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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.
I guess the lure of the big bucks in teaching and nursing is too hard to resist.
Have you read my blog lately?
Women seem just as capable of sitting at a desk pounding a keyboard as men.
I suppose I could hand-wave up an argument that men's more object oriented approach to language might be more amenable to being adapted to write code compared to womens' more personal-perspective oriented approach (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.5.1172). But I don't believe it. Male and female brains are both wonderfully adaptive and there are plenty of brilliant women out there. (Leave aside the fact that you only have to be moderately intelligent to write code.) Also, there's no evidence yet that men and women use language differently innately as opposed to having learned different uses of grammar along with their gender roles.
But these 716 women who had made it past all that shit and were working in the tech sector found that once you get there, it sucks to be in a job where you're treated poorly because you're a woman, or you feel isolated because everybody else is a guy.
There are exceptions. My sister is a successful electronics engineer. But she works in a big company where she's not the only woman. She might have left the industry too if she had worked her first job in a smaller company where it was all men except her.
Is it not even remotely possible that it could be caused by a naturally occurring preference of one gender to enjoy the field and a preference for another field to not find the activity as fulfilling?
You'll never see this kind of desperate hand-wringing over the lack of diversity in the nursing field for the last 100 years. But that's because we have a current sociological neurosis that says we have to force women into every field whether they want it or not. And we don't care what men do as long as they aren't getting in the way of women.
I know that sounds intolerably cruel and snide, but I really don't mean it that way in the slightest. It's a very accurate analysis of attitudes that I see in our current culture. And if people would be honest with themselves, I think they could see that. They have justifications for that attitude. But they still have it.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
"One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. By definition, "news" means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it's probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported -- automobile deaths, domestic violence -- when it's so common that it's not news, then you should start worrying."
That pretty much sums it up.
Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies
Greetings from Silicon Valley where I've worked at five startups. In one of them, with about 25 employees, our female Director of Marketing started her several month maternity leave two months before we shipped our first product. This left a huge hole and being a startup, no new person was hired and all the existing management was required to chip in to get her job done. In the engineering department this was especially a touchy subject and needless to say, when she came back from leave she was not welcome in the engineering part of the building. I think startup companies and maternity leave are mutually exclusive.
And yet we expect men to put up with that in female dominated professions. Teaching is just absolutely miserable for men, most teachers are women and you get the constant suspicion that your a pedophile if you take too much interest in the girls and you're a misogynist if you take too little interest in the girls. There's the feminist indoctrination that's couched as educational materials on things like sexual violence.
I like teaching, but the profession barely tolerates men.
Here's a hint, perhaps rather than obsessing over why women don't hold as many jobs in an area, perhaps we ought to realize that they are overrepresented in other areas and that if that isn't a problem, then underrepresentation shouldn't be either.
Why they left matters. Consider:
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."
The first two are contractual terms they freely agreed to, the third is illegal, and the fourth is inside the person's head, not the environment.
I don't doubt that there are cases of actual sexism, and they should be investigated and addressed, and maybe this anecdotal evidence by one Forbes.com writer with no clue about research methodology is something to start with. But it's not clear that the women interviewed were any more objective about their career or their former employer than any other disgruntled ex-employee.
There's probably nothing that prohibits anyone with capable intelligence from learning anything, but there may be underlying differences in the sexes due to the way our brains are physically different, which is just as good of an explanation as to why men and women have different writing styles. I lean towards that explanation as opposed to social factors, simply because there is other research that points to biological sex determining behavior. For example, young children of opposite sexes have different toy preferences. There's evidence to suggest that some things are certainly acquired due to social factors: color preference for example.
I've heard other interesting theories for the disparity as well such as autism-spectrum disorders being more prevalent in males than females and that people who are have more mild forms of disorders along that spectrum tend to be more attracted to computers and machines than they are to occupations that involve dealing with people. This also explains the stereotype of engineers and computer scientists being socially awkward, which there is some truth to.
Ok, so they chose women who'd left the field completely. That means getting out full stop. You don't do that for career progression, you don't usually do that for more salary. You get out because it's not for you.
Now, if they'd gone and surveyed an equal number of women who chose to stay in the field as well, and an equal number of men who had left the field entirely and also ones who chose to stay, they'd at least be showing an attempt to remove bias. But no. They chose to skew the numbers completely and then write that it's all the fault of men (again).
I nearly got out of the field because the women in management above me didn't really understand how to run an enterprise class department, which did nasty things to my health.
I'm pretty sure that if you choose men who leave the field with women management as a bias adjuster you'd find a lot that just say "management often sucks". Gender isn't necessarily the decider. Hell, where I work, the women are often far more lewd and crude than us men (for the simple reason they can; if we crack those jokes, we stand a very big risk of being had up for sexual harrassment if the gal in question is having a bad day). Politics these days are hideously misandrist, yet nobody seems to give a damn about that.
Blaming corporate culture is bullshit because most women from birth are told to not go into tech.
This is nonsense. I see the exact opposite. Parents and schools try to push the girls into tech, and it is the girls themselves that are uninterested. I coach a Mindstorms robotic team at an elementary school. We work hard to recruit girls, but only get a few. We get way more boys applying than the classroom can accommodate. So boys are turned away, girls are not. Then when I talk to the parents, the parents of the girls say they had to cajole and convince the girls to participate. The parents of the boys say the opposite, that it was the enthusiastic boy badgering them to let him join. We do everything we can to recruit girls, and make them feel comfortable so they stay on board. We have a geek woman as a co-coach, so they have a role mode. We let them work in an all-girl group, which they prefer. Yet they still drop off the team to go try out for the school play. It is frustrating, and I don't know what else we can do. I have heard several of their parents express similar frustrations.
I have a friend in the medical field. It is female dominated. She reports that the females there
a) sexually harass the younger, good looking men
b) are generally verbally abusive and dismissive to the men
c) exclude the men from lunches.
d) preferentially break up the shit duties based on seniority.. which means mostly women have the 'good' duties and schedules and mostly men have the shit duties and schedules.
I.e. they are in the majority and they rule the roost. If the men don't want their working lives worse than they already are, they just "go along to get along" and tolerate the abuses.
The current IT field starts with self selection by gender before high school. For what ever reason, girls don't prefer IT things as a group. It gets worse in college. I have personal experience with this. We started with fewer females to begin with and when we hit the weedout courses, the females dropped out or transferred to other easier degrees at a higher rate. Keep in mind 70% of everyone of both genders who started as freshmen didn't get a degree at all. By the end, the ratio was about 99% men and 1% females.
Now we go to the work environment. Of men, I knew over 30% who would leave work and go home and "play" on computer with .net, java, html, etc. An other 10% would work after hours on project management certification or advanced degrees. Of women, I knew exactly ONE woman in 10 years who behaved like that. About 10% of women would work on pmi or advanced degrees.
After a while, those who loved computers and "played" on them outside of work hours excelled technically. More females tracked off into management than males.
Which leads to a majority male environment. There just aren't enough females interested at a young age, those who are interested drop out more in college, most that graduate don't "love" computers-- they just see IT as a job/career not as "play."
And in a majority male environment, it's hard to prevent
a) Males excluding females when they socialize over fantasy football and the latest html changes.
b) Hanging out with females socially is fun but risky. You could do something and get a complaint.
c) Males despite being in the majority still tend to get the shit duties (such as working at night to install a program while the female gets to stay home because it's "dangerous" at night).
d) Males in a majority can get *too* comfortable making off color comments or telling off color jokes. This can lead to complaints.
At the last place where I worked, females were about 70% of the managers and team leads. There were some sexual harassment issues around 2005 and after that it was annual training and an extremely dust dry environment socially. It was also an older crowd (about 42 average) so the sexual hijinks were gone.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.