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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.
Here we go again. This topic is becoming horribly redundant.
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.
We have two female programmers on our team of 10 devs (total). They are paid equivalently to the males, receive the same training opportunities, and each holds expert status in some region of our offerings. The men do not joke about about them (I would know, being one of the male devs and all, I would hear it). If that kind of thing started up it would be nipped in the bud......as it was a few years ago when we hired, then shortly thereafter fired, a guy who turned out to be outright misogynistic.
I am not denying the trend in the industry, I am just pointing out that there *are* places that refuse to hire unprofessional jerks, and will treat all their employees with respect.
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.
Small companies often have barely enough to pay employees that are present. To be paying for employees on leave is something else, male or female. I recently had to take leave and if it wasn't for my insurance I wouldn't have gotten a dime. At the same time all the tech companies I have worked at treated everyone fairly and had policies about 'poisoned workplace'. Sure there are people who have discriminatory attitude, but in a healthy work place they shouldn't be staying long.
As for pay I don't know enough about the realities and individual cases to know the truth. What I do know is companies will often give you a pay that you negotiated, which may be worse than you are worth. A good company will try give up something fair knowing that unfair salary if it becomes knowledge hurts them more. My current company makes it a fireable offence to talk salary. Other companies I have worked for have a ladder according to position.
Good colleagues come in many shapes, form, sexuality, culture and variations of gended, just as do the bad colleagues. We all screw up sometimes, but we should endeavour to treat each other fairly and with respect.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
People who leave the tech industry after already having finished school tend to leave because of issues in the industry, rather than issues in school.
In other news, people who leave the Olympics without medals usually fail to win medals because of their performance at the Olympics, rather than during earlier competitions.
This is completely non-news and in no way contradicts the Code.org story. The author is bad and should feel bad.
So they men get maternity leave then, I guess is what you are implying.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Of course there's a biological difference. In fact, just looking at the group of men, most of them aren't going to be good at writing code.
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.
Al the nurses I know make around $70 - $80K working 36 hours a week with rock'in benefits. And they do not have to put up with idiotic laydry lists of skills or the bullshit of "Americans do not have the skills so we need H1-bs"
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.
Being good with tech is not the ability to play with a smart phone. It's the ability to design one.
I'm proud to work at a place where the last few women that quit did so because, as they put it, we're disorganized beyond words and the way we handle customers is unacceptable and the entire workflow is a gigantic shitstorm, not sexism or a manly working environment.
Being good with tech is not the ability to play with a smart phone. It's the ability to design one.
Programmers are often the worst designers in the world. They understand logic and how to code, but often lack the design skills to make the code actually useful to the masses.
The super users of a product often understand the products way better, and even use their products in ways the original designers couldn't even dream of. I've seen kids design their own apps just because they're THAT much into their smartphones.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
There's plenty of design work at the lower levels where you don't need to know what appeals to the masses. In fact, that's going to be most of the work. Squeezing an extra 0.1 dB of sensitivity out of the RF receiver path, for instance.
Did they also interview men who left the technology field?
I've interviewed at companies and been disgusted at what I saw of their culture. But that's not a feature of technology, except to the extent that current demand for technology allows dysfunctional businesses to survive longer than they should.
If you write good code, gender, race or background doesn't really matter. It's the great equalizer.
Guys are the butt of "jokes" everyday to in the office place. It's not something directed only at women lol.
That's an awfully low bar to set. When I was a kid using a computer required technical knowledge, you'd have to know what commands to type in in order to make the thing do what you wanted. Before that it was punch card machines. Later when Win 3.0 came out it got a bit easier, but there was still a ton of technical knowledge necessary in order to free up enough RAM to get things to run.
It's rather ridiculous of you to suggest that the ability to use apps that were designed for people with no technical knowledge as evidence that women are good with technology. The evidence that women are good with technology would be female sys admins and computer scientists.
Not indicative of anything, but during the conversations I've had with the small number of female students in my vicinity, they told me programming was something that simply didn't interest them. They often went into other, but related fields rather than sticking around in software design.
Check out http://www.todaysengineer.org/2010/feb/satisfaction.asp
This article is one of the few that I've found that contains statistics about retention in various tech fields of both men and women. The differences in retention rates do vary but not by as much as is commonly portrayed in the media. In fact, based on what I'd previously read, they are surprisingly similar. Men and women may have somewhat different reasons for leaving the field, but that doesn't change the fact that roughly 40% of both sexes ultimately leave engineering.
Yeah, but young women are more likely to look into careers in tech if women in their communities are in tech. (On my phone, can look up the reference later if you'd like.) So if you lose the women who are there you are also losing the women in the pipeline. Tech had to look like a reasonable option if you want to attract more than a few mavericks (like me.)
(And I eventually went into research, though I contribute to actively contribute to the pipeline on the teaching side. And hey, if industry sounds more entertaining than research, i might switch back. The paycheck was fun but I just got so bored.)
At the corporation that I work that, the CTO is a woman. *Every* single person that reports to her, is a woman. Most of management is female.
It's so anti-male, for instance, we recently had a tour of our department by upper management (approximately 15 people I'd guess) and there wasn't a man amongst them. I jokingly told my coworker the only way we'll ever get promoted is to cut off our penises, and... well it's partly true.
Majority of the IT sector is male. Majority of management is female. This is how my corporation works.
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.
Actually, I have a theory -- and it's a revolution, just not a positive one.
You have many valid points there.
However, I'd still like to challenge the belief that the technology of today is creating noise rather than giving people the focus and energy they need to concentrate on good education. You have to see these devices as a PART of their education.
Their smartphones, iPads, Android-tables etc. are like carrying around huge stacks of books with all the information they could possibly fit in their heads, the more information you have at hand - the more material you have for making better design decisions rather than book-smarts from the past and gone times.
I can however agree that constantly using smartphones during classes when they're supposed to focus on what the teacher say etc. can create noise and take away their focus from the current lessons. We're already onto that at our schools and we plan to forbid the use of Cellphones during lessons. However, iPads will be available to them during self study.
My impression (and you have to understand that I come from a life as a service tech, designer AND a teacher) of these kids (especially women), are that they are quick to learn, quick to pick up anything technical, even theory. As an example I can mention their Science classes. They had to explain how a computer mice works in technical detail, how a radio works, how their electrical appliances worked in detail (it's a part of their curriculum) - and I took it upon me to explain to them in detail how these things worked, I drew outlines & theoretical schematics on how the various components worked and what they do together, and surprise surprise, they picked it up like NO ONE I remember from my time as a student, it's amazing (at least to me).
I could mention numerous examples like this, but I guess we have to agree to disagree, and basically lean back and watch the show. However, I really thought you had a LOT of valid points to you theory, your theory isn't uncommon at all.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Call it flame-bait, but is seems that you mommy should not have opted for pregnancy. According do you it would have being a double whammy -
economical benefit and one less asshole in the world.
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
Stereotypes being bad works both ways. A positive stereotype is still bad; don't generalize women as being very bad or very good at technology.
Low pay is causing women to leave. This just in, let's pay women more than men so they work in this field.
Or maybe, fuck you suck equality. Life isn't all roses for men either. Low pay, jokes, attitudes, we deal with these things as well.
you know what. If you would log into the damn site, you wouldnt have to deal with it. Ive not once seen this beta site everyone is bitching about simply because im logged in.
If you dont like it, log in, otherwise just STFU, we have choices
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Phil Mason? Is that you?
Required reading for internet skeptics
When I was starting out, we had tons of women in what was a low-status industry, where programming was described as "teaching mechanical children". I think there's a broader discussion in Kraft's "Programmers and Managers" (Springer-Verlag).
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
Swap the sex of the pronouns and it reads with exactly the same amount of worth.
When was the last time you sat in a classroom full of kids/students? Take a look around yourself, most if not all females are heavily into their smartphones, they quickly share apps and use their cellphones as it would be a natural part of their body.
Let me know how that translates for them into being able to solve differential equations or quickly understand the behavior of electronic circuits from schematics, once you find that out. :-p
Ezekiel 23:20
They understand logic and how to code, but often lack the design skills to make the code actually useful to the masses.
"Design" in this context means "engineering design", not a fancy skin.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well, for starters, an older person with hands-on experience is unlikely to have a lesser knowledge in the subject matter than she had, regardless of sex and fancy clothing. Second, the dress was a financial consideration, wasn't it?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
I worked in an R&D email implementation unit for a very large financial institution, staff was about 20 employees, 9 of which were female. We did a large amount of project driven interaction with many other groups and the women seemed to do better than men in that area. The only area that I never saw a woman working in was M$ contractors, and they were all but one low caste East Indians, their mouth piece was the stereo type Oxford English sounding East Indian who spoke for them most of the time.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Has there ever been a study on why men leave the tech industry? I bet many have and for reasons similar to why women leave the tech industry. Looking at one side of the industry creates a slanted view of the situation.
Don't forget about:
1) Summers off
2) 5 hour work day
3) Layoffs and other terminations almost unheard of
4) 30 and out retirement with full pension and benefits
5) And (if you don't get caught) group sex with the students
Your eloquence is breathtaking. But I must point out, you couldn't rebut my statement.
Whoosh.
"If you can't stand the (male-dominated workplace) heat, go back to the kitchen."
It's a play on the earlier saying, sure.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Well...programmers tend to be more introverted than most of society; and there's fewer introverts in the female gender - women are a very social gender. But that's about the only "biological" argument that could be made - the programming culture is just not very suitable to attracting women.
All said though, the culture is slowly shifting to more amenable; but it's still going to take quite some time.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
And then you leave the organization,
NOT the industry.
Seems the proper decision to me.
I didn't see anyone and didn't assume anything. And I don't know what he saw, but honestly, neither do you. Since you weren't there, you can hardly claim the right to come to the conclusion that he didn't experience the right stimuli to make him go elsewhere. And I definitely don't see how customers don't have the right to go to businesses they like. There's plenty of choice on both sides.
Ezekiel 23:20
The same is true for most men. The problem I see here is not women leaving the field, but men staying in it that hove not business staying.
The thing we should be doing is to sack bad coders. A bad coder is worse than no coder, after all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Blaming corporate culture is bullshit because most women from birth are told to not go into tech.
but who is telling girls not to go into tech and why?
corporate culture has been influencing curricula, teaching methods, and career tracks down to the elementary grades for generations.
it's a cultural problem that discourages women from pursuing careers in tech from about the age of three when they're given their first barbie doll.
it's perhaps worth mentioning that the Barbie doll, unmistakably adult and independent, entered the American market at a time (1959) when almost all dolls were portrayed as infants.
The people who bring this up are not interested in equality as in making sure that there is a perfect split in all things. They are interested in making sure women have access to what they see as desirable careers. They don't go after the blue collar jobs because those are seen as undesirable.
Mike Rowe has given several good talks about what he calls the "war on work" and how it is seen in America as somehow a bad thing to have a skilled trade. You are "successful" if you have an office white collar job. This is despite the fact that many blue collar trades pay extremely well and, according to Rowe, the people in them are generally very happy.
Hence why you see people take issue with tech jobs. They are white collar jobs and are perceived to be good, and they have less women than men. So they wish that to be changed. They do not care about change in jobs that are perceived to be bad, an imbalance is perfectly fine there.
Having had one really, really bad women in my PhD group (hiring failure on the part of our professor...) I do not agree. On the other hand, competent women are very welcome, it makes for a better and nicer work environment. On the engineering and scientific side, I have not noticed any difference, people of female gender are just as diverse in their skills, insights and ideas as the other variant.
Sure, there are less, but there are indications that women tend more to the average than men, i.e. less homeless ones but also less scientists and engineers. That would be consistent with what evolution requires. But whether this is true or not does not matter: In CS, I have yet to find a competent women that claims she was discriminated against or things were harder because of her gender. I have met quite a few female whiners of rather moderate skills that thought they could have it easy though, but fortunately that did not work out for most (some left, some started to do the work that was required). So the solution is rather obvious: Do not make it harder for women to get into the field, but also do not make it any easier. If it turns out that it is 1% of all men, but only 0.5% of all women that can be good engineers, so what? We really do not want to lose that 0.5%, they are desperately needed. Also, such a distribution would say nothing relevant about the others.
Incidentally, the reason why there are few female CEOs is entirely clear: CEOs are routinely psychopaths and that is one of the most important "qualities" to get into such a position. Women have far less psychopaths than men (one number I found is 7x as many male psychopaths as female ones) and of course that means less female CEOs. When it comes to screwing up, the female CEOs are just as good as the male ones though, just look like Charley Fiorina killed HP for a good example.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I work for the engineering college and so of course getting more women is something they work at. You find a good number of women in the intro courses, 175 and that kind of stuff, but most of them vanish by graduation, off to other degrees. So one of the things they tried is having a women's only honour section taught by one of our female professors.
She is an excellent role model: She's a women who has not had to give up on either her career or family. She's a full professor with tenure, her own research lab, multiple papers to her name and so on, however she also has two boys, just about to become teenagers. She's an engineering geek, but it doesn't mean she can't be girly when she wants (she got a pink laptop she just loved). She's also passionate about engineering and teaching and a very engaging and caring lecturer.
So a great example. The result? No retention increase. The women in her class weren't any more interested in staying in engineering than those in regular classes.
You know, that is why men routinely do not do that. But there are always some female underperformers that keep complaining and want it all for free (there are about the same number of men doing underperforming, but they tend to be embarrassed about it), and these do understandably not get any sympathy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on the matter.
There is a primal difference between men and women that is applicable to software engineering.
Software writing is basically the manipulation of symbols to change the operation of physical machinery. This definition can be extended to mean that software creates functional machinery through the manipulation of symbols (text typed on editors that is compiled into machine-controlling patterns of 1s and 0s).
Men get a primal Promethean thrill and ego boost from creating machines from symbols.
Women get the same thrill and primal sense-of-purpose from creating new living human beings (i.e. babies), instead of machinery.
This, I believe, is the subliminal reason that so few women go into the software development field.
If children can have such fundamental things as colour preferences influenced by societal factors why do you think that things like choice of toy or later choice of study options is somehow down to genetic differences?
The study you linked to is pretty weak, and doesn't seem to have excluded societal factors at all. Even at only a few months old a child will have been dressed in gender specific colours with gender specific styles of clothing, surrounded by gender specific toys in their home etc. Perhaps females just recognized the doll because they had one at home. That type of study is pretty much pointless because unless you bring the test subjects up in a completely neutral environment you can't preclude the possibility that there were influenced.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why are companies pushing women into IT? Simple. Follow the money. If companies could find a way to make IT interesting for women, then they could double their workforce. Doubling the supply of workers for the same number of jobs means that companies could cut salaries in half. Cutting salaries means increasing profits and bonuses for executives. That's the real motivation, not some altruistic concern over womens' rights or equality.
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
You should probably read the studies. The researchers found no statistical difference in color preference at the time of testing, which suggests that color preference is socially acquired as children age. That and the differences in preferences across multiple cultures also suggests any color preferences are arbitrary in and of themselves. However, they did notice the difference in toy preference. If dressing children in specific colors had an impact, why didn't the infants show a difference in color preference? Why would that effect only be noticed in terms of toy preference?
Also, the reason they believe that it's not a social factor is because they found similar results in monkeys. Infant male monkeys had a stronger preference for wheeled toys as well. Given that monkeys are unlikely to naturally have toys for their offspring or socially constructed gender roles, it seems to point to biological underpinnings that evolved at some point before humans became divergent as a species, although it would be necessary to conduct a similar study with other groups of primates in order to ascertain whether or not it's something that evolved independently in both species.
Humans are sexually dimorphic. It's been known for some time that male and female children develop at different rates (e.g. boys tend to develop fine motor skills more slowly, but develop gross motor skills more quickly) and once puberty hits have rather stark physical differences in terms of muscular development and strength. Is it really that difficult to accept that there are differences in the ways that the brain develops between the two sexes and that this manifests in subtle differences such as toy preference?
Considering a Harvard president (Lawrence Summers) was forced to resign for even suggesting they *talk* about what you're saying - let alone actually argue it - yes it is that difficult for many to accept. It flies in the face of 50 years of cultural ideas about self-determination and the utter supremacy of nurture over nature.
You have to recognize reality before you can change anything in a meaningful way. One fact of the matter is that there are about as many male assholes as there are female ones. They do behave differently though dud to cultural and biological factors. Ignoring that gets you exactly nowhere.
And no, I am not part of the problem. But maybe I know a few female engineers and scientists that are competent and do not need any help and hence have reason to believe that those calling for help loudly are not in that class.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well said.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So what? The truth (whatever that may ultimately be as I'm not suggesting that my own current understanding is the final say on the matter) is still the truth whether anyone likes it or not. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't, but invariably we'll have to accept it if we want to get anywhere. Let's just be brave enough to conduct the necessary experiments and improve our understanding of world whether those results tell us we've been horribly misguided or not.
Doubling the pool of potential workers is exactly why wages have stagnated for the past 40 years and the middle class is being hit so hard. My parent's generation could afford to raise several kids with one breadwinner in a solid middle-class neighborhood. Those days are over now that women have entered the workforce en mass. It boils down to supply and demand. Women entering the workforce equals a surplus of labor, hence wages went down in the aggregate. And people wonder why women are less happy with their lives today than they were 40+ years ago.
The disservice feminism did for women was convincing them that joining the rat race was "empowerment". Most guys would trade places with women in a heartbeat if it meant having all of their worldly wants and needs provided for them in exchange of keeping the house clean and spending time with their family.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Pointing at pipefitters and calling them sexist
Wooosh!
I personally agree with you, and the trend to deny reality that exists among the PC crowd is something I find mildly irritating. But careers are at stake and some people are going to take the easy road - it's simply human nature.