Tech's Gender Gap Started At Stanford

JCallery writes: The New York Times has an in-depth look at the gender gap in tech through the eyes of Stanford's class of 1994. The article surveys the culture of the school and its attempts at changing the equation on diversity. It also examines Stanford's impact on the big companies (Yahoo, PayPal, WhatsApp, Stella & Dot) and big names (Peter Theil, Rachel Maddow, Brian Acton) that came of age during the pioneering era of the early web.

Comments

Risk = Reward

[Tokolosh]

"A group of British researchers have analyzed data from the Darwin Awards and found that men are more likely to engage in life-threatening risky behaviour than women."

The term "idiotic" is used a lot in the quoted article, but it is a genetic fact that males are more willing to take a chance. The outcome is a gender gap. Women should stop their shrill haranguing, get their hands dirty and be more "idiotic".

Re:Risk = Reward

[BarbaraHudson]

I had submitted that as a story two weeks ago. Newcastle University study: Men are bigger idiots I guess people didn't like the title :-)

Re:Risk = Reward

[digsbo]

WTF is this modded Troll? See my quote from TFA below that DIRECTLY SUPPORTS PARENT'S ASSERTION:

"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."

Re:Risk = Reward

[Cockatrice_hunter]

That is NOT what the study said. The study stated that men were more likely to receive the Darwin awards than females. They suggested possible reasons for this including selection and reporting bias (ex. it's more OK to laugh at the deaths of men then that of men).

Re:Risk = Reward

[Livius]

We need to encourage more women to participate in Darwin Award activities!

Re:Risk = Reward

[Ol Olsoc]

WTF is this modded Troll? See my quote from TFA below that DIRECTLY SUPPORTS PARENT'S ASSERTION:

"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."

There are people her who pull out the sexist card, the downmods, unless you conform to their very narrow perception of reality. Someone called me sexist because I noted it isn't difficult to walk over to the "boys to section", after I said I'd let my daughters play with any toy they wanted, be it tradional male, or female type toy. Expect this post to be hit with either flamebait or troll about ten minutes after I post it.

And yes, that quote is in the story.

I thiink the answer to why a lot of women are not going into particular fields is twofold. First off, you have to really really want to be a STEM worker. There are better paying jobs, with better job prospects, better pay, and one each shitload more prestige than STEM work.

If my offspring was engaged to a programmer, I'd ask him or her if they had any plans for when their job was outsourced.

In my own case, I spent a lot of extra hours, including overnights at the job. Field trips with indeterminate length of stay. Lost a lot of vacation, (Got a couple months a year, took a week or less. Times that over 30 plus years.

I think that for all the bitching and moaning over this subject, the answer is much simpler than the variations on the "Men suck" meme.

In the earlier days of post liberation, women tried a lot of different careers. Eventually, they found out which ones they wanted to be in. And it doesn't have a whole lot to do with what we are hearning about.

I find it hard to believe that the often shy geeks in STEM fields are more sexist than the business people in industry where "escorts" are a standard practice. It does not compute.

And I have worked in efforts to engage young women in STEM fields. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that there two ways to get more women in STEM fields. Either force more women into them, or fire men until we reach equal gender representation.

Re:Risk = Reward

[Ol Olsoc]

That is NOT what the study said. The study stated that men were more likely to receive the Darwin awards than females. They suggested possible reasons for this including selection and reporting bias (ex. it's more OK to laugh at the deaths of men then that of men).

Would it not be true that natural selection would select for women who were predisposed toward being risk averse? If you want your offspring to survive to reproduce, you can't be doing the prehistorical version of base jumping.

And for men, especially in prehistoric times, those who took risks might have been rewarded with more and better food, and therefore could provide more for their offspring.

Simplistic, it's true, but I have to say there is something to it. My better half is quite risk averse - but it happened after we had a child. Before that, she was into horseback riding and some sports. After the child was born, th ehorseback riding tailed off unti she just stopped. Now, she's pretty much stopped any risky behavior at all. As in a merry-go-round is beyond her comfort level.

On the other hand, I'm into Hockey (playing) motorcycling, and regularly climb towers and rooftops as part of my other hobby. As a concession, to her, I haven't bungee jumped - yet.

This is not to say that if a woman wants to do something, she shouldn't because it is a "guy thing". If she can, there's no reason why she shouldn't.

Re:Risk = Reward

[lgw]

Wait, you mean there's a life-threatening behavior gap? This is unacceptable, we must encourage women to do stupid things that may risk their lives. To not do so is sexist!

Actually, this is mostly done. The lifespan of women and men is quickly converging, as is pay (if you take into account lifetime hours worked - for professional women who haven't had a kid, I believe women are slightly ahead under 35 now).

Does Slashdot have to have a "gender gap story" every 2 Bennett stories or something? I guess it's out with "news for nerds" and in with "Reddit envy".

Re:Risk = Reward

[ShanghaiBill]

And for men, especially in prehistoric times, those who took risks might have been rewarded with more and better food

Far more importantly, they were likely to be rewarded with more and better mates. Through history, most human societies practiced some degree of polygamy. Men are more likely than women to have many offspring, but they are also more likely to have zero offspring. So they have a stronger genetic incentive to pursue a risky "winner-take-all" strategy. Even today, a guy who takes risks that pay off, can sire a family, divorce, marry another woman half his age, and sire another family. Of course, this is easier in a community property state.

Re:Risk = Reward

[AmiMoJo]

While the troll mod is unjustified, it also misses the point and makes sets up a straw feminist to make its argument.

The point is that we waste a lot of talent because silicon valley and many companies are set up to value masculine attributes - daring, aggressive behaviour that involves a lot of risk. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but it also means that we might never get to see that brilliant technology that was invented by a female coder.

More over, that point focuses on the people at the top of start-ups, the ones responsible for raising money and taking risks with it. It doesn't justify the imbalance among engineers, the people writing the actual code. Again, it's down to things like guys looking for people like themselves, and not valuing feminine traits which are actually good for business, and not networking with enough women to get the applicants in the first place etc.

Re:Risk = Reward

[AmiMoJo]

If STEM jobs are so bad why do men do them? Do women just make better choices?

Re:Risk = Reward

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Just on a point of order, women have worked outside the home as long as men have worked. The only "liberating" that was done involved fewer requirements for physical strength in order to work and the mass production of white goods, reducing the effort involved in housework to a couple of hours a day.

Re:Risk = Reward

[sinij]

Women make safer choices and give higher priority to work-life balance.

Males tend to take more risks, this is evolved trait that greatly benefited hunter-gatherers (e.g. going after mammoth). Males also tend to fail more, server rooms and call centers are littered with dead-end careers. In reality, few men success, but few that do skew the statistics because of the nature of success.

Re:Risk = Reward

[Ol Olsoc]

If STEM jobs are so bad why do men do them? Do women just make better choices?

Note - you applied the word "bad" here. For most of my career, I wouldn't have thought of doing anything else. That's not a "bad" job.

But the rub is this. Many - most? women wouldn't do what I did. Why? I dunno, I can only give reasons from experience. And perhaps for many people, a job with irregular hours, travel, sometimes dangerous work, sometimes working in primitive conditions, and work so diverse in nature, I kept a suit shirt and tie as well as farmer clothing because I never knew what would come up. For some, that was a bad job. I loved the variety of the work. But no reason why any motivated female couldn't do it.

And I think that's the point. Motivation. Not all tech jobs are as demanding. But if I only programmed all day - yeah, I'd not find that a good job.

Re:Risk = Reward

[Ol Olsoc]

Just on a point of order, women have worked outside the home as long as men have worked. The only "liberating" that was done involved fewer requirements for physical strength in order to work and the mass production of white goods, reducing the effort involved in housework to a couple of hours a day.

Glad you brought that up. The modern day conveniences had taken the housewife position from a full time job, to one that can be accomplished in short order. So a lot of women were likely getting bored out of their minds. And while little children are in need of constant attention, after they are all off at school, there is a vacuum that needs filled.

Now your mentioning of women working outside the home is interesting, because it brings up the matter of the "Rosie the Riveter" women working in industry during World War 2.

These ladies performed completely competent work. So why, after the war, did they so willingly trade off their war work, to go back to being housewives?

Re:Risk = Reward

[sinij]

I disagree, you argument could be boiled down to "we should value mediocrity more". While there are some sectors, like social working or nursing, where "daring, aggressive behaviour that involves a lot of risk" is not desirable, in STEM it is universally must-have quality.

Re:Risk = Reward

[Bigbutt]

I am doing similar stuff at home. I'm taking a break right now from writing code for a work application I wrote and it's Christmas Eve. I spent hours yesterday gaming and today just want to be in solitude thinking over what I'm writing and working on my project.

[John]

Re:Risk = Reward

[Bigbutt]

Hah! I was working as a programmer at one place writing surveying software (to read data from a Surveying instrument and write it back out to an HP plotter) but I also went out on surveying jobs and one time had to chase cows back to the farm because the owners were also farmers raising cows, chickens, and corn. This was back in 84/85.

[John]

Re:Risk = Reward

[nctritech]

Women make safer choices. That's better if safety and stability are higher priorities. Men make riskier choices that come with greater potential rewards; some obtain the rewards and some fall flat on their faces. Neither choice is "better" without looking at what matters to the person making that choice.

A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled

[Crashmarik]

Really how could anyone think a piece with that title is anything but a biased bit of garbage not fit to line a birdcage with ?

There is reporting and then there is agenda reporting. It's pretty damn clear that the NYT is agenda reporting to the point it would make Hearst blush.

Re:A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled

[Austerity Empowers]

I thought it was serious until I read that students showed up at Stanford in 1994 barely knowing what email was. Then I realized it's satire. I mean, you can't seriously propose that the tech revolution started in 1994, right? Even Intel, Apple and Microsoft are latecomers to teh tech revolution, which was already very gender biased in the late 70s. When did "high tech" begin? I'm not sure, maybe WWII, maybe the industrial revolution, or maybe as late as teh semiconductor. All of these were well before Stanford class of '94 graduates were BORN. Even I knew what email was long before 1994, I even had email of my own.

This isn't intended to be a geriatric post where I try to claim I'm an OG, most things high-tech were invented before I was born. C existed, Unix was a thing. The only thing the mid-90s meant to high-tech was the birth of the popular internet, which many of us remember being the death of the useful internet.

Re:A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled

[twistedcubic]

It was the class of 1994, which entered college in 1990. So the article is correct. I was in the class of 1994 at a different college, and saw my first web browser in early 1994. Before that I used Wais and Gopher. Most of my classmates learned about IRC sometime in 1991-1992, not before. AOL was not a household name before 1990.

Re:A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled

[Austerity Empowers]

Yet "high-tech" started long before that, and was already very gender biased. The article specifically said "email", which was quite common in the 80s on college campuses and high tech industries, I know because I had to maintain some legacy scripts, rules for which were set up in the 80s and nobody really understood anymore in 2000.

The article is correct on some facts, but is entirely lost in narrative.

Re:A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled

[Dahamma]

I was in Stanford class of 1994 - which means, yes, I started in 1990. And, yes, we barely knew what real "email" was, since pretty much no 18 year old in high school had it. I had been on BBSs for 4-5 years before that, but at that point for even the leading edge outside of academia it was private BBS or CompuServe, etc.

By 1994 email was ubiquitous, Usenet was already long in the tooth, the Mosaic browser had been released, and we all had wired Ethernet in our dorm rooms (which still was definitely NOT the norm for college campuses - but it was nice). I wrote the first TCP/IP driver for DOOM so we could play multiplayer in the dorms once they blocked IPX after the initial DOOM IPX driver killed a lot of campus networks ;)

Anyway, the point is that range of 1990-1994 was in fact one of the critical periods for those developing the *commercial* Internet, and Stanford was at ground zero of a lot of it. And another point of the article is (if you read the whole thing) while at Stanford, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were not just the total dicks described in the article - they were WORSE. They basically started the Stanford Review to counter/insult any effort at racial or gender diversity/progress on campus. Even they apologized (according to the article) for the crap they wrote at the time (and Thiel came out of the closet eventually) and at the time it was BAD...

All that being said, the title of this slashdot post is FUCKING STUPID. It's in NO way what the article said, and as you know it's ridiculous to claim tech or ANY OTHER gender gap in business, engineering, or whatever somehow started in *1990* (more like 1790? 1690? 1690BC?) or at a single location...

What do you expect from STANford

[Spy Handler]

It was started by a MAN named STAN, obviously a male chauvinistic pig school.

Re:What do you expect from STANford

[rmdingler]

Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, Istanbul...

And the maternal copulater is statistically likely to pray to Mecca.

Re:What do you expect from STANford

[LynnwoodRooster]

Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Kurdistan, Istanbul...

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night

Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you've a date in Constantinople
She'll be waiting in Istanbul

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way

So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can't go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

Istanbul, Istanbul
Istanbul, Istanbul

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can't go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

Istanbul

Best version - Craig Ferguson!

Re:What do you expect from STANford

[14erCleaner]

And who knew that history started in 1994? Back in the 70's and 80's when I was a CS major, and 90% of the students were male, I guess that wasn't a "gender gap". Huh.

Are you kidding me?

[digsbo]

Number one, they're looking at the extreme high end of achievers, who - guess what - aren't representative.

And then the TFA has this gem:

"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."

Does anybody see what I see there?

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Wycliffe]

"Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests."

Does anybody see what I see there?

Exactly. The gender gap in tech** didn't start at Stanford, it started about 10000+ years ago when women stayed home in relative safety while men went out on ambitious quests to hunt wild and dangerous beasts.

**or wall street or any other career that is all consuming.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[sphealey]

Yes, the women who were finally admitted to engineering school in 1943, 44, and 45, and who were then kicked out (in some cases bodily) in 1946 without being allowed to graduate (much less take the jobs for which they had sought education) were just playing out a male-centric fantasy of evolutionary biology "explaining" pre-historic history. Got it.

sPh

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Rinikusu]

... gamergate is actually about ethics in quests?

Re:Are you kidding me?

[misexistentialist]

I assume they were kicked out due to the men returning from war, those selfish bastards.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[plopez]

Most of the men never saw a shot fired in anger. For every JFK there were several Richard Nixon REMFs sitting at a base playing poker.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Dahamma]

You are totally correct in that. And even 20+ years later, my mom was working in admissions at a major university and was passed up for promotion because she "was probably getting married soon, and would just have kids and leave" (which she did, ie. ME, but I still don't agree with that any more than "preexisting conditions").

But 60 years later, that argument is just not true any more (especially at Stanford, my alma mater), and should be put to bed. The GP comment was what I would call "totally douchey" but the article is also absurd in somehow claiming gender bias started at a single school in a single year. Bullshit sensationalistic headlines... because anyone who actually READ the article would probably find it interesting, and not particularly biased or inflammatory (besides the fact that, yes, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were total a-holes back then).

Re:Are you kidding me?

[AmiMoJo]

Does anybody see what I see there?

That women need more encouragement? That silicon valley rewards aggressiveness and risk taking, rather than good technology?

TFA says that silicon valley is a meritocracy, but then demonstrates that "merit" actually means masculine attributes rather than technical ability. That's the problem, and we lose out on potentially great tech and programmers because we don't value their work more than their personality.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

For every JFK there were several Richard Nixon REMFs sitting at a base playing poker.

So...who did the one guy play with?

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

What are you babbling about now, there isn't some great god of success sitting there handing out career advancements based on people's personalities in silicon valley. The world as viewed through a feminist lens appears indistinguishable from a world viewed through the eyes of a primitive witchdoctor.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[plopez]

The only ones who deserve it are actual combat veterans. Filling out paperwork to order toilet paper does not count.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[digsbo]

Hang on a second there. Improvement most often means moving out of a local maximum on the performance/value function. Rarely is the progress along that function monotonic. If it is a female trait to resist the risk of moving through a rough patch to get to a better place on the curve (i.e. getting out of a local maximum), then they are selecting *themselves* out of the available pool of workers who can improve their organization's position on the performance/value function. Plenty of men also have this resistance. These people tend toward the maintenance programming and incremental feature development roles. These aren't the highest paying or most noteworthy jobs. They're the most easily outsourced, too.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Sarius64]

So, none of the women in WWII that weren't combat nurses?

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Wycliffe]

The only ones who deserve it are actual combat veterans. Filling out paperwork to order toilet paper does not count.

When you join the military (or are forced to quit college to join because you are drafted), you have no idea whether
you will be in logistics or on the frontline. You still made a huge sacrifice. Also, don't underestimate logistics.
WWII invented palletized freight which is what runs the modern economy. Without pallets and their larger brother
container freight, modern civilization like we know it wouldn't exist.

I don't think the women should have been kicked out but we've come a long way since the 1940s. That type of gender
prejudice is mostly a thing of the past.

What gender gap?

[crossmr]

News flash:
Not everything in this world is going to mimic the real demographics of the planet. If they idea is that we're all special snowflakes, we're sometimes going to find some people better suited to certain things than others. Unless there is evidence that the best person isn't being hired for the job, there is no gender gap. A gender gap is an artificial construct made by people who can't get past gender in the first place.

Re:What gender gap?

[msauve]

In this whole world, you're unique. Just like everyone else.

Re:What gender gap?

[haggholm]

Not everything in this world is going to mimic the real demographics of the planet.

No, but human abilities tend to fall along bell curves.

Observation: White males are overrepresented in tech fields when contrasted with non-white, non-male, or neither-white-nor-male workers.

Feminist/progressivist position: The reason behind this overrepresentation is a complex system of biases (consider all the studies that have shown that people whose names, listed, on resumes, sound white and male, are more likely to get called in for interviews), historical factors (such as unequal education opportunities), and cultural factors (for example, unequal participation can form a positive feedback loop because being the odd person out, especially in a very visible way, can be off-putting). Then, of course, there really is a lot of overt misogyny, as five minutes on Reddit can prove not merely beyond doubt, but also beyond hope. All of these things (or rather, the gender-related rather than race-related parts) are what feminists are referring to when they use the term "patriarchy". In my opinion that's a poorly chosen term, implying something less nebulous, more focused, intentional, and planned than is the case; but there you are -- the feminist movement isn't perfect either.

("Privilege" is another term that leads to endless misunderstanding, since it gets thrown around in a manner that can sound pretty accusatory, but that again misses the point. The observation that certain people benefit from certain injustices is not the same as blaming them for those injustices. Maybe you went to Harvard on the family fortune your great-grandfather made by exploiting slave labour, and are therefore better educated than the black guy across town whose great-grandfather was one of those slaves. You hold no moral responsibility for slavery, but your superior employment prospects are still the product not of disinterested meritocracy, but the outcome of slavery.)

Reactionary position: Nah, it just so coincidentally happens that (a) all the smartest people/people with most talent in these (high-paying) fields just happen to belong to the same demographic that's also most represented among business leaders, politicians, &c., and/or (b) the people who take an interest in these fields just happen to belong to that same moneyed and powerful demographic.

Sure.

Personally, I don't expect that the gender balance would be exactly 50% even if none of the above factors were present, as presumably some degree of inclination, and potentially (but not necessarily) some fractional degree of talent for many professions may be causally tied to biological sex, and presumably different jobs would go in and out of vogue with various demographics. (By analogy, from what I hear: Why are all the top-level swimmers in the US white? Because swimming just isn't very popular among African-Americans.) But, with a few exceptions where biological traits matter, as for jobs where men's statistical advantage in physical strength makes them, on average, more qualified, I don't expect the "natural" imbalance to be very large, and unless your company has keyboards with really fucking serious resistance and tactile feedback, such that the average woman could not type without the assistance of a hammer and nail sink, I don't think it's unreasonable to postulate that there's something more to it.

Another way to look at it: Suppose (this may or may not really be the case) that there was at some point horrible discrimination, since resolved, so that women for a long time avoided the field. Therefore, very few women work in the field, and since it ipso facto looks like a field with very few opportunities for women, very few women chose to get relevant educations and degrees. Employers can say, with some justification, that the reason they hire so few women is that there are few qualified c

Re:What gender gap?

[x0ra]

of course, most of them tends to have it filled with fat...

Re:What gender gap?

[sphealey]

Excellent summary. Thanks.

sPh

Re:What gender gap?

[rmdingler]

What?

Like a hammer, 11-in-1 screwdriver, and bailing wire all in a single fabulous Ronco creation?

It's kind of like pie a la mode or a warm doughnut with maple sugar... at the pinnacle, son!

Re:What gender gap?

[crossmr]

Right. If there's anything that's clear in the months after all this #GamerGate bullshit reached its apparent peak, it's that sexism and the bullying/harrassment of women is a fiction whipped up by angry feminists with a persecution complex.

I can't possibly imagine what would ever give anyone cause to think that...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanha...

Re:What gender gap?

[dbIII]

It's a widening gap.
When I was an undergraduate the engineering students did CS classes to meet girls, since around 1% of the engineering enrolement was female and CS slightly more then 50%. Now I see far more women around in professional engineering roles than in IT positions - only one in the room of 50+ at an IPv6 thing and she was a sales rep. It's a very dramatic change and not artificial. The "special snowflakes" are the whiney little boys who can't cope with the change being pointed out to them in my opinion. It's depressing that this place is turning into a whiney little boy site where all women are considered inferior instead of one that could respect Admiral Grace Hopper and Marie Curie for what they did.

Re:What gender gap?

[bluegutang]

Observation: White males are overrepresented in tech fields when contrasted with non-white, non-male, or neither-white-nor-male workers.

That's not my observation. Where I work, white males are slightly underrepresented. (Asian males are drastically overrepresented...)

If your basic observation is wrong, what does that say about all the speculative analysis you've based on it?

Re:What gender gap?

[crossmr]

I certainly respect them for what they did, did I say anywhere that I didn't?
What I said was that a forced gender balance makes no sense. Some people are, to an extent, attracted to certain kinds of things. It isn't uniform, and there is no reason to expect it to be uniform across socio/economic/gender/nationality/etc across the world.

Re:What gender gap?

[AmiMoJo]

(I'm very uncomfortable with "affirmative action" type initiatives, since a pure meritocracy looks fairer, but perhaps they're sometimes needed to clean up after past injustices?

Affirmative action is supposed to still be a meritocracy, it's just that you make some effort to get members of the minority group to apply instead of just throwing the posting out there. For example, you might make an effort to network with women so that they see your job listing, as often guys mostly have other guys in their circles. It might go as far as offering grants to help minority candidates afford to apply and study, or to move to where the job is.

Ultimately though the choice of candidate is down to merit alone. If they don't make the grade, they still don't get in. At least, that's how it is supposed to work, but maybe some people are doing it wrong.

Re:What gender gap?

[AmiMoJo]

One person doing something does not meant that the 50% of the population who share her gender is dishonest. #GamerGate is over, the bullshit was exposed. Let it go.

Re:What gender gap?

[crossmr]

That pre-dated gamergate and had nothing to do with it. upwards of 10% of all rape claims are patently false. Another 40% lack sufficient evidence to tell either way, so the amount of fake rapes reported to police could be anywhere from 10-50%

Re:What gender gap?

[dbIII]

What I said was that a forced gender balance makes no sense

Yet we have one. A widening one. It's probably best if we do something about it instead of pretending that there is nothing driving women away from considering IT.
Part of the HR bullshit is asking what people's hobbies are etc so we end up with a "better fit" when the reality is encouraging monocultures. Having all female school teachers is just as insane as having all male IT people, and it's far more insidious than that where it may be all males that cheer for the same football team. When your talent pool is drawn from a small pond you can't expect much in the way of results.

Re:What gender gap?

[LordLimecat]

One person doing something does not meant that the 50% of the population who share her gender is dishonest.

For a moment I read that as "does not meant that the 50% of the population who share his gender.." and thought you were commenting about the absurdity of the broad-based accusations that men in general are the problem.

Then I re-read and realized you were just being disingenuous.

Re:What gender gap?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I would say that the backlash against feminazis and SJWs started by GG is just getting started, and it's long overdue.

Re:What gender gap?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Feminist/progressivist position: The reason behind this overrepresentation is a complex system of biases (consider all the studies that have shown that people whose names, listed, on resumes, sound white and male, are more likely to get called in for interviews), historical factors (such as unequal education opportunities), and cultural factors (for example, unequal participation can form a positive feedback loop because being the odd person out, especially in a very visible way, can be off-putting). Then, of course, there really is a lot of overt misogyny, as five minutes on Reddit can prove not merely beyond doubt, but also beyond hope. All of these things (or rather, the gender-related rather than race-related parts) are what feminists are referring to when they use the term "patriarchy". In my opinion that's a poorly chosen term, implying something less nebulous, more focused, intentional, and planned than is the case; but there you are -- the feminist movement isn't perfect either.

("Privilege" is another term that leads to endless misunderstanding, since it gets thrown around in a manner that can sound pretty accusatory, but that again misses the point. The observation that certain people benefit from certain injustices is not the same as blaming them for those injustices. Maybe you went to Harvard on the family fortune your great-grandfather made by exploiting slave labour, and are therefore better educated than the black guy across town whose great-grandfather was one of those slaves. You hold no moral responsibility for slavery, but your superior employment prospects are still the product not of disinterested meritocracy, but the outcome of slavery.)

Of course what exposes feminists and quite often progressives as the naked bigots dressed up in flowery language they are, is that they've nothing to say about fields where women are overrepresented, or their underrepresentation in unpleasant jobs like garbage collection.

It's always a matter of great amusement to hear these often very privileged white women and men talking about how they're part of a civil rights movement when the actual civil rights movement was sparked off by a false rape allegation.

Re:What gender gap?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Typical feminist shaming language. Why don't you take it back to jezebel.

Re:What gender gap?

[Any Web Loco]

This is a great post - thanks. Sadly, as evidenced by the Overrated and Troll mods you've got, and most of the replies, you could have equally validly said:

...there really is a lot of overt misogyny, as five minutes on Slashdot can prove not merely beyond doubt, but also beyond hope.

Re:What gender gap?

[dbIII]

No, it's the language of a real man instead of a whiney little boy. When you succeed in growing up you will not be "shamed" by it.
Part of being a real man is caring about the future of your daughters, nieces etc.

Re:What gender gap?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Oh indeed it is shaming language, one of the few two bit tricks that lackbrained and heavily indoctrinated meat puppet social justice warriors use to try and win arguments. It usually comes accompanied by critical theory attacks, which are not to be confused with critical thought, indeed they are the exact opposite of critical thought.

So, let's "deconstruct" this as you chimanpzees are wont to say.

A real man has a cock and two nuts. That's all it takes to be a real man. Nobody cares what you think a real man is. Nobody.

This site isn't and never has been a place where women are generally considered inferior. Only a dribbling zealot incapable of reading and comprehending the words before them could possibly believe that to be the case. Said zealot then falls back on social justice parlour trick number three: hyperbole the shit out of everything. Someone has an objection to gender based quotas, they're obviously wifebeating rapists. Someone points out that the "pay gap" is based on age and experience instead of gender, they're clearly whiney little boys who need to grow up.

Here's my advice, take two steps back and get fucked, you tantrum throwing little poster child for the wee man syndrome.

If you actually cared about your "daughters, nieces etc" you wouldn't be parroting feminist talking points like an idiot, you'd be teaching them to take responsibility for themselves and to succeed on their own merits. If you weren't so busy seeing muh soggy knees and rapists everywhere, you'd recognise that teaching women to be paranoid neurotics is doing them less of a favour than the Salem witch trials did for the moral fibre of the locality.

There's really not much to it.

Re:What gender gap?

[dbIII]

Did you get rejected by some girl and now you are foaming at the mouth and seeing feminists everywhere? All I did is wrote about dysfunctional workplaces full of nothing but chestbeating whiney little boys under thirty in response to some really stupid stuff above and you come swinging in to unleash the torrents of childish shit. "Feminist shaming language"? Nowhere near it unless you have the delusion of seeing it everywhere you look. What really appears to have happened is you are took my words personally for some reason and consider yourself a "whiney little boy" like the idiot crossmr above with his "special snowflake" comment. I was not addressing you and do not appreciate your childish action of of kneejerk insult that makes no sense in the context. I suggest applying some effort to growing up instead of insulting anyone that suggests a varied workplace.

Re:What gender gap?

[crossmr]

You need to move overseas. Asia especially, thigh gaps as far as the eye can see.

As always, looking at this wrong.

[Shadow of Eternity]

Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech
Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on
Step 3: "WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN TECH?!!!!"

Tech fields aren't some fortress designed to keep women out, they're a ghetto that unattractive or non-conforming men were shoved into. That's why the "neckbeard" stereotype is pushed so hard these days, nobody wants to give up bullying these people but they need to find some way to JUSTIFY it that also covers for the fact that bullying is exactly why the gender gap exists in the first place. So they invent this massive straw misogynist "neckbeard" caricature and start pushing it everywhere. Now it's not just that nerds are losers, it's that they're misogynist losers and that's why it's totally ok to bully them because it's all their fault anyway.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[sphealey]

- - - - - Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech - - - - -

Technology people were global heroes from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Whilst arising from groups and cultures that had been stigmatized in the 60s/70s their success at opening up the new world was lionized as the PC/technology revolution got rolling. Nerd became a cool thing to be.

  Problem is that starting in the 1990s and really rolling after 2000 the tech world damaged itself in some fundamental way, and is now being looked on much more skeptically. Source of that damage isn't totally clear (well, then there's Uber) but it isn't accurate to blame society for stigmatizing technology people out of nowhere; there are reasons.

sPh

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is that starting in the 1990s and really rolling after 2000 the tech world damaged itself in some fundamental way

Yeah, like constant demand for long hours, a severe disinclination to pay a decent salary, constant threat of being outsourced, no real promotion ladder, no real prospects after you turn 40, and most of the job is the tedious stuff that nobody likes doing.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[horigath]

Tech fields aren't some fortress designed to keep women out, they're a ghetto that unattractive or non-conforming men were shoved into.

Why is this an OR? Power functions in multiple directions at the same time; if one barrier can negatively impact the mobility of non-conforming men as well as simultaneously push women even farther away from economic power that seems like a tremendous win for the patriarchy.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[Shadow of Eternity]

Because you can't have an unfalsifiable theory. The way your claim works everything is patriarchy no matter what it is, even if it hurts men, therefore nothing will ever NOT be patriarchy.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[horigath]

I don't care if you like the word or not: you didn't use any term to describe who is performing the three steps in your post:

Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech
Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on
Step 3: "WHY AREN'T THERE MORE WOMEN IN TECH?!!!!"

so I offered the one that seemed closest to hand and is often used to describe a similar abstract group that seems to directly or indirectly pull the strings of our society.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[Shadow of Eternity]

What part of "unfalsifiable" did you not understand? The problem is that you are trying to claim something whose definition is "men are privileged" is harming and oppressing men. That doesn't work because that makes your theory unfalsifiable.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[horigath]

lol no i'm not. I knew it wasn't worth my time to type a definition of how I used the word because sure enough you didn't read it.

in the meantime, i'll be sure to tell everyone i know in the humanities about Karl Popper and how you can read about him on wikipedia I don't think any of them has ever thought to do so before nope not even once. ciao.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[AmiMoJo]

Step 1: Stigmatize the traits that lead people to excel in tech fields, men posessing those traits, and anyone in tech
Step 2: Watch as that stigmatization isolates and ostracizes people in tech as "nerds" "dweebs" "dorks" "losers" and so on

Funny, those masculine traits tend not to be associated with nerds.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[TheRaven64]

I'm responsible for computer science admissions at an all-women college in Cambridge. I don't yet gave the figures for this year, but in the most recent year that I do have statistics for male computer science applicants had around a 15% acceptance rate, female applicants had around a 20% acceptance rate over the entire university. In spite of this, only 14% of our total admissions for CompSci were women. You can see the whole figures here. The women that we admit are not clustered anywhere particularly on the bell curve, so we're not bumping up the ratio by letting in inferior female candidates - we're just not seeing many women apply.

These numbers are even worse if you discount international students. The vast majority of women who make it to the interview stage are from outside of the UK. If you only count international students, then the gender ratios are more equal. To me, this means that there's something cultural in the UK (and, from what I've seen, the US) that isn't happening elsewhere, which puts women off computer science before they even get to university applications.

In some countries, the pressure is in the opposite direction. If you work in any computing-related discipline, you've probably worked with some extremely competent Iranian women (unless you work at a company like Google that refuses to hire anyone from Iran). If Iranian women want to pursue further education, they have a choice of engineering or medicine, but medicine in a country with a strong patriarchal ethos doesn't lead to many career paths (no one trusts a woman doctor), so they go to engineering. Within engineering, they have the choice of computer science or something that involves working in a factory, so most of them go into computer science. And then they graduate and realise that the job market looks much better abroad and that they have marketable skills, so they leave.

It's not something that has a quick fix, but it really needs to start in primary schools. It's easy to put young children off a career path very early on and very hard to fix it later.

Re: As always, looking at this wrong.

[TheRaven64]

Interesting. I know a couple of people who did well at Google interviews but were rejected on the grounds that they were Iranian citizens. Perhaps Professor Sahami has become a naturalised US citizen? It seems that US companies have a lot of difficulty hiring Iranian nationals.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[Shadow of Eternity]

Funny that it's feminists who most viciously gender-police nerds and non-conforming males, as with the "neckbeard" slur and accompanying straw man/caricature that's been escalated to practically minstrel levels of absurdity.

The traits that lead to success in tech aren't masculine traits, they're non-SJW traits of resilience, internal locus of control, tolerance, and personal responsibility. It's traits that lead to someone being a hard worker who accepts and even relishes in adversity and views their failures or difficulties as a sign they need to work harder rather than externalizing them on an unfalsifiable and often circular conspiracy theory.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[Shadow of Eternity]

I said falsifiability, not falsificationism. Since you apparently don't even know the difference allow me to explain it in words of two syllables or less: Any theory you can't disprove is not a valid theory. You can't make a claim that can never be wrong and say it's valid logic.

Get it now? If I flip a coin and say "heads I win, tails you lose" that's not valid. If you make a theory that can never be wrong because it claims every outcome supports it your theory is not valid.

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[horigath]

ah you've caught me at lunch, i'll bite.

You've said the same thing three times now. Here are some things you should consider:

1. sometimes words are used by different people to mean different things!

For instance, “patriarchy” was used by me above to fill in the missing actor in your original post, with a rough definition given above. The word can also be used to refer to the patrilinial systems of property or government that existed in Europe before modern systems of law. It can also be used to describe systems of government in general in which power is largely in the hands of men. It is also sometimes used in a more theoretical sense to describe a system, process, or tendency that causes these other forms to sustain themselves. One time, some woman on the internet used it to refer to “an ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything” but seeing as this is not a definition used by anybody else it's pretty clear that it was a straw man designed just so she could write a huge screed about how it is an unfalsifiable theory.

You seem completely unconcerned with which of these is being discussed when you call it an unfalsifiable theory, despite most of them referring to observable tendencies or things, or even formalized systems of law.

Please don't lecture people on definitions when you don't understand how words work.

2. maybe you should think about reading the criticism section of that wikipedia page you linked instead of holding up a concept not generally accepted by philosophers (of science or otherwise) as the End of All Arguments?

3. If you are really so worried about being bullied and called names, as mentioned in the first post, I would invite you to consider that maybe the lack of support you say you receive could be connected with the fact that when people try to apply their own tools that they find effective for fighting oppression in order to explain, address, and ideally point a way to resolution of the ”ghettoization” that you describe yourself in, you seem most interested in chasing them away with unrelated wikipedia links, a patronizing tone, and a tremendous chip on your shoulder.

Like, what is the correlation between being called a neckbeard and telling people they are wrong about things they clearly understand better than you?

4. bonus round: maybe if you are going to hold every response up to a ridiculous standard of logical completeness you shouldn't lead with a rhetorical strategy of ”that's what they want you to think” by listing some actions that you seem to want to attribute only to an unnamed ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything. Because that sounds an awful lot like an unfalsifiable theory.

Or maybe you know, don't complain about things you clearly don't want to change?

Re:As always, looking at this wrong.

[Shadow of Eternity]

1. Yes, sometimes words are used by people to mean different things. This is generally called "semantics" and is a tactic very popular among the more social justice inclined, who often redefine words sometimes even on the fly to make their arguments unfalsifiable or otherwise justify their actions. For most of the world we have a dictionary and if you're using a word to mean something outside it's standard meaning it's YOUR job to clarify your meaning, not everyone else's to telepathically divine it.

You didn't "define a missing actor", you tried to claim that even the alternative interpretation I proposed was proof of feminism's Patriarchy theory. Your exact words were "that seems like a tremendous win for the patriarchy". Patriarchy as a theory boils down to the assertion that men are privileged and women are oppressed. Your argument was that evidence of the opposite STILL supports patriarchy... Because. Just because. Because you say it does. The problem is that makes Patriarchy theory unfalsifiable, it makes literally every single possible thing that could ever happen something which supports the existence of a Patriarchy. It means that no matter what we will never NOT live in a Patriarchy because even men getting screwed is still Patriarchy.

That's just as logically invalid as saying "Heads I win, Tails you lose".

2. Again they're criticising Karl Popper's organized philosophical school of Falsificationism, not the very core of basic logical validity itself that states something must be disprovable in the first place, aka the principle of falsifiability... as in the ability to BE falsified at ALL.

Falsfiability, as in disprovability, IS the end of all arguments. If something can't ever be disproven it is inherently not a valid proposition. "God did it" is not a valid logical or scientific theory, it's a religious assertion. "I'm right because I say I'm right" is not a valid argument because it is circular. "Patriarchy is the system which privileges men and oppresses women... but when men are oppressed and women privileged that's patriarchy too" is not valid.

3. This is pure speciousness, you're making personal commentary (and insults) about me to try and deflect from your failure of even basic logical validity.

4a. Requiring that things NOT be completely undisprovable circular bunk is not a "ridiculous standard of logical completeness", it's the very foundation of basic rational thought and logic.

4b. I am not attributing everything to some "unnamed ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force". That's feminism's Patriarchy theory you're thinking of. Yknow, that thing you cited in your very first post and which I pointed out is a logically invalid theory.

bonus round: The only people who don't want things to change are people who adhere to Patriarchy theory, that's why it's unfalsifiable in the first place. If everything is always patriarchy then they always have an excuse to claim victimhood and oppression and then use that "Victim Cred" as a rhetorical and social weapon against others. That is the very core of social justice tactics.

Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[argStyopa]

...in vapid, stupid conclusions based on flawed initial premises.

First I noticed was that "coding" is a superpower.
Second is that tech's gender gap began in 1994? Seriously?

So before 1994, women were nearly equally represented in computing? HAHAHAHA.

It's not even worth refuting, it's such an asinine premise.

Hint to the author: the world began before you.

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[sphealey]

- - - - - So before 1994, women were nearly equally represented in computing? HAHAHAHA. - - - - -

Um, much more nearly, yes.

1943 to 1945 - women were about 95% of the computing workforce.

1946 to mid/late 1950s - still a very large percentage of women, since they had the experience (from the war) and were pushed back out of other engineering fields. Computing, being a branch of applied mathematics, was considered "acceptable" for women to take up

1960-1980 - still a large percentage of women in "data processing" (as programmers and systems analysts, not just keypunch operators), esp in very large companies.

1980 - boom in university computer science begins and many women are interested. 1984 is the peak post-war year for women graduating from engineering programs (around 40% IIRC); a large percentage are CS with many of the rest EE. Many of these women (my classmates) go on to critical roles in companies and universities building out this " 'net " concept (later renamed the Internet).

post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.

So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[x0ra]

Of course they were, most men were taking bullets on the various front for them... There wasn't much women on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day...

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[adri]

I was working in the first dot com boom during 1998-2001. Now, I was working in Amsterdam rather than the US, but I did get to feel exactly how screwed up this situation got. And looking back at it, this article does re-iterate a lot of those points quite clearly.

The people that succeeded were for the most part the ones that put in long hours, were ruthless about achieving their goals and cared not about things like "work/life balance", "emotional stability", "health concerns", etc. Whenever I came out to the US to talk shop with other internet infrastructure people, they were working long hours, ignoring what the industry said they could / couldn't do. There were women in tech, but they weren't the programmers - the ones I met tended to be algorithms people, data scientists, etc. They weren't in the meat grinder of bashing out C/perl code.

The article covered the long hours, it covered what happened when things went pear shaped, and it did a pretty good hatchet job on the kind of focus and ruthlessness you needed to get where you wanted to go. It was amazing to watch and now a little scary. Then the dot-com bust happened and people lost everything. Plenty of people I knew said "fuck it" and left the industry. Those that stayed either made their money, or they were just suckers for loving their jobs. They didn't have strong personal relationships with others. They just loved kicking ass and taking names in their work career. That sometimes worked out for them and sometimes didn't.

A lot of the people I knew in the tech field did just leave and look for something more stable. The people that stuck it out were homeless, couch-surfing, living with family/friends, existing wherever they could just to get over the sheer loss of everything. Not everyone is cut out for that level of destitution and dedication - eventually they'll snap and go off to something more stable.

This field is terrible. It chews you over and spits you out. If you're lucky then you make a bunch of money and save a bunch of money. Plenty of people working in tech and living in San Francisco aren't even doing that. We don't necessarily churn out people who are risk takers out of university - heck, churning out creative thinkers just became an "in vogue" thing again with this whole maker faire mentality that's happening nowdays. But when the thing crashes again, you'll see the same cycle - those who are willing to risk it all and live hand-to-mouth from wherever they can will do it. Others will go find whatever is safe and stable and start life again from there.

Now, is that gender biased? Maybe. Someone has to go do a little more research to figure that out. But from what I saw, there were a handful of women that stuck through that and came out ahead. Most that I knew just gave it in and went back to school, moved in with parents, or decided to stop work and have babies. The guys seemed more happy to take the risk again and again and live hand-to-mouth.

There's lots to fix. We have to stop being insensitive asshats. part of that is institutional - the brogrammer culture is strong here. Part of that comes out of all of the stupid stress and anxiety that litters this community. It's hard to pay attention to how you live, how you interact, how you make others feel, how to communicate well and well, how not to be an asshole if you're always stressed out, anxious and sleep deprived. add in a bit of being shouted at and some threats about your job security and .. well, you just stop giving any fucks. Part of it is no constant exposure to dealing with other people and a focus on your ability to churn out code - your job doesn't tend to want you spending time each day to improve yourself in all ways - it needs to be work relevant, and hey you have that deadline that just appeared? Eww. It's good to see people standing up and calling out bad behvaiour. it's good to see that some communities are sprouting up and eschewing shitty behaviour. But I'd really like to see the stress, anxiety and hours drop as well as a focus on people interaction. My 20 year old self gave no interest to any of these things. My 35 year old self .. suddenly realises that it's pretty fucking important.

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[rmdingler]

There wasn't much women on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day...

Are you certain? It's difficult to imagine that many men heading single-mindedly toward their deaths with no promise of procreation.

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[Oligonicella]

If that was supposed to be facetious, it missed.

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[colinb8]

• 1. "Of course they were, most men were taking bullets on the various front for them"
• Is that really true? You might be the type of man(?) this was aimed at? Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942
• "It is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."
• "When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic - remember she didn't get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich"
• (For a semi-balanced opinion on this little "book", I suggest reading the review by Peasant, which explains that the original was actually seven pages of ratty typescript, that the brown cover is a modern fake, and then has thoughtful ideas on the reasons for its use in 1942.)

• USA census 1940 Continental USA population about 132 million, plus about 2 million for Alaska, Hawaii, etc.
• 26.4% aged 5-19, so about 7.0% 16-19; 38.9% 20-44, so about 23.3% 20-34; 19.8% 45-64;
• so about 30.3% aged 16-34; assuming 50% male, that's about 20 million males 16-34;
• so about 35.4% aged 35-64; assuming 50% male, that's about 23 million males 35-64.
• In splitting the 20-44 counts I'm assuming that year by year births for those ages were roughly equal; I'm also ignoring that older people have higher mortality rates than younger people, because that's not going to have a major effect on rough calculations for these ages.
• The total serving in US army, navy, marines, coast guard were 1.8 million in 1941 rising to 12.2 million in 1945, or a (possibly misleading) yearly average of about 7.7 million.
• You also need to understand that a large number of those serving would have been in logistics and other support, a necessary requirement of modern war which Churchill seemed not to understand fully - he periodically complained about how many serving personnel in British and Commonwealth and Empire forces in the Middle East were not actually fighting.
• So from those numbers I suggest that "most" USA men were never anywhere near a front In World War 2. I'm not casting aspersions on their courage - I'm merely pointing out that in World War 2 most USA adult males were, like almost all USA adult females, considered not suitable for fighting and/or more useful in manufacturing, etc.

• 2. "There wasn't much women on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day"
• True. However, about 15% to 20% of the French Resistance were woman, and resisting the Nazis wasn't exactly safe. I would be surprised if the percentages in, for example, Belgium and Holland, were not similar. And that's before we consider the Soviet women who fought as soldiers, partisans, in tanks, and in aircraft (bombers and fighters):
• Night_Witches
• Soviet_women_in_World_War_II
• Women_in_the_Russian_and_Soviet_military
• Manshuk_Mametova
• Nina_Lobkovskaya
• Lyudmila_Pavlichenko

• 3. And all that's before we even get into the subject of how many men in *any* army actually fight.
• Britains

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[dbIII]

In 1987 there were slightly more women in the introductory CS classes than men at the University I attended. There was the expectation of it being around equal if not the reality in actual employment. I didn't move into IT until around 2000 (yes, I'm one of those evil engineers that stole your CS jobs without even a cert) so I don't know what the employement situation was before then, but it does seem to have become far less balanced even since 2000. There's a LOT more women in mining than in IT. How weird is that?

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

1943 to 1945 - women were about 95% of the computing workforce.

And by computing workforce, you mean this?

Furthermore, even quite some time after the advent of digital computers, there was this period in which the prevalent opinion in the field was that computer hardware design happened to be the actually important (and perhaps prestigious) job whereas programming said computers was a lowly, clerical work... I don't think that anyone should be surprised to whom these new jobs initially went. In other words, I find it plausible that the initial high involvement of women in early computing was actually a symptom of pre-existing sexism rather than of later-lost equality.

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[serviscope_minor]

So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women

Genetics. Something about cavemen and hunting mammoths versus gathering berries or raising kids or something.

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[Bite The Pillow]

Does the culture affect the decision to join the field? It sounds like you are saying that people experience the culture, then decide to change field of study.

To support your suggestion, a simple study asking for opinions would put this to rest.

You replied to the question of what changed. While you may be correct, it doesn't seem to answer the question. What changed to give women a gradually decreasing share if employment over 50+ years?

Re:Slashdot is exceeding itself lately...

[strikethree]

So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.

I am not that person but perhaps women are smarter than men? That is when pay vs work hours went upside down. It is also when the work environment went to utter crap.

superficial read...

[slew]

That summary is a total superficial read of the article.

It seems to me the point of the article was that 1994 (the web 1.0 boom of silicon valley) seemingly should have been more women friendly, but the valley was already being run by money from the previous booms in silicon valley and for a multitude of reasons which they list (e.g., male dominated venture capital firms), was unfriendly to women as chronicled by the biographies of the class of '94 from Stanford. One of the reason they cited was that women seem to gravitate towards "safe" jobs (e.g., law, finance, medicine) and a new "boys-club" mentality of the startup culture (specifically mentioning Paypal which was a Stanford dominated startup).

These same trends were most certainly true both before 1994 and after 1994 and not exclusive to Stanford... TFA didn't say techs' gender gap started at Stanford. TFA used Stanford as emblematic of the issue.

Re:superficial read...

[sphealey]

I remember reading "how to interview in Silicon Valley" articles during that time period that described firms doing things such as flying entire recruiting classes to Las Vegas and eliminating any candidates who didn't gamble and drink in large quantities. That's behavior that predictive for success in complex business-focused entities for sure.

sPH

Yup

[s.petry]

But then again, I have not hear the arguments about the patriarchy and misogyny for a while so at least it's different agenda based reporting.

Society does not have enough turmoil, so we have to invent and spew more...

Re:Yup

[CaptainLard]

Society does not have enough turmoil, so we have to invent and spew more...

The first half of that sentence may have been sarcasm but its true! Crime, teen pregnancy, car accident deaths are all historically low. Life expectancy has never been higher, the cold war is over, etc, etc. Thats why those in power need the war on terror and the left vs right political circle jerk.

The unfortunate part is, the one true long term existential threat facing society is the only one the aforementioned powerful ones choose to ignore. Yes, AGW. Everything else "wrong" with society can be fixed at any time and isn't at the point of no return...welp, if anything that's going to get me an offtopic mod.

True, But It Goes Back Way Farther

[machineghost]

It's not just "Tech's Gender Gap" that started at Stanford; Silicon Valley itself started at Stanford (see Francis Terman, William Shockley, Fairchild Eight, etc.). So while it's technically accurate to say the gender gap started at Stanford, it's just as accurate to say CD-ROMs or Pets.com or anything else Silicon Valley-related started there. Silicon Valley is the genesis of digital technology, and Stanford is the genesis of Silicon Valley.

Re:True, But It Goes Back Way Farther

[dbIII]

There seemed to be a lot going on in Texas (no I'm not from there and never been there), but somehow they dropped the ball and California got the electronics crown.

Doesn't anyone check facts?

[russotto]

By 1994, the gender gap in tech was already well-established; it wouldn't become much greater until the .com crash. And it didn't start at Stanford, it was at least a national phenomenon. My second-rate east coast state school showed the same trends.

Re:Doesn't anyone check facts?

[wonkey_monkey]

By 1994, the gender gap in tech was already well-established;

Is that BC or AD? Because I suspect the former is probably true, as well.

there was certainly interest...

[Anonymous Coward]

...up until 1984. Interesting story about the culture which helped shaped women out of the field, or at the very least, class them out.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding

Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[Kunedog]

But then again, I have not hear the arguments about the patriarchy and misogyny for a while so at least it's different agenda based reporting.

Society does not have enough turmoil, so we have to invent and spew more...

Here's an article posted three weeks ago about a woman in STEM that (for once) contains no clickbaiting headline, libel about entire groups committing discrimination & misogyny & harassment, nor the usual thinly veiled, anvilicious feminist agenda.

It was just an honest and interesting account of life at CERN, with a woman at the center of it. It garnered barely 30 comments. Who wants to bet this thread will end up with three times that?

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been going on at Slashdot for years. Enough bullshit like this will drive anyone out of tech eventually.

It's stepped up in recent years. Suddenly all of tech has a chronic gender diversity problem and the "culture" of the whole sector is to blame. And of course there's nothing anyone can do about it because no solutions are ever a) proposed, b) implemented, and most importantly c) will never have any effect on these kinds of articles which are produced for for-profit fear mongering. I blame social media and the ease with which talent-less people can shout down and drown out people who actually want to work.

If I ever have any offspring -- male or female -- I'm going to tell them not to go into tech because the whole field is turning into a identity political battleground and anyone sitting in no-man's land is going to get shelled. I hope to fuck that this doesn't start creeping into STEM because if it does I'm going to have to tell them to go into accounting, law, or farming. The internet is going to eat the West at this rate.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[ShieldW0lf]

Doesn't anyone else see that it's immoral to press, entice or implore a woman to sacrifice her child bearing years so she can fix your computer, or to let other people do so?

Didn't the article about how Facebook is funding freezing womens eggs wake anyone's eyes up to just how fucked up we've become?

Is that what you want for your daughter? Sure as hell isn't what I want for mine.

If that's what you're going to use your power for, you shouldn't have it.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[Anonymous Coward]

Women have agency, everyone especially feminists constantly want to treat them as naive innocents in all things.

I just want to guarantee equality of opportunity, not to guarantee the equality of outcome. The latter tends to destroy the former.

How a woman chooses to spend her childbearing years is her business, I will nether support or go against her choice. She's granted the same apathy from me that any guy is. Unless their equality of opporunity is infringed upon.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[AmiMoJo]

The point is that it shouldn't be a choice between kids or career. Why can't men and women have both?

Society needs kids, obviously. Society has an interest in seeing kids brought up well, which means a reasonable and stable income, time enough for parenting, high quality childcare and education. If we can't facilitate that, it's a problem that needs to be fixed.

Unless you think women should just plan to marry a guy with a good job who can look after her and her child, or maybe become a welfare queen, women need to have a career.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[Puls4r]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. People act like this sort of thing is new. But every single industry has the same problem with the same kind of thing. Telling your kids not to go into your field is pretty much a 'grass is greener' viewpoint. Take it from someone who works in automotive, you don't WANT the solutions that people propose. You're going to end up going to sensitivity training, diversity training, business relationship training and sexual harassment training. When it's all said and done the only thing you'll have learned that you didn't already know is a new repertoire of jokes about the topic. Note: When you're in sexual harassment class and they ask you what you would do if a girl with nice donuts walks by, the correct response is not "eat them".

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[Intrepid imaginaut]

The point is that it shouldn't be a choice between kids or career.

Yeah the choice is kids or career without much water between the two. If you don't like that resign yourself to having your children raised by strangers and hired help, which for most isn't acceptable. Raising children takes time and effort, something that the convenience of white goods and reduced physical requirements in the workforce hasn't changed.

What we're seeing now is a lot of women who went into the workforce and discovered that they were going to be neither wealthy nor successful, just like 99% of men in the workforce. Instead they're going to have a middle class lifestyle that they'd probably have been able to enjoy anyway plus a family had they chosen to raise kids instead. Is it any wonder womens' happiness has been decreasing.

That's not to say that men shouldn't be househusbands except it seems women aren't very attracted by that. Patriarchy, right?

I think first of all that the religion of feminism needs to die loudly and publicly along with every other social engineering cult, and secondly that people need to learn to differentiate between "a career" and "financial independence". These aren't the same thing.

And do not mistake me for a conservative or a traditionalist, I am neither.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[sinij]

>>>Why can't men and women have both?

Very good question with a simple answer. Our economy is built on assumption of perpetual growth that comes from increased productivity. If productivity stands still we experience recessions. Some of the productivity gains come from technology, but majority of it comes from grinding more out of workers.

Did you ever notice than your grandfather was a sole bread winner and only worked 9-5 with serious overtime pay, while both you and your spouse are grinding out 80 hours work weeks? That is your answer why we can't have it both.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[Anonymous Coward]

It's stepped up in recent years. Suddenly all of tech has a chronic gender diversity problem and the "culture" of the whole sector is to blame.

It is the same nonsense spouted by certain agenda-seeking groups about the so-called "campus rape culture." When I attended university there was no culture of rape much less any tolerance for such behavior. Were some female students raped? Possibly. Were some male students rape? Possibly. Did the student body, faculty, and administration condone such behavior? Not bloody likely.

In the workplace I have worked alongside men and women. Neither group has a monopoly on positive or negative traits. I will say working with female co-workers tended to be far more pleasant than dealing with the buffoons and bullies present among some male co-workers.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[s.petry]

Because it's not possible to have both, unless you are just going to be a baby factory and let the State raise the kids. Is that another thing you want? And trust me, I'm a huge advocate for Plato's "The Republic" but that is one area where I completely disagree with Socrates. (if you are confused read the book)

Being a parent is a full time job all on its own. Not everyone can be like the Yahoo CEO and build a nursery next to her office to spend some time with the kid while at work. Most women in fact are not in such a position, and many don't want the stress of having a baby at work anyway. Instead of admonishing or belittling a person for wanting to be a parent, prop them up for being a parent.

Oh I know, I'm a misogynist for claiming that the woman should do these things. If of course you ignore the fact that men don't have the breasts to breast feed, and lack the uterus to carry a baby from conception to birth. After birth, I'm fine either way. I work with a lady who pumps all day and her husband takes care of the baby (and their other 2 children) all day. Nothing wrong with this arrangement in my opinion, and in today's society it's often the fiscally responsible choice.

Stop painting any woman without a career in some_company as a bad thing, and relationships as a bad thing. Parents (yes, that is plural) should both be involved in a kids life, and this happens when we promote the benefits of relationships and promote accountability for actions (such as pregnancy). This trend of 2 people being required to work full time at a company is a very new one, it really started in the 1970s and 80s.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[AmiMoJo]

Yeah the choice is kids or career without much water between the two. If you don't like that resign yourself to having your children raised by strangers and hired help, which for most isn't acceptable.

It's sad that you just accept that. Try taking a look at northern European countries like Sweden. Child care is excellent, so good that most parents actually prefer to to hand their kids over to well paid, highly trained professionals. It really is top notch.

Combine that with strong rights for employees wanting time off around the birth and then needing flexible working hours in the early years and it really is possible to have a career and kids without sacrificing anything.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[ShieldW0lf]

Unless you think women should just plan to marry a guy with a good job who can look after her and her child, or maybe become a welfare queen, women need to have a career.
 
That is precisely what we should be preparing young people for. And not just women, but men too.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[guises]

It's immoral to allow other people to implore a woman to do something? That's pretty messed up, but I'm going to assume that was unintended statement on your part.

If I had a daughter, what I'd want for her is a life without children of her own. I'm lost on the point that you're arguing for here - is it fucked up that people would want children so badly that they would go to such extreme lengths to ensure that they could have one? Yes it is, certainly. We would all be better off if people did not want children so badly.

But maybe you're arguing for children and against having a career? You're suggesting that women should stick with the traditional domestic role, so that they won't have to give up their child bearing years? Or maybe you're arguing against the idea that the child bearing years and career-having years should overlap at all? Perhaps this is a subtle argument against age discrimination, your point just isn't clear.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[izat]

Facebook offering to pay for a voluntary service for their employees? Oh the humanity.

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[ShieldW0lf]

Yes, it is immoral to allow rich men to try to turn future mothers into their own beasts of burden, just because they have more "points" than the next guy. When it becomes normative, it's necessary to have a bloody revolution. Why do you think WWII was necessary?

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[guises]

Why do you think WWII was necessary?

It wasn't necessary of course. It happened for many reasons - overpopulation, inefficient farming, and abusive reparations after the First World War were big ones. Though you could combine the first two I suppose. It really depends how you look at it though: some might point the finger at a system of adversarial government, which was unable to satisfactorily solve the problems of overpopulation and inefficient farming, and which allowed the abusive reparations to be levied. Other people might point at specific politicians... Once again, I don't understand where you're going with this.

The first part of your comment: is that a complicated way of saying that women should not be allowed to have jobs before their childbearing years are finished?

Re:Clickbaiting Bullshit Works

[dbIII]

And do not mistake me for a conservative or a traditionalist, I am neither.

So, do we have here - a whiney little gay woman hater or a whiney little virgin that thinks he should get a free girl without doing anything to make one think he's worthwhile to be with? Or is there some other reason for the sheer poison above that even people in their 70's would think is too fucking medieval?

Mod parent up, it has data

[haggholm]

(I can't mod you up, alas.) The stats match what I've seen before, so I'm not trying to cast aspersions (I believe you're correct), but for the sake of completeness, could you provide your sources for those stats? This thread would be 10x nicer with long-term trend graphs.

Re:Mod parent up, it has data

[sphealey]

Fair request. Unfortunately that's based on 30 years of reading the history of computing (as well as being there when some of it occurred), generally in sources which were never transferred to digital/online. Also working for a professor who had a NSF contract to study that question ~1983 and helping him collate surveys (again - paper!), run stats, etc. Probably read a lot of the papers he had ordered prints of as well. Would probably take a PhD research effort to put it all into citation form, even if some of that data is still available.

sPh

Just

[Mandrel]

Women are first held back by their much lower fertility cut-off age. This causes the world to crowd in earlier, wanting babies, marriage, and relationships, distracting and rushing them so they find it harder to take the time and effort to pursue uncertain and uncommon paths.

In a different way women do it to themselves, avoiding founding the big universal services, instead starting companies that sell mainly to other women: fashion, children's products, jewelry, cosmetics, craft, and journalism targeted at women. This indeed applies to the Stanford woman featured in the article. Have women been forced into this ghetto by misogyny, or are they just smartly going where there's little male competition?

Almost Shirley

[rmdingler]

If you're a regular contributor to content, at a probability near one you will have encountered the undeserved down mod.

In the eye of the beholder, one's genius is often the waste-of-oxygen of another.

Study is a waste of time and money

[walterbyrd]

IT is all going to be offshored anyway.

No, No it doesnt.

[thesupraman]

I am sorry, what data does it have?
Oh, you mean it has unsupported assertions that match your desired worldview?

Let me make my own suggestion:
Pre mid 90s, CS was a rather unpopular course, generally filled with people who had a true interest in it, and in quite low numbers.
Therefore it tended to have a moderately (more) balanced gender participation, although that does vary quite strongly depending on location.

During the later 90s, the 'tech boom' made it a much more popular course for a lot of people who through it could be a path to 'success', the
content was watered down, the attendance went through the roof, and more of a male bias was seem.

HOWEVER, what to know where the opposite happened? business courses, MBAs, Laywers, Doctors.
Thats right, women CHOSE to avoid tech because they saw a larger payout in other areas - and women in general are better at long term planning.
Women went for the established, known risk long term payout of those kinds of course (at least as viewed at the time), whereas Men tended to bias more
towards the 'excitement and risk' of tech, with a lower probable payout.

But history meant a few of the tech people ended up making it big - so not its 'unfair' that more women didnt choose that path, and its the mens fault.

Get real, CS, and other tech courses, were most certainly NOT sexy in the early-mid 90s, and women were not excluded - most people who took them
were looked down on by much of the rest of the faculty.

Or, should we perhaps look at the current gener in bio-research, and advanced medical? a HUGE bias to women - who is screaming out about fixing that
equality? yes? please? no one? thought not.

Its just more of the usual - if something does well, women want 'equality' inforced there, but if it doesnt, they are happy to ignore it.
Or should be be trying to fix the gender gap in trades and manual labour areas? more women working in mines and fabrication?

Thought not..

Re:No, No it doesnt.

[Bigbutt]

Perhaps the problem is we men don't have legitimate male organizations that advocate for the boys and men. Women will naturally advocate for their benefit. Alternately the total nut-jobs have made having a male advocate so toxic that we can't have nice things.

[John]

High Tech?

[Darinbob]

I find it odd that they equate "early web" with "high tech". This was the point in time when computers basically dumbed themselves down, and any company throwing up a web page claimed that they were high tech in order to get funding. Before 1994 the engineers at Stanford, men and women, were instrumental in building up the state of the art in computer science and they came from engineering disciplines completely distinct from the MBA program.

The gender gap that exists is not necessarily in the business end of these companies but in engineering side, and in particular the IT computer support groups. Yes there is a gender gap in the upper management layers but this is true outside of tech companies as well. When people note that there's a gender gap in STEM fields the "E" does not stand for "entrepreneur", and yet the large media companies can't seem to figure out the difference.

Re:as someone

[BarbaraHudson]

"Also don't get why people care about the gender gaps, but whatever."

You would if it affected you personally, or your daughter (assuming you have one). Maybe it had a direct impact on you if your mom worked, because women tend to be paid less for the same work.

i wonder...

[Connie_Lingus]

...it is gender bias that most women don't become plumbers either?

Seems to me that the high tech women CEOs

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

have all been massive failures.Well Virginia Rometty hasn't been a massive failure, but she hasn't been a success either.

Smart kids are usually socially awkward

[Tony Isaac]

Face it, smart kids were mercilessly teased in school since a long time before 1994. But being socially awkward, these kids stick to what they ARE good at, like tinkering with computers. This provides an escape for them, since they don't have a clue how to be accepted by others.

Girls tend to mature socially earlier than boys. They DO understand how to relate to others socially, and they don't want any part of the kind of treatment they see their smart male friends enduring. So...they do the smart thing...they stay away.

Is this all a terrible injustice? Probably. But we shouldn't be blaming the men. They are the ones who stuck with their quest despite the pressure. If there is anyone to blame, blame Hollywood, which (at the time) produced movie after movie reinforcing the "nerd" stereotype.

Re:Inventing gaps

[istartedi]

Good point. You left out the generation gap, and of course The Gap, which derived its name from the generation gap because it was selling casual clothing to Boomers.

That is how it really was in 1994

[dbIII]

I thought it was serious until I read that students showed up at Stanford in 1994 barely knowing what email was

That is how it was.


In early 1994 I was writing technical reports with a pen and giving them to a typist. By the end of the year it improved, I could type them up to save on a floppy disk to give to typists who would adjust them to the organisations style and then print them out, then I would glue photographs onto the reports and they would be distributed. I'm not sure if we got email in that year or in 1996 - that's for a group of engineers and scientists supporting electricity generation and distibution for an entire state.
So that's a bunch of university graduates, let alone undergraduates, that did not have email. We'd heard of email, we'd seen email, and I knew people who had email in the late 1980s and was jealous - but we did not have access to email at the start of 1994. Even quite a few University CS departments only gave staff and postgraduate students email access.

Re: That is how it really was in 1994

[dbIII]

Wow, sorry you were late to the game. I started using email in 1984, and that was in Wisconsin.

I wasn't late, you were just one of the early adopters. It's just another example of how telecommunications monopolies suck fetid dogs balls and how in a lot of places email access was not available at any price while in others it was long established.
Not even the CS undergraduates at a university near me had email in 1994 - it was decided there were too many of them so the email access that earlier classes had was revoked.

It is very simple

[dbIII]

White males are overrepresented in tech fields when contrasted with non-white, non-male, or neither-white-nor-male workers.

White males had more options to follow the money, and when the money started turning up in IT they squeezed the women out of the profession.
It's a cultural thing which we are perpetuating where employment is by the "best fit" instead of by ability. That's how we ended up with programmer pits filled with chest beating little boys in the shape of men acting like the stockbrokers that geeks used to make fun of - stupidly toxic testosterone culture of gun nut "alpha males" that could barely survive a camping trip.
A bit of diversity stops such fucking stupid oneupmanship and makes the workplace a bit less feral. If you have nobody to respect apart from someone exactly like yourself you get stagnant. A few older people, people from completely different fields, people with different upbringings etc keep you out of a rut - and a gender mix stops the place from degenerating into a drunken toga party.

Re:It is very simple

[misexistentialist]

Go ahead and start a company using black women if men are just poseurs. No doubt it will be a very relaxed and quiet environment...

Re:It is very simple

[Sarius64]

Because obviously they're all guilty of something whether you can prove it or not. Burn the warlocks!

the internet happened

[anyaristow]

post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.

So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.

The internet happened. Online venues (like slashdot) became places where self-selection happens. Being mostly male to begin with, that's the direction online forums went. More and more pure. This is where people exploring an interest in technology go, and learn it's a field where it's acceptable to say the kind of shit that gets up-moderated here. Fewer women enter the field. Online forums become more pure. Rinse and repeat.

Keyword = 'Diversity'

[Taco Cowboy]

Whenever I scan a document or an article and the word 'Diversity' pops up ... sigh!, yet another useless Political Correctness piece of crap!

The theme is always the same --- no matter if it's tech, or business, or wealth, or whatever-you-can-think-of, their basic argument is that someone has been _WRONGED_ and we must do everything to right the wrong, to make sure that the disenfrenchised party is disenfrenchised no more !

The 'common theme' is 'GAP', and the adjective can be 'racial', or 'gender', or 'wealth', or whathaveyou

They never care to address the WHY, they only want to talk about the "injustice"

The society is not going forward if every time they come up with something new the rest of us have to stop everything in order to 'help the disenfrenchised'

Re:Keyword = 'Diversity'

[Bite The Pillow]

Every article I have read, and its over 20 in the past 6 months, has some attempt to ask why. Maybe a quote from an expert, or study, or at the least then a vague statement that people are asking questions.

The point of this article seems to be examining what happened at one place when tech became popular. It's the addressing of the why, or at least one attempt to explain it.

You seem to have a hair trigger on this issue, and I encourage you to reevaluate how your perspective fits in.

Re:Keyword = 'Diversity'

[Sarius64]

No, really, now they have evidence that diversity somehow makes more money. Especially for diversity pimps.

The gender gap is female choice.

[Karmashock]

Either force women to join the tech industry by law or there will always be a gender gap... oh unless you lobotomize men so they can't even do it if they want to do it.

Short of that... gender gap is forever. Women don't want to do it - so they don't.

Re:The gender gap is female choice.

[serviscope_minor]

Except that's not true: until the 80s, women did want to do it.

10 years is far too short a time to be explained by genetics. Hell, it's not even one generation. So, what happened? Something about the environment must have changed. It may be good or bad, but either way, banal comments like that are just dripping work ignorance if the actual facts.

Re:The gender gap is female choice.

[Karmashock]

Except for it is because women were never excluded from technical education in the last 20 years or so.

And even RIGHT NOW they are not taking these courses.

So are universities sexist? The same universities that passed "yes means yes"?

The unis are if anything biased towards women which can be shown through a large number of statistics. If women wanted to do computer science, they would.

They don't.

Here you have the option of turning tail and scurrying away or backing up that "ignorance" charge. I assure you, if you stay put long enough, I will nail a dunce cap to your pointy little head. ;-)

Your move, chester.

Re:The gender gap is female choice.

[serviscope_minor]

You can try with the dunce cap, but you'll have to be quicker than that.

If you actually read my post, instead of assuming a meaning and replying to that, you'll see that you've mostly posted non sequiturs. I did not label the situation add good or bad, so you cannot accuse me of bias in that regard.

It is indisputably not due to genetics as ten years is too short. So, I ask again, what had changed?

The fact that you jumped from that question to one of your customary rants indicated very singly that you have a substantial axe to grind.

Re:The gender gap is female choice.

[Karmashock]

The primary change is that additional career opportunities opened up for women.

Prior to that change, women were often restricted to clerical positions in corporations and computer programming was deemed clerical. So effectively, women that applied for programming courses were actually applying for training to be super clerks or master typists effectively.

When additional career opportunities opened up they chose careers they found more rewarding or interesting.

As to genetics, I do not believe women are incapable of doing the work. To the contrary, I think women have certain advantages especially in our society that simply make them choose things they'd rather do that the men they're competing against cannot do.

There are genetic reasons for this... amongst them, women have more generalized talents where as men tend to be specialized. This is both genetic and neurological. Men that are genius mathematicans for example tend to be poor poets. Women that are genius mathematicians tend to be equally gifted in several if not many different things. This is largely because men in our species are the lab rats.

Women have much more normalized mutations and tend to have a much stronger bell curve around the middle of the of human ability. Men still tend to cluster around the middle but they are far more likely to be either geniuses or idiots. This covers a variaty of mutations beyond the mental as well.

Men are the dispensable sex. You can lose 90 percent of the male population in a generation and have no impact at all on the next generation's size. That sort of death toll is unusual but a very high death toll in the Bronze age for example saw some appaulling survival rates for men. The survival rates for women have always been greater because they are protected. Men literally die to protect them by default. And that is simply a cultural expression of a genetic survival strategy that goes back before we gained awareness.

That has consequences. And a result is that there are more men with the aptitude to do the work. There are many women with the aptitude as well... however, as stated above they tend to have far more options then the men.

Beyond all this, what you have to admit is that this is happening WELL before companies ever have an opportunity to hire a woman. The companies are not causing this to happen. The women are completely free to choose CS classes and they do not in the same numbers that men do EVEN when they outnumber men in the university.

What is more, the choice appears to happen well before they even reach college. The boys that go into CS tend to have years of experience with computers long before they take those course which gives them an advantage.

This is not going to change unless you mandate that women take these courses by law or custom and then take these jobs.

If you're not willing to do that then you might as well stick your thumb up your ass and sing show tunes. It is equally likely to get the result you're going for here.

*facepalm* No, it didn't

[wonkey_monkey]

Tech's Gender Gap Started At Stanford

No it didn't. It started when tech started, at which point males and females had already been different from each other, on average, for millions of years. Might as well talk about the mammoth-hunting gender gap.

Gender discrimination, now, that's something else. But I don't think that started at Stanford in 1994, either.

Why take it personally?

[dbIII]

Why take it personally when the problem is the peer group?

Lets talk about

[ruir]

Gap gender in nurses, kindergaten, teachers and hairdressers. Fuck this sexism and the fake political correctness.

Re:Lets talk about

[serviscope_minor]

Go ahead: you start.

Why do you expect a tech website to discuss issues in other industries? And what to bad biases in other industries have to do with biases in tech? Other industries having opposite biases just means there are more crappy things. It doesn't excuse the tech industry in any way.

Summarised glibly as: two wrongs don't make a right.

Re:Lets talk about

[ruir]

You know very well what I meant. God forbids we talk about situations where other than male whites are in a good light, but everyone knows they do exist. This fucking posts are just political in nature and have a clearly goal of laying ground for quotas. If it comes to that, lets do that in all professions than.

Re:Lets talk about

[serviscope_minor]

Like I said: go ahead. I was offering you the opportunity to start. Instead of taking about it, you instead went off on a rant again.

You're basically seeing feminist conspiracies where there are none.

Like I said, this is a tech website. I know I abstract that a large gender gap in nursing in primary education is a bad thing. However, I know little about either field and frankly aren't very interested in them either. I like machines and tech things, which is why I flame here rather than on some nursing website.

But instead of accepting the obvious truth that slashdotters are generally interested in tech, you decided yet again to give your axe a good old grind. You sure it's not you who has the agenda and biases.

Re:Lets talk about

[ruir]

I have always heard that there has to be quotas in good paying and "easy" jobs who predominately are dominated by males. IT people (if that is a good job, but it is an argument for another day), board director members, politicians... but what about quotas for lorry drivers, garbish collectors, nurses, .... you got the idea. It has nothing to do with this being a tech site, it is a society bias you ignore very conveniently. But please, do keep calling me a conspiracy nut.

Re:as someone

[BarbaraHudson]

Women tend to be paid the same amount as men with similar experience. The issue is women leave the work force to have kids and when they return they have five or six fewer years of experience then their peers. Numerous sources for this, you should really stop trotting out that falsified canard.

Absolutely NOT true. Linky

Despite passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which requires that men and women in the same work place be given equal pay for equal work, the "gender gap" in pay persists. Full-time women workers’ earnings are only about 77 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings. The pay gap is even greater for African-American and Latina women, with African-American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a Caucasian man. Decades of research shows that no matter how you evaluate the data, there remains a pay gap — even after factoring in the kind of work people do, or qualifications such as education and experience — and there is good evidence that discrimination contributes to the persistent pay disparity between men and women. In other words, pay discrimination is a real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange American women and their families.

In other words, 51 years after the feds made it illegal to pay people with the same qualifications and experience less, it's still happening. When comparing people with the same qualifications and experience, women get paid less. You saying otherwise won't make it true, especially when a quick search shows otherwise.

Early web?

[FacePlant]

The gender gap was evident in 1984 when I got to college and there were only three females in my Comp. Sci. program.

Utter strawman shit

[dbIII]

parroting feminist talking points

Where did I do that? Oh it's the strawman in your head.

If you weren't so busy seeing muh soggy knees and rapists everywhere

No mention of rapists and whatever "muh soggy knees" is supposed to mean, so once again strawman in your head.

It appears I don't have very much to do with this discussion so why don't you carry it on with yourself offline instead of the stupid fucking cowardly and childish strawman shit in my name?

Also WTF was "Why don't you take it back to jezebel" supposed to mean and WTF did it have to do with either my post or the one above - was it a reply to the strawman in your head again?

you tantrum throwing little poster child

Not the strawman this time, sounds just like you and your rant doesn't it?

It's a pretty sad case when saying something positive about Marie Curie is considered rabid feminism. Would that make me gay if I mentioned Charles Darwin?