Slashdot Mirror
Fortune.com: Blame Tech Diversity On Culture, Not Pipeline
FrnkMit writes: Challenging a previous Code.org story on tech diversity, a Forbes.com writer interviewed 716 women who left the technology field. Her conclusion: corporate culture, and the larger social structure, is the primary cause for these women leaving the industry and never looking back. Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies, low pay which barely covers day care, "jokes" from male coworkers, and always feeling like the "odd duck." In reality, there are probably many intertwined causes: peer pressure at the high-school and college level, female-unfriendly geek culture, low pay, a lack of accommodations for pregnant/nursing mothers, the myth of "having it all," stereotype threat, and repeated assertions that women aren't biologically suited to writing software and therefore there's no problem at all.
Here we go again. This topic is becoming horribly redundant.
Blaming corporate culture is bullshit because most women from birth are told to not go into tech. The problem isn't graduating millions of female computer scientists and then they all get their first jobs and quit because of misogyny. They never studied tech to begin with. The problem isn't a office policy one, it's a cultural and societal problem that discourages women from pursuing careers in tech from about the age of three when they're given their first barbie doll.
Being good with tech is not the ability to play with a smart phone. It's the ability to design one.
Did they try to find men who left the field as a control group? The reasons cited in TFA also applies to a lot of men I know that have left the industry. I would like to know if it really affects women, also whether or not a higher % of women leave the tech industry vs men, esp. if you control for being a parent.
Monstar L
You just learn to deal with it.
Well, not if you're a woman. If you're a woman you complain about it and get laws passed so you don't get your feelings hurt.
Jobs in order of % male.
I find it strange that we talk about discrimination in high tech, when we have literally dozens of fields over 90% male, with and only a handful of niche tech fields even in the top 100. Hell, from that chart, we have sixty-one fields more male-dominated than CNC programmers (at 93.5%), the highest of the male-dominated tech fields. And general purpose coder only pushes 78.5%, with over a hundred non-tech fields higher on the list.
Yes, Slashdot has the byline "news for nerds". Until I start hearing people whine about why we don't see more female pipefitters, however, fuck right off about the "culture" in IT as somehow magically the core of the problem.
More relevantly, if we have a problem, that problem comes from human culture, not tech culture. Women don't do construction and men don't teach (at least not below the HS level), simple as that. However - And this counts as the simple most important point you will read in this entire discussion - They can! If a woman wants to get trained as a master pipefitter, she could have a well-paying job a week after completing her apprenticeship (usually 4-5 years); and even the apprenticeship phase doesn't suck all that bad, they make enough to live on in most of the US.
But we - as a species, not as a niche community of high-tech misogynists - view fitting pipe, welding, roofing, well-drilling, etc as "dirty" jobs that women don't want to do. We view dealing with disgusting snotty little 6YOs, much less trying to cram facts into their head, as something males don't want to do. Does that come from the fact that each side really doesn't want to do "off-gender" jobs, or the fact that society has conditioned us to believe that?
Short answer: it doesn't matter. Do what you want. If, however, you discover that the conditions in your chosen profession don't agree with your personality, don't blame the job, blame what you see in the mirror.
Comparing teacher salaries to private sector salaries is misleading. Often teachers have benefits that cannot be matched in the private sector including generous defined benefit pensions, retirement health care and time off. Total teacher compensation is heavily back-end loaded.
http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/tea...
Swap the sex of the pronouns and it reads with exactly the same amount of worth.
"...and female rejection..."
Yo, where I'm from of a guy doesn't like a gal, she's expected to grow a pair (of ovaries) and cope. Being all embittered is considered pathetic and a personal failing, not something that men have driven her to. (And, y'know, that's sad, and counselling often can help a lot.)
And women experience rejection all the time. Seriously. All the time.
This stuff is hard, make no mistake. But I'm wondering more and more how much the mythologizing the great force that is female rejection is really more about male introverts who don't interact with women, and never learn to interact with women, and create this whole mythology about women that is mostly not tempered by experiences with actual women. Because really, the girl in your eighth grade class who didn't want anything to do with you (or whatever) isn't something you should obsess about for the rest of your life. And I think it used to be that people had to deal with each other, face to face, enough, that it kind of wore the sharp edges off of the neurosis, at least for most.* And it's now a lot easier to form insular subculture where men come up with all these theories about what women are like, etc. etc. and don't actually interact with women in meaningful ways.**
Because really, I read all this stuff about what women are supposed to be like... and I am a woman. And, okay, I'm fairly atypical, but I spend time around a lot of women, of all varieties. I date both men and women. And these stories have so little in common with the actual people I know, it's pretty absurd.
* Not that I'm advocating the generic superiority of social interactions with the people who happen to live near you. You can have my internet connection when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
** Note, if this doesn't turn around and get expressed as misogyny in the workplace, or shooting sprees or whatever, go right ahead. It takes all kinds.
Or how about neither? How about if a generally "misogynistic culture" among men in tech is a fabrication, and individual misogynists actually less prevalent in tech than in fields like sales or advertising which attract the more "alpha male" type (and are yet less male-dominated). How about if we're being sold the idea of a misogynistic nerd culture because those doing the selling feel that as nerds, we'll be more likely to accept that idea than the completely un-self-aware and unapologetic "bro" type?
It's like any other hurdle that life can place in your path. You either deal with it and get past it or you whine that you are a victim. There are plenty of people that can manage the former as the latter is actively discouraged in many parts of western culture.
Tolerance of the damsel in distress mentality is far more harmful to women than "misogyny".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sexism in tech is part of a larger trend of sexism in US culture. I am somewhat offended by the insinuations of sexism in tech, because of wholehearted denial and refusal to deal with sexism in larger US culture, and I feel that nerd culture/tech is being singled out. I also feel that most sexism in tech stems from stereotypes and myths about women that are present in larger culture, and your asking nerds to have morales that larger society doesn't have.
At very least please don't tell me there is no connection between rape culture and celebrity culture, and even some of the most ardent feminists stick up for rapists who are RIAA/MPAA sponsored musicians, because most of them are part of organizations that are tied to eachother politically.
I recoiled in horror as people suggested changing rape laws to let roman polanksi off the hook after admitting to raping a 13 year old girl.
Nerds are blamed for "booth babes" present at industry centered conventions, which also grace other industry conventions like automobible conventions, and completely ignore the CEO/Business types who they are there to slobber all over them.
A quick google finds that sexism is pretty prevelant in other fields
Sexism in law/legal:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sexism+in+law&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=np&source=hp
http://ms-jd.org/blog/article/what-no-one-tells-you-you-go-law-school-youre-entering-sexist-profession
www.legalweek.com/legal-week/feature/2259318/sexism-and-the-city-why-female-lawyers-are-afraid-to-speak-out-against-discrimination
http://abovethelaw.com/sexism/
Sexism in medicine:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sexism+in+medicine&btnG=Search&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&channel=np
http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinlarosa/stories-of-everyday-sexism-as-told-by-women-in-medicine
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2012/nuanced-sexism-reflections-female-surgery-resident
Sexism in business:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sexism+in+business&btnG=Search&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&channel=np
http://www.topmba.com/blog/harvard-study-confirms-sexism-business-mba-news
http://www.businessinsider.com/sexism-leads-to-feminist-manifesto-2014-5
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/01/harvard-business-dean-apologizes-for-sexism-on-campus/
So thats just other "proffesional" fields. Now lets look at the source of sexism. mainstream culture:
Ganster rap, promoting pimping, forced prostitution. No one wants to touch this with a ten foot pole. Gone are the socialist days of Martin Luther King, or even the more extreme black panthers. Today, black power, at least as what corporations let broadcast on TV is about domination, gold chains, material posessions, to include other human beings.
Lets even get into rock'n'roll. In mainstream rock'n'roll. Men are rock stars, and women are groupies. Few if any women front mainstream rock bands.
Lets look at underground like hardcore punk, and modern HC influenced metal. Then you get to see some of the girls shine as front women, bassists, and are capable of fufilling the same hard hard hitting roles as men.
Rape culture - its well visable from a young age, that certain cliques such as the football team are more or less allowed to have sex with anyone they want, despite what that anyone would say about it. The trappings of success and what it means to be a leader as violence are embedded pretty early on. Every 2-3 years on que there is a national story about the football team raping someone. Nothing is done.
Low social status is conferred to men who haven't raped anyone. Utter refusal to break this up and replace it with more postives.
Sexual shame and denial. Even in many liberal progressivist circles, people are told to be affraid of their bodies. It seems the onl