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Women in Computing To Decline To 22% by 2025, Study Warns (usatoday.com)
New research warns that at the rate we're going, the number of women in the computing workforce will decline to 22% from 24% by 2025 if nothing is done to encourage more of them to study computer science. From a USA Today report (shared by an anonymous reader): The research from Accenture and nonprofit group Girls Who Code says taking steps now to encourage more women to pursue a computer science education could triple the number of women in computing to 3.9 million in that same timeframe. Women account for 24% of computing jobs today, but could account for 39% by 2025, according to the report, Cracking the Gender Code. And greater numbers of women entering computer science could boost women's cumulative earnings by $299 billion and help the U.S. fill the growing demand for computing talent, said Julie Sweet, Accenture's group chief executive for North America.
If women choose not to go into computing fields, why should they be forced (or even encouraged) to do so?
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
How about letting people pick the field(s) they want to go into without telling them what they "ought" to do based on a pointless metric or percentage?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
humans in computing is on decline.
Putting aside yet another "WE NEEDZ MORE WOMENZ IN IT" crap, did anyone else think "H1B" when they read "growing demand?"
Companies are already doing everything they can to bring in cheaper talent. The "demand" in question has nothing to do with the number of competent and trained talent, but rather the number of competent and trained talent willing to work for peanuts. Encouraging more domestic IT/programming workers to enter the field will only exasperate that, regardless of their plumbing.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I don't understand why they should be "encouraged" to study computer science to just keep up some random statistic vs. encouraging them to do whatever their hearts tell them they should be doing? Stories like this make me so angry because it casts women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices. Whatever...
I suppose by letting everyone choose whatever career they desire.
Women value stability in careers often because they are the ones left holding the domestic bag when the dude flakes on the family.
IT and stability are often at odds. I happened to be in California during the dot-com bust, and had to take scrappy contracts, some out-of-state, to survive.
One's skills are always growing outdated and you have to guess the correct "new thing" to get documented experience in or get left behind again. It's like being the news weather person before satellites: guess right often enough or get booted.
Table-ized A.I.
Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves. Most people suck at programming. Most people suck at just about anything they do. Programming is hardly a glamorous job. Most people are non-technical, illogical and irrational, especially when it comes to their pathetic attempts to do whatever "business" they are trying to get done. For the most part, the only reason they're still in business is because their customers are clueless and their competition is even less competent.
A better question: why are there so many men left in computing? If I wanted to have morons yapping nonsense at me all day I could turn on the TV - no need to go into work.
Plenty of industries (coal mining, nursing, etc) are dominated by one sex, and no one gives a shit. Why should we give a shit about computer science being dominated by men?
Are women in computing declining to 22%?
Or are women in computing increasing to 39%?
http://amarillo.com/opinion/op...
Good paying jobs, and women just don't want them.
So here's what I don't get: there are some programs encouraging women to get into science, technology, computing, etc. I'm not sure how many, but this part is for sure: there's a heck of a lot more now than there were 20 years ago. So if numbers are going down compared to what they were 20 years ago...what are these programs accomplishing? Could these things actually being more harm than good? I'll be honest, I know little of them but I'm pretty sure they're mostly "Hey girls, computing is fun too! hehe" which I can't imagine is terribly effective on anyone.
As usual, no one is bothering to address why this trend may be happening. Just saying "Oh, it must be discrimination and sexism" isn't helpful because it doesn't do anything to fix why that's the case and what can be done about it--and even then, I really doubt girls are saying "I think I'll be treated badly so I won't go into that" because that's not how 17 year olds think. Heck, the acting and singing businesses are even more ruthless than computing is, telling you flat out "you're too short" or "you're not pretty enough" and there's thousands of girls still lining up for that because they believe they'll be the exception. Same goes for job prospects. Most everyone believes she'll be the exception who makes it (PhD programs exist because thousands of smart kids have this very delusion).
So what is it, really?
I suspect that one thing is true is the ratio is a bad true measure of anything. We've had an uptick of H1B's in tech in the past years and I'm guessing that the majority of those positions have gone to men brought in from overseas. That would make growth in men higher than women which would wreck the ratio.
Stories like this make me so angry because it casts women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices.
Well, perhaps you should calm down, stop and actually think. Humans, ALL humans are influenced by outside factors. No man is an island etc etc.
Funnily enough that includes women.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
disclaimer: im just a machinist who likes linux.
we had something similar to this in the late 90s when kickpress workers and fabricators were starting to get replaced by multi-axis milling machines and fluidform/laser. almost overnight we had a crisis where we needed more people who could do CAD/CAM, because while im sure managers saved a bunch of money handing out pink slips to the line workers they were losing a hell of a lot of money on trying to find a good desk jockey who didnt crash tools and wreck parts every hour. Management offered hundred dollar bonuses if we could convince someone to join the team and this worked for a while until someone started complaining about diversity and asking why we didnt have it.
we didnt have black or latino CNC or SPC guys because most of them never saw a promotion. Its not racism --nobody was yelling bigoted obscenities-- but the managers in charge of lining up bonuses and promotions came from an ancient era where brown people were still some subset fraction of an actual person. the ones that got promoted didnt see much of a raise either, at least at the North Carolina shops i worked at. When the diversity hammer started to swing too close to the portly boss-types, they made excuses until retirement. Either they promoted a hard work ethic, or they were trying to drive cost.
and women? we had women but they were all in the office stamping paychecks and handling HR claims, or in shipping. we had welders, good female welders, but management fired them once we started shipping the parts to missouri, then mexico for final weld. The management came down hard on us for creating hostile work environments, and sure in some cases that was true. The worst shop i was in had 3 sexual harassment meetings in a year. But to tell the truth, it was probably the pay or the fact that if you left for maternity, you usually lost your job. I worked at a place that ran an entire diversity job fair for a year before realizing the factory area we worked in never had a womens locker room, so incompetence can certainly be attributed..
but programming? what barriers exist? i mean christ its every day im online seeing courses or classes, or getting some handout from a government agency that encourages me to take a spreadsheet class or something. programming is an office job; is an office a hostile workplace?? why is it so hard to just give someone the damn job so long as they have enough sense not to chooch up the work? why is there a percentage to achieve?
Good people go to bed earlier.
With all the baby boomers being retired in 2030, women — and men — are more likely to go into healthcare than computers.
I would rather encourage young kids to be curious and to have other aspects that may lead to programming and other technology. Pushing programming and coding itself to young girls (boys as well) may turn kids off, where if you encourage things like curiosity, those who end up programming will have done so because they are passionate about it. People who are passionate about it end up being good at it, and we need more girls (and boys) that are actually good at programming.
We cannot state that we need the same representation in the various fields as we have in the general population. Women and men, blacks and whites, hetero and homo, all have different interests for whatever reason. What we need is to ensure that everyone is given an opportunity to try and if they are unsuccessful so be it. Seems to work in sports where the best are hired and retained, why not try this with work and stop with the PC work force demographics BS.
Outside factors are not an issue. If your parents were doctors, maybe you'll follow in their footsteps. If you liked to draw as a child, maybe architecture or animator is for you. Whatever it is. Outside factors help influence a decision, but don't sit there and say that the decision is wrong. It's not yours or anyone else's to make.
I'm angry because this story casts their decisions to enter whatever they do instead of computer science as misguided. No one is keeping them from deciding to enter Computer Science. It's just not the choice they prefer. I'm sure automobile mechanics are also low on their choices, but you don't see people freaking out to "help them make the right decision" there, do you?
Information Technology and Computer Science need to be entirely split up. This within itself will virtually entirely solve the problem. The problem right now is that they're treated as one in the same, with the same requirements for entirely different jobs. The programs in school focus specifically on short algorithm design for things like tree searching or solving various mathematical principals. In the real world, however, the primary focus is on finding solutions to either business logic problems or finding new ways for users to interact with their devices and the environment around them. The CS side focuses primarily on the mathematics of computing, while IT focus more on the logical side of computing. Developing a great and simple API doesn't require much of a math background, but needs quite a bit of logical thinking. But again, as stated initially, the schools are only focusing on the mathematical side, which correlates to an extremely small part of the actual tech sector, with the logical side being the majority of the jobs in the workplace. Schools need to finally get their shit together and teach the industry, rather than teach what some particular program is more or less forced upon them by a very few companies that dont fully represent the industry.
So is all that recent pitchforking about how women aren't /in/ tech working then? Is encouraging them to "have a career in tech" producing good fruits here, or is that a factor in the decline? Are we going to be losing the percentage 5-year women in tech or are we going to be losing the percentage of women that have been working in it since the 90s that were quite content with their careers before we started making their gender the primary focus?
I realize that's not the popular question set, but that's usually the best reason to answer such questions.
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Keeping the IT lights on is a thankless job. When everything works well, few people care about IT. When SHTF, everyone blames the "useless" IT department.
Couple this with the influx of H1B workers and wage stagnation, why on earth would anyone want to do this job?
Women close to me in demanding jobs like teaching or nursing say they find those careers challenging and fulfilling. When I ask them about technology work, they make a face and say - no thanks.
Maybe it's OK that men and women are actually different and they have differing tastes in work. Maybe the SJW's of the world simply need to be OK with that.
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
Men in nursing has been increasing for a while, although the figures are still pretty small.
But rising at a pretty good rate: http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/releases/2013/cb13-32_figure1-hi.jpg
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
How is this possible. There are dozens of government programs, corporate program, and not profit programs all pushing "Women in Tech". Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent encouraging women to join the tech field. In a society the is getting ever less sexist. And for all this the participation rate is going down?
Maybe these groups should reevaluate what they are doing and try to understand why women aren't interested in joining the tech workforce. It's seems crying sexism at every opportunity is not an effective strategy.
And what if the conditions of work are preventing them? And I'm not just talking about the "usual" conditions like a lack of affordable daycare and the like which often keep women from better employment. What if there are certain groups within this industry, or in any industry really, who are hostile to women being there?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As an avid viewer of Deadliest Catch, I am troubled by the lack of female representation aboard Alaskan crab fishing vessels. Women should be encouraged to enter this lucrative filed where they are grossly underrepresented. Of course, that would involve risking their lives and destroying their bodies like men do, while being isolated from their families for months at a time, so I doubt the women's studies departments will be pushing for this.
I get the feeling that the people who are troubled by women's underrepresentation in STEM fields and C-suites somehow view this as women missing out on easy money, when that couldn't be further from the truth. These fields typically require huge sacrifices in terms of time and stress, not to mention isolation. Men seem more willing to accept these sacrifices because we're taught to do that from a very young age. We become providers (wallets) and sacrifice our time as nurturers within the family because it is expected of us. Women can't expect to take on these roles without the downsides that come with them, and the lack of women in certain fields is likely a reflection of women valuing family time over work time.
I don't understand why they should be "encouraged" to study computer science to just keep up some random statistic vs. encouraging them to do whatever their hearts tell them they should be doing? Stories like this {snip} cast women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices. Whatever...
I came here to post the same thing, except for the "makes me angry" part.
I've worked in IT for over 2 decades. This may have existed back in the late 80's, possibly even into the very early 90's, but since about 1995 has been a fallacy perpetrated by those with an agenda to cast this industry as somehow sexist or backwards. If there are any people left who are still truly hostile to females in IT that haven't been weeded out through attrition, harassment claims, or other HR procedures, they must be really good at hiding how they truly feel and therefore it isn't really an issue anymore.
Stop being disingenuous and perpetrating "what if" scenarios to further a divisive agenda you know is going to lose, anyway.
If other people's opinions are enough to discourage you, then you have a weak spine and won't succeed at anything you do.
Affirmative Action was never about anything other than political correctness dressed up as a statistic that can be changed by government.
There are women in Construction, but the overwhelming members of that industrty are ... men - No outcry ... women. - No outcry ... men. - No outcry
There are men in Nursing, but the overwhelming members of nursing field are
There are women in police and fire, but the overwhelming members are
The terrible thing is, that when we tell women "You can be whatever you want" and then despise them for being what many of them want to be (moms) ; we are doing a huge disservice to women .Women are special, just as men are. They just tend to be specialized in different areas. Everyone being the "same" isn't progressive, it is enslavement.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Outside factors are not an issue.
Bullshit they ain't. Summon Captain Anecdote!
I was talking to my officemate a couple of months ago about relational databases (she was doing a course on them). I prefer to think about things in a quite mathematical way, and I was trying t ooffer some insight in that direction. Turns out she apparently used to be decent at maths but dropped it after being told repeatedly in school words t othe effects of "maths isn't for girls".
So perhaps you'd like to go and explain to her how outside factors are not an issue.
. Outside factors help influence a decision
Wait... didn't you just say they're not a factor? Please do try to make up your mind.
It's just not the choice they prefer.
Aaaand we're back to it not mattering.
Honestly, you seem to be trying to rationalize something or other to me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So if there were outside factors that biologically predisposed men and women towards different career paths or interests would you accept that those might result in something other than an even distribution of employment in certain vocations?
I already have a feeling that the answer is no, because you've already reached your conclusion and are just filling in everything else after the fact.
First off, I'm a little skeptical believing anything coming out of Accenture as a non-biased study, same way a Gartner magic quadrant rating is basically a paid-for advertisement.
Next, women are smart. They see programmers, admins, etc. being tossed out of work above the age of 40, having to constantly grind on skills training and being one mistaken specialization away from being out of a job. They also see industry offshoring every single job they possibly can in pursuit of lower costs. Women and men starting out in their careers need to be shown there's a future in tech or else no one is going to want to go into it. If you're smart enough to get perfect grades and perfect MCAT scores, there's absolutely no reason to not go to medical school and become a doctor. Medicine and some other licensed/regulated health care work is and will be the last protected, stable high paying profession left in the US. Why would you slave away in an IT or developer job only to be tossed out in 15-20 years, while your doctor friends are contemplating which boat will fit best in the dock next to their waterfront mansion? Right now the answer is that tech jobs do offer a decent salary for the work, but that stability thing is a killer. I'd rather be a licensed professional who's able to name their own price and whose competition will be kept to a reasonable number by law than be disposable.
Women are rational creatures, and want stable work for themselves and their families. I'm a little cynical, but it seems like Accenture might be trying to ensure there's a steady flow of new recruits. Their entire business model is shipping 25 year old "consultants" around the country, men and women, to project manage and direct their Indian techies to "do the needful" from remote. The company's business model is up-or-out, and it works just like school does, so it's tailor-made for fresh grads with no work experience. If that pipeline is stopped, Accenture's entire cost structure goes up because they have to start hiring experienced people.
New research warns that at the rate we're going, the number of men in the nursing workforce will decline to 22% from 24% by 2025 if nothing is done to encourage more of them to study nursing science.
This tragic result of institutional discrimination shows no sign of improvement in the immediate future. Beginning at childhood and continuing throughout the educational system, there is little incentive given boys to study nursing. Those who do are often discriminated against by employers and even patients. Legislators have failed to recognize the problem or offer incentives for equal rights for boys.
...omphaloskepsis often...
So if there were outside factors that biologically predisposed men and women towards different career paths
That makes no sense. A biological predisposition would be an internal factor not an external one. An external one is other people and circumstances influencing you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
After endlessly repeating the message, "Women need to be encouraged to work in this field because they don't naturally have much interest in it", who could blame them for wanting nothing to do with it? No one wants the first thought people have of you to be, "Is this a professional or just the diversity hire?"
Could also have something to do with not wanting to work unreasonable hours just to eventually be replaced by an H1B.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Choice is an interesting thing. We like to think that our choices are free because we control them, but important decisions such as career goals aren't really about all the possibilities. They typically boil down to risk/reward.
It is based on what we see as "risk". I fooled around with computers for years before college, and I excelled in math and science. There was low risk in going into CS, and high reward given its demand. But someone without those childhood experiences might have considered the risk too high. Their chosen path may have less reward but much less risk.
Exposure undeniably makes a impact on how we view our choices. When someone's exposure only includes fields with low reward, we can't expect them to deny the risk associated with career goals that are unfamiliar.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
why is it a "problem" to you? This is america, not china, we let our kids do what they want and be what they want here
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So the answer to the question is "Yes, we're a back of sexist assholes where I work, so women should just put up with pricks because 'spines'!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Outside factors are not an issue.
If every role model of a programmer you see until you're a teenager is male.
If computer programmer Barbie involves the girl doing some design, but the actual coding being done by boys.
If every children's TV show that includes both women and computers has the woman saying computers are hard and the man solving the problems.
If all of the clever boys at your school are encouraged into extracurricular activities involving computers, but the girls aren't.
I'm sure it would have no impact at all on you.
If you don't think that this is real, then sit down for a couple of hours this evening and watch two hours of children's TV. Count the number of male vs female lead roles. Count the number of times anyone builds anything and whether it's done by a male or female character.
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So if there were outside factors that biologically predisposed men and women towards different career paths or interests would you accept that those might result in something other than an even distribution of employment in certain vocations?
This doesn't make sense. The differences are either innate (biological) or the result of external factors. If they're the result of external factors (i.e. not biological) then they're likely to be amenable to change. The fact that the participation of women varies hugely between cultures (for example, in India, Korea, Israel, Iran, and Lithuania, Romania, it's a lot higher) implies strongly that external factors are far more of a reason why we have so few women than anything biological.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I wish half as much time and money was spent on men. We have male high school and college graduation rates at record lows and well below that of women which strikes me as far more important problem than a lack of women in a single field of business. Shoot, no one even talks about how few men become teachers when many studies show boys learn better from men than women (it's the same for female teachers and girls).
Dont get me wrong, having a good ratio of women in a workplace team is a good thing as it brings different perspectives, I just feel i hear a ton about the lack of women in computing and virtually nothing about a far more serious problem.
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In other news....we're also seen SEVERE declines of men entering the workforce as Hooters waitstaff.
Hooters need to hire more lady boys to fill out all those hot pants.
He's not complaining about choice, but that we're apparently telling women they are making the WRONG CHOICE.
And, oddly, blaming the men for making them choose wrong too.
Actually, I see quite the opposite more often. A lot of TV shows are making quite an effort to change the gender stereotypes. Nowadays you see more females doing the tech or science jobs and roles on kids TV shows than you do males. Obviously not working, there are other societal factors at work, or kids are smart enough to realize those characters are exceptions meant to reverse the rule.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
No problem of this nature is fixed by forcing people to change. The only way is to stick it out in the hostile environment until you are a majority. Then you can change the situation simply by acting differently. When you're the majority, you set the tone.
That's assuming there's a problem to begin with, of course.
It's not that women are not choosing to go into computer fields. It's that they are being SCARED off by being told how horrible it is for women - even though I cannot think of any field in which women are generally treated better, and respected for knowledge.
I agree we should let people choose what interest them but women currently are being painted a very false picture of what being in the computer industry is like, leading to misinformed choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So if there were outside factors that biologically predisposed men and women towards different career paths or interests would you accept that those might result in something other than an even distribution of employment in certain vocations?
Studies have shown that female programmers write more efficient code on average than male programmers. Now, I'm not going to say this makes women better than men at programming, it could be, you have to be really focused to be a woman going into a male dominated profession.
However, it does show that there is definitely reason to doubt that males are biologically better at it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's ridiculously-hard to become a male nurse. In many cases, there are only a handful of male nurses on a medical campus--I've seen as low as two at one school. Somehow it was decided they didn't have girlfriends; none of the girls would date them, because they spent most of their time on-campus and didn't have many prospective young men to pick from.
You can imagine the demands on time.
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time to cut H1B's and the 60+ hour work week!
in EU the Working Time Directive is in place.
It also sounds like what happens to men in tech, too.
ack of affordable daycare
I don't see this as a problem for women who work in software engineering as much as women who work in lower paying professions. In this field it is still profitable to use day-care and work, at least for the few years that you need day-care before school starts.
What does hurt is taking time off for maternity, to a small degree, or taking a few years off for child-rearing to a large degree. That is a more fair criticism, technology moves very fast and the women who are in it do have a problem catching up with N years of being out of date.
What if there are certain groups within this industry, or in any industry really, who are hostile to women being there?
Please out these groups, I have not seen anything like this. What I do see is that I've interviewed exactly 1 woman in almost 20 years. There is no supply, whatever is happening seems to be happening downstream of the corporate world, in colleges or below.
You're right that we shouldn't care about some random statistic...but we should be interested enough in these random statistics to ask the question "Why is that happening?" I mean, if someone told me that 25% fewer men were going to choose to become doctors, that would make me wonder why. That's a pretty big shift regardless of gender or profession.
Personally, I don't think we're doing such a bang-up job in the IT field. Take the frequent reports of mass compromises. Take the latest DDoS by video cameras of all things. I think we should care that the best people to go into the field do, if they want to, absent any outside influence.
So, do I want to artificially nudge the stats so we have 50% male/50% female? No, not at all. Stuff like this should spur us to ask why it's happening, though, and if it's due to some outside influence (like we're systemically dissuading women in technology), then yes, we should do something about it.
Alright, anecdotal evidence is always dodgy, but here's mine.
I have an intern working with me right now who is a bright, talented, hardworking young woman. She's been interviewing at a variety of shops and found one that looked really good for a junior software engineer. Lot's of flexibility about the kind of work you do etc.
She was talking to one of the HR types and they felt the need to inform her that there were multiple generations of engineer there, and that some of the older engineers sometimes said things like, "Women don't belong in programming." And that she should just ignore it.
Now, whether any engineer there actually said that, someone from inside the company felt the need to tell her that they would, and told her the right behavior was to just put up with it. No matter how you cut that, it does not scream "Welcoming environment".
Have you talked to any nurses? There's a large demand for male nurses.
no, because men can still choose to be house husbands.
The barrier doesn't exist. Computers are ubiquitous. There are tons of free development tools, tutorials, forums to ask questions. If you really want to get into it, you'll already be playing around with code.
The fact is that programming is a shit field over the long term. If I had to do it over again, I would have just kept it as something to toy around with.
Doesn't matter how many women you try to push in the field - the vast majority change to another field within 10 years.
Over the long term, it's better than being forced out in 20 years by the beancounters because you're perceived as too old (both sexes) and they can get someone younger cheaper.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Can you explain why a perceived or actual lack of females in IT matters? Is the economy worse off? Are women raped more often because of it? Is it the cause of Trump's rise to power? Is it causing the moral decay of Western Civilization?
Simple. IT and computer technologies jobs tend to be major time suckers, where sacrificing your personal time for staying late and delivering on ever reducing timelines is valued.
Women simply don't fall for that trap, while men do. Mostly because we men are dumber and because we do it for "honor" (being a team player, a good engineer, whatever).
But the ideologues believe (which is good for furthering their cause) it's because men in IT are mysoginist a*holes.
Biased, yes, but not how you think.
Big Tech are colluding to deflate wages by trying to get more people into competition for jobs. Diversity is just a buzzword to get everyone to do their work for them. H1Bs are not quite the gold mine they were hoping for.
The lack of women in tech has mostly been because of natural aptitude/interest. Whether that's mostly cultural, or due to divergent brain development based on hormonal differences. You can't really convince someone to become interested - only nurture the interest that is actually there.
Maybe in Silly Valley.
Most of my coworkers in Silicon Valley are pro-Hillary.
I don't think I've ever met a female plumber.
I have and she was 100% dyke.
I wonder how they come across that estimate of tripling women in 'computing workforce', has there been any measurable success in the current efforts that are literally everywhere? What happens if we include only ethical means?
Women are known to over-represent to PM. There was a phenomena for a while that women were shit for programming and other similar tasks, but always seemed to know everything that was going on around them--so they moved them out of their jobs and made them keep track of everyone else's jobs. When we started targeting formalized project management (PMI certifications and approaches), they only got better at it, somehow, for no reason known to me (I haven't looked too hard).
The end result is the big names in Project Management are Tres Roeder (Male, original proponent of Stakeholder Management) and Rita Mulcahy (female, dead, still considered the leader in PMI education); and many of the detailed books on project management processes and procedures are written by women. Men in project management have a large tendency to lean toward authority--they use older processes, repeat what's worked in the past (experience = authority), and bank on the understanding that they're in charge and that means something--while women seem to lean on processes and order, incorporating new ideas more-readily.
I have no idea why this happens, but it's a thing. There are flighty women who have no clue what's happening around them, and there are men who are actually serious about optimizing their approach to PM; but the general trend is women are more high-powered project managers, and men are largely sedentary and lean on processes they've used in the past coupled with the wielding of authority to demand people simply get shit done somehow.
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Look, the answer is simple. Hire women. Promote them. Stop whining about how they don't show up at your frat parties and won't be your girlfriends.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It is up to you to demonstrate there is evidence of a 'problem'. A statistic that simply says that there are less women than men in a given area is not evidence of a 'problem'. You've suggested there is a 'hostility' to women working in a given field...PROVE IT. Hell, you have to prove that 'affordable daycare' is a requirement to support more women getting in to any given field as well. Why? Well, how about the fact that no woman HAS to decide to have children for one thing. Secondly, having children is still by & large a 'shared decision & responsibility' between 2 people. If 2 people decide to have kids and further decide that the woman will by & large stay home more often to take care of the kids or otherwise impact their work behaviour to care for the kids that's THEIR choice. Thirdly, women seem to be a large factor in the work force today and in many areas they dominate, e.g. teaching, nursing/medical care in general etc. Professions that require physical locality to the job, and no one seems to be screaming about the lack of women in those fields, whereas in computing fields many people can work remotely providing them far greater freedom of choice in how they address daycare issues (assuming those are valid anyway).
Now, having said that I have no problem with 'promoting' a field of study to anyone who wants to get in to it & wants to know more about it as a 'educational value benefit'. On the other hand any technique that biases selection of candidates in a field based on factors other than a meritocracy are by definition discriminatory. I don't see anything of that nature here so I don't see why anyone would be 'hot' on this topic in this article.
Perhaps it's because of the feminists, who do not actually code, but are simply sexist. They've turned the workspace into a battleground, and they're making everyone uncomfortable.
When are these people going to be branded as a hate group and incarcerated? It's way past time.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
That's true for every field in one way or another. In the long run, every job is something that can eventually be outsourced, replaced by robots, or both. Getting ahead financially is about playing the percentages, picking something that pays well and that you can stand, and saving up as much money as you can for the inevitable drought later.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
what school? 1950s alabama?
what programmers are role models?
greater numbers of women entering computer science could boost women's cumulative earnings by $299 billion and help the U.S. fill the growing demand for computing talent
Wasn't there a recent article on these jobs going away along with a list of down sizing already this year? That doesn't sound like a growing demand.
This is a simple question of physiology - girls can't grow neckbeards, therefore they can't reach pinnacle of programming career.
Not my issue. It's clear to me that anyone writing about computers for movies and television have no actual clue what it's really about, and I don't think they're interested in getting it right.
Income disparities encourage people to enter fields they would not otherwise select. If this study is correct even with the inflated wages in a number of tech fields, is a government program or an "awareness" effort going to change that? Why do we insist on goalseeking to 50-50 gender split in engineering disciplines but not other fields like medicine?
I have no idea why the split is what it is, and neither does anyone else. But it is not de facto evidence of discrimination or improper socialization.
Studies have shown that female programmers write more efficient code on average than male programmers.
Can we please have a link to those 'studies'? Because I find this remark exceedingly sexist and I wonder if you aren't just making things up.
Yeah I didn't make a ton of sense. What I meant by not an issue is that there are no problems with what goes into a decision. We have to trust women (and everyone in general) to make the decisions with the information they have.
Counterpoint: Could it be that depending on race, the differences between the sexes is mitigated or exacerbated?
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
RMS is my role model.
Why should anybody need to be "hard" to have a fucking job in an IT department? Why does one need a "spine"? Are you fucking incapable of treating coworkers decently? Do you have some sort of mental disorder that requires you to be a fucking twat?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The truth of the matter that often goes ignored is that in countries with HIGHER gender equality, fewer women go into tech.
Why? Because when women have options, they'd rather do different things.
When women don't have options, they go in to tech, and do well.
The fact that we're supposed to deny that men and women enjoy different things is what's most offensive about this entire debate.
Men's TV shows, magazines, books, games, activities and music are *all* notably different across the board than their female counterparts.
The notion that this is the product of the "patriarchy" is what is offensive.
Men and women have different bodies. Different brains. Different chemistry. Different emotions. Different illnesses. Different goals.
Why on earth would we have the same career choices?
In and of itself, it may not be an issue, but when the justification for the lower number of women in IT is "they need to grow a spine", then maybe, just maybe, there are actual job place factors involved.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The participation rate of women in the world of HAM radio has been a consistent 11% across the entire world for the last hundred years. That includes all cultures.
So you're saying that bcause she didn't completely wreck her career on the say-so of teachers (something you're speculating about of course), then her anecdote is somehow wrong?
unless the same person was also telling her relational databases are for girls and not math?!!!
Given she was looking at relational databases now, about 20 years after leaving school, I'd strongly suspect her teachers didn't tell her anything about relational databases.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I am all for equal opportunity, and that means those women that _want_ to go into computing should not face greater hurdles than the men that want the same. But why aim for 50%? That strikes me as a "cargo cult" approach where not any potential issues are targeted, but merely statistical numbers. This will, rather obviously, not solve any issues and it will push women into a field where rather obviously most do not want to go. How that could be perceived as a good thing is beyond me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And the only conclusion you can reach is that women are incompetent and "not interested". Have you ever pondered that people with attitudes like yours might be part of the problem?
I'm a guy. I can program competently. But I hate doing it so I don't have a programming job. In my life experience men and women tend to enjoy different things and in different ways, the two genders are equal but obviously different. What if the majority of women who could be competent programmers just don't want to do that job because (like this guy) they find programming uncomfortable and unpleasant? How do we find the truth of the matter (especially with so much political correctness muddying things up)?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Any problems that still exist in IT still exist in any "traditionally male" industries and occupations. And it's not just females that are affected, it's any special snowflake.
We can't single out IT and say how sexist and terrible its constituents are when I'm sure there are still much worse places (harassment-wise, etc.) for snowflakes like refineries, steel mills, oil rigs, railroads, heavy equipment repair, and probably almost any other blue collar job where you get dirty or risk your life.
Saying that the snowflakes get treated worse in a cube farm full of programmers than literally any of those other places is doing a disservice to the real women working in those other fields every day busting their asses. The difference? Your average millennial snowflake doesn't want to be a millwright, work on an oil rig, repair railroad tracks or become a tradesman. Why? Because (unlike tech) it isn't perceived as glorious, you have to deal with extremes of temperature, you can't become famous doing it, you can't sit on your ass and tweet all day about how oppressed you are while doing it, you probably won't get rich (but you'll earn a very comfortable living) and you sure as hell can't be a SJW idiot if you want to survive (literally, in many of those places) the first month on the job.
Yet, women have been working in all of those jobs for generations now. The problem isn't sexism or discrimination or harassment (which again, the HR departments and years of sensitivity training have pretty much taken care of), it's the softness of the last two generations of humans. They've been taught that feelings must be preserved above all else, above self, above country, above safety, and above security. In the traditional blue-collar industries I've mentioned above, anyone who makes it past training and the first week on the job will realize, right quick, that the safety of you and your crew is the number one priority. Feelings be damned. Does it matter if someone hurt your feelings if they got you out of a serious jam alive?
Now, in IT, it may not be life or death, but you might make a bad decision and decide to preserve someone's feelings and lose your career or promotion over it. You might lose your business a ton of money if a critical system goes offline or worse. And that isn't cool, we shouldn't have to lie to people and tell them they're good at something they aren't if they actually aren't good at it because of some protected status (or worse yet, feelings). There are plenty of women throughout history who have found great success in traditionally male fields. There are probably a lot who (for whatever reason) couldn't cut it and decided to move on. We are at a critical juncture right now where we decide what's more important: feelings or honesty. Hurting someone's feelings isn't always malicious, unwarranted, nor is it discrimination, in fact, it's one of the few things that even to me (as a man) can reach me when I'm sure I'm right and I'm really not. It's part of growing and being an adult.
So, are we going to embrace being an adult, growing up, and being responsible for making good decisions? Or are we going to embrace a permeating culture of perpetual adolescence where everyone gets a trophy and we base someone's worth not on what they produce or they can create or build, but on how many oppression points they can collect for themselves or how many times you signal your virtue to those holding those points? Women should work wherever they want to work, it shouldn't matter what percentage of them work where, it's their decision to determine whether they can cut it or not in a certain field. And saying they somehow shouldn't be left to decide their own future and destiny for themselves is positively the most sexist thing I've ever heard.
That we should trust women to make their own choices? Was that it?
So you are saying that it is sex dependent?
So women aren't interested in programming without being "convinced". Fine by me. Let's work on male teachers in elementary schools, female janitors, women in american ninja warrior, male housekeepers, female chefs, and, oh, I don't know, construction workers, painters, general contractors, babysitters, brick-layers, landscapers, fire fighters, lumberjacks, and film directors.
Ah, free money. Be sure you give me some too.
There's this little thing called google that slashdotters need to learn to use!
Here's one article: https://www.theguardian.com/te...
If you want one of the other articles on similar studies done I suggest you learn to google. Here is a great resource for learning how to google:
http://searchengineland.com/gu...
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
My HR department is 100% female.
...but it's difficult when the rest of the world (including the people who are ostensibly trying to solve the problem) is busy conspiring to convince them that IT isn't for them.
Girls tend to as much of an interest in math and science as boys until fairly early on in grade school (I feel like it was 3rd grade or so). It seems to me that there's a lot of cultural pressure -- much of it from women -- pushing young girls away from STEM fields and into other areas of study. The aforementioned people who are ostensibly trying to solve the problem are blaming the IT industry, when in fact this happens much too early for the supposed culture of IT to have much of anything to do with it. Get girls and young women interested in IT and get people used to seeing them interested in IT, and the cultural issues will age out of the population as young IT professionals grow up used to being surrounded by both men and women.
The trouble is that the primary group of people looking into this issue is that they start out with the conclusion that men are uniquely at fault for the gender gap in IT and then go looking for evidence to support that,
My sister is a mechanical engineer... she works with a lot of H1Bs who are very respectful although they probably refer to her as the Mistress of Darkness behind her back.
There were other women in her class but she was the only women to graduate that year... while taking a welding class a piece of molten metal somehow manged to make it past her apron, her shirt, an under shirt, and into her bra... one of the guys pulled out his pocket knife and cut her shirt and bra off in front of a dozen guys she was both grateful and completely embarrassed. Afterwards I was out at one of the local bars with her and some guys from that class where offering to cut her bra off...
So you are saying that it is sex dependent?
It could be. There really isn't any evidence either way. There have been several big media stories on studies in the last few years showing women may be better than men.
None of them are truly convincing, as I said, it could be you have to be the best of your gender to compete in a field that is dominated by the alternate sex. (Many of the top hairdressers, and clothes designers are men despite being the minority sex... not because men are better, but for same reason)
However, I don't think it is unreasonable to say that men and women are better at different things. Men just might not be better at programming.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Why would women specifically want to go into a job where you work long hours and at all times of the day and for mediocre wages for the required skill set and are forced to compete for a shrinking number of opportunities with foreign workers whose cost of living is 10% of yours and for corporations who get tax breaks to hire them?
If every role model of a programmer you see until you're a teenager is male.
The only age-appropriate programmer role model I can think of offhand from when I was a kid and teen is the girl in Jurassic Park. And later on, let's see... well, there was Edward from Cowboy Bebop. I'm trying to think of a good male example as a strong character (not a pathetic clown), but nothing is coming to me. When it comes to positive computer programmer role models in the stuff I watched growing up, females are honestly the first thing I think of. Male programmers are usually portrayed, first and foremost, as creatures of pity.
Also, I'm curious if you are at all concerned about our profound lack of female sanitation workers? Female fisherman? Female homeless people?
I don't understand why they should be "encouraged" to study computer science to just keep up some random statistic vs. encouraging them to do whatever their hearts tell them they should be doing? Stories like this make me so angry because it casts women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices. Whatever...
It is not just to keep up some random statistic. Software careers are among the most profitable, and when a segment of society does not participate in them, society as a whole suffer.
I do agree that the word "encourage" is a bit mystifying. But it is important since there is not enough done from elementary to HS to show that a career in STEM (not just software) is open to anyone, not just boys.
Furthermore, it is important to understand why STEM is so difficult for women. I know for a fact that there is a shitload of harassment, specially in Academia (I've seen it.)
That will make any woman say "fuck it!". Not so much in software, but in other hard sciences like Math and Biology. The solution is not to say "grow a thicker skin", but to be more decent (or rather, less creepy and grabby.)
Like every four to six months in the Seattle area, either the Sleaze-attle Times, or the Sleaze-attle Weekly, runs some such story about Only white males being in local IT, but there's a major problem: one looks at those companies they reference, and you see mostly brown-skinned doods from India. (Perhaps they consider themselves white, but they certainly aren't Americans yet, still foreign visa workers from abroad!
When I was in IT, before they stopped hiring me, I worked around plenty of women and minorities, but they were by and large American, while I look around at those companies now, all I see are foreign visa workers, and since around 50% or more of all new IT hires are foreign visa workers, I believe the real data bears me out.
I've worked in IT for over 2 decades. This may have existed back in the late 80's, possibly even into the very early 90's, but since about 1995 has been a fallacy perpetrated by those with an agenda to cast this industry as somehow sexist or backwards. If there are any people left who are still truly hostile to females in IT that haven't been weeded out through attrition, harassment claims, or other HR procedures, they must be really good at hiding how they truly feel and therefore it isn't really an issue anymore.
Stop being disingenuous and perpetrating "what if" scenarios to further a divisive agenda you know is going to lose, anyway.
I tend to agree with you that harassment in the workplace is significantly less than what it used to be. The stigma still lingers, however. It doesn't help when geeks make presentations with sexual parts in conferences, either (and no, the answer is not to develop humor or grow thicker skin, but to be less of a pervert.)
Harassment in academia and in other STEM fields still exists, and it is serious enough to make students switch careers and not pursue work in Academia. I've seen it.
I've worked at two company's who had the policy where are females were automatically placed on the management track. If you were male, you had to work there five years before you eligible for management training, education or being mentored.
Alright, anecdotal evidence is always dodgy, ... She was talking to one of the HR types and they felt the need to inform her that there were multiple generations of engineer there, and that some of the older engineers sometimes said things like, "Women don't belong in programming." ...
I'm perfectly willing to accept isolated incidents. But the widespread existence of such a sentiment, I have to call BS. As you say, its just an anecdote
I am an old engineer and in 30+ years of software development at various employers, small, medium and large I never saw that sentiment. Were there occasional inappropriate jokes, well from a PC/SJW perspective yes, but the women I knew could give as well as take. And when in a female majority environment the non-PC jokes targeting men came from the women occasionally too, All these jokes whether from males or females, while admittedly not PC, were not offered with malicious intent and were more in the nature of friendly teammates joking around with each other. Everyone, male and female, had their day where they thought something was not funny. Even so, when a team transitioned away from an all male team as that first female member joined, there was either indifference or a supportive sentiment, not a hostile sentiment, when we males got together and talked when we got the news; even in the old days of the mid 1980s.
Were there excessive dating invitations, excessive as in "how many times do you need to hear no", yes. One time I had to have a serious talk with a peer from another team about taking "no for answer" when I found a team member in her cube obviously pissed off about something and she confided in what it was.
I have to admit that one day I made one of my female team members cry. I got her to follow me out of our cubicle farm and into an empty office and I closed the door for privacy. I then told her that of all the people I had worked with these last four years at the company she was the most reliable person I knew. That if it were possible to get something done she was the person I learned to trust more than any other. And the fact that she did this while having to juggle hours around occasionally to take care of things related to her two kids, school events, doctor's appointments, etc made her even more impressive. She cried, gave me a big hug, and then I went for my exit interview with HR since that was my last day. By the way, this was not my unique opinion, she was a highly respected engineer among her peers and management. As I was getting ready to leave I realized I had never shared my opinion with her.
I agree that women have faced challenges over the decades. For several years I dated a female engineer, she worked on embedded software, so I have her perspective to add to my own. And while these many challenges still exist to this day to one degree or another, the "women don't belong in programming" problem is not something I've seen myself or had 30+ years of coworkers mention that they had seen. I'm sure it happened somewhere but such a sentiment is an anomaly not a widespread problem like being asked out on a date too many times.
My opinion as to why the low representation of women exists, I think it is simply that fewer are exposed to it. I initially imagined programming boring, then I had to do a little in school and I discovered it to be a lot of fun, interesting and that I was also good at it. It was literally a life changing revelation. I expect that fewer females are given the chance to make such a personal discovery. So maybe there is a "women don't belong in programming" sentiment, but it would seem to be at home with their family, parents, aunts, uncles, etc than in industry. FWIW that girlfriend I had who did embedded software, her dad had a small manufacturing business and her and her sister grew up around people who made things. Both had the same opportunities to explore, but only she had the curiosity, her sister did not. Programming
No problem of this nature is fixed by forcing people to change. The only way is to stick it out in the hostile environment until you are a majority. Then you can change the situation simply by acting differently. When you're the majority, you set the tone.
That's assuming there's a problem to begin with, of course.
The Civils Right movement says otherwise. Sometimes you have to force people to be less of an asshole.
Back in the 1980s, there was a PSA-type show, where the Sunday morning interviewer was a fairly intelligent woman, interviewing a young lady who was explaining women's programs in the construction industry. She explained her parents paid for her liberal arts college degree, but she thought she was technically inclined, so she enrolled in a special government-paid-for electronics tech course --- which she flunked out of. Next she enrolled in a special government-paid-for appliance tech course --- which she flunked out of, and she was currently in a special government-paid-for construction course - - - which she either hadn't yet completed or flunked out of. The lady interviewer started becoming irritated with her and kept inquiring how many other courses she was planning on taking?
I meant external from the perspective of the job itself, basically there isn't some characteristic of the job (e.g. requires lifting 100 lbs. or more on a regular basis) that favors men over women, though I can see where the confusion comes from due to poor wording on my part.
Here's one popular argument that I've heard before that offers an explanation for why IT and programming are predominantly male-driven: The incidence rate for autism spectrum disorders is about 4-5 times higher (there are plenty of interesting theories as to why for this in itself) in males than in females. People who fall into these categories often have more difficulty working with people and are likely to find programming or IT more appealing as they find working with a machine less difficult, because it doesn't require them to use the emotional reasoning capabilities that they lack or find more difficult to use.
If that were true, it's not that there's anything inherent to programming or IT jobs that make women bad or somehow less suitable in any general sense, but rather men being drawn to the field disproportionately.
Ok, I'll bite....
WTF are "lady boys"?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
At present, women are a significant minority, and they still will be. 20% is enough, but 5% is not. Managing % figures is not the way to go.
John_Chalisque
Because often culture pushes them away from doing what their hearts wants them to do.
In high school how many boys will admit that they would want to be a Nurse? vs how many may had found a rewarding career as a nurse?
Society tell us that a Nurse is a Womans jobs so when choosing a career men may not even consider it.
The same with Computer Science. It is said to be a man's job, so woman who may love such a career wouldn't even consider it an option.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From what I have learned. This is also a problem of a different degree depending on where you would work.
East Coast Tech is far more tolerant and welcoming than West Coast Tech.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Girls born today are 75% more likely to go to University than boys. /idontwanttoliveonthisplanetanymore
That's not alarming.
But Women in (death boring to many) IT going from 24% to 22% is.
WTF are "lady boys"?
Asian girls with dicks.
It's common on tech forums to see "females naturally don't like tech or math". When and how did we prove with undeniable certainty the "natural" inclinations of a person, based on their gender? Considering many of these professions are hardly "natural" anyway, how do you make that determination? Are females born with a propensity to like purses rather than wallets?
Personally, I welcome diversity, and while many people will clamor that it forces unqualified people into workplaces, I'll show you many people who are simply "making it work" and are nothing special. In fact, I'd argue the most damage of keeping unqualified workers exists in "they know (or are related to) X". Many female developers I've met are just as skilled as their male counterparts and usually tend to be more organized in my experience. I've seen less female "rock stars" but that may be due to the fact that I've worked with WAY more men (sample bias).
While this is an anecdote, I feel like it has some truth in it. I was at Target. A mother and her daughter were shopping around. The young daughter begged to be Spider-Man for Halloween and the mother continually said, "No, that's for boys. You can choose something else." My experience tells me that is far from a rarity, and that's simply concerning dressing up like some fictional character. I feel like many people in the tech community who are decently rational will say, "Who cares what costume or choice a child makes based on their gender" and then attempt to apply that to how others react to the same situation. Well, there are many people out there who still apply genders to the most minute of decisions, and they are parents. :)
P.S. I'm not a SJW, at all. Please stop overusing the term. However, I just don't see what's worth whining about. Who the fuck cares? Your job is not at risk by a certain discipline attempting to be more inclusive. If it is, then that is an HR problem at your company or your skills aren't that great. People who are upset are either severely overreacting (for whatever reason) or are just play the protectionist game.
Except:
In countries where women have *more* choice, most women don't go into math/science related fields.
In countries where women have *less* choice, many more women do.
The conversation is not about career capacity. It's about choice.
Ironically, what people seem to be worried about is that when women have greater freedom of choice, they don't choose the same thing as men do. ...And apparently that's a problem.
We live in strange times.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
We're whining and spending a ton more money on ' correcting' gender imbalance because it is inherently wrong for some reason and supposedly the problem is only worsening according to these studies from the mouths of progressives themselves so it looks like its just making the problem worse so why bother? If anything, doing nothing will improve gender balance if you buy all the logic.
How are men in the workplace keeping women from studying Computer Science in Universities?
Are they all running down to the college admissions offices and stealing all the pencils during their lunch breaks?
Because if they are that's totally misogyny!
He's not complaining about choice, but that we're apparently telling women they are making the WRONG CHOICE. And, oddly, blaming the men for making them choose wrong too.
Well, both women and men told my girlfriend (when she was a kid) that STEM subjects were not good career options for girls - unless they planned to become teachers. And a few years ago, our daughter was being the same by most of her teachers - both women and men.
(Both of them replied "BS - I'm going to be an engineer.")
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I suppose your company totally gets it and there is never any of the mini-aggressions and put-downs that can erode a female technologist's confidence in her abilities or desire to work at your company, or in the industry in general?
And that never happens to men right? Both men and women are occasional recipients of the joke gone wrong. Both men and women have to deal with a-hole coworkers who try to elevate themselves by denigrating the skills of others. And by men I am including majority white straight men. Everyone gets their feeling hurt one day or another, and its something that should be avoided regardless of gender. But lets not try to manufacture a PC/SJW explanation for the problem of female underrepresentation, assuming that it is a problem and not a natural occurrence, more on that below.
The problem is simple. Many people do not imagine that programming can be something fun and interesting. Many software developers were actually a bit surprised at how much they liked it once they gave it a try, and sometimes these tries were not of their choosing, something school made them do for instance. The heart of the problem is more likely a lack opportunity to make such a personal discovery. In other words things go "wrong" long before someone enters the workplace, the flaw is not in the workplace.
Of course, maybe things aren't going as "wrong" as I just suggested. To do well and to be happy in software development a person needs a certain innate interest in it. As mentioned above we don't always know that this interest exists, it sometimes has to be discovered through experience. But perhaps there is a natural difference in the occurrence of this interest between males and females. I dated a girl for several years that was a software developer, embedded systems. She and her sister grew up in an environment with a dad that built things, who took his daughters to work occasionally, who had them help him make things out in the garage. One daughter discovered an interest, one did not. Is one of these daughters an anomaly, and if so which one? I have a niece and nephew that are fraternal twins. Both grew up being exposed to the outdoors. My niece is the one who wants to go on family camping trips, trips where we hike in and live out of our packs for two or three days, her brother has no interest. Scuba diving is a hobby of mine, while physical it is certainly within the abilities of "average" women. Yet in college where a very inexpensive and truly excellent training program was available through the PE department very few women took the class. Sometimes things require an inherent interest, and what factors into that interest may be biological and not necessarily socially induced. Its premature to say what the natural representation of women in a particular activity is.
The very worst thing you can do for women is ironically what the companies have been doing: hire them as "diversity" hires and promote them because they're female. That automatically and implicitly labels any woman, irrespective of the actual merit, as a "diversity" employee who is hired and promoted not because of merit, but because they don't have a penis. This, counterintuitively to some, makes it much harder for them to earn the respect of their male peers.
So if affirmative action is your idea of how to improve the situation, I suggest you reconsider, and instead turn to the only thing that works in high tech: strict, unyielding meritocracy, and high hiring bar irrespective of gender, race, or sexual orientation.
I was talking to my officemate a couple of months ago about relational databases (she was doing a course on them). I prefer to think about things in a quite mathematical way, and I was trying t ooffer some insight in that direction. Turns out she apparently used to be decent at maths but dropped it after being told repeatedly in school words t othe effects of "maths isn't for girls".
This, in spades.
The thing we should be concerned about is not whether there are "enough" women in computing, it's why the percentage of them is falling. If it's simply because women in general aren't into computing as a career, then fine. But if it's because the culture is hostile to them, then let's do something about that, m'kay?
Your friend who was told math is not for girls apprently was not schooled in Iceland.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
...law and medicine in particular soared straight towards 50/50 with no dips, whereas women avoid IT with every downturn. The first downturn was after the dot-bomb, and now the larger financial slowdown.
What's the diff? The other three are real professions. This gives them some protections from the members being turned into commodities when there's a surplus of them. There are reduced openings, even job losses, but a floor on how badly they're paid and treated.
Women are just being rational and evaluating it as a job and career - and their tendencies should be read as the canary in the coal mine: coming in from the outside, they have a clearer view. Make IT a real profession like law, medicine, engineering, with state level licensing requirements, and you'll get rid of a lot of the industry's worst features, have a buffer against H1-B outsourcing, and the gender issue will go away as with the other professions. Women
Exactly - and those imported cultures are very misogynist, leading to more women quitting.
More than 3/4 of software developers leave the industry - there is no recruiting issue, there is a retention issue.
Am I missing something? That article was about the number of pull requests at GitHub that were accepted, it mentioned nothing about your statement that "Studies have shown that female programmers write more efficient code on average than male programmers". If you are going to be that dickish in your reply, you should at least post something that supports your argument. Just because a pull request is accepted does not mean it is more efficient and a self-selected group (GitHub users) is a poor source for meaningful statistical data.
Enigma
And maybe they just need to grow up and stop expecting special privileges wherever they go. If it's the same environment for males, it's not discrimination. Demanding unilaterally defined special treatment would be the discrimination. It's not different when women do it...
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
Turns out she apparently used to be decent at maths but dropped it after being told repeatedly in school words t othe effects of "maths isn't for girls".
Don't most people studying STEM fields need to be able to obsess over their interests despite social pressures to the contrary? You didn't mention if she actually enjoyed math.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
You can't outsource or replace with robots services catering to humans and their bodies.
Nor can you outsource or robotize salesmanship, leadership and all the other -ships.
And there will probably always be legal reasons why legal services and public administration can't be out given out to foreign employees or machines.
But speaking of services for humans...
Education and health services are about as female dominated as manufacturing tends to be male dominated.
Actually, slightly more... 74.65% for E&H vs 71.9% for manufacturing.
But much more important is that there are more than twice as many jobs in E&H services (33,678 thousands ) than in manufacturing (15,338 thousands).
Education and health services is actually the BIGGEST industry in the US, making up more than a fifth (but not quite a quarter - 22.62%) of ALL JOBS in the USA.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1...
You can't outsource child care or health care cause you can't outsource people. And robots are nowhere near to be able to do that job.
Making those E&H jobs safe and secure.
Amazingly, that category has the most humans who, thorough a quirk of biology, tend to have the need for a safe and stable environment in order to gestate, give birth to and raise the next generation of humans.
Whodathunkit, right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
words t othe effects of "maths isn't for girls".
So, a British problem, then? Here in the US we study only one math, instead of multiple maths, so girls have an easier time with it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The fact that the participation of women varies hugely between cultures (for example, in India, Korea, Israel, Iran, and Lithuania, Romania, it's a lot higher) implies strongly that external factors are far more of a reason why we have so few women than anything biological.
Only in the most shallow analysis.
In many countries, a software development job with a multinational corp is the best job you can hope for unless your parents are politically connected. Better pay and batter status than doctor or lawyer. Here in the US, that's not true, and so women talented enough to pursue the best job around do something else like doctor or lawyer (or vet, which is a better job than doctor these days after malpractice insurance).
Based on my unscientific survey of quite a few interns from India, the vast majority of them entered the field of software development "because my parents chose it for me", male or female. You get that in the US occasionally for doctors or lawyers, of course.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And do you really think if the same thing had happened to a guy (molten metal falling down his pants and someone cutting his pants off) he wouldn't have had the same sort of joking? In our group we tease each other constantly over anything and everything. We take it, we give it, we deal with it. If someone's feelings got hurt by the teasing, we'd stop teasing that person, but they'd become an outsider at that point. When you work in close proximity to a group of people for extended periods of time you have to have a way to ease the natural tensions that arise.
Well, you could argue that the reason you have to push women to enter coding as a career is that they're also being pushed to aim high on the career ladder.
That was the thing that made me laugh at the whole Barbie "I Can Be a Computer Engineer" fracas. Oh, it was sexist alright -- against men. Here's how I construe that story: Barbie is an entrepreneur who obtains free commodity coding and sysadmin labor from her male pals and yet retains total ownership of the resulting intellectual property. It's a cynical way of doing business, but that girl is going places.
Here is where they'll be in ten years:
Stephen -- works as a network admin where the pay is lousy and everyone treats him like shit. Despite the fact he hates his job, he's terrified that it will be outsourced.
Brian -- works as a coder. His pay looks pretty good, until you factor in the hours he puts in to meet deadlines management pulls out of its ass, the cost of his Bay Area apartment, and the time he spends commuting on the clogged freeway. He gets through the day with Adderall he scores of the neighbor's kid and comes down every night with booze. His apartment is full of expensive sports equipment he doesn't have time to use anymore. He's gained fifty pounds since he was in High School and will gain another fifty in the next five years. Brain can live with all this, but the thing that really bothers him is that when he does a great job, nobody cares.
Barbie -- Sold her girl-power themed indie computer game studio for millions, landing her on the cover of Time's "30 Entrepreneurs under 30" issue. She parlays this into a senior VP position at a hot social media startup, and after cashing out on the IPO joins an angel investor group. She's currently bankrolling research in parthenogenesis.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hogwash. 'Math isn't for girls' maybe was something she was telling hereself, or maybe her friends were telling her this. I distinctly remember girls outperforming us guys in advanced math classes back in the 80s. Who has been telling girls this (other than other girls?).
love is just extroverted narcissism
When has computers been discussed (ever) on TV in an even vaguely realistic sense?
love is just extroverted narcissism
"anecdote is somehow wrong" not at all i do think you need support to be successful, just saying that what one person may have once said about math probably is at best reaching for blame.
After endlessly repeating the message, "Women need to be encouraged to work in this field because they don't naturally have much interest in it
I see your debatig strategy is more or less:
1. Make up stupid shit
2. Reach conclusions based on 1.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I am absolutely certain that if it happened to a guy that there would still be teasing. I just thought it was funny and so did she although she was probably teased more than any other woman in the program because of it and was still the only one to graduate.
Garbage collection requires quite a lot of upper-body strength
Nope. Modern trucks have mechanized lifts that lift garbage containers into trucks. At the dumps all of the work is with heavy equipment, which a three-year old could drive...
There is no requirement other than being in generally good physical condition.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm sure it would have no impact at all on you.
It's very possible that it has a mostly non-measurable impact. I remember reading a blog a while back where they were talking the influence of Barbie, or Saturday Morning cartoons, or something like that, on how they set their expectations in life. One off hand sentence they had went something like "And if you're not the type of person who felt influenced by such things, what are you doing on this blog?" And that was every eye opening to me. Because I'm someone who can't think of a single programming role model, yet still became a programmer. And I can't think of any "reading between the lines" kind of influence on me (so it was kind of odd that I was reading that blog). There are people who pick up on non-existent signals about gender roles, etc from toys and media, and there are other people who don't. And I'm sure there are lots of people who fit into the range between the extremes.
I believe that boys/men are much more likely to not pick up on even the most blatant messages about expectations, than girls/women are. The result is that you get the Slashdot type who will read these articles about ideas on encouraging others, and since there wasn't anything even close to that in their own experience, they don't see what all of the fuss is about. The flip side are other people who will only go where they're granted permission to go. And knowing that both types of personalities exist is important.
"She was talking to one of the HR types and they felt the need to inform her [...] that some of the older engineers sometimes said things like, "Women don't belong in programming.""
It sounds like HR was part of the problem here, propagating rumours.
In other news, men still at 0.0% birthing rates. When will we be able to get these numbers up? Since the dawn of time, women have given birth to 100% of all babies. This is rank discrimination against men to deny us the wonder of childbirth. /sarc off
In all truthfulness men and women are different, and while there are outliers among both (men who WANT to stay home to raise the kids or women who get all excited about writing code or mathematical theorems) stereotypes exist for a reason, because in most cases they are true. On top of that, we are dealing with basic, biological differences in men and women.
What if I told you there was a job that only women could do, and that the employer injects the employees on a daily basis with an addictive drug (oxytocin) that makes the employees want to stay at the job, even though the job entails sleep deprivation, severe body modification and even intentional infliction of pain on a frequent basis? That is essential motherhood. And everything I described is biologically done to the mother over the course of pregnancy, childbirth and nursing.
Conversely, when you watch the Olympics, in the physical strength events (running, throwing etc.), the women you see taking home the gold are at about the level of your average high school track star. If we integrated the sexes in those events, no woman would ever medal again, it is basic biology, which is why Olympic cheaters have been trying for years to pass off men as women.
The real, government sanctioned discrimination these days is inflicted on the white male, and indirectly on his family. Thus we have the rapidly shrinking middle class. It is shameful and there is no excuse. The white male is Boxer the horse from Animal Farm. The white male built western civilization and defended it with his blood for generations and when he is gone (i.e. unemployed/broken/welfare recipient, etc.), it will crumble (we already see the cracks).
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
https://imgur.com/gallery/CfDz...
America should import some H1B Politicians maybe then your government will get serious about the H1B visa issue.
Except then you'll be fired for lacking "people skills".
Logic skills and people skills are almost mutually exclusive in my observation. Soothing (typical) humans is the art of hiding or bending the ugly sides of their reality. You have to essentially half lie to get along.
It's almost like mastering Newtonian physics, and then having to switch to quantum physics: you have unlearn or put aside most of what you mastered, and switch back and forth between them as needed.
It's doable, but not easy. But humans are even worse because at least quantum physics has documented formulas and rules. Humans don't, or at least it's inconsistent between humans, and YOU have to figure out how each varies. Thus, you must master the physics of hundreds of different undocumented universes.
Table-ized A.I.
No HR professional would tolerate that sort of thing. They have been indoctrinating corporate drones in a very extreme notion of sexual harassment for over 20 years now. Such a thing would have been an intolerable liability to the company 20 years ago. Forget about these days.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Women in tech management is not something new or unusual. If you think so then I suspect that you need to stop looking at Vogue to get your information about the tech industry.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This is the interesting thing about today versus 50 years ago.
Shit still happens. Now you have a cause of action. You might even get a 38 million dollar judgement.
So put away the violin and stop the water works.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Semi-side story: In college I had to take a CNC course as part of my minor. We were given a drawing of a part to be produced on a CNC lathe as our final class project.
It was generally assumed we were to generate the coordinate list by hand. It was a lot of grunt work so I wrote a Pascal program on the side to compute the delta's, do some basic range checking, and draw a rough plot via "ASCII art". I only had to enter the raw coordinates. Using this program I got the delta list done and and it all checked out in theory and I thought I was a real hot-shot.
Then came time to actually machine it. A teacher's assistant inserted a raw aluminum block, loaded my punched tape, closed the transparent lid, and pressed "Go".
The CNC lathe started shaping the part according to plan. I started smiling as it got near the finish, for the part forming before my eyes looked just like the assignment drawing.
Then suddenly aluminum started spraying out like crazy from the cutting tool, making a sharp jarring "neeeaaarrr" sound. Internally I thought "Oh shit!" Mentally, that was my grade being shredded before us.
Soon the horrible noise ceased, and the machine completed the action. There was a little rough patch near the end, but otherwise the part visually looked good.
Not knowing what to think, I glanced at the teacher's assistant. In a monotone voice, he said, "You had some excessive delta's, but otherwise the shape is correct. You get a B- on it. You almost broke the blade. If the blade had broke, you'd get a C-. You got lucky". (They were used to broken blades for students.)
Turns out my Pascal delta distance checker only checked the "x" distance due to a bug, not the Pythagorean distance.
Had I done it all by hand, I'd probably avoid or catch that mistake because I'd be "experiencing" the direct data details. Automation is not always a free lunch.
(Arguably I could have also spent more time checking the software, but that could take approximately as long as hand computations.)
Table-ized A.I.
If we are going to throw stones how about the plummeting numbers for men in education and health.
My wife puts it this way - and she saw second wave feminism begin in the 1960s: "I wanted to be valued for being a housewife and mother. I enjoyed raising kids and I enjoyed keeping house. Yes, I had additional interests, some of which i did, and some of which I didn't. But feminism told me that my choice to want to be home to raise my kids was a terrible thing. And don't get me started with 'Ms.' What we WANTED was different titles to see what men were married, and what ones were single. What the feminists decided was that EVERYONE was gonna rut around regardless of marital status." It's unfortunate.
You have it backwards :-)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Bending over backwards isn't enough apparently.
Women already make up nearly 60% of all college graduates. They already receive favoritism for things like financial aid, grants, and scholarships (except for sports). There are TV ads, commercials, and companies doing everything they can to get more women into STEM and it is all failing. So what, coercion and extortion are not working so we panic?
People should stop trying to bully people into a field and forcing an ideology that people simply don't want. There is equal opportunity, in fact it's white males who today are treated like shit by politicians, academics, and media and every other racial group and gender is receiving preferences.
Also, people in general need to stop pretending like biological differences don't matter. They do, and facts matter.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If computer programmer Barbie involves the girl doing some design, but the actual coding being done by boys.
It was worse than that, Computer Engineer Barbie said:
" 'I'm only creating the design ideas,' Barbie says, laughing. 'I'll need Steven's and Brian's help to turn it into a real game.' "
Barbie then gets a virus on the computer, which then infects another computer, and the boys wind up fixing it for her.
After class, Barbie meets with Steven and Brian in the library.
" 'Hi, guys,' says Barbie. 'I tried to send you my designs, but I ended up crashing my laptop — and Skipper's, too! I need to get back the lost files and repair both of our laptops.'
" 'It will go faster if Brian and I help,' offers Steven."
Brian and Steven take over — and, at the end of the day, Barbie takes credit for the boys' work.
Note that this wasn't an actual Barbie, it was a book "Barbie: I can be a computer engineer". Amusingly enough on the book cover it had a computer monitor with a bunch of 1s and 0s, and a Tux Penguin sitting underneath it!
Picture Here
Shhhhh!
That example goes directly against the narrative!
It's an interesting digression because the film version switched roles of the kids around.
In the book, the boy was the dinosaur expert AND the computer expert. The girl had some interest in sports but otherwise contributed nothing to the plot and whined a lot. Spielburg saw that and thought.. "why don't we give a reason for BOTH of them to exist.."
I don't understand why people don't see this as a problem. Why don't we have a 50% representation, like the demographics suggest, without resorting to lame "girls don't like tech" excuses?
More importantly, why are the numbers *declining* over the years? If there was some innate bias like some here insist, then why is it changing? Are our genes changing and mutating that much in only a few short decades? Or perhaps there are other factors at work,.
Recruiting doesn't start at the corporation. It should start in grade school. Stop telling girls and boys about which jobs are for girls and which jobs are for boys. Retention is a problem because there are workplaces that are just too uncomfortable if you don't like a frat boy style of work, but the numbers are women going into computer science have been declining over time and that's long before retention should start being an issue.
If I was the one in a hostile environment, I'd change instead of sticking it out. That's human nature. Which is a great excuse if it's only *other* people who have to put up with it. Lack of empathy showing here I think. It means that only those with the most endurance to stick it out get represented, which really is not a fair representation. A guy that shows up that doesn't want to make waves and just wants a conflict free work space has a much easier time than a woman who doesn't want to make waves and have a conflict free work space.
Men don't have to be better than average to get hired, but it seems that women do. Just look around at all the male idiots who get hired and retain their job. Much higher proportion of mediocre males than mediocre females in computing and engineering from what I've seen.
Of course you don't have to be in the majority to set the tone. You could have the tone set for you by HR or management (oh, but then the whining starts that they can't joke around anymore, have to watch what they say in the hallways, or otherwise behave like human beings).
Affordable day care is also for men. It's a good benefit for a company so that women AND men can afford to have children and be happier at work. If you think child rearing is only the woman's job then you may be a part of the problem.
Meritocracy is a myth. Just look around at all the mediocre men in the workplace and ask whether morons were the best of the bunch. Why does the below average male get a job in computing or engineering but the few women who get hired are above average? Because there's a different set of standards being applied. People don't hire based only on skills, abilities, and experience, they have biases. I hear those in candidate reviews sometimes: "I didn't really get along with so-and-so", "he seemed like a nice guy, I liked him", or "he had good skills but didn't seem like he would fit into our group". Hiring decisions are more emotional than logical, and that in itself is a problem.
I've worked in a few of those places and it appears to me (as a male observer) that those places have become far less "sexist and terrible" than I.T. in general, and the increasing number of women in those places (while declining in I.T.) appears to back me up.
From where I'm standing it looks like we've taken massive steps backwards since 2000. I worked in an IT startup that wanted a few people with engineering backgrounds and there were quite a few women in the place. I've visited similar places since and see 100% males, 100% anglo-saxon and nerf balls getting thrown all over the place. It turned into a fucking "no girls allowed" grade school club full of people who just want to be friends and do not dare to challenge any shit ideas that anyone in the group comes up. Go Team! instead of making good choices.
Monocultures suck and will fuck you up if you are trying to sell anything outside of your select little club.
That explains a lot at the undergraduate level :)
I shouldn't make a joke about the depressing decline that's resulted in so few even attempting introductory calculus.
This is because - as we all know - the secret to great code and efficient programming is evenly distributed genitalia.
You have it backwards :-)
So, instead of making up stupid shit, then reaching a conclusion based on it, you jumped to a conclusion first then started making up stupid shit?
Sure, OK, I'll accept that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
With increased automation and clever third world countries on hand, the last thing I would encourage my daughter into is IT. Maybe into a cushy management job that won't get sent abroad or given to a robot?
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/385/
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Turns out she apparently used to be decent at maths but dropped it after being told repeatedly in school words t othe effects of "maths isn't for girls".
This is so weird. I am 49 years old and I have never seen a female discouraged from math at school or otherwise. Supposedly, the 70s, when I was going to elementary school, it was the height of females being discouraged from doing non-female things.
It is odd how during that time frame, the female teachers were busy helping the female students while essentially ignoring the male students and giving absolutely no encouragement at all to me or my fellow male students. There were 5 people in my classes from kindergarten to 4th grade who excelled. 4 were females and then there was me. The girls all got constant loving attention while, despite my scores always being higher, was ignored.
It was time for college in the mid 80s. They were grants and loans available for women and minorities, but for me, there was shit available. Needless to say, since I could not even afford the paperwork fees, much less college itself, I did not go to college.
Regardless, computers and communications between computers was/is a passion for me. I am now a highly paid Senior Security Engineer. No college, brief military service, and lots of suffering, but I am where many people would like to be.
Fuck women. They can all burn in mother fucking hell. Those fucking bitches get EVERYTHING in life handed to them on a fucking silver platter and it STILL is not enough. 50 fucking years of society sucking the dicks of girls and we STILL get this shit. Fuck off.
Women are useless, stupid pieces of shit. If you are female and can prove yourself otherwise, fine. I will respect you. All of this social justice shit has backfired though. I hate all women by default. You all fucking suck. Prove you are worthy. I for one am discriminating against your fat lazy asses. Every single time I see someone like "virtue signal" I throw up.
Maths isn't for girls? The fucking WORLD isn't for girls. They are clearly too fucking weak and stupid to stand up for themselves so evolution says they must be eliminated. Oh wait...
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
If you don't think that this is real, then sit down for a couple of hours this evening and watch two hours of children's TV. Count the number of male vs female lead roles. Count the number of times anyone builds anything and whether it's done by a male or female character.
How cute. You are able to see all of the injustices against females but are conveniently blind to the same injustices against males in the exact same fucking programs. Ah well, I guess there has to be some narrative and the poor picked on women is the narrative you choose.
Ever pay attention to the relationship between the father and the mother? The mother is invariably beautiful while the father is invariably a slightly dorky and weak male who can't solve problems like "mom" can.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
But they don't often get to be _single_ house husbands because they almost never get primary custody of the children.
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters No one has ever shown that have different color people of different shape changes anything if any significance over any meaningful period of time. Take for example the number of Europeans and their dominance of the planet. The amount of time and number of individuals is infinitesimal. When did we scientists start to care about anything other than large and meaningful datasets and conclusions. Who of us Engineers cares anything more than reaching for the stars? I would gladly sacrifice myself and anyone or anything I have ever encountered for us to escape this provincial backwards looking mindset. Ad Astra per Aspera
50 fucking years of society sucking the dicks of girls and we STILL get this shit.
I think you might be a little confused about women there, bucko.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Huh yes I wasn't specific. It was her teachers, apparently.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
anyone who calls someone an asshole generally is one themselves
Some assholes are better than others.
anyone who calls someone an asshole generally is one themselves
Some assholes are better than others.
A person who discriminates another by race is an asshole. If calling such a person an asshole makes me an asshole, so be it. Someone has to spell shit out for the lowbrow crowd.
So, you're a woman "in" Tech, (because HR is not technical) and because you see mostly men around you, that is proof that there is a problem? I've heard all of the arguments as to why it is "necessary" for women to be equally represented in Tech companies, yet they're all nonsensical. Having more women does not bring greater profits, nor does it mean better products. This is nothing but women complaining about not getting paid as much as some highly technical men.
i guess its time to burn the jock strap and demand equality?!!
You're not in tech, You're in HR at a tech company.
So babies are assholes: http://www.latimes.com/science...
The number of women in computing is a statistic, not necessarily a problem.
This article is suggesting that we solve a statistical different without first proving that the statistic indicates a problem in need of solving.
Personally, I want more women in computing, especially dev, because, well, women are awesome. So awesome, I married a woman. :-)
Also, I personally feel that a feminine perspective can be beneficial to many dev projects, but I have not data to back up my personal feeling.
I've working as a developer/programmer for 20 yrs, and recently transitioned to teaching programming --- the comments pretty much show why women don't want to go into programming, it's not has nothing to do with 'self-selection', innate gender differences, etc., it has to do with them dealing with a bunch of d1cks.
I have karma to burn, so all those people in denial can mod me down -- but I've seen this shit firsthand for years, so justify your sexism and bias all you want, but most people posting hear are part of the problem. So go vote for Trump, and enjoy your Nov 8th meltdown
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
So babies are assholes: http://www.latimes.com/science...
They are good assholes.
In a situation where failing businesses are bought out and absorbed a variety of reasons for failure can propagate. A lot of I.T. is like that.
The fact that you can choose what to buy from a preselected and limited set of items, whose every single element is being actively PUSHED at you doesn't mean that EVERY... SINGLE... ONE of those items is actively being designed, packaged, promoted, priced... etc. etc.in order to SELL IT to people.
Should say:
"The fact that you can choose what to buy from a preselected and limited set of items, whose every single element is being actively PUSHED at you doesn't mean that EVERY... SINGLE... ONE of those items wasn't actively designed, packaged, promoted, priced... etc. etc. in order to SELL IT to people."
Serves me right for watching a quiz show while slashdotting.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There is this generally accepted principle in discussion that if you claim something, it is up to you to provide the evidence of the claim. Just pointing at the audience and shouting "you are all idiots for not looking this up yourselves" is not only not done, but it is in fact a pretty damn sure indication that whatever claim you are making is bogus. Your blustering, idiotic response about "learn how to use Google" clearly indicates your claim is without merit. If it had merit, you would have provided a link to one of those studies you claim exist.
Oh wait, you did. You linked to the well-known scientific journal The Guardian, known for only publishing the highest quality of peer-reviewed studies... Which itself links to a study that has neither been reviewed nor published, and uses a questionable methodology to make an extremely click-baity claim.
In particular, the entire claim seems to rest on the performance of the gender-neutral/outsider group, where women score slightly higher than men. The study does not make clear how it managed to divide the gender-neutral group into men and women, and in fact it can be argued that for anyone they could positively identify one way or the other, so can others, so that individual should no longer count as gender-neutral.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016...
There is this generally accepted principle in discussion that if you claim something, it is up to you to provide the evidence of the claim.
Not when it is public knowledge and something that has been all over the news.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch