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Could a Grace Hopper Get Hired In Today's Silicon Valley?
theodp writes "There has been lots of heated discussion on the topic of where-the-girls-aren't, both in the tech and larger business world. Dave Winer broached the subject of 'Why are there so few women programmers?', prompting a mix of flame, venom and insight. Over at Valleywag, Nitasha Tiku pegs 'Culture Fit' as an insidious excuse used to marginalize women in tech. Completing the trilogy is an HBR article, 'Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?', in which Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic concludes the problem is that manifestations of hubris, which occur much more frequently in men than women, are commonly mistaken for leadership potential. So, with a gender and age strike against her, would a Grace Hopper in her prime even land an interview in today's Silicon Valley?"
" manifestations of hubris ... are commonly mistaken for leadership potential "
Not limited to tech jobs in the valley.
Of course, anyone with credentials like this: "She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics and earned her Master's degree at Yale University in 1930." would get an interview at a tech company, or even become the CEO.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Because she didn't have a degree in computer science her resume would never be approved by HR. The hiring manager wouldn't even know she applied.
This article, as well as the source articles are all nothing but professional trolls written for the express purpose of generating page views. What's next, links to articles on Jezebel asking if the average man beats his wife before or after raping her?
The US Senate has huge barriers to entry...for everyone. Including all of us reading this. Jobs with the local government have incentives to entry for women.
Why am I not surprised the racism card was immediately played in response to a legitimate question in an attempt to silence debate? Especially when race wasn't even involved until you brought it up?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
why are there so few women in a position to be hired in the first place? Why aren't many women choosing to study these subjects. Are they being discouraged from studying computer science? Are they graded more harshly? Is it social pressure?
Maybe they damn well don't want to.
Here is what I don't get and why these "why are there not enough women in X" articles piss me off....why do we have to treat women like a man with an inverted penis, instead of what they are, a completely different creature that SOMETIMES have interests that overlap ours, sometimes not?
Does a woman's brain look the same as ours on a CAT scan? Nope, different areas are used more and different areas used less, in fact any scan tech worth his salt can spot a female vs male scan in seconds. There are plenty of fields where a woman will just slaughter a man, for example a female pilot will whup the dog shit out of a male pilot because she can take more Gs and in a fight the one that can push the plane the hardest without having a black or red out wins. Women are better at language, women are better at diffusing tense situations which is why they make better cops and hostage negotiators...the list goes on and on.
So why in the hell do we have to treat little Sally like she is just Jimmy without a penis? Why? ALL we should do is make sure that if little Sally WANTS to try out for a job she can without discrimination that is it, THAT IS ALL we should do. Instead we try to set quotas and if there isn't "X" number of this or that gender (this only seems to apply to women and certain minorities, nobody complains there is not enough white people playing basketball or males becoming nurses) everyone acts shocked! Shocked I tell you! That little Sally doesn't want to do the same shit little Jimmy does...did you ever stop to think maybe little Sally finds computers boring as hell? Did you think about that? Because I fix the computers that women use every day and I have found the VAST majority, I'd say at least a good 7 if not 8 out of 10 just want to do their job and get as far from the PC as they can when the work day is done. You see many females actually LIKE face to face interaction, I know, its weird, and they find just staring at a screen for hours dull and repetitive. Ironic considering the one time they like spending hours on the thing is FB and those damned FB games, or as I call them "hamster pushes the button and gets a treat" but hey I'm not a woman and if it makes 'em happy? More power to 'em.
So as long as we make sure little Sally can do the job if she wants, which with the rise of startups and appstores frankly I don't see as much of a problem since anybody can start their own software house now, then we should just stay the hell out of it. I think if we did so you'd find that certain jobs women are drawn to, certain jobs men are drawn to because surprise! They truly are different creatures with different wants, needs, and goals.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Nobody is suggesting a conspiracy. They are, however, suggesting certain biases may be responsible -- possibly unconscious, possibly promoted as much by other women as by men.
The idea that men are "naturally" more interested in programming is something that's possible but should be treated with appropriate skepticism. It's not like there were programming contests a million years ago that were evolved into us, and it's not like obvious different circumstances like pregnancy go particularly well with a lot of other currently-female-dominated jobs (e.g. nursing). So either there's some very indirect inherent cause, or there's some cultural motivation. The cultural thing might even be good on net compared to not having it. Or horrible beyond just a gender imbalance in a particular industry.
Both of these things are, of course, much easier to claim than to prove. But one thing that is pretty much proven is that people who think they aren't sexist often do have biases (eg. http://www.theage.com.au/national/how-the-sex-bias-prevails-20100514-v4mv.html). Same goes for race.
I would say the same, and I don't understand what is being said about leaders. The women have their fair share of incompetent leaders as well. Well not completely fair, since the women to men ratio is still low, but I would guess the ratio of incompetence female leaders to competent ones is the same as for men.
I can only think of a handfull of male leaders in IT that are more incompetent than Carly Fioni.
Shouldn't that raise concern though? Given that there was greater parity up into the 1980s, why have the numbers of women programmers dropped so dramatically over the last couple of decades? This is on contrast to other STEM fields where the numbers of women have been steadily growing. Unless you're saying 50% of the population suddenly lost interest in what is considered one of the more lucrative fields in the global economy right now.
Up until I the last few years, I would have agreed that women programmers are rare (and they are at most companies). However, I now work for a company with a large number of Indian engineers, and about half of them are women. My conclusion is that the lack of women must be largely cultural (in the US) and nothing whatsoever to do with gender differences in ability.
Common sense! Good for you.
See people, all it takes is actually using your brain and not succumbing to "politically correct" bullshit.
I believe any futher comments in this thread to be redundant (though no doubt someone will nit-pick all the same).
which is totally what she said
LOl male oriented lingo. The only man keeping women out of tech might be daddy clearing out all challenges for you in advance your whole life.
This is so true, and if I had mod points, you'd be getting them.
What we should be doing, and what gender (or classification of your choice) blind really means is that women should be treated the same as men at the interview and at the annual review. It is true that in many fields there is still a wage disparity between women and men doing the same job with the same skills and qualifications. That is a genuine wrong that must be fixed. What <classification> blind doesn't mean is that job hiring or school admissions should be quota based, as quotas always seem to cause more trouble than they are worth. True equality is on a case by case basis, rather than a statistical measure across populations.
The low numbers, is the fact why it is hard to find exceptional. The population isn't a normal distribution, but shifted a bit.
There is always a bit more worthless then exceptional. However if you increase the population up you find more, but if you reduce the population down then you wil find very few.
The worthless developers tend not to last long, if they do, they kinda just suck your sole as you need to make up for them.
The Okayish you tend to work with fine, and they don't bother you. The exceptional you may not even realize they are exceptional, they do their job and get done. Also women tend not to brag as much as guys do, so there is less self promotion.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That matches my experience. About half are below average.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
I'm female, and I agree...to an extent. BUT there is still a ceiling on my paycheck and a boy's club, you cannot deny that. Once people get working together and get in their groove, if you throw a stick in the mix it can grind to a halt. The same would go if the tables were turned and somehow, by some mutation, females dominated programming. I would then be calling it a girl's club.
I was fortunate for awhile. I grew up the smartest computer kid in my little po-dunk town. Then I went to college and the class was actually mixed, men/women/race. Then I got that "job" right out of college, but after 5 years, I wanted to see what else was out there.
So I left the state and that job to find something else. What I found was (generally speaking) being a programmer meant being 1 of 2 stinky men that hover around one computer all day (with about 3 computers per office or cubicle). All the guys (and I say guys, because I saw no females during my interview - except one receptionist) at Google looked depressed and the were shoved into cubby-offices that were smaller than my studio apartment.
What female wants to hang around that (let alone privileged and spoiled from the previous job)? I left that state and am back into IT not programming and happy as a lark. Except now I have a non-profit ceiling because of the boy's club at the local tech shop. I couldn't even hand those bastards my resume because they wouldn't even look at me. Had I not been at a job fair, I would have shoved it in their face.
So maybe after-all this guy is right. Females don't want that thankless depressing programming job.
I don't believe for a moment that it's any kind of negative force, such as sexism or bigotry, that's keeping women out of the field. It's just not interesting to most of them. I know it's hard to talk about in today's politically correct world, but men and women ARE wired differently. Exceptions certainly exist, but they are still just exceptions.
We could go on and on about why there aren't more male nurses, and the conversation would be silly if we tried to ignore the fact that guys just tend not to be interested in nursing because they're guys.
As for females in this industry, I've seen all kinds. Some are good, some are inexperienced, some just plain suck, and others are incredibly talented. Just like their male counterparts.
If you think it is easy to wake-up at 6am, prepare the breakfast, dress-up the kids, send them to school, go to work, work, go back home, take the kids, prepare the dinner, check their homework, listen to their stories, and after midnight finally falling asleep.....
Yep, it sounds easy, you should try it for awhile.
You realise that there are all those quotas in the South because it is pretty amazingly racist, right? Whenever I travel there, I fell like I'm in a clichéd rendering of "Gone With The Wind" -- minus the class.
Quotas are a terrible idea, except that they are the only way to break the old-boy cliques... Of course, after 1-2 generation you have to remove them.
Wish I had mod points. I have a female friend who works as an elementary school teacher and she told me that 100% of the teaching staff at her school are *women*. So what? Who cares? I think women are drawn to other fields, simple as that.
It's time we ended discrimination against dead people, don't you think? Why, they aren't even allowed to vote except in Chicago and a few other cities.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You need to go back and research some history. The post-WWII period was really the first time in the last several centuries that women were expected to not have to bring income into the household. You probably don't realize that because most of the literature was written by the upper class, but women of the lower classes had to work for the family to get by. Weaving, knitting, needlepoint, painting ceramics, cheese making, butter making, washing clothes, and the like were all sources of income that could be done out of the home, as were raising chickens and rabbits, collecting eggs, and salting fish.
Women often worked outside the home, and not only in the stereotypical one-room schoolhouse of the movies. My grandmothers and great-grandmothers all worked in resorts and restaurants, a shoe factory, a comforter factory, canneries, basket factories and a fishing lure factory. They were not uncommon in that regard. The storied life of 'Little House on the Prairie' was just that, a story. In reality the mother would probably have spent a couple days a week at the local meat packing plant or the flour mill.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Sounds to me like the woman in your scenario has a shit husband.
just that men don't tend to go into teaching
You couldn't have picked a worse example:
They don't now. You do realise that in the within recorded history the last 20 years of female dominaed teaching is a massive anomaly. The thing is you get this thing called "feminisation" where female domiated careers are seen as worth less, and that puts off men. That coupled with the "being the odd one out" syndrome puts off even more.
Teaching was for the longest time a perfectly respetable career for men.
I think therefore we can conclude that the recent trend to women must be a recent sociatal pressure (and not a good one) rather than anything inherent.
However, even if we could wave a magic want and made all that bad stuff go away we're never going to see a 50/50 split in the technology field.
Quite possible, but we're talking here about a 999/1 split, not a 70/30 or 80/20 split. Once it's 999/1, then something is very, very badly fucked up. Men and women are just not that different.
Off all the women I know from childhood, only a small fraction have gone into technology.
And what of all the men? The majority of people--men and women--do not go into computing.
The thing is that computing is very male dominated now and you are in computing. Therefore you see only men who have gone into computing. That's massive, gigantic selection bias.
Another nice point: women were actually much more common in the early days of computing? Why? Dunno, but it shows that it's not an "inherently male" thing.
They didn't choose these fields because they were "pushed away" from programming.
Some of were deeply passionate about programming. Most people in programming aren't, just liek most people in most fields aren't passionate. For many people it's a thing to fall into for lack of any better ideas. This is where subtle pressures start to matter: who's going to go into a second choice field massively dominated by one gender and rampant sexism?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There are those that will say your statement is sexist...
I'm sure there are. More sensible people would simply say that the statement is ignorant and excessively simplistic.
SJW n. One who posts facts.