (male) professionals, why is this need of H1B? And why they were "sold" in one week? I don't know for you, but my CS degree, combined with my years and years of studying math, statistic and logic, are for some strange reason telling me that the first sentence is not true. The rest is history, as they say.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Wait? Are you telling me that females are supposed to be the ones with the cleavage in IT?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[wbackner]

^This. If only I had mod points.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[AmiMoJo]

Problem is a lot of managers don't recognize when the best candidate is a woman. Women are different to men, obviously, and thus have different strengths. These are often not things you can put in a list of bullet points, and the guys doing the hiring tend to compare the candidates to the guys they already have.

There are many subtle reasons why women are still not equal to men in the world of work. Turns out merely trying hard to be fair and equal is not enough, at least for today. Hopefully in the future when the balance is closer to 50/50 it will be.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[TheMathemagician]

What local communities do you think there are in Central London? Or are you using "local community" as a codeword for black/brown skinned? I'm a white, educated, English male who lives in West London. Am I not a member of my local community?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[davester666]

You just redefine what 'best' means.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[MacGyver2210]

That is incredibly ignorant. No, women were NOT being 'discriminated against'. There just weren't anywhere near as many women applicants. The tech sector is rife with complaints about the lack of women, and yet, women go into technical fields and apply for jobs in that area a fractional percent as often as men do.

If you have a pool of applicants, hire the most qualified ones. If women are pissed they weren't chosen, they should work harder and get better at what they do so they will be chosen the next time. It's better than complaining that they didn't get the job due to lack of a penis.

If there is any evidence of impropriety or discrimination, that shit should be dealt with immediately. Short of that, don't hire based on gender or race. Hire based on ability.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe the US is some kind of egalitarian utopia but in the UK, which isn't dissimilar, women still get paid less for doing exactly the same job. It is technically illegal but hard to prove because they just give women a slightly different job title and pretend that it isn't worth as much.

The different clustering you mention is also problematic. We don't have enough men in primary school teaching so the kids lack male role-models in that environment. There is plenty of evidence that women are interested in engineering but steered away from it by a combination of societal bias, peer pressure and resistance to them entering the field.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[AmiMoJo]

Actually there is a campaign, complete with incentives, in the UK to recruit more men into primary school education. There is a big lack of male teachers to act as role models for kids of that age. Part of the problem is attributed to the hysteria of paedophilia in the last couple of decades.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[aardvarkjoe]

It is also fair to introduce some bias...

Are you reading what you're typing?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[stanlyb]

Or more likely, she knows that you would never ever approve female candidate, so why bother?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[stanlyb]

There is, but, as a friend of mine said, once they realize they are speaking with woman over the phone, ...........

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Belial6]

Are you really wondering why a person would feel that being discriminated against based on gender is threatening or unfair? How PC brainwashed do you have to be to not even understand why some people might not want to be discriminated against?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[drinkypoo]

What a constructive and logical response! Bonus points for the additional "socially retarded" shaming.

It's called honesty. I'm still not as socially adept as I think I should be. I don't deny it, or pretend it's not the case. Doing that is part of what leads to being sexist and thinking you aren't. If I could give people one piece of advice and have them take it, and I mean any people anywhere, it's stop lying to yourself. Is that constructive and logical enough for you?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Belial6]

No. Not good for them. Discrimination is not OK just because it is "inside the law". Owning people used to be "inside the law" that didn't make it OK.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Belial6]

Unless you are wrong and there is a systemic bias for women that you have been too PC brainwashed to even consider this a possibility.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[citizenr]

Somehow this problem didnt exist in ~1940.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[BradleyUffner]

As a man, I don't get why this is so treatening or unfair to some of you guys. Seriously.

I don't find it threatening or unfair... I find it to be not logical and dishonest. Don't call it "fair" if it isn't fair.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[PoolOfThought]

> Companies with more diversity tend to do better. Source please. Also, please expand on "do better".

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Belial6]

The problem is that you are discriminating against men. Women make sexual jokes, flirt in the office, are crass just as much as men. The difference that a large portion of the population takes the stance that if a man makes a sexual or biased comment, the man is a sexist. If a woman makes a sexual or biased comment the man is a sexist.

I can say that I have never heard a man in an office declare that he should mutilate women's sexual organs. I have heard more than one woman comment that they should mutilate men's sexual organs.
I can say that I have never been to a children's at a museum where the event coordinator wore a "Guys Rule!" T-Shirt. I can't say the same about "Girls Rule!" and other gender biased shirts.
I can say that I have never been told "We will not consider women for this position". I have been told "We will not consider men for this position".
I could go on, but the point is that male bashing is not the solution to end gender bias. You are part of the problem.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Yakasha]

Then use some actual random function. A coin toss should be fine. That will at least be fair.

Not if you get to choose how to place the coin on your finger...

Trying to make an unfair world fair is a fool's errand as long as people have opinions.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Belial6]

That or she taught you the lesson you would carry with you for the rest of your life. She tough you that women are helpless victims and that men are evil abusers who's very presence is an attack on women. She was wrong.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[CastrTroy]

Except that when 2 people are equal in skill set, you defer to other qualifications such as which person you think will work better with the existing employees, or which person will just be more fun to have around the office. Perhaps it's which person you think will be more likely to stay late a few nights a week, or which person you won't likely have to find a replacement for when they go on maternity leave. So if 2 people are equally qualified, you're probably going to choose the one that's got a better personality, or who made a better joke during the interview process, or who likes the same sports you do. That last reason about maternity leave is a big reason cited why women of a certain age aren't hired. But it's a serious business concern. When there's 2 equally qualified people, and one has a bigger chance of being gone in a year, you're going to hire the person that is more likely to stick around.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[scot4875]

You're the second person to state that.

This is a deliberate shaming and deflection tactic. Bringing up any disagreement automatically means you're a misogynist racist.

Maybe I should clarify

You can't clarify. People with this mindset are little better than religious ideologues. They do not want to understand your position, because you disagree with them. Instead, they will twist your words and attack you personally, rather than address your actual arguments. Have fun hacking at strawmen if you choose to continue to engage these types.

--Jeremy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[scot4875]

Men and women have the same brain structures. Hell, they have the same bodies initially while growing. That's why men have nonfunctional nipples. They have different hormone levels, but the minds aren't vastly different.

So, let's just ignore the fact that pretty much every animal on the planet that uses sexual reproduction has specialized roles for the different sexes. Let's just assume that their brains are identical, and they (generally -- obviously biology is not 100% precise and there's a wide spectrum of behavior) just *choose* to do what all the other members of their sex are doing.

Humans? Well, we're *special*. We couldn't *possibly* be subject to the same forces that guide mindless animals.

--Jeremy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Belial6]

This is exactly it. From the day they are born, little boys are taught that if they want to have a roof over their head and food in their belly, they would need to make sure they had a job. Even if that job completely sucked. From the day they are born, little girls are taught that they are just one blowjob away from a warm bed and a good meal. (OK that was crass and society usually works up to the blowjob part) The point is that it is made clear to every boy that he MUST work and to every girl that she CAN work.

If you divide up the groups based on who is told they CAN work as opposed to MUST work, you find that everything looks a lot more fair. There are other reasons that people do or don't have to work, and you will find that men who believe they don't have to work tend to fall into the same category as the bulk of women, whereas women who believe they do have to work tend to fall into the category as most men.

It isn't so much a gender bias in the workplace as a systemic bias towards women having their way paid by men with a bit of "That which does not kill you makes you stronger." thrown in.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[scot4875]

In fact, there's a definite trend in elementary education (especially K-3) to try to get men into that field

Since when? All the stats I've seen (I'm not going to cite any, seeing as how you neglected to cite any) show a steadily decreasing number of men in primary education, and a similar trend at the college level.

If there's a trend to try to get men into education, it's failing miserably.

--Jeremy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[scot4875]

The thing that people somehow manage to neglect to mention in these discussions is the fact that women dominate HR departments, so if there *is* a bias against women in hiring, it's primarily *by other women*.

--Jeremy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[RobbieCrash]

I'm sorry, but you;'re incorrect about the wage gap being debunked "time and time again." While the wage gap is not 70cents on the dollar anymore, there is a significant difference in women's pay. In Ontario, according to Stats Canada, the gap is currently 25%. It's also the same in the US according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is worse than it has been since 2005.

I'm very sorry you feel discriminated against, but this supposed attack on male rights is horse shit made up by bitter people who cannot tolerate the fact that 1000 years of cultural manipulation by us white men is being undone.

The numbers of male nurses has increased incredibly in the last 30 years, and male nurses are currently making significantly more money than women, and are in higher positions.

There are massive campaigns to get more men involved teaching, and early child development. There's also employment campaigns to get more women involved in trades, including the more dangerous ones, those campaigns are primarily ones which you complain about in your first paragraph (scholarships directed at women).

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[router]

Mirrors the engineering departments in college. Seriously. Lucky to have 10% women in class. Add to that the tech immigration, which is all men, and 97% probably mirrors their hiring pool. Want to help fix it? Make the feds only accept 50/50 men/women H1-B applications. That would get the ratio back in a hurry. Plus it would get some women in technical fields, a step I would applaud. Sucks to go to work everyday, all dudes. Science and engineering companies are the biggest sausage parties on the planet.

andy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[erice]

You just redefine what 'best' means.

Not necessarily. If you improve benefits in such a way that the job becomes more appealing to women, more qualified women will apply. Child care, for instance. It would be a benefit for any employee that has children but, statistically, women are more likely to be single parents and take greater responsibility for children in a two parent family.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[brit74]

You are assuming that all the female candidates are of lower quality and that is why they don't get hired in the first place. That assumption is wrong. Sometimes they don't get hired because the person hiring them is biased against their gender (they won't fit in, might generate sexual harassment lawsuits etc.).

That's why it's useful to compare the gender ratios against the applicants for a job. It's not a perfect measure, by any means, though.

For example, only about 20% of the students studying computer science are women, which means you can't really expect more than 20% of the programmers to be women in the workforce; though historical rates also come into play here. I had read recently that about 27% of developer jobs are staffed by women, which almost seems to indicate a pro-woman bias.

There was a big storm a number of years back when some student in the admissions office noticed that minority students had lower test scores than white students. They ended up leaking a bunch of information showing that minority students had SAT scores that were, on average, several hundred points below the SAT scores of white students (of course, there's other factors to take into account in that case, for example, if no white students had test scores less than X, but minority students had test scores several hundred points below X. Averages can be deceiving since they can be skewed by a bunch of high performing white students.)

So, yeah, it is very possible for affirmative action to favor lower quality minorities over higher performing white candidates.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[router]

This. The most uncomfortable sexual discussions ever held in my presence, in the workplace, were from women. I have been subject to sexual harassment at work, and it was from a woman. Shit goes both ways, the real kicker is that some women think they are doing men a favor by being hypersexual in the workplace. How retarded is that?

andy

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Kwyj1b0]

Negative feedback loop anyone?

Actually, I think you are describing positive feedback - less women in STEM workforce leads to less women in STEM classes, which leads to less women applying for STEM jobs which leads to even fewer women in STEM workforce.

Balancing the quota in the short term leads to biasing and loss of productivity, but in the long term it MIGHT lead to an actual equilibrium - say you want 50% of people in an industry to be women. Right now, not too many ladies are in that field, so you will hire the most competent women you can find while discarding better qualified men. Girls joining colleges might see the favorable bias, and enter that field (while boys shy away from it). With more women to choose from, you have more hiring choices (and since the ladies have greater competition, they can't just slide by - they will be competing against more women). Eventually, you can reach the equilibrium with men and women being as talented (assuming no inherent difference in abilities across the genders).

I don't claim that this is a worthy goal to pursue. I am just pointing out that this strategy of bias can (if implemented properly) get you to the desired gender ratio.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[luis_a_espinal]

It is fair for the women who have historically been at a dissadvantage. Similarly, it is not fair, in the absolute sense of the word, to let women and children take the boats first over men when the ship is sinking. Are we gonna cry about it, calling it an unfair practice. "Fair" is not necessarily the same as "acceptable", "appropriate" or "sensible" (or in the case of men being men, the correct thing to do.)

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[luis_a_espinal]

It is also fair to introduce some bias...

Are you reading what you're typing?

Well, since your question is making the presumption that I'm not, I let it become a de-facto answer to your question since you happen to be subject matter expert in this specific subject/post/whatever.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[luis_a_espinal]

No. Not good for them. Discrimination is not OK just because it is "inside the law".

Well, as a similar analogy, it is not good, and it is discriminatory, to let women and children take the rafts before men when the ship is sinking. If we taken an absolutist POV, then this practice is discriminatory as well. Poor us men.

Owning people used to be "inside the law" that didn't make it OK.

Of course not, but it is neither ok to take my original argument and try to 'falsify' it by extending it to a complete different context. This is right up the alley of Godwin's Law when it comes to conjuring emotional arguments.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[operagost]

If they were predominantly picking the man previously in this situation, then women were discriminated against.

This is not a logical conclusion. I'm embarrassed to have to spell it out to an adult, but if you had several candidates and the best ones happen to be male, you pick them. Picking the male is not ipso facto discrimination any more than picking the female if you were in a field dominated by women, like elementary school teachers.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[operagost]

It is fair for the women who have historically been at a dissadvantage.

"Fair" is not necessarily the same as "acceptable", "appropriate" or "sensible"

You got that right.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Belial6]

I tried not to assume anything. I'm asking if women don't attain higher in STEM fields of education because they don't see a career in STEM as a viable target, because there are few women working in STEM. Negative feedback loop anyone?

I am not buying this. While there might be some jobs like fireman or kindergarten teacher where gender dominance is publicly visible to kids, I don't think most kids know that STEM is predominantly male until someone starts telling them that more women are needed, and that "really, you can do it even though you are a girl".

The feedback loop you are looking for is as old as man itself. The fact that chasing down a wild boar in the dead of winter while 9 months pregnant doesn't lead to a real high survival rate. This lead to making sure that if you were of the child bearing gender, you tried to bear children only with those who would care for you. Fast forward 10,000 years and little girls are still trained from birth that 'bringing home the bacon' is an option and that they can choose to just find a man to take care of them. Little boys are taught from birth that if they want to eat, they will need to 'bring home the bacon'. If they want to breed, they will need to give a bunch of that bacon to a woman.

While times are changing, up until very recently, if a woman didn't work while her husband did, she was a 'housewife'. If a man didn't work while his wife did he was a 'bumb'.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[brit74]

I dunno, you seem perfectly comfortable with a bunch of undeserving white professionals who got there simply because they were born in first/second base thanks to past discrimination and they would not have made it at all, had they started from the dug out, like a kid from the ghetto.

You act like jobs are just given out to white people with no real consideration of whether they're capable or educated ("undeserving white professionals"). I don't know if you know this, but employers generally try to pick the best/most capable candidate. If we're going to base this purely on some "past discrimination" and want society to rectify past wrong by handing out jobs to the down and out, then I look forward to an incompetent workforce.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[stanlyb]

Paradoxically, in some countries where the poverty is a problem, the tend to have..SURPRISE, more female engineers!
WTH? Why? Are women smarter than men when you have to do more with less!

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

Except that you're trying to equate an ethical dilemma to simple legality. That IS a fallacy... and yes, according to the 'equality' style fairness pitched by the left, forcing men to sacrifice themselves for women and children is discriminatory. It's just that they don't want to admit that all their 'fighting oppression' rhetoric is blustering that hides selfish motives..

What if the same company wanted to exclude women for the sake of some 'social experiment'? If the law allowed it, would you be ok with it? The point is that we're all supposed to be equal before the law. That includes men. Carving out legal exceptions and bypasses for certain castes just reinforces such castes.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Alomex]

You act like jobs are just given out to white people with no real consideration of whether they're capable or educated

I do not. There was consideration given. Say, they wrote a test and they were less competent but they got a higher score because they wrote it on a full stomach, and had the black kid had breakfast he would have done equally well.

I don't know if you know this, but employers generally try to pick the best/most capable candidate.

They try. But when you have systemic racism and discrimination even well intentioned people fail. In a recent study the same resume with a white name and a criminal conviction got the same number of interviews as the identical resume with a black name (e.g. Yamal) without a criminal conviction.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

How do you know this? Skill testing should focus on testing such skillsets, not character assessment. The gender doesn't matter. Just pick the best applicant.

It's interesting that you're willing to acknowledge differences in the genders when you want to show women in a positive light (they have different strengths), but in situations where men naturally do better (trying hard to be 'fair and equal' is not enough), suddenly it's a social problem that needs intervention. I wonder if you are just unaware of how much propagandic swill you've swallowed since your college years. It's hypocritical and, frankly, insane. I recommend you reevaluate your position, that is, if you are truly interested in hiring the best candidates and not just cowering to peer pressure to be 'politically correct'.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

No. Difference alone does not make one more qualified. Applicants must be judged on relevant attributes, but gender isn't one of them..at least, that's the argument.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

Certainly not today, where women are selected FOR with extreme bias in corporate, academic, and government settings; not because they're more gifted, genetically superior, or any of the other implied barbs feminists make against males, but just because they're women. That is gender discrimination, and no it is no more justified than the inverse they claim to fight. People with this mentality are insecure hypocrites who want to hide their selfish motivations.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Hognoxious]

I was really hoping that one of the Boston bombers was you.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[roman_mir]

I wouldn't target non-government civilians under any circumstances.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Grishnakh]

> Typically you see a rule like "at least 10% of the workforce must be x% female".

But TFA Says

  > Don’t lower hiring standards, or make exceptions or compromises

There's only two possibilities here, the way I see it:

1) You discriminate against men. If it comes down to two candidates, one male and one female, you choose the female because you want the numbers to look better, but this amounts to discrimination. Of course, many people, like "luis_a_espinal" in a comment below, think this is a perfectly fine solution and that men shouldn't mind being discriminated against.

2) You really do only hire the better candidate, in all cases, no exceptions. Then, if it comes down to the situation above, you simply don't hire either one if you can't show that one is really significantly better than the other. So you wait until a superior candidate comes along, or you wait for one of those two to drop out (i.e., they give up on waiting for you to make a decision, and accept a job elsewhere). Of course, this strategy may leave you chronically and horribly understaffed, or staffed with incompetents, because you'll have to continuously avoid any situation where there might be any bias, and so you only hire when it's obvious that there's no dilemma between equally-strong male and female candidates, and in doing so, you'll probably have all the good candidates move on to other jobs, leaving you with poor candidates of either sex.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

What?! That statement makes strange assumptions. If they were hiring based on ability in the first place, the 'candidate pool' is already as large as possible. There is no alternate 'best candidates-with-more-women' pool by definition because the candidates are already stacked based on relevant attributes. Gender isn't supposed to be one of them, but I guess feminists don't mind gender discrimination as long as it's used to select FOR women. This is a typical example of the hypocrisy found in cultural marxism.

Despite what feminists will say, there's no guarantee the results would be a 50/50 split between the genders. In fact, it is highly unlikely, and driven mostly by the type of job being filled. Women are drawn to some types of jobs and men to others. There's no need for it to be 50/50. Such assumptions are childish at best, and frankly, seeing so many adults these days reason this way is quite scary.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Grishnakh]

Hopefully in the future when the balance is closer to 50/50 it will be.

Why does it need to be 50/50? Why exactly do we need 50% of people in IT to be female?

Before you fire off an answer to that question, consider these questions: why don't we have a 50/50 ratio in other professions, such as nursing and elementary school teaching, and daycare work? And why isn't there a giant push to fix this "problem"? Why is it not a problem that men who try to become kindergarten teachers are highly discriminated against (they're seen as potential molesters), and that there's no big push to equalize the gender distribution in this profession? However, for IT and many other jobs which women apparently aren't that interested in, there's all kinds of debate about and pushing for equalization. Is grade school (e.g. K-8) teaching not important to society? If anything, it seems like it should be considered more important to society than working some boring IT job at some megacorporation. But instead, it's seen as pathetic, and only fit for women, and so no one cares that there's almost no men in it, and that any men who do try to go into it are reviled.

I don't see why we should push to have more women in male-only jobs as long as there's no equal push to have more men in female-only jobs.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Grishnakh]

As some other responders said, this may or may not be due to the industry as much as the company itself. I've worked at six different companies over my working career, and the differences between them all was night and day. Some had terrible cultures, others had good ones, others had weird ones. Some were really good for women, others weren't. Many times, different workgroups had radically different cultures within the same company.

I don't think it's quite fair to make blanket statements about entire industries based on a sample size of one with each industry.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[u38cg]

I'm not talking about race as such, just the simple fact that in a company of hundreds of people, finding one who was born or brought up within a couple of miles is like finding hens teeth. That seems odd to me. I don't blame anyone in particular for this state of affairs, but once you recognise it I think there's an argument to be made for addressing it.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[websitebroke]

So let's just throw our hands up in the air and do nothing, eh?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[thesandtiger]

That's the thing, though - telling people to just suck it up and deal is a shitty response because it basically lowers everyone.

Why should anyone, regardless of gender, tolerate being treated poorly where they work? There's no law of physics that states that work has to be a soul destroying experience or that employees need to take shit and like it.

I find it pretty depressing that so many people are behaving like putting up with abuse is a *good* thing.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[__aaltlg1547]

Wow! Surely you meant to post this offensive drivel as an AC.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[__aaltlg1547]

Men and women have the same brain structures. Hell, they have the same bodies initially while growing. That's why men have nonfunctional nipples. They have different hormone levels, but the minds aren't vastly different.

So, let's just ignore the fact that pretty much every animal on the planet that uses sexual reproduction has specialized roles for the different sexes. Let's just assume that their brains are identical, and they (generally -- obviously biology is not 100% precise and there's a wide spectrum of behavior) just *choose* to do what all the other members of their sex are doing.

Humans? Well, we're *special*. We couldn't *possibly* be subject to the same forces that guide mindless animals.

--Jeremy

There are measurable differences in the brain structures of men and women, but the differences in average capacity to do any mental task are insignificant and can't explain the massive differences you see in their presence in fields like engineering.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

1. there are a lot of men who aren't 'given a chance' either. That's life. It's not fair. Men are expected to know, understand, and respect this. Why aren't women held to that? They're equals after all..

2. It doesn't matter if the industry is male or female dominated. By itself, it's not proof of systemic discrimination. Men and women tend to have different temperamental imperatives that cause them to make different kinds of choices in life. That's fine. The problem is that feminists (and by extension, leftist philosophy) think that humans are infinitely malleable constructs. That's crazytalk. Offering equal opportunity training/outreach programs in order to maximize hiring pools is fine. It just needs to be open to everyone.

3. Too bad. Men have to tolerate an increasing amount of feminization in everything nowadays that makes them feel out of place and guilt tripped into thinking their own male-centric behavior patterns are unacceptable. Elements of this can be found in the media/entertainment, in the law, in office politics, on college campuses (and highschools too), and in government. For a growing number, it's hitting points of intolerability. Frankly, forcing androgyny on everyone by demanding women act more masculine, and men act more feminine, is a mistake that creates misery for both genders.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

You can't always fix people problems either, because when it's tried, it creates more problems for society than it solves.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[epyT-R]

What's read by women as 'confrontational' is read by (healthy) men as direct and to-the-point dialog: a critical component of an efficient, effective employee, especially in technology work. Thus the argument could be made that the 'confrontational' interaction is a relevant way to vet relevant character traits.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Ambassador Kosh]

Probably end up having the computer give a test on all skills that are required. If you can't past the test you don't know the skill regardless of what you said on your resume.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[HertzaHaeon]

If you're referring to that wage gap crap, it's been debunked time and time again.

There's a big difference in what men and women earn at the end of the day (although in the studies I've seen there's a few percentage points of difference that can't be explained). This is often explained with women making different career and family choices. If we accept that reasoning, then if a difference is the result of choice, then it's acceptable. That makes me wonder about one of your other points:

Where are the employment campaigns for more women in dangerous or hard labor jobs?

Why do you think this is a problem? Noone's forcing men to work in dangerous jobs, right? Just like women "choosing" jobs that pay less than men's jobs, men choose dangerous jobs. Women choose one way and get paid less, men choose another way and have more work accidents.

Personally I'm against both situations and I don't think that choice (or the illusion of it) magically solves every problem.

Lastly, I think you should pitch your idea of hiring women into these male-dominated, dangerous jobs. I'm sure women are genuinely wanted by the guys there, and they'll be accepted as equals, right?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

It is also fair to introduce some bias

I don't get why this is so treatening or unfair

Perhaps it's because it isn't fair to introduce some bias.

Removing bias is great. Introducing objectivity is great. Introducing bias is fucking moronic.

Which part of "don't discriminate based on sex" is so difficult? It works both ways.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

bringing a woman's perspective is a skill that no male applicant can possess

That's sexist. It may be correct, but it's also sexist. What is this "woman's perspective" that you seek? What insights, skills, experience and contribution are you hoping from that team member?

Assess the individual on those criteria, not on their sex.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

Actually if there's a ship going down and the crew refuse to let a man board a lifeboat because there's a woman waiting in the queue behind him, I'm going to attack those crew in his defence. He has as much right to a chance of survival as she does.

Chivalry is all well and nice, but women want equality. That includes an equal chance of dying.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

Except that they didn't change or lower standards. So no, 'best' was still meeting the same criteria; it just happens that if you have a pool of 20 people not 10, twice as many of them are likely to pass the bar.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

statistically, women are more likely to be single parents

Yet I don't hear the feminists bitching about the fathers that are being financially screwed by the courts and denied custody of their children.

Anyway, childcare matters as much to couples as it does to single parents.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

But if you weren't (unconsciously) being sexist, then every time a man and a woman were equally qualified for a position, on average you should end up with the same number of men and women being hired.

So were 15% of the qualified applications female? If so, Etsy aren't being sexist. If significantly more or less then Etsy are potentially being (unconsiously) sexist.

Sadly the article doesn't state the gender balance of the applicant pool or its most qualified people.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

Removing unconscious bias in the hiring process is worthwhile.

I think it was Super Freakonomics (but may have been another book, so apologies if I got it wrong) that mentioned that orchestras were overwhelmingly male, despite a large number of talented female instrument players.

So they stopped having people play in front of a group of assessors. Instead they had the assessors listen to someone playing behind a curtain, and hire based on the quality of the music.

Gender balance rapidly closed in on 50/50. Draw your own conclusions.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

Say, they wrote a test and they were less competent but they got a higher score because they wrote it on a full stomach, and had the black kid had breakfast he would have done equally well.

I grew up wearing second-hand clothes because my parents couldn't afford new ones. We didn't own a telephone until I was 18. Shit, we didn't own a colour television until I was 7. We didn't own a car until I was 7.

Tell me, am I black or white? Did I eat properly or not? Did I get an education or not?

Don't fucking pretend white people have some inherent advantage. Tell the fucking president.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Grishnakh]

I'm an engineer, and if I had a son or daughter, I'd discourage them from STEM too, unless they plan to make a business out of it somehow. Working for a company is never going to get you very far. If a kid is smart enough for a STEM career, they're smart enough for a medical career instead, and they'll do far, far better there.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Grishnakh]

BS. Medicine used to be dominated by men too (at least for the doctor positions), yet these days there's tons of female doctors, and they're having a hard time convincing women to go into nursing because the smart ones all want to be doctors instead (gee, wonder why...). Law used to be dominated by men too, and now there's plenty of female attorneys. Women have pushed into many male-dominated fields, but engineering isn't one of them. Then again, neither is construction.

What's the correlation? Well, engineering and construction share one trait which they don't share with law or medicine: prestige. Lawyers and doctors, in our society, are highly esteemed. Sure, lawyers have nasty jokes about them, but everyone thinks they make tons of money, and when an actual lawyer comes around, everyone bows down to him/her. I've seen it in my extended family; it's weird. But construction workers and engineers? Nope, they're seen as crappy jobs in this society. Construction work is seen as being for men who aren't very smart and only have muscle as a useful advantage. Engineering is seen as being for men who are socially retarded and "geeky". Programming is even worse. Why would women want to get into a profession that is viewed poorly by the population at large?

Contrast this with other cultures, namely India and China: in those places, engineering and programming are seen as prestigious careers, and pay extremely well (compared to other professions there), and as a result, there's tons of women in these STEM fields in those countries, unlike here in the West.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Grishnakh]

because it's currently thought that much of the rampant diagnoses of ADHD in boys is due to female teachers not understanding gender differences in behavior between boys and girls.

Yet somehow this wasn't a problem 50+ years ago, even though back then there were even fewer male teachers in those K-3 grades.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Alomex]

Right, because racism, segregation and jim crow laws are just "fucking pretend".

Tell the fucking president.

and he can tell you that there were swaths of the country which didn't vote for him (or believe he's a kenyan muslim) for the simple reason that he's black.

None of this should be news to you, but you have your head so far up your ass that you cannot see this.

And lastly in no way did I claim that only black people are poor.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[davester666]

So you are saying we have to pay women more than men to get them to work in the tech industry?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[houghi]

My experience is if you have all women and add one man, you have a lot of problems. If you have all men and add one women, you have a serious improvement.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[LordVader717]

The majority of job seekers in tech are male. So if you use an unequally distributed attribute as a selection criterium then it's bias and therefore unfair.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[LordVader717]

The systemic bias you speak would be that most people hired would be men. That isn't unfair or discriminatory. You can introduce a different bias to unfairly favour women and get a more equal distribution of gender in your employees. But you've only gained something if you perceive it to be a problem when there is a large proportion of a particular gender in a certain working environment. To me that in itself seems like a sexist attitude.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Cederic]

Segregation? Still?
Jim Crow laws? No, not any more.
Racism? Yes. I've been racially discriminated against. What? I'm of Anglo-Saxon descent? Nonetheless, I've suffered racial discrimination.

What's your fucking point then? Because frankly pulling up shit that happened over half a century ago is utter bullshit. Fuck me, let me tell you about the fucking Normans. They killed my ancestors, the fuckers.

Get over it. Get on with life. Stop carrying a chip on your shoulder and stop pretending that white people somehow have this inherent systemic intentional bias towards them. I know too many successful people that aren't white to believe for a fucking minute that race is the issue.

Why do you think the term 'white trash' exists?

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[mcvos]

Way to justify your chauvinism with a True Scotsman there.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[Alomex]

Segregation? Still?

Absolutely. There are still establishments that do not accept black people all over the deep south. Heck even Denny's was discriminating against blacks just a few years ago.

What's your fucking point then?

Do yourself a favor: try to swear less and think more. Not that I expect you to follow my advice. You are too angry to have a rational thought on this issue.

Stop carrying a chip on your shoulder

I'm not a member of a visible minority but I do not close my eyes to reality like you do.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[nobodie]

You are being simplistic about hiring and decision-making. The system is either completely anonymous and based on the key words in your CV/resume (which we all hate because you can game the system by just using the right keywords even when used in an ungrammatical and nonsensical way) or you can go with "your gut feeling" which means all your hidden biases come out and you haven't a clue about being biased so you just hire the same kind of people you hired before: women for the menial work and men for the higher level work..

HR departments are as bad as the rest of us, the system is just fucked up, to right that wrong requires being deliberately "unfair" and choosing people that go against your base feelings, because they are biased, really my friend, they are. Mine are, and I have spent 30 years trying not to let my biases influence me, and still I'm biased. You, I'm afraid, are too.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[vilanye]

In my CS program there was always on average about 8 women in the program at any given time(and about 50 guys).

Only 1 was equal to the top guys, she was absolutely brilliant. Maybe 2 were mediocre and the rest sucked and washed out.

That is far worse % than men in general.

Yeah, it is a small sample but my post-college experiences have showed me that that ratio of excellent male CS to women was about right.

Who really gives a fuck if more women go into this field? What possible positive will it bring?

If anything CS standards need to double or even triple. No one in my program that wasn't at least a B+ student was even a moderately capable programmer. They just banged on their code until it compiled, and even asking them to produce code that would compile was like asking them to fly.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[PurplePhase]

Other factors might also include that fewer women have the disposition for the kinds of drama/politics/socializing that exists in the IT realm, though that bleeds towards "old boys club" and we're back to sexism talk again...

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[alexandru_preoteasa]

Aha, starting off with an ad hominem. Followed by strawman... another strawman... Blech.

Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist

[alexandru_preoteasa]

Right on the money. I spent my mod points already, dammit... The entitlement culture driven by cultural Marxism is incredible, isn't it?

It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

The problem is most women just aren't interested in engineering type roles. I know 1 female engineer out of the 40+ women I know, all the rest can't stand doing math, physic's or even intense thinking. I think part of the problem is that when kids grow up boys are taught to build and women are taught to be pretty, when a boy plays with Lego or other similar products in a sense he's engineering. On the other hand girls are given a barbie and a easy bake oven and told to have fun, how is that going to lead to a career in engineering. I think the problem needs to be fixed at the child level.

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

Question is why are they not interested?
I have never heard of a credible biological reason to this, is there a "scientist" gene that is present in only men? I would find that hard to belive.

Personally I think you're right about development of young children. Want more women in STEM? Then give them things like video games and Legos to play with as children to help foster that interest.
It's unreasonable to tell them for 12+ years that those are BOY TOYS then expect them to overnight develop an interest.

Re:It's to bad

[ctid]

When I started in computing (this is in the mid 1980s), the majority of programmers that I worked with were female. This was an old-fashioned mini-computer based department in an industrial environment.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

ya what woman would want someone who supports women in engineering! I know right, unthinkable, ass.

Re:It's to bad

[RussR42]

Obligatory xkcd (Although something seems to have gone wrong, it's an SMBC)

Re:It's to bad

[tommeke100]

It's the brain.
I saw a documentary once about why boys like car mechanics and exact things and girls don't.
When working on a car, the man's brain uses mainly his logical half. Women usually use both halves of their brain, even on logical things.
They found that women who did enjoy car mechanics, had a brain usage pattern similar to men, so they too used their logical half of the brain on these tasks.
You can't change nature (or just very slowly through natural selection ;-)).

Re:It's to bad

[SJHillman]

You're saying the problem is with people that have identified a potential root cause, rather than just trying to treat the symptoms? I sure hope you're not a doctor. Or a mechanic. Or an engineer. Or in IT. Or any field that requires solving problems for that matter.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

Exactly! My sister always wanted to use my Lego but mom kept buying her barbies and now she's in Psyc, who knows, maybe if she played with Lego at a young age she would of entered engineering or IT.

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

Yea, it's not that children lack the interest, it seems that it's the parents who keep buying them the gender specific toys, and reinforcing his idea that women do not belong in STEM.

Children should have the same opportunity to play with w/e toy they have an interest in.
If a boy want's to play dress up with dolls, don't tease him or think him developmentally challenged. (nor tolerate that from his peers)

Of course this is all well and good but in reality marketing and consumer buying habits play a much bigger role to a company and their bottom line then some idealised view on an internet forum. Don't expect a change in any of this till it's the parents who get wise and start ignoring the gender specific marketing.

Re:It's to bad

[PPalmgren]

There might actually be a biological reason. I was watching a documentary on the brain on NatGeo, and they brought up a study on chimps while discussing the general differences between the male and female brain. They gave chimps who had lived without human interaction some human toys. Even among chimps without our cultural influence, the males predominantly chose the trucks and the females predominantly chose the dolls.

This was like a decade ago so I don't know the significance of that study or if it has been debunked, but I always found it interesting.

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

Oh yes there are differences in the brains of both genders, I just can't see it being the sole justification for the gulf we are observing; especially when you compare it to history,

Men used to dominate the health and teaching fields; yet now are a small minority; 200 years is nowhere near enough time for a biological change to have happened on such a wide a scale and with such an impact.

I would suggest that our social norms are a much better candidate.

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

Which might hold up till you also compare it to other industries that used to be dominated by men but over the past couple centuries, their representation has dropped like a rock.

Male teachers, nurses, seamsters, college graduates.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

Well one thing is for sure my daughter, if I have any, is going to bought lego before barbies.

Re:It's to bad

[ixarux]

But from what I understand, there can be effeminate men and there are masculine women. Gender has passed the stage where it is treated as just a binary. And it is often not completely correlated from the actual biological sex of a human.
So while we have artificial constructs based on historical practices, both men and women find themselves discriminated when they fall on either side of the spectrum.

Re:It's to bad

[SJHillman]

The problem with comparing it to history is that until a few decades ago, it didn't matter what women were interested in - they simply weren't allowed in most fields. However, now women are able to choose any job that men can choose, it's an entirely different ball game.

Since women are now allowed to choose what they want to be, they tend to gravitate towards nursing, teaching and other human interaction fields. Of course societal pressures still play a major role, but I just don't think you can compare it to history of more than a few decades ago.

Re:It's to bad

[h4rr4r]

I think you mean both sexes, gender is a different thing all together. Sex is defined by biology, gender is a cultural thing.

Re:It's to bad

[h4rr4r]

Our culture has passed that stage. Gender is defined by a culture. There have in the past been cultures that defined it more like you are speaking about now already.

Re:It's to bad

[nine-times]

You're saying the problem is with people that have identified a potential root cause, rather than just trying to treat the symptoms? I sure hope you're not a doctor.

We often treat symptoms rather than the root cause. If you're seriously injured, they might give you a pain reliever and something to reduce swelling. If have the flu, they might recommend a fever reducer and decongestant/expectorant. If you have lung cancer, they don't try to go back in time to prevent you from smoking. The focus is generally on reducing the symptom of "death".

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

But we're not talking about social norms, it's being proposed that there is a biological reason for it; which history does not support.
Also the world is bigger than western culture, in other cultures throughout history women have played a role in various industries; clearly the differences which are present in the brains of men and woman cannot be the sole cause of this gulf.

Re:It's to bad

[nine-times]

Did they address the question of whether this brain pattern was the result of nature or nurture?

That tends to be a difficult question, since you can't have controlled experiments.

Re:It's to bad

[misexistentialist]

Differences in brain size and structure, not to mention reproductive strategy, isn't a "credible biological" cause? Let's assume they don't effect performance or motivation in any way, but why more women in STEM? Is there a shortage of manpower? Or are the men going to be reassigned as homemakers? Where is the payoff for anyone except in fulfilling some abstract concept?

Re:It's to bad

[StormyWeather]

We have a play room for my son and two daughters, who are only a 3 year spread apart. I try to teach my girls building and whatnot, but they will straight up take the Lincoln logs and make a cake out of them, or cookies. My littlest girl does nothing but talk about being a mommy to every doll, stuffed animal, or whatever. It's not like there isn't at least some genetic angle on this.

With that being said my girls are very creative with drawing, and enjoy building sand castles, and whatnot. But my son gravitates to trying to take my drills and hammers and do stuff.

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

Like I have said elsewhere, history does not support this.
Go look say 200yrs ago, men dominated in some areas that they no longer do; was this because of some rapid spur of mutation in the human brain that just so happened to only occur in the western world? Or because of changing social norms?

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

DIctionary wise they are synonyms.
Maybe in your more narrow view they are, but I'm going off what they actually mean.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sex&tbs=dfn:1&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=sEdxUZfIC8nGrgGFx4Aw&ved=0CDAQkQ4&biw=1280&bih=679

Re:It's to bad

[thaylin]

Men used to be the sole workforce for skilled labor (IE those fields) so that does not eliminate brain factors

Re:It's to bad

[StormyWeather]

So I was watching a hot rod video yesterday with my son. These two guys rented a Lambo and a hot rod. What they were surprised at, and what I was surprised at was that women were much more interested and gravitated to the hot rod over the Lambo, and men were more interested in the Lambo than the hot rod. We had a discussion in the house about it and decided that it was because men were interested in the engineering, power, and general sexyness of the lambo, and the women were interested in the ruggedness, artistic nature, and individuality of the hot rod. Also my wife said the guy with the Lambo probably has a small penis, but that's out of the context of this conversation.

Here's the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rArpyMXT2ew

Re:It's to bad

[h4rr4r]

Only way way down on the list, and it is wrong.

Sex is biology, gender is a function of culture.

Re:It's to bad

[SJHillman]

In each case you give, it's an example of something we may not be able to help the root cause of. However, if we had a pill that would completely wipe out the flu in your body with no adverse side effects, I think we would use that instead of a decongestant. Sure, we treat the symptoms as a stopgap or when we can't fix the root cause but ultimately, we fix the root cause whenever we're able.

When I broke my leg, they gave me painkillers in the short term but it didn't help anything until the leg was screwed back together (literally) and the root cause (several broken bones) was fixed (by allowing them to heal properly).

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

It's on the right hand side, the only one.
Provide some proof of your claim then, because every major dictionary in use agrees with me, as well as the US dept. of health and human services.

Re:It's to bad

[eagee]

This is such bullshit. Women *were* the first programmers b/c it was a natural transition from touch typing to writing code. You know, women like the one who created the Liskoff Substitution Principle!? You know, Barbara Liskoff? Women were some of the most significant innovators in the field!

The reason women aren't in programming anymore is because there was a massive campaign to make programming a male dominated profession in the 60's and it's just stuck since then. It's a shame that you have such a bigoted, short signed, idiotic attitude about women. ( ...or even intense thinking? what the fuck is wrong with you and the idiots that modded you up as "insightful"?)

Re:It's to bad

[trout007]

I think is is a bit different. There are different skills in life. A big breakdown is dealing with people and dealing with things. There are careers based on this.
If you are good at dealing with people but not things you go into careers like teachers, caregivers, educators, or nursing.
If you are good at dealing with things but not people there are careers like the trades, physical sciences, and engineering.
If you are good at both there are careers like law, medicine, and human sciences.

Where does gender play? I think women tend to be predisposed to be better at dealing with people. When you have a woman that is also good at dealing with things she will tend to go into law or medicine. Women don't typically go into stem not because they aren't smart enough but because they are too good at dealing with people.

This is the same reason you don't see many men in education or care giving. They are predisposed to be better at working with things. If they are also good at dealing with people they go into law or medicine.

The men that go into care giving or women that go into engineering are strange because they go against their genders predisposition.

None of this should be construed as to support barriers or stereotypes to prevent people from doing what they are good at. People are individuals and should be treated as such based upon merit.

Re:It's to bad

[h4rr4r]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_gender_difference

Should be enough to get you started.

A simple real world example is anyone whose gender does not match their sex.

Re:It's to bad

[h4rr4r]

Also for fun, you should look up what a synonym is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synonym

The same or similar meaning. In this case they are similar, but not exactly the same. In our culture they normally have been considered to match up until very recently. Now it is far more accepted that they do not.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

..... My post was clearly centered around getting more women in to engineering .... how you took that the wrong way is beyond any stage of logical or rational thinking ........ but good work.

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

You're trying to refute the US dept of health and human services by using a contested philosophy wiki article that is only half written and is full of grammatical mistakes?

Man it's too bad /. does not have a Fail of the Day award, you should definitely win it.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

I agree, I don't think there is a barrier, I just think from a young age the focus is in the wrong area. Just like a woman can be an engineer I think a man can be a dress maker but if you never allow those options at a young age you'll never know what can happen.

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+Synonym&aq=f&oq=define%3A+Synonym&aqs=chrome.0.57j58j61j62l3.1504j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Noun
A word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language

And fail again on your part, why can you do nothing but cite recently updated wiki articles?

At least use the source noted on the article, are you in highschool?

Re:It's to bad

[firex726]

It does not need to be, but for all intents and purposes they are interchangeable.
Also US health and human services uses them as interchangeable, unless you feel they don't know what they are talking about?

Re:It's to bad

[kick6]

The problem is most women just aren't interested in engineering type roles. I know 1 female engineer out of the 40+ women I know, all the rest can't stand doing math, physic's or even intense thinking. I think part of the problem is that when kids grow up boys are taught to build and women are taught to be pretty, when a boy plays with Lego or other similar products in a sense he's engineering. On the other hand girls are given a barbie and a easy bake oven and told to have fun, how is that going to lead to a career in engineering. I think the problem needs to be fixed at the child level.

Have you considered the fact that there are innate sex differences? Little girls gravitate towards playing a certain way, and little boys do to. To say "girls are given barbie and an easy bake" is disingenuous. These are the toys girls would naturally choose...subject to a normal distribution (before you drop the "not all girls are like that" tripe).

Re:It's to bad

[h4rr4r]

Do you know what nearly means?

Nice way to imply I edited it those articles. Rest assured I did not. Wiki is merely longer than an overly simplistic dictionary definition. Dictionaries often suffer from their extremely short form.

I graduated long ago, looking at your uid much longer ago than you.

Re:It's to bad

[h4rr4r]

I am glad that makes you happy.
The US dept of health is tainted by politics and more likely many of its employees have differing opinions.

Rather than insults you could try actual debate. I hope none of your friends or family have to deal with you in a situation where they are not sex and gender consistant.

Re:It's to bad

[nine-times]

I get the sense that you think you're arguing with me, but I don't see how you are.

if we had a pill that would completely wipe out the flu in your body with no adverse side effects, I think we would use that instead of a decongestant. Sure, we treat the symptoms as a stopgap or when we can't fix the root cause but ultimately, we fix the root cause whenever we're able.

That's essentially the reason that people who favor affirmative action hold that position. We don't have a pill that can completely wipe out cultural bias, so we treat the symptoms as a stopgap, hopefully allowing these biases to "heal naturally".

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

I don't believe that at all! If you give a girl a box of Lego and tell her to build something she will, she'll have fun and she'll probably enjoy it. My sister loved playing Lego with me, my female friends say the same things about there childhood. There is nothing wrong with doing gender separation, infact I think it's a good idea because it leads to a different mindset, one that can be extremely helpful. However there is also nothing wrong with letting a girl or boy explore on there own, put a barbie, a box of Lego, an Easy bake over and a computer in the same room and see what happens. I'm willing bet that on a good number of occasions each gender will play with / use the other genders toys.

Re:It's to bad

[VortexCortex]

That is perfectly fine, although you need to also be responsive to what they want. You can have the goal of gender neutrality, but when your one year old daughter desperately seeks out every form of doll she sees, and when she takes your action figure collection and pretends to give them a bottle and put them to bed, you won't be helping her (or him) by trying to force her to switch to more 'neutral' toys.

Different children have different proclivities from a very, very young age, and parents can't simply over-write them. I suspect that girls tend to have more traditionally 'feminine' proclivities, causing the stereotype in the first place... but it's kind of irrelevant. The key point is to respond to them as individuals, and tailor your parenting to their needs and interests.

There's all kinds of bullishit here. Little girls don't learn to put babies to bed on their own, pal. They don't even know what babies are. When's the last time you even heard of a little boy grabbing a dolly and putting it to bed? Having a vagina doesn't make them want to do that shit. Mimicking crap they see on TV does.

Re:It's to bad

[DerekLyons]

On the other hand girls are given a barbie and a easy bake oven and told to have fun, how is that going to lead to a career in engineering.

The problem isn't the sexism of the toys... the problem is that your default belief seems to be that engineering is only about building Manly Stuff. Engineering is a very broad field and includes processes (like what happens in cooking and why and how to control it) as well as physical stuff. (Not to mention a whole raftload of related scientific disciplines, like food science, diet and nutrition, material science, chemical engineering...)
 
My sister often wonders what would happened to her had her curiosity about what happens during cooking had been channeled into looking deeper, into the scientific method - rather than just being encouraged to follow the recipes and cook "because she was a girl".

Re:It's to bad

[Hentes]

Why is it a problem that different people are interested in different fields? Should we also force boys to become nurses or secretaries?

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

.... I never said that, I used it as an example and not a literal. For instance I'm a computer, electrical and embedded engineer, all three of which aren't "Manly" professions but all of which have a VERY small section of females. Through all my schooling I literally had class with 0 females, there was 1 female in the year under me and that was it. Engineering is just taking an idea or concept and making it come into being, that could be as simple as adding a switch to a product to turn it off and on or as big as building a nuclear reactor. As a kid what are you really going to be able to do to design / build and the answer most people would come up with is "Lego", I'm not using it as a "Manly" expression, I'm using it as a step into learning how to design / build.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

No but we should give them the option, I never said force.

Re:It's to bad

[DerekLyons]

I never said that

Not in so many words, no. But you certainly implied it... and to quote from this message:

Engineering is just taking an idea or concept and making it come into being, that could be as simple as adding a switch to a product to turn it off and on or as big as building a nuclear reactor.

As a kid what are you really going to be able to do to design / build and the answer most people would come up with is "Lego"

You're just making it even more obvious that you seem to believe engineering is about "designing and building" physical stuff.
 

For instance I'm a computer, electrical and embedded engineer, all three of which aren't "Manly" professions but all of which have a VERY small section of females.

If you could wrap your head around the notion that there's more to engineering than building stuff, and actually bother to read and comprehend my original posting - you'd understand why. It has nothing to do with the selection of toys.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

Right from Wiki and google:

Engineering is the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design, build, and maintain structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.

Re:It's to bad

[AmiMoJo]

Even dolls need to be engineered. They have joints. There are social interactions, something technology seems keen to model. Take a look at what women are doing in hobby electronics - wearable devices sewn into clothing, products focused on communication.

These traditionally male dominated fields are not inherently "male". Traditionally female fields are not entirely non-technical (try becoming a nurse or professional hair dresser). Even Barbie has her own car, and about a decade ago car manufacturers suddenly realized that if they made cars tailored to women's tastes they could sell a lot more.

Re:It's to bad

[citizenr]

It's the brain.

I saw a documentary once about why boys like car mechanics and exact things and girls don't.

Here is your documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UoO3EFHj5k

Re:It's to bad

[scot4875]

Question is why are they not interested?

Why is a hen inclined to sit on eggs while a rooster crows in the morning? I mean a hen's brain looks just like a rooster's, so obviously it couldn't be a biological reason.

--Jeremy

Re:It's to bad

[scot4875]

The other problem with comparing it to history is that until a few decades ago (well, a century and change), the vast majority of the human population was subsistence farmers. You can't draw any meaningful comparisons to history for *anybody* when the last 100 years have been completely unlike anything else in our history.

--Jeremy

Re:It's to bad

[BobSutan]

Relevant:

http://rixstep.com/2/20111127,00.shtml

tl;dw - the more free a society, the more people can follow their predispositions. That often translates to men doing more manual and technical work, and women gravitating to nurturing types of jobs and/or those with a strong social interaction element.

Re:It's to bad

[Belial6]

The biological reason is that women have babies. I know, your first thought is "What?!?!?! That is stupid!". Here me out though. The answer to almost all questions concerning "is it biological or environmental" is "Yes". 20,000 years ago chasing down a wild boar while 9 months pregnant in the dead of winter was simply not realistic. We had not yet developed agriculture, so planning ahead for the winter and late pregnancy wasn't really going to cut it. At this time in human history, attaching yourself to a male that will 'bring home the bacon' was a matter of survival. For men, 'bringing home the bacon' was a means to procreation. It may be crude to say in mixed company, but this is why prostitution is considered the oldest profession.

Jump ahead 10,000 years and humans started developing agriculture. Early agriculture couldn't be easy work. It was a time where being the biggest and strongest might not have been an absolute necessity, but it certainly gave big strong men an evolutionary advantage of small weak ones. Still, women who attached themselves to big strong men who would stick around had a greater chance of passing on their genes.

We have only had, maybe, 100 years of civilization where being big and strong did not give men a biological advantage and women a biological advantage by having sex with these men greater than they could get by assuming the roles that these men filled. It would be fair to argue that 100 year number to be as low as 0 when spread across the entire population.

So, what we see now is that we have 20,000 years of biologically created social structure to overcome. I will make a call back to the question of "Is it biology or environment?", and say again "Yes". We now live in an age where 90% of the jobs could be done by women and taking a few months off for a pregnancy is not going to lead to starvation, but there is still the 10% of jobs that are biologically biased, and we have to deal with the societal environment we been pushed to by biology.

The biggest hurdle is that people are people. Most people will work take the path of least resistance and work as little as possible in the easiest job they can find. What this leads to is that little girls are trained that they can make a living without even getting out of bed. People don't want to admit this, but I see it every day. It starts out from before they can walk. STEM fields are harder than a lot of other fields. They require effort. It isn't that women can't do it. It is that they don't have to. Consider, how many people you know that would continue to work at their current job if they won the lottery tomorrow? When it comes to food on the table and a roof over their head, most women in the US have won the lottery. (Notice that I am not saying that they won in terms of other rights or quality of life. I am strictly speaking of food and shelter. The things that let you survive.)

To be fair, I also agree that gender stereo types are incredibly strong in society. It is really strong even with many who believe they don't do it. I am very conscious of it with my child, and I know that even I do it. If my son wanted to where a pretty pretty princes dress, I wouldn't tell him no, but I would talk with him about how he could expect to be treated by others because of it, and let him decide if it was worth it, or if it was something he wanted to do only at home. I also don't buy him princess dresses as surprise gifts. When his mom is painting her nails and he wants to paint his too, I recommend black because it is a color than males can pull off without getting teased. I still won't tell him no, but there is also no good reason to throw him to the wolves unprepared. If I had a daughter, nail polish or a princess dress wouldn't even cross my mind.

Re:It's to bad

[Belial6]

The problem with affirmative action is that it leads to addiction just like pain killers. Affirmative action is like giving you an Oxycontin prescription with unlimited refills because your neighbor broke his leg.

Re:It's to bad

[BitZtream]

He's probably in Big Pharma

Re:It's to bad

[BitZtream]

Not really.

Rolls of the sexes have been pretty standard throughout recorded history.

There have been times when the rolls get reversed, exceptions to every generalization do exist but that doesn't invalidate the generalization, it just reminds you that its a generalization and nothing more. Trying to pretend exceptions were the normal is dishonest at best.

Re:It's to bad

[bogjobber]

I get your point about gender roles being "normalized" in children, but come on man. This line:

I know 1 female engineer out of the 40+ women I know, all the rest can't stand doing math, physic's or even intense thinking.

is pretty fucking condescending. Grow up.

Re:It's to bad

[Murdoch5]

Not it's not, it's only condescending if it's false. I'm not saying I don't like hanging out with them or that they don't talents of there own but I'm saying that you could never throw them a Mensa style question or a complex mathematical question and get an answer.

Re:It's to bad

[LordVader717]

You'd need to elaborate a little more, but this may have been a historical remnant.

In the days of human computers a lot of them were female math students. But the work was pretty menial for someone with such a high education.

Re:It's to bad

[brit74]

I have never heard of a credible biological reason to this, is there a "scientist" gene that is present in only men? I would find that hard to belive.

Obviously, there's no "scientist gene". But, it's not a simple dichotomy between "gene for x" versus "it's all socialization". We still haven't found the genes responsible for tallness (and I say "genes" because there's probably a variety of them). Additionally, I'd expect tallness to be based on hormones, as well (this is why males tend to be taller, on average, than women). It would be fallacious to say that men are taller because of some "tallness gene" that is only present in men. Yet, we can all agree that tallness is heritable and it would be laughable to say it's all socialization (even if height is based somewhat on how much nutrition you receive as a child). I could say the same thing about strength (men tend to be naturally stronger than women - and this is based on hormonal levels, not some "strength gene" that is present only in males). The way you ask the question is biased towards getting the answer you want.

I don't know where this guy or you are coming from

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically you see a rule like "at least 10% of the workforce m ust be x% female". This means that people will be hired according to their gender - sexism is built into the system. The same applies to many anti racist rules. You can't ever have rules that explicitly favor one gender over another.

I've been in this business since the early 90s, I have never - ever- heard anyone speak that way. Neither have I ever seen anyone do anything on this guy's "Don't" list.

Ever.

The only reason we didn't that have many women engineers, programmers, computer scientists, etc... was because there wasn't that many applicants.

At IBM Boca - when it still existed - there were plenty of women engineers and women engineering managers.

If you want more women in tech, look at the CS programs.

But you see, most women are smarter. They see that if they want a nice livelyhood, they'll skip the whole engineering thing and the off-shoring and to medical school. As a matter of fact, my doctor is a woman and she is the first doc that ever just sat down and listen to me. And she gets the problem/diagnosis right the first time, too.

Not so hard really

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Don't be combative (this will get you better male employees as well)
2) Don't allow your team to be combative (mgmt needs to do their job in reigning in aggressive team members)
3) Recognize and punish prejudice in the interview/work place (I've witnessed this several times with some being harder on women for no apparent reason)

That's it really. I've worked with a lot of women in tech, and they do fine. There are some environments though that aren't fitting for ANYONE, and men tend to end up there. Women tend to think about problems differently, which if you are looking for the best team is something you should want. Sadly, those that approach problems differently have tended to be hounded into submission in some work places. It doesn't matter if they're presenting a valid point, the receivers can't seem to process the approach and discount everything. In truth, it's many of the men who have no business being in the roles their in. That have no idea how to handle running a team. Add that to mgmt who never seems to like to put an engineer in their place, or worse, agrees with the hostility and you get a place no one wants to work in.

Re:Not so hard really

[ameoba]

You left out a very important one - be a company that appeals to women.

from 2% to 15%

[tommeke100]

I don't know how much "engineers" (whatever that means... support engineers? software engineers? ... ) he employs, but he went from 2% to 15% women engineers.
Wiki says Etsy had 60 employees in 2009.
How much of these are engineers? Let us take 30, so he went from 1 women engineer to 5?

And if the total of staff represents a 50/50 ratio (implied but not explicitly said in the article), that means he's employing much more women in the artsy/HR/finance/marketing departments? Isn't that discrimination too?

15% is still a pretty low mark. I don't see this as being a success at all.

Re:from 2% to 15%

[rolfwind]

15% is still a pretty low mark. I don't see this as being a success at all.

If you look at the typical Comp Sci and Engineering Classroom, it's pretty good.

These women have to come from somewhere, you can't (typically) hire them out of high school and expect them to perform.

Re:from 2% to 15%

[jimbolauski]

15% is actually 50% better then the rest of the IT field 10%, and yes it is discrimination to choose any race or gender over another.

Re:HOST files know no gender... apk

[TrollstonButtersbean]

tldr

well obviously

[Velex]

He did it by giving the IT department nut shots and creeper cards every day until they all left. Without any men or trans women to compete with, womyn-born-womyn found they were able to land IT jobs. Obviously.

I'd love to see more women in tech, but...

[DoctorBonzo]

what I see reported as the biggest turn-off to most women is the perception that tech work, computer science in particular, is "geeky", whatever that might mean.

Proposed solutions always seem to involve changing geek culture to be more welcoming and sensitive, but I don't see that happening. To me, geekiness is inherent in the field and can't be avoided. Where's the value proposition in trying to attract women to a situation that they are likely to find ultimately distasteful?

Seems to me that people follow their interests. What's the advantage of misdirecting these interests in the name of some abstract goal of "diversity"?

Am I missing something?

Re:I'd love to see more women in tech, but...

[nine-times]

what I see reported as the biggest turn-off to most women is the perception that tech work, computer science in particular, is "geeky"

Sounds like the problem is that women are too smart to work in tech.

Re:I'd love to see more women in tech, but...

[Jiro]

Women (when you get outside the poor single mother demographic, which isn't too likely in the tech industry) are less willing to take low satisfaction jobs in exchange for high pay to support their family, because of the expectation that the man is the primary breadwinner. Needless to say, this is going to lead to few women taking tech jobs.

Women are also less willing to become social outcasts for their interests, and with fewer girls obsessed with geeky subjects than boys, you're going to have fewer women in the tech industry.

You can solve these by improving tech working conditions and improving the status of geeks. Of course that'll never happen.

Re:I'd love to see more women in tech, but...

[anyaristow]

Judging from the local "fandom" community, which of course is anecdotal, there are lots of geeky women. Most of them aren't in tech, either.

Re:I'd love to see more women in tech, but...

[Leslie43]

I know I will get crap for this and but here it is from a woman's perspective...

Women actually used to be a larger part of I.T. in general and classrooms at one time were on track to reach an expected 45%. Instead of climbing, those numbers are falling.

You can blame it on parents not giving girls tech toys, and yes that may be part of it, but considering how many female gamers there are (nearly half of gamers are female), that doesn't explain it completely. Remember, the average age of gamers these days (30's) have kids in high school and college, that means these kids likely grew up on video games. There is obvious interest, and there was an interest, they just don't have an interest in a career in those fields any longer.

So the real question is why don't they want a career in I.T.?
The answer is men. Male geeks as it turns out are quite sexist (and geeks develop a minor god complex to boot). E3 has a spectacularly bad reputation among women and there is/was an actually boycott because of repeatedly being groped, talked down to and generally treated bad. Look at how things are marketed there... Booth babes? How much more sexist can you get. Other tech trade shows aren't any better.

In online gaming, there are a TON of women playing games online, you guys act like they don't play FPS or anything hardcore, yes, we do, you just don't see them because most of them hide their gender. Xbox players are the worst, however even on PC, which is better it can still be pretty bad. Personally, I don't hide my gender, however I won't play before 8pm, and I won't play long unless it's with other friends. All it takes is one guys to ask "are you really a girl", and the entire game will change and go downhill. If it's not "you got killed by a girl", it's a guy trying to talk smack to me. If I stay quiet, he will get more aggressive as it goes, if I talk back, he will instantly go ballistic, there is no middle ground, it usually only stops if a 3rd person steps in, I leave or someone gets booted. Then your have the games themselves, IF there is a female character, her clothes get skimpier the more "armor" she gets... By the time she is "armored up" she looks more like a sex slave than a warrior. Which only reinforces the males view of women only being good for eye candy. Try playing as a girl for a week or more and you will begin to see what women really go through when playing online and you will begin to see why they hide.

This is why the classrooms are emptying out. I know not all guys are this way, and as they grow up they grow out of this (some more than others), however the worst of it happens right at the age where we are choosing our careers (teens). Why would a woman pick a career where she's not only objectified, she's verbally abused on a daily basis?

Re:I'd love to see more women in tech, but...

[DoctorBonzo]

Yes, this is what I see reported a lot, and I think you've expressed it better than many.

Unless, I'm misunderstanding, though, I find your interest in online shooters really curious since it seems like such a stereotypically male genre. What is it about shooter gameplay that attracts you, but wouldn't induce you to trash talk back when you run into the attitudes you describe?

I'm wondering if this could lead to a new sub-genre or a previously undiscovered demographic...

Re:Why to do it?

[SJHillman]

A lot of studies involving this seem to avoid actually talking to young girls. Of the ones I've talked to, many of them feel insulted that they could get hired because they have a specific set of reproductive organs rather than on their other merits. It reminds me of the pilot episode (I think) of SG-1 where Carter goes off on a rant against O'Neil because "her reproductive organs are on the inside". And it turns out he just dislikes scientists.

To Summarize

[jbmartin6]

How Etsy did it: aggressively pursued women who met the requirements

Re:To Summarize

[nine-times]

Isn't that how we all "do it"? Aggressively pursuing women who meet our "requirements"?

Headline

[rossdee]

I think the headline should read:

Changing the ratio of women to men in tech How they did it.

Re:Headline

[drinkypoo]

I think the headline should read:

Changing the ratio of women to men in tech How they did it.

Is that because you think a reasonable person would otherwise assume that the ratio is women to cheeseburgers or women to solar flares or women to rutabagas?

Re:Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

(Score:+1, Pedantic)

Re:Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

This is offensive to my uncle, who happens to be a cheeseburger solar flare rutabaga.

Re:Headline

[drinkypoo]

No, that is because the way the headline is written, it makes men in tech appear as so "normal" that they don't even need to be mentioned. Mentioning only women frames the problem as a women problem, when it's actually more of a men problem.

So it would be okay with you to say "Changing the Ratio of Men in Tech: How Etsy Did It" because it frames the problem as a problem with men? Either way, I read the headline to imply that the problem is not enough women, since I have some background in this area, and that's to whom such articles are addressed: people with some background in this area.

Stop with this myopic bullshit!

[ixarux]

Bullshit!

Policies are not all myopic decisions that affect just a single generation.

When you make a policy, you are looking at its impact in the long run. By having more women in the workplace you are encouraging more diversity of gender in the work place for future generations.
This is something you need to consider. Does diversity in a workplace help? Is it an ideal you wish to work towards in the long run? If you think diversity is unimportant, and you rather wish to reduce current costs in searching for labour, then so be it.

I think a large part of policies deals with compromising people's present value vs. future value of a decision. It is why, we humans are floundering in solving problems in the world.

Re:Stop with this myopic bullshit!

[Belial6]

You are right that a long term view is needed. That is why biasing towards women is a bad plan. Today, people tell themselves that "We are just correcting historical bias". The problem is that you are just creating a new set of biases. In the long run, you are not fixing the problem, you are just shifting which group has the advantage. I see this all the time with my 9 year old son. Over the years we have had lots of events and programs that he would have loved to attend and would likely have learned a good deal from, but they were only being offered to girls. Frequently the events he does attend will include people running them that make subtle, (or sometimes not so subtle) digs against boys, implying that they are inherently bad or inferior. Just reading the comments on this article, you see adult men that have been trained to believe that somehow they don't deserve to be treated as an equal individual because they have a penis. The rhetoric against males has only snowballed in the the past two decades. The long term view says that you stop the pendulum from swinging. You don't just shove it in the other direction.

"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[anyaristow]

No, the problem is know-it all, under-socialized people who think their simplistic explanations are genius, and who think women "don't like intense thinking", and who moderate as troll anyone who calls out their misogyny.

People like this are intolerable for women to work with.

I sure hope you're not a doctor. Or a mechanic. Or an engineer. Or in IT. Or any field that requires solving problems for that matter.

Oh, no, someone thinks you and your like are under-socialized, misogynist, delusional dumbasses. However will you deal with that? That's right, you'll make a determination of my job-worthiness from two sentences I wrote.

Aren't you clever!

*You* are why women don't want to work in IT.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[h4rr4r]

So you think women are incapable of dealing with adversity?
They are incapable of tolerating socially uncouth individuals to reach their life goals?

Who is the misogynist here?

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[mooingyak]

So... this comment:

I think part of the problem is that when kids grow up boys are taught to build and women are taught to be pretty, when a boy plays with Lego or other similar products in a sense he's engineering. On the other hand girls are given a barbie and a easy bake oven and told to have fun, how is that going to lead to a career in engineering. I think the problem needs to be fixed at the child level.

He's arguing that when gender stereotypes are reinforced at a young age, the effect cascades to adulthood and thus we have fewer women in technical fields.

How is that misogynist? He's not claiming that women are inherently unsuited or anything like that. He's saying society pushes women away from engineering, and if we want more women in engineering we've got to change the ways we treat boys and girls.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[SJHillman]

You're the only one who said anything about women not liking intense thinking. For that matter, you're the only one who has said the disparity is because women are different... everyone else you're responding to is saying that the issue is with society.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[StormyWeather]

Am I the only one that things genetics, and the way our brains work has some angle on this? I mean, just watching my kids grow up you can give my son a stick and it's a gun, a bat, or he will combine the sticks with other sticks to build a fort. Give my girls a stick and they will break it and make candles for a cake they made out of sand. Granted the girls are willing to sword fight with the stick too, but they don't hold the long term interest in it that my son will.

Sexual tendencies don't mean sexual discrimination. Personally I'm hoping my girls will go into some sort of higher education type field, but if they are happy in life to be a mom and raise great children then who the fuck am I to get in the way of that dream.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[thaylin]

Reading comprehension bro. HE did not say women in general did not like intense thinking, but some of them dont like intense thinking, and even beyond that, some women he knows.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[anyaristow]

Karma inferno. Burn, baby, burn!

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[h4rr4r]

No one as far as I know.

I have hired women and will hire them in the future, same as men. I will not however be told about about how they are delicate child like creatures who cannot possibly face adversity by you. This is the worst kind of misogyny, the kind that pretends to be on the side of women.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[anyaristow]

Go to the top of the thread.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[Murdoch5]

It's people like you who cause this gender divide to grow and expand. You think it's automatically sexist and offensive to suggest to a woman to act / think like a man or to tell a man to act / think like woman. I never said a woman in IT is a bad thing, I never said a woman in engineering is a bad thing, I never even said that woman can't do any job a man can do. The problem is people like you who read one thing and spin it into a web of offense and hurtful remarks. I fell very sorry for any woman who has to work with you, they must come to work every single day dreading having to work with you.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[Murdoch5]

Thank you for defending my post! I'm glad at least most people here can understand my point.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[Murdoch5]

Yep! Because if I take a global sample of women I'm more then willing to say that a goo section women do like Intense thinking and logical puzzles, but that isn't the claim I made or the group I used to base my point off. I'm glad most people here can read beyond the grade 4 level.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[h4rr4r]

Can I have that in cash?
I don't take bitcoins.

Re:"identified a potential root cause", my ass

[BitZtream]

Okay, so you're whats referred to by normal people (men and women) as a militant, man hating dyke. While I don't know, nor care about your sexual preference or your gender, the name applies as it makes it clear I'm attempting to offend you as absolutely much as possible.

The reason is this: You're so pissed off about it being someone elses fault that you're telling him ... that he's wrong, its not a problem with society ... but you know what it is ... a problem with society ...

You're so pissed off you can't see straight and don't realize you're just making an ass out of yourself. People like you are why people don't want to go to work.

Get over yourself. There are lots of reasons why women don't do the same things men do. You don't get to decide what those reasons are any more than I do, and all anyone on slashdot is doing is speculating because not a single fucking one of us has any clue why anyone else actually does what they do. Pretending either one of us know why some other woman doesn't want to be an engineer is like arguing over the existence of God. Its a silly argument no matter which side you're on. We only know why we are engineers.

Get off your bitchy ass horse and get over your self. Pull whatever it is thats stuck up your ass out, move on, relax, and enjoy life. Your hatred of others is going to tear you up.

Not really a problem

[ixarux]

It's not about being interesting in engineering. We are moving to a world where we are able to create interdisciplinary domains of work. Pyschology, Neuroscience, and computer science are now interlinked. We are being inspired by biology in many engineering applications.

I think that we need to look beyond the current to the possibilities. How can we utilize the large talent pool, with diverse strengths to increase the potential of engineering in solving problems. Women are half of our human species, and I bet we are losing out on a lot of diversity by sticking to archetype engineering stereotypes.

Another point I would like to make, albeit a little disconnected, is that a young child looks at its adults to be able to dream possibilities of what kind of future they might look for. Having less women engineers right now, will decrease the probability of young girls having a role model to emulate. Even if we spend extra resources to mine out as many rare female engineers as we can, it will be worth it in the long run.

Re:Not really a problem

[Murdoch5]

I agree so what we need to do is move the system so we start focusing engineering towards women even in grade school, they might never pick that line or work but at least if they understand where it's coming from it's a start.

Technical people choose where they work

[davide marney]

If you are in a technical field that requires a lot of time, effort (and sometimes money) to become proficient, then personal attributes like gender are generally meaningless. Is there any doubt that a person who is sufficiently smart and dedicated enough to become a crack developer can do so, regardless of gender?

Developing software is a huge enterprise, spanning hundreds of job categories and every human skill imaginable. No doubt if one were to include the full scope of work, then the balance of men to women would be the same as the working population as a whole; that is certainly the case where I work.

Sure, there are some disciplines where men are more concentrated, but also others where women are more concentrated, and still others where the split is more even. What does that matter? To deliver a great product, everyone must put their heart into pushing the wagon down the road, or it goes nowhere.

Re:Technical people choose where they work

[wisnoskij]

Depends on what you meant by "full scope of work". If you include secretaries, HR, ect I bet you would be right.

But primarily women are not drawn to engineering type jobs, and every single IT course in any technical college or university is filled with primarily men. Add to that the IQ difference that makes a 2:1 ratio of men to women who have high IQs and you get a natural situation where women are going to be a small minority.

Re:I don't know where this guy or you are coming f

[Anonymous Coward]

Docs make a lot, but they also start their careers close to $750k behind an engineer with a BS between foregone income, student loans for med school, and accrued interest on debt from undergrad. You are probably looking at age 50-55 before the doctors pull ahead on net worth.

Never good enough

[Zynder]

Your post has 2 issues:

1) It's never good enough for many people. He increased from 2 to 15%. That is a substantial gain. If that were in the financial market investors would be popping champagne. Should we automatically assume that he should rest on his laurels and stop increasing it? Most likely not. That becomes a matter of opinion though about what the proper mixture of men and women, race or whatever other areas are covered under policies like this. I have no opinion on that detail other than you should have the proper personnel makeup to accomplish your task in the most effective manner. To immediately rebuke this particular effort is though just starts a chain of goalpost moving which accomplishes nothing. What if next year it increases to 20%? Is that enough? Some will say no and say we need more so maybe he redoubles his efforts and makes it to 30% the next year. Is that enough? Some will say no, rinse and repeat. At least he is doing something positive because in this economy I am happy if anyone has a job, especially engineers cause that's my trade.

2) You found and demonstrated why alot of people use percentages. The way you apply them can make your results appear bigger or smaller than they are. As you said the article states 15% so that went from 1 to 5 total engineers. 5 does sound small doesn't it? So to make it look bigger convert it to a percentage. People like you and I will catch that but laymen or those who just aren't interested will just kinda gloss over it. You can go the other way too. Say there's something that has killed 100,000 people. That is a lot of people. But if you were trying to deny the issue or block legislation or something similar then you could convert that to a percentage and say (just an example) "That's less than 1% of the population!" Now that doesn't sound so bad anymore. Less than 1%? Statistically insignificant most would say. Don't tell that to the families of the dead though.

High profile jobs

[dutchwhizzman]

You always hear about women being underrepresented in high profile jobs. I never see campaigns to get more women into plumbing, road work, carpentry, mining and similar "men jobs". Until those jobs get an equal represented share in the campaigns to get more women doing mens' jobs and the campaign gives just as much attention to men doing "women jobs", I regard the campaigns as sexist biased. The only way to break these gender biased roles is to work on them all at the same time and give all of them the same kind of attention. Focusing on a specific small part will never work, unless it's part of a big campaign that works on all jobs in all levels.

Re:High profile jobs

[LordLucless]

You also see very little effort to address the gender imbalance in teaching, nursing or human relations (which are all female dominated).

Re:High profile jobs

[fermion]

In fact this is taken quite seriously in trades. At the high school level, where the trades are going to recruit, there is quite an effort in literature to represent gender equality, often even more than race or other background. With a trade, the results are pretty quickly apparent, so a quick learner and responsible person will succeed even if they are not traditional.

Of course there is a difference between a tradesperson and a professional engineer. Though both are in principle licensed, the pay and work environment are different. I see many people who have never done anything but push paper complain how they with were in a trade so they could make better money. Well, why don't you? Probably because of lack of skill of love of being in a nice air conditioned office with snacks and television. Which is to say the trades require skill, hard work, and endurance. Al for about what you would make in an office job where you are just sitting around all day playing on the computer. So most will choose the office chair.

Engineering on the other hand can be less work than a tradesperson, and also double the money or more. If you are sent into the field to do real work, you get paid more.

Here is the thing. We don't need more technical people, we need better technical people. We have technical people coming out the colleges at a huge rate. The problem is that they often do not work at the required level. Part of the problem is we are not getting the best of best to go into technical fields, and one of the issues is that large parts of the population are being encouraged to go into other fields. Back in the 80's I saw female technical people, who were brilliant top of their class, leave for other fields because they could not get a job. While the good old boys from the local A&M, who didn't even know how to put in a fuse of operate a computer, were hired at 6 figures.

When the skilled jobs are all held by immigrants because we don't want to employ the locals who can do the work because of gender or background, maybe we will learn the error of our ways.

HR wins again

[Empiric]

In getting the notion propagated that humans need to be interchangable biped commodities--er, "resources".

I'm an engineer, my sister is a nurse. I don't consider either job imbued with a superiority such that the statistical gender count needs to be "fixed" in either case. If men and women are psychologically different and often have a different mix of motivating interests (as, when we review reality, we see is... reality), why should we expect or desire that all types of jobs net out at a 50-50 gender split?

Re:HR wins again

[VortexCortex]

why should we expect or desire that all types of jobs net out at a 50-50 gender split?

We shouldn't. Not until all toys are marketed to children with a 50-50 gender split...

Re:It's too bad

[unixisc]

The problem is most women just aren't interested in engineering type roles. I know 1 female engineer out of the 40+ women I know, all the rest can't stand doing math, physic's or even intense thinking. I think part of the problem is that when kids grow up boys are taught to build and women are taught to be pretty, when a boy plays with Lego or other similar products in a sense he's engineering. On the other hand girls are given a barbie and a easy bake oven and told to have fun, how is that going to lead to a career in engineering. I think the problem needs to be fixed at the child level.

Not a bad idea. Good way to do it - just ban all dolls, make-up kits, cooking sets and so on, and make unisex toys for everyone. Force girls to build and break stuff, just like boys do, but don't leave the option for either to play w/ dolls. That way, boys won't turn out to be metrosexual, and girls won't turn up to be pretty-in-pink Barbie lovers who grow up to either become arts majors who can't find jobs outside education or politics, or barefoot & pregnant and good for nothing else.

Re:HOST files know no gender... apk

[unixisc]

Maybe we could equalize things at least in Unix computing by having both men & women edit /etc/host files. Either you'll see the men doing more human interaction, or women finding the files more interesting

A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

I'm a woman and I was recently doing a job search and interviewed at a dozen places before settling on one that I liked (and have since come to love).

It was, overall, a very uncomfortable experience for me. I was, at many of the places, subjected to comments along the lines of "I've worked with a female developer before, and it was really difficult because she didn't have a sense of humor/couldn't take a joke/made us feel like we had to be on our best behavior - would you be like that?" Seriously. I was repeatedly told that one concern was the rest of the team feeling like they might have to walk on eggshells around me.

When I heard these things I essentially shut down the interview and let them know I would not be interested. I explained that I appreciated their honesty, but the fact that they had concerns along those lines made me know it wasn't the place for me, and I thanked them for their time.

It isn't that I don't have a sense of humor, or that I'm easily offended - it's that I really don't want to have to be responsible for all women ever, and I don't want to have to worry that my co-workers are continually holding me accountable or interpreting things I say or do as if I were somehow the same as the other women they had worked with. And despite my shutting it down, I was *still* offered jobs at half the places.

The place that I liked - and have come to love - gender never came up during the interview. We talked about the tech, we talked about the work, we talked about the long term goals for the position, and we talked about the culture. The only time gender has come up was when one of my co-workers, who has a daughter, asked me how I came to get so interested in technology and science because he wanted to encourage his daughter as much as possible without pushing her.

Looking at the comments here, there's a whole lot of "othering" going on. A lot of comments that seem to treat women as members of some kind of hive mind wherein certain behaviors are just expected. This is completely unfair - it would be as unfair as me treating all men like rapists just because some men are. There's also a lot of anger I'm sensing from a lot of the guys - feeling like they're being discriminated against in some cases by quotas (real or imagined) or whatever. You guys are certainly entitled to your anger, just like I'm entitled to be bugged when idiots can't distinguish me from some other woman despite us being entirely different people.

The thing I would recommend to people - all people - is to take everyone you will be dealing with as an individual AS an individual. Just as you wouldn't want to be held responsible for things you had nothing to do with, so, too, other people don't want to be made responsible for everyone who shares their gender, race, ethnicity, or other arbitrary trait.

For the record, I think hiring quotas are stupid. Affirmative action is "good intention, wretched implementation." That said, the people saying they've been turned down for developer/in demand jobs because they are white/male/other majority class must be incredibly unimpressive candidates. If you were such hot shit that you "deserved" the job, you would have gotten the job. Businesses are in business to make MONEY, they will hire whomever will make them MONEY, and if you couldn't make it clear you would make them more MONEY than some other random person, that's on you.

Re:A different perspective.

[RussR42]

Well written and I agree. That didn't stop me from giggling a bit at your sig...

I don't want to have to worry that my co-workers are continually holding me accountable or interpreting things I say or do as if I were somehow the same as the other women they had worked with.

Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.

:)

Re:A different perspective.

[Ambassador Kosh]

It is sad but I can see the humor aspect part of the question. Most of the engineers I have been around make jokes about things like using the equipment to cook breakfast or wondering if the reactor could build up enough pressure to make a cool water gun etc. Most of the women I have known go upset at those jokes for some reason. I can understand not making sexual jokes since they don't really belong in the work place. However, if engineers can't make non-sexual jokes about the equipment it makes it very hard to bond with the team.

What I notice is teams try to hire people that will fit in with the rest of the team. A lot of men are also looked over because they would not fit in with the team and for engineers a sense of humor is pretty important. You even find a lot of actual solutions can come out of silly jokes. I have met many women who would fit in and many that would not. I would want to make that clear during the hiring process although I would have made it clear what type of humor I was referring to.

If you do work with a solar concentrator and have never though of cooking a marshmallow with it you should not be working with it. :)
If the idea of using your large CSTR to make fruit punch has never occurred to you please find another field.

Re:A different perspective.

[onyxruby]

First off, I find most of your comment the most intelligent one in this thread, in particular I agree that sex should simply never come up as an issue. On the point about the the affirmative action though I will have to disagree with you. In many government jobs, or jobs that relate to government (road construction etc) where affirmative action is required you happen to be wrong.

A couple of examples for you are when the Federal government setup the TSA. I was involved with the program from an IT standpoint as we had testing stations all over the US and territories. When the program first started we to hire an entire government agencies worth of people all at once and it was a massive logistical undertaking. We had hotels rented, nurses and doctors for physical exams, IT staff, security staff, the whole nine yards were on hand to run tests to hire enough people to hire the screeners. On average each temporary hiring center had between 30-60 temporary staff on hand.

We had to keep each center open until the appropriate quotas were filled for each airport. In some cases that meant we kept centers staffed for weeks or months in order to make sure we hired enough women for certain positions (supervisors etc). We actually had the same thing happen with men in Guam or American Samoa if I recall where the local culture was that only women worked in security.

You'll see the same thing happen with any number of other fields that relate to government in any number of other ways. In many of these cases affirmative action literally equals a quota and the more qualified white/male/other majority class will lose out on the job to the entirely unqualified candidate simply because they are trying to fill a given quota.

Re:A different perspective.

[Velex]

So, let me ask you this. How on earth am I supposed to do that when I'm treated as "all men" despite my body parts? How do I do that when I'm required to attend date rape and sexual harassment training on the basis of body parts I might have, things that presume me to be a pig and a rapist merely on the basis of body parts?

There are some things that have happened to recently that made me overhaul my worldview. Firstly, the gall of the womyn-born-womyn at the American Academy of Pediatrics telling men what body parts they should or should not have in the midst of womyn-born-womyn screaming about how inappropriate it was for men to talk about women's health was simply repugnant. Second was the Ada Initiative going around at hacker conventions sexually harassing men with creeper cards threatening violence, culminating in the censorship of a panel on sexuality that would have helped with the kind of harm reduction that the Ada Initiative claimed was the basis for threatening nut shots.

I had to ask myself: I know that womyn-born-womyn consider me to be a man despite all the reasons that's not correct, and instead womyn-born-womyn see me more in the light of Buffalo Bill, merely wearing a woman suit, merely mimicking like John Carpenter's The Thing rather than actually being. I know I am a woman because that's what I am. I can't change it. You can't change it. Feminism can't change it.

I work around women every day who believe that math is for boys only. Not only that, but they believe that math is just a stupid thing boys use to make them feel stupid.

I guess my question for you is how on earth I could ever see womyn-born-womyn as individuals when womyn-born-womyn are hell bent on painting anybody who, in their sole judgement, has some kind of male "stuff" about them as rapists?

How do I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when articles like this presume that the problem with women in IT is "all men?" How the hell am I supposed to do anything about the problem when my co-workers are teaching their daughters that math is hard and stupid and when womyn-born-womyn seek to reduce me to a body part I may or may not have and put this insolvable problem in my lap? How do I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when they're always screaming for a man to fix their own problems, even when it's a problem that no man and no amount of creeper cards can fix? How can I treat womyn-born-womyn as individuals when they paint me as "all men" and proceed to punish me for their own flaws and when they refuse to take responsibility for their self-made shortcomings?

Re:A different perspective.

[meta-monkey]

Actually, could you share your answer to your new co-worker's question?

What made you, specifically, interested and encouraged in engineering and sciences?

What do you think could be done, generally, to foster these interests in girls, from early development through college?

I've been thinking a lot about this topic since the birth of my child.

(And no, I'm not asking you to represent "all women." Just your personal opinions and experiences.)

Re:A different perspective.

[slimjim8094]

First of all, many women do treat all men as (at least potential) rapists. As you note, it's not valid, and I'm certainly not trying to suggest that you have anything to do with it, but such as it is.

As unfortunate as it is that they asked you those questions, and that they felt like they should ask, I can see why they did. A well known bug-as-feature of the human brain is the extremely powerful and innate ability to categorize things. This is why we don't have to rediscover an apple every time we see one - but it also leads to stereotypes when this is applied to people. And it requires active work in everybody to realize this particular flaw of human thought and avoid or mitigate it, or avoid making these associations in the first place.

I am going somewhere with this. The thing is, almost all men in the workplace - and especially tech men - have or have heard a horror story about a man making a benign joke or a comment that a woman hears and takes offense to. Or a man who asks a woman out that he finds attractive and faces sexual harassment discipline, not because he was being harassing and asking multiple times, or creating a toxic workplace environment, but simply for asking (and men are expected to be the ones to ask).

Witness the recent Adria Richards case. She heard two guys talking to each other (not in reference to her) making a 12-year-old style "dongle" joke, proceeded to misinterpret something else they said as sexual when it wasn't, and decided that the best course of action was to publicly denounce them with a photograph on Twitter and write a blog post, instead of, you know, asking them to cut it out.

You're absolutely, unequivocally, 100% right that she does not say anything about all or most women, and you are obviously not "responsible" or "accountable" for what she and others like her have done. The problem is, virtually never has a man done these things - in fact if he does, he is laughed away before it gets anywhere (which is another problem). And most women won't either, but it's a risk that doesn't exist with men. So they're not holding you accountable for others' actions when they have a concern that doesn't exist with the men they hire.

It's not right, and I don't agree with it, but you can see where they're coming from. An apparently unique phenomenon with this (as opposed to other 'ism's) is a small minority of women considering anything sexual as therefore sexist against women (which I find a really creepy attitude). Guys tend to make sexual jokes to each other - it's probably not appropriate for work, but I have a hard time saying it is deserving of a career-damaging sexual harassment claim. And it's very rare for a man to complain about this to management, whereas it's statistically much much more likely (relative to men) for women to do so (even if most women wouldn't).

So what you saw was a bunch of men nervous about their careers. Maybe they shouldn't have been (both their fear and what caused it shouldn't be happening), but I have a hard time condemning them for it. Perfectly reasonable to not want to work in an environment where that was the prevailing fear, though...

Re:A different perspective.

[stanlyb]

That sounds good on theory, but what about the reality check?
First thing first, all of the comments here, complaining about women, quotas and aliens are intently (or subconsciously) implying that, at the end of the day, all of the men hired are actually hot shit!!!
WTF? Guys, really? Right now in my company there are about 70% guys, who i don't wanna to be associated in any way, and that should be put in prison, just because of them my profession is having all these funny problems with quality and quantity.
BUT, never mind me, keep swimming, it is not a fish.

Re: A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

For me it was being encouraged to ask not just why but how. Why do magnets attract/repel and how can I make it happen, for example.

Even with 'girly' things I was given (an e-z bake oven for example) I was encouraged to think about how it worked and what that meant.

The other part of it was, I think, that my mom was raised hyper-traditionally, rebelled against it, and would be damned if any child of hers would grow up thinking anything was off limits just because of their gender. Whenever I experienced someone saying x was for girls or y was for boys, I also experienced my mom saying that was horseshit, so I guess I internalized it.

Re: A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

But it actually reinforces my point: I literally cannot tell AC's apart so they may well be the same person. One IS capable of telling two different human beings one runs across on the job apart, and so should treat them as individuals.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

The thing is, I totally get the sense of humor thing - but not in the guise of "we had a woman, she didn't have a sense of humor, so we're asking you this because she didn't." It would be no different than saying "we had a (insert whatever irrelevant demographic category), they didn't work out, you must answer for something you had nothing to do with."

When I said we discussed the culture during my interview with the place I ultimately went with, I mean we talked about exactly the kind of things like toasting marshmallows etc. We talked about our personal programming projects, home network set-ups, random geeky shit that lets you get a feel for if someone is really interested and driven or just doing it for the $$$. We also talked about how people in the office generally comport themselves - including having a sense of humor/sense of perspective about things. But the point here is that at no time did I feel like I was being presumed to be lacking just because someone else in a similar demographic bucket to me was lacking.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

I consider myself to be a feminist - actually, rather, a humanist. I think you're probably using the term "feminist" to mean something more akin to "feminazi" or "people who use the term feminist in order to justify treating men like shit."

I don't treat men like shit, nor do I think all men are rapists, so I can't answer to your statements of "feminists do this" because, in my experience, they do not, and I certainly don't.

Think about it in reverse - if I were to say "you're just like every other guy out there, you think all feminists are bad people blah blah blah" it would be stupid, right? Because not ALL guys make blanket statements about feminists like you just did. I can say YOU are making a poor argument because of your blanket statements, but it would be completely unfair of me to say that ALL of whatever term I want to apply to you (men's rights activist? I dunno) aren't capable of making a reasonable argument.

Personally, I think it sucks that ANYONE has to live in fear of another person being an asshole (and, you're really describing "assholes who happen to identify as feminists" rather than feminists), and I wish it were different, but alas, we live in this world, not fantasy land.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

First, let me say it sounds like a shitty situation you're in, and you sound really frustrated (and rightfully so) about it. I've known a few trans-folk (men and women) and it just sounds like a totally raw deal any way you slice it. All the negatives of either gender, none of the positives, with a healthy heaping of irrational hatred on top, when it comes to how society treats you. For what it's worth, you tell me you're a woman, and that's good enough for me, because I really don't give a damn about what you've got in your undies.

Second, there's no way I can answer your question about how you should deal with this. You're asking me to explain, in some way, the behaviors and beliefs of people who are not me, and then how you should handle that. The best I can do is say "well, some people are assholes and if they're assholes to you it's probably better to not put too much stock in what they say" but that kind of doesn't really mean a whole hell of a lot since it's pretty much a platitude.

The only thing I can tell you is that you would probably benefit from finding some way to let go of your (certainly justified) anger. It doesn't seem to be doing you much good, and frankly seems like it would just alienate many people who might otherwise be allies or at least not assholes like the people you described.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

Don't be so irrational. I'll dismiss the slurs you used because I have to assume you aren't able to control yourself while within the grips of such strong emotions.

I can understand from your hysterics here why you think a meltdown may have occurred, but my handling of the situation was diplomatic enough that, as I said, I was still offered positions despite clearly stating my lack of interest due to a poor fit.

I don't think it's oversensitive or self-important to call an early end to an interview where you know it won't be a fit and you don't want either party to waste any more time. Frankly, I'd find it fairly rude to do otherwise.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

Honestly, the reason I don't just "deal with it" is because I don't have to. I'm fortunate enough to be in a situation where I'm able to be selective and one of the categories where I choose to be selective is "not wanting to be held accountable for unknown behaviors of people who are not me."

Everyone has things that are deal-breakers for their workplace - you don't care about being stereotyped, which is your prerogative - but I do. Likewise I'm sure there are things I couldn't care less about but that you find vitally important. Different people are different.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

Oh, for sure - people absolutely tend to stereotype. It's incredibly convenient when you're dealing with people in the abstract, but it really, really sucks as a tool when you're dealing with people on an individual basis. Thus the whole problem.

I absolutely can see where they're coming from, and actually, I have great sympathy for them. I also have some biases/stereotypes that go through my mind when I meet individuals who fall into certain categories, but I make a conscious (and sometimes incredibly DIFFICULT, and sometimes failed) effort not to apply my biases to them or to make them answer for it. I'm not perfect, far from it, but I make the effort. The point here is that if people make the effort, things will get a little better.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

No, the fact that someone was hired does not mean they're hot shit. It means they were hired.

My point was about the converse: If someone is not being hired in a field as in-demand as the one that is the subject of this article, then it's more probable that they aren't very good at their job than it is that they are somehow having their jobs sniped by the tiny pool of female candidates for said positions.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

I'm actually quite consistent: When there is some way to differentiate individuals, I treat them as individuals. When there is literally no way to differentiate individuals, I have no obligation to try and make any distinction.

As far as I know, you're the same person who called me a cunt in another post because you have chosen to post in such a way that I literally have no way of knowing otherwise. Shame on you for using such language!

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

Why? Just as I'm not responsible for the behavior of any individual but myself, I'm also not responsible for the behavior of any organization I'm not a part of.

You're making my point - you're holding me accountable for, or at least suggesting that I have a responsibility to take action about behaviors I had nothing to do with, which is ridiculous.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

Except that's really not true in this context.

The article and my response is about hiring skilled workers in a very in-demand field in which there really are NOT a lot of female applicants.

If a guy is finding it hard to find a job in this industry because he is somehow unlucky enough to be applying for jobs that the vanishingly small number of female applicants are also hiring for at the vanishingly small number of technology firms that are actually using some kind of arbitrary quota system for skilled technologists, then I would venture to say the problem is that said guy is living in an alternate universe, because that in no way, shape, or form represents the reality we live in.

For unskilled jobs, yes, I'm absolutely sure people run afoul of quotas all the time. For jobs in fields where there is a surplus of skilled workers, yes, I'm absolutely sure people run afoul of quotas all the time. But for jobs in fields where skilled workers are in short supply and there is high demand? Nope, sorry, not buying it as a systemic problem.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

Actually, that's what I was talking about with affirmative action being "good intention, awful implementation" - government hiring is often based on factors other than qualifications because the government is under no obligation to turn a profit or perform at any particular level.

However, that's not applicable to non-governmental firms that are not doing government business. Some may have quotas, but I find it very unlikely that they will have hard and fast quotas when it comes to hiring a very in-demand skillset in a very competitive sector, and when a bad hire can have a very bad downside. Certainly it would not happen repeatedly to the point where it is a systemic problem - there simply aren't enough female applicants to go around for it to actually BE a problem where men find themselves systemically discriminated against in hiring for highly skilled and in-demand roles.

Re:A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

Nah, more like I found the first reasonable opportunity to thank them for their time and the opportunity, explain that I didn't really feel like it was going to be a good match, and that I hoped they found someone who was a good fit.

I suppose I could have done a "shut it down!" kind of thing complete with slammed doors or something, which would have been fun but not terribly professional.

Re:A different perspective.

[slimjim8094]

Totally agreed. People need to realize that our brains are predisposed to make stereotypes, and be both prepared and willing to fight against that.

Re: A different perspective.

[RussR42]

I've had a couple, but here goes:

I was aware that I was comparing apples and oranges but the juxtaposition of two similar thoughts in apparent discord was amusing. Particularly if you assume sexist guy that "can't" tell the difference between two women.

You did the right thing, the guys worried about your gender weren't worried about doing their jobs or you doing yours, this means an office full of the daily WTF and some light sexual harassment to go with it.

Re:A different perspective.

[Ambassador Kosh]

It is pretty sad that so many people still divide the world into ethnic, gender etc groups and then judge everyone in the group based on a stereotype. I understand why humans do it. There is a fair bit of biology behind that in terms of how our brains categorize number to make it easier to handle complex system. However, it is also extremely lazy thinking and most people should know better at this point.

I often wonder what the world would be like if we could actually get along and work together to solve problems instead of all the wasted energy and effort we have now. At the same time we are moving forward and trying to create artificial enzymes to create nanotech drugs to cure diseases we have others in the society that still can't accept science like evolution, plate tectonics or the age of the earth. It is like we have two completely different worlds. Some people are moving forward at great speed while many others seem like they would be much happier a few hundred years ago.

Evolution is even used in modern engineering. At least for the biological engineering side one of the best ways to figure out how to destroy a toxin is to take some bacteria and give them a little bit of it. Most will die but some will have a mutation that allows them to survive. You can keep creasing the levels of the toxin and can use directed evolution to create a bacteria to break down what you need. You can also use a little genetic engineering and gene splicing to help the process along.

This is a strange world but at least as an engineer you can work to try and make it better.

Re:A different perspective.

[Velex]

What about the hypocrisy of womyn-born-womyn to complain and bitch that men might have things to say about issues of "women's health" and "my body, my choice" when the womyn-born-womyn presumes that it's perfectly ok to speak authoritatively about issues of men's health?

My genitals were mutilated when I was born, and I suffered greatly. There was searing pain when I was young, and male adolescence was a painful, hellish torture. I nearly killed myself because of the physical pain.

In 2012, you womyn-born-womyn were shouting about how men have no right to speak about women's bodies. Why, then, did the womyn-born-womyn at the American Academy of Pediatrics flip-flop their position on routine infant male genital mutilation? Was it some feminist stunt to tell men, "Haha, I have my body, my choice, but we've already succeeded in painfully mutilating you at birth and cursing you to 19 years of intense physical pain that you even thought was normal for a man!"

No, I'll tell you what it was. When the CDC recommended vaccination of young girls against HPV, you womyn-born-womyn went ballistic. How dare the government give young girls a vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease! How dare the innocence and sexual purity of young girls be questioned!

Yet, why do the womyn-born-womyn of the AAP want male infants mutilated? To protect from sexually transmitted diseases! Even a male infant is a rapist who deserves to be punished by painful mutilation!

What is the name and address of the woman I was punished for raping? Well, what is it. WHO DID I FUCKING RAPE TO DESERVE THAT TORTURE?!

You damned womyn-born-womyn owe every man and trans woman who has suffered from genital mutilation a big fucking explanation for your hypocrisy.

I have been reduced to my body parts and punished for a body part I hate having, that I have against my will at every stage of my life.

How could I ever see you womyn-born-womyn as individuals? You are all guilty, and if the world were just, it would be my right to cut off your clitoris so that you can know genital pain and almost complete loss of sensation except for the sensation of intense pain just as I do and then rape you as payback for all the times I have been presumed and outright called a rapist by you womyn-born-monsters..

Re: A different perspective.

[thesandtiger]

There is no possible way I can respond to any of your comments except to say that you very clearly are in significant distress. I sympathize with your pain, but I am not the appropriate person to help you with it, so I can only urge you in the strongest possible way to seek professional help as soon as you are able. I can't imagine Slashdot is the appropriate place to deal with this, nor can I imagine it being particularly helpful for your situation. Good luck.

"Probably heard of Etsy"?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I never heard of them until recently - and I still haven't heard of them from anyone on the business side. But lately they've been getting mentioned in TWIT podcasts a lot; and there was a Network World article about them. Yet still - no non-technical person I know has ever even mentioned them

I suspect Etsy has had some sort of unfocused marketing campaign going on over the past few months and is trying to raise their brand awareness - but they're going about it bass-ackwards.

Re:"Probably heard of Etsy"?

[serialband]

Etsy is geared towards arts and crafts. It's not really tech oriented. If you're not into arts&crafts or don't really know any artists, you won't likely know much about Etsy early on.

Well the daughter is better off

[Esben]

becomming a lawyer than an engineer isn't she?

Re:Well the daughter is better off

[ebno-10db]

Exactly, and the percentage of women in law is much higher than in STEM. Similarly, for years now over half of newly graduating MD's have been women. Back in say, the 1980's, when STEM Ph.D. salaries were rising, I think it was a good idea to encourage women to enter these traditionally male fields. Then in the 80's the NSF pushed for vastly increasing the number of student visas for the express purpose of driving down Ph.D. salaries. As time went on, the H-1B visa was introduced. Offshoring and inshoring became the gospel of our patriotic tech execs. There was a nice bubble in the mid to late 90's, but it's now been longer since the bubble than the bubble lasted.

Nowadays encouraging women to enter STEM fields seems like misogyny. I actively discourage my daughter from doing so, but only because I love her.

Mod parent up

[davide marney]

Great post. Love this line: "...I really don't want to have to be responsible for all women ever, and I don't want to have to worry that my co-workers are continually holding me accountable or interpreting things I say or do as if I were somehow the same as the other women they had worked with."

My personal policy has always been to assume that everyone is smart, competent, and wants to work together, and then let experience prove otherwise.

Re:I don't know where this guy or you are coming f

[BitZtream]

I'm not sure what med school you're talking about, but my wife went to one of the best in the nation and while she does have some stupid ridiculous debt ... theres no way in hell any normal person ends up with $750k in school loans and debt. If you hit 1/3rd of that, you need a different career cause you've already failed out and restarted multiple times.

If you have undergrad debt of any size, you're more or less a stupid fuck who deserves it. There are millions of dollars in unclaimed grants waiting every year for insanely stupid stuff ... so many so that if you have to pay for school, you really don't deserve the degree. (If you choose to pay for it all yourself and leave the grants for someone else, thats another story and I applaud you, but its still probably a waste of your money). Theres no excuse to have debt coming out of undergrad.

Re:I don't know where this guy or you are coming f

[iamwahoo2]

I think you are right. I do believe that there are still many gender biases in our workforce and society as a whole, but the problem in the engineering fields with lack of females has been shown to be primarily a problem of supply. What is interesting is that universities first tried to fix this problem by soliciting femailes entering college but have now found that they need to intervene earlier than college in order to get women more interested in math and engineering. The engineering program that I am most familiar with now spends the majority of their outreach to female students on adolescent age ranges and all metrics seem to indicate that this is far more effective.

Question

[ebno-10db]

What's a "woman"?

Very good timing

[viiviiviivii]

Right now I would really REALLY like to increase the female count in my dev team.

Ideally I would like to move towards 50/50 ratio, which sounds ridiculous (as I have only known 3 awesome female devs in my entire careeer), but, as my office is on Mallorca, has good pay (for Spain), amazing benefits, I really hope I can find 4 or so awesome female devs.

We'll most likely be doing a nationwide tv advertising campaign to get their attention..

Let's see if I can!

Cry me a river.

[luis_a_espinal]

Did they not let women apply before?

This means if they get two similarly qualified candidates they will select a woman if their quota needs one. That means males who apply are being discriminated against.

As a man, I will say this to those "men" who feel discriminated or unfairly treated by that practice: Go to the Cry-Me-A-River Department and send us a violin-shaped postcard when you get there. Srlsly, man the f* up.

A little bit of social adjustment to achieve some fairness that has been conspicuously absent in the history of humankind will inevitably hit someone else. Bohoho, big deal. World is unfair, but it has always been more favorable to us men than to women. It doesn't take a lot of testicular fortitude to accept this fact graciously.

If a man gets passed in favor of an equally qualified woman, and said man cannot find another job in this male-predominant industry, then chances are there is something wrong with him.

It is absolutely pathetic to see men born and raised in one of the most prosperous nations in the history of mankind getting their panties all curled up because a company in a male-predominant, highly-paid industry decides to favor women in their hiring process. It speaks volumes about them, and that wasn't meant as a compliment.

Re:Cry me a river.

[meta-monkey]

I agree. Are men being "discriminated against" in these circumstances? Is it "unfair?" Maybe. But my father raised me to be a man, and one of his frequent lessons was "life isn't fair."

Part of being a man is accepting that life isn't fair. You have to shoulder responsibilities and make sacrifices that others do not. We do not complain that women and children get the lifeboats before we do. We do not complain about opening doors for women, or giving up our seats on busses so they can sit, or picking up the check. When the nutjob opened fire in the Colorado theater, many of the men (boys, even) died using their bodies to shield others. Those were Men.

This does not mean women are not ALLOWED to do these things. By all means, grab the check. By all means, fight for your country (my wife was in the Army for 9 years and carried her M-16 through Bosnia and Kosovo, helping protect the people there from each other). If you are a man who feels "threatened" by strong women, then you are not much of a man.

So men, do not whine about "discrimination." It's unmanly. Suck it up, find a better job, or make your own job. Women, what you choose to do is up to you. I hope you choose to compete as the best candidate for whatever position you apply. If you don't, and would prefer special treatment, that's fine. Ignore the crying whiners on their way out. They're not really men. And yes, I'll hold the door open for you.

Re:Cry me a river.

[operagost]

Why is it that the same progressives who rail against the existence of traditional gender roles suddenly tell us to "man up" when we complain about injustice?

Re:Cry me a river.

[epyT-R]

Fine. If "life isn't fair" and women are equally human, they should be able to handle the same lessons the same way men have to. Why treat them as an elevated caste? They don't need it...right? Conversely, if a better qualified man is selected against because of his gender for the sake of a less qualified woman, it must be considered an equal affront to 'social justice' as it would the other way around.

Being equals, women shouldn't be so easily duped into demanding entitlements by leftist parties hungry for political platforms. They should want to be free of that! The issue isn't about manliness, it's about the feminist hypocrisy in using discrimination as the solution for discrimination. Women are either equals or they are not. There is no middle ground where they get to operate in 'equality' mode where it benefits them and then switch to chattel status when the going gets too tough. If they are equal, and men are expected to treat them as such, they can open their own doors, pay for their own meals, pass the same military training regimens, etc as the men have to. However, if women are not equals and thus need law-driven chattel privilege to survive, that's ok too, but it also means they have to defer to mens' judgment, even when they don't agree with it. You cannot separate power from responsibility while maintaining a stable society.

It is not men's role to simply suck it up. They're supposed to stand up for themselves too. It's just that neochivalry in combination with feminist-tainted culture has made it nearly impossible to do. This is not healthy for society. It puts men in a double bind that keeps them in adolescent limbo while women run around taking advantage like spoiled adolescents (kardashian syndrome). Guys like you are the problem, not the solution. You're a white knight hypocrite who pretends to consider women as equals, while knowing (and thus treating them) otherwise, without having the balls to call them out on their bullshit. It's guys like you who enable feminism and elevate it to scripture status.

Re:Cry me a river.

[meta-monkey]

Fine. If "life isn't fair" and women are equally human, they should be able to handle the same lessons the same way men have to.

You're flawed from your very first sentence.

You might have an argument if I'd said "life is fair" but I said the exact opposite. Your entire post is a non-sequitur.

Life is not fair. If you're expecting it to be, you're in for a rude awakening. I'd tell you to wish life were fair in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first, but I think you wouldn't bother, assuming they'd fill up equally.

Re:Cry me a river.

[Cederic]

You missed his point. You stated that life isn't fair, therefore men have to deal with the shit that causes.

He merely asked why women don't also have to deal with the shit that causes. Using the unfairness as an excuse why men have to deal with unfairness and women don't is ducking the issue.

Re:Cry me a river.

[meta-monkey]

No, it isn't. You're asking "why do men have to deal and women don't." That implies you think women should have to "deal with it" because men do. That is, it should be "fair."

But, my entire premise (and the nature of reality) is that life is not fair.

A Man is someone who understands and accepts the unfairness of life and fulfills his obligations and responsibilities anyway.

Re:Cry me a river.

[Cederic]

As I said, you're ducking the issue.

Btw, if you want to know what a Man is, read Kipling.
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

Personally I prefer Heinlein's version:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12051-a-human-being-should-be-able-to-change-a-diaper

Note that Heinlein didn't differentiate on gender. Neither should you; it's not fair.

Re:Cry me a river.

[BenoitRen]

We do not complain about opening doors for women, or giving up our seats on busses so they can sit

What does misguided chivalry have to do with being a man?

Re:Cry me a river.

[solidraven]

No, it is actually unfair and holds back development. I've seen total idiots get catapulted into a position simply cause they were of a particular race or female (or both). It's bad for business, it's bad for progress, and it's just discrimination really. So they're fighting discrimination (though in my opinion there isn't any) with discrimination. Is it that hard to apply the same hiring standards for everybody?

Problem is that in the technology business women often simply can't perform as well as men. It's common knowledge that men tend to perform better in abstract thinking, which is necessary in many parts of high-technology business. Good luck developing algorithms, debugging complex designs, etc. without those skills. I simply haven't met a lot of women who perform well at that. I think it's about a 10% group of those that make it into the technology industry that performs well at it. No problem getting beaten by any of those, but damn I'd hate getting pushed aside for somebody who is a plain idiot and gets hired due to gender equality laws (see next paragraph to read what I mean).

A good example is one of the women who was in my class back in school; She had no confidence (didn't dare to turn on a power supply when something was hooked up to it), didn't even know how to hook up a LED now that I come to think of it (fatal flaw as EE I'd say), only passed theoretical exams she could study by heart and for the others she cheated or took several attempts to get through. For labs the professors had to go easy on her cause else the gender equality number for the EE department would plummet (she was the only one that year). So she got let through due to gender "equality" laws, not based on performance in practical or theoretical skills. Sad thing is, she got a M.Sc. due to that and now wants to work in the medical industry. Luckily that market is flooded so it isn't working out for her, because I really think she'll kill somebody at some point due to her incompetence if she does end up in the medical industry; That's gender equality for ya.

Re:Cry me a river.

[alexandru_preoteasa]

Thank you for exhibiting reading comprehension. Seems to be a problem associated with sufferers of Mangina Syndrome, such as Mr. meta-monkey.

Two cents from an Etsy shop owner

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

Etsy's been a fantastic exercise in home-grown projects that can turn into full-time work for yourself, or for a whole team of people, if you're lucky enough to get a lot of attention from the community. Etsy, like Pinterest, Facebook, or Reddit, is easy to get a lot of attention on if you've got a good product, as people are constantly combing Etsy for cool stuff to buy that doesn't exist anywhere else. I run a store that makes custom Kindle and iPad covers and enjoyed enough success building Neverending Story covers that it's enabled me to expand out, and find other people to help me meet the demand.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/95190935/neverending-story-ipad-tablet-cover

My team is about half and half guys and gals. The girls often have great ideas on improvements to the products, or a lot of input to make new geek things. The guys have proven to be good organizers and implementers of ideas that are more removed from what we do, and often prefer to work with completely different materials and mediums than the girls. It's proven to be a very fun and dynamic with a lot of creative energy, but overall I would say that the girls have a lot more distributed creativity and imagination that they can apply in many small ways, while the guys tend to focus on bigger, singular projects with their creativity. It's been interesting observing the difference between the genders in a crafting workshop, and seeing the balance it brings in furthering the company as a whole. There's a lot of crossover training that happens too though - the guys have engineering backgrounds, and teach the girls how to program Arduinos and work with laser cutters and workshop tools, while the girls teach us guys how to sew, book bind, and work in some of the more traditional mediums. If it's a fun environment and they've got access to people willing to teach, many people are far more willing to learn than if they're asked or expected to make the leap into something unfamiliar. There may be a lot fewer female engineers by numbers, but that's not to say that many of them don't have engineering skills or inclinations, even without the formal training.

Were is TFA?

[bferrell]

Everyone always says "Read the fine article". There is no fine article to read this time... Just an assertion. I am disturbed by my lack of faith in the poster. :(

Re:Were is TFA?

[bferrell]

Never mind... No coffee yet

Self Contradictory

[wisnoskij]

One of his rules: "Don’t use identifying language that might unintentionally marginalize minority candidates such as “women engineers”—-they’re just “engineers.”"
Which he then violates about 2 times for every single other rule, dozens more for the article, and again for his premise.

Sounds like just another, lets start taking gender into account when we are trying to fill a role, such that we get about a 50:50 ratio in our company.

I think the wording "women in tech" is wrong.

[raque]

I live in a gender switched world. My wife is a programmer for a major Wall Street firm, and I stay home to raise the kids. She has been at the firm for 25+ years and is a manager who is part of the hiring team. I've been a SAHD for 20+ years. When we attend those various office functions I notice a fair amount of female programming staff. Way over 10%. The section my wife manages is over 50% female. What is different is that this is a mainframe COBOL environment. When I talk to the male programmers about tech we discuss with linux distro we like and how so & so did what ever. The women discuss how they are using tool X to solve problem Y. Tool X is what they have, it cost a lot of money, it does the job. They are not interested in the tools themselves, they are interested in the problem they are solving. Understanding what the user needs, how that might be different then what they asked for, and doing all of this in a timely fashion is the topic of this and every day.

After that they are interested in how much money is being made, what the benefits are, time off, just like any other job. So we are talking about long term job stability, good office environment, how many stalls are in the bathroom, who is and isn't and idiot.

Asking why women aren't represented in tech misses the point. The question should be what does a tech job provide that an HR or accounting job doesn't.

so much for reading comprehension

[luis_a_espinal]

So what you are saying is that men who can't get a job are worthless people?

No. Nice strawman by the way. I'm talking about men worrying about not getting a job at the sight one (A SINGLE FUCKING ONE) single company slightly preferring women in a men-dominated industry, which, even in these economic conditions still provide ample opportunity for employment.

I'm not talking about men in general looking for jobs, in general, and not finding jobs, in general. But don't let that stop you from building a strawman to knock out and pat yourself in the back celebrating your victory, though.

That if a man can't get a job, he's obviously terrible at what he does?

No. See above.

If a man is unable to get a job, then he is pathetic?

No. See above.

It speaks volumes about a man because a company didn't hire him?

No. See above. But don't let reading comprehension stop you from building up your angst.

Autism

[anyaristow]

Last I read the ratio of autistic males to females was 4:1, which is still far less than the ratio of male to female tech workers in some fields, like IT. Also, the autistic ratio is probably over-stated, because there are social pressures to (1) give girls non-institutional social coaching, more so than boys, since social awkwardness is better tolerated in boys, and this allows coached girls to get by without institutional help and they are therefore less often diagnosed autistic, and (2) give boys institutional help in life and coping skills, since lack of success is less tolerated in boys, so they are more likely to be diagnosed.

Autism certainly plays a role in who works in the tech industry, but even autistic women are under-represented.

Team fit

[Vrtigo1]

The whole deal of picking the most qualified person for the job is a load of crap. When I hire someone, I look at how well they are suited to the position, but I also look at how well they would mesh with the team they would become a part of. If the existing team is a bunch of 20-something guys that talk about guns and cars all day, a 40-something woman who's starting her second career in the tech field probably isn't going to be the best fit. If I have her up against a guy that is a better cultural fit but slightly less technically qualified, the guy is probably going to get the job. Sure it might not fit with HR policies, but here in the real world, I don't like having to rehire in 6 months when she quits because she doesn't like the work environment.

Re:Team fit

[Cederic]

How about you change the work environment? It's muppets like you perpetuating a broken environment that cause the problems.

Not to mention that most 40yo women I know would rip apart any number of 20-something guys with absolute ease and total confidence. Hiring even one would probably improve the team signficantly just by changing behaviours.

Re:Team fit

[Vrtigo1]

By hiring males (where the largest pool of IT talent is), your logic says I'm perpetuating a "broken environment"? You say it's this broken environment that causes the problems. Can you define the "problems" for me? I have a perfectly capable team that gets work done and meshes well, so I wouldn't call that a problem.

For most positions, I'd have to specifically recruit for a female to get one application from one. And let's be practical here...whether or not a woman can shred the rest of the team is sort of contrary to the point. Do I really want to hire someone when that's what you think they'd be inclined to do? What kind of work life is that going to be for her? Is she really going to want to go to a job where she dreads her coworkers? The answer, sure...for about 6 months. Then she'll realize she would be happier somewhere else and she'll leave, at which point we've come full circle back to my initial reason for typically not hiring someone into that type of situation.

I'm all for workforce diversity, but it's not my job to accomplish it when it's going to impact my team in a negative way. What do you suppose the ratio of male to female auto mechanics is? Or Nascar drivers? Would you say that a woman is inherently any less qualified to fix a car or drive a car? Of course not. In general women don't enter those fields for the same reasons they don't enter the IT field. It's dominated by males and, again, in general, women aren't a good cultural fit.

So, again, while I'm all for diversity, it's not my job, or an auto shop owner's job, or a race team owner's job to hire women when they think they won't be a good team fit and will probably cause disruption to the team environment.

In my team, when the office door's closed and HR isn't around, you can feel free to talk about whatever you want, and that's part of what makes working in IT special. By bringing someone who isn't used to that culture in, you disrupt it.

Re:Team fit

[Cederic]

So basically you're as immature, ignorant and bigoted as your team. Rock on, way to go. Moron.

Re:Team fit

[Vrtigo1]

That's cool. You didn't respond to any of my points and resorted to calling me names, so I'm guessing that's your way of admitting defeat. Thanks!

Re:Also

[epyT-R]

No, it's confused white knights like you who are missing the point. The way guys like you treat women is contrary to 'empowerment' or 'equality' or any other term as used by feminists. You've absorbed the loony feminist propaganda in primary and collegiate level schooling as well as the 'manners' your father (from another era) taught you and are trying to reconcile them. While that's understandable, you must realize you can't! They are fundamentally incompatible. Your entire post being an ad hominem attack on men who openly question such double standards, is evidence of this irrationality. Start holding women to the same expectations you hold for men in any given situation. That's the only way women will ever have the chance of earning respect as equals..real respect, not the grudgingly superficial acknowledgement that PC policies demand. The one thing feminists never seem to grasp is that it is impossible to force someone to respect another. Respect is earned by complying with the standards the former holds for the latter.

If women can hack it with the guys, they should have no problem understanding that if they want the same respect guys give each other for accomplishments achieved, they'll have to do it without the preferential treatment. If they need that chattel privilege to survive, then they aren't equal, and should be deferring to mens' judgment in these areas. I don't have a problem with either system, really, but I do have a problem with government and/or culturally enforced double standards. If she's the better applicant based on relevant attributes, she should get the job/school placement/raise/promotion/etc, but if I am, I should get it.

Then there's the whole concept of radical egalitarianism driving all of this. Sorry, but equal opportunity != equal outcome, nor is equal outcome necessarily 'fair'. Only children reason that way. Using the latter as a measurement of the success of the former is craziness.

Re:Also

[Cederic]

No, they rated you as 'troll' because you're trolling.

You're ignoring the industries with 90% female employment. You're ignoring average working hours. You're ignoring rates of death at work. You're ignoring the sacrifices men have to make because they're expected to earn a family income. You're ignoring the superior pay women under 25 get compared to men.

In other words, you're ignoring anything at all that might possibly make you look like the cunt you are. That's trolling.