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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.
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.
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.
In civilized countries they already do.
My husband gets paternity leave, so yes, some companies are very into equality. He works for a large, global company, so maybe some of those European practices have rubbed off. It's funny because most people see the company as an evil slave-driver, but their policies are actually rather enlightened.
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.
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
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.
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.