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Why Women Devs Are Hard To Recruit and Even Harder To Keep (windowsitpro.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The results of a recent survey conducted by GitHub sheds light on the issue of why women developers are hard to recruit and keep in the business of tech. Windows IT Pro reports: "The 2017 Open Source Survey 'collected responses from 5,500 randomly sampled respondents sourced from over 3,800 open source repositories on GitHub.com, and over 500 responses from a non-random sample of communities that work on other platforms.' Although the survey focused on open source and asked 50 questions on a wide range of topics that were in no way focused on gender issues alone, some of the data collected offers insight into why the developer industry as a whole has trouble recruiting and keeping female devs. Indeed, the severity of the gender gap in open source is substantial. In the survey, 95 percent of respondents were men, with the response rate from women at only 3 percent -- a degree of under-representation that's not seen elsewhere in this study. Other groups show numbers that are more proportionate to their numbers in the general population, with 'ethnic or national minorities' representing 16 percent of the respondents, immigrants at 26 percent, and 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, or another minority sexual orientation' at 7 percent. The problems that women in tech face are pretty much what you might expect. Twenty-five percent of the women surveyed report 'encountering language or content that makes them feel unwelcome,' compared with 15 percent of men. Women are six times more likely to encounter stereotyping than men (12 versus 2 percent), and twice as likely to be subjected to unsolicited sexual advances (6 vs 3 percent)."
The summary has the wrong numbers, in the report it is 12 vs 2 percent.
This survey was designed by GitHub with valuable input from the research and open source communities. We especially thank: Anna Filippova (Carnegie Mellon University), Andrea Forte (Drexel University), Edward Galvez (Wikimedia Foundation), Rebecca Weiss (Mozilla), and Laura Dabbish (Carnegie Mellon University) for conversations, research questions, and prior art that informed the questionnaire design.
Anna Filippova is not the "lead researcher". Not to mention the fact that the second person in that list is a professor at Drexel in the College of Computing and Informatics and Laura Dabbish is a faculty member at CMU with a PhD in Computer Science.
Look at who did the study before you write comments that make you look dumb.
Did you look? It's an unscientific "study" performed by a gender studies major.
Honestly, the major alone should be an indicator that the result is probably garbage
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The answer to the question why people might prefer men to women when it comes to working on a code project.
May I refer you to figure 3 of the article. Yes, I know, RTFA is not very Slashdott-y, but bear with me. Could you? Thank you. We see the differences in men and women when it comes to what's important to them in a project they want to participate in. What we can see in the figure is that values like Responsive Maintainers, License or Development progress are pretty much on par with both sexes when it comes to importance.
Looking at values like "welcoming community", "contribution guide" or "code of conduct", you will see a distinct difference in the value men and women attribute to them, with women putting considerably more emphasis on these things.
In other words, at least this is my interpretation and please, I would very much enjoy hearing yours, women want to "feel good" while working on a project, while men don't give a fuck about that and just want to get shit done.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reverse discrimination is like unicorns. Often spoken about but never seen.
And that was in a thread that started with
New York has a law preventing male daycare workers from changing diapers.
Jesus H Fucking Christ you're dense. Did your head crack the concrete floor you were dropped on when born? Does your skull bend light?
Were the draft to actually be instituted, and applied to women, I suspect you would hear these brave justice warriors singing a much different tune.
I suspect you're completely wrong, in fact I'm quite sure of it. "Vocal feminists" may not often be the same sort of women who voluntarily join the military, but they absolutely are the sort of women who would despise any woman who tried to use her gender to avoid being drafted. Many of them would probably argue against the draft, but they'd argue against it for both men and women.
In any case, the draft is irrelevant. Not only haven't we used it in 40 years (since before you were even born, most likely), it's very unlikely we'll ever use it again. Conscription isn't compatible with the needs of a high-tech military.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Women say that they want to be involved but there are reasons not to be. That seems unfair and bad for everyone because their potentially useful contributions are lost.
The question of course, is what would have to happen to get that 1:1 presumptive requirement.
In my experience in a University environment, which perhaps comes closest to the mythical fairness desired to engender gender equality demands, we still had issues filling female positions. Even affirmative action - like me giving up several promotions so that departmental women could be fast-tracked were not all that successful. Keeping in mind that this was a workplace where a man could be terminated very easily. And if a University environment largely run by feminists isn't enough to satisfy the women, this is going to be a tough nut to crack.
If my personal experience from over 30 years in such an environment is of any worth, I see some of the following problems.
My career involved non-traditional work hours, and travel. That means that I sometimes had to come in early, or stay late. I also had travel, but two weeks away was the upper limit, and most were a few days in duration.
The ladies in my position simply wouldn't do that. Now people might argue about whether such a career was worth it, but if you choose that work, it isn't unreasonable to do that work.
Next up is that I tended to finish their work when they "couldn't" stay past 5:00 p.m. Fortunately I was more interested in getting the work finished. We had one who even confided that she went into a carpool so she had a excuse not to work extra.
So how do I achieve a equal mix in a position that ends up having two standards? One for myself and another couple males, and another one for females who could pick and choose what they do?
And all at the same time that the women could get any of us in trouble. And we did get complaints, mostly about my pay, which was substantially higher than theirs. Fortunately, due to my keeping meticulous records, and my own boss understanding the situation, they were told that if they wanted my pay, they would have to do the same work I did. I also explained that I wouldn't come in early or stay late to finish their work. And when there was a downturn in work, which happens about every 5 years, they were let go, based on seniority or work production.
Now as to the issue of college attendance. This delves into societal issues. The university environment is very unfriendly to men, especially those in the bloom of youth. You get to attend mandatory sexual harassment courses, and at any moment you can find yourself kicked out. I get sexual assault messages as required by law, and they end up being like weird creepy porn. Regardless, for all of the postings, we almost never see anything make it to court.
But in the aggregate, the University environment is toxic to young males, and males being males, they tend to avoid toxic environments.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
How is that law not gender discrimination?
It is not gender discrimination because the "law" doesn't actually exist. Men can legally change diapers in NY. The only reference I could find was a daycare that had a policy that the male teachers would not change diapers, but that was not a legal requirement.
It's like getting on a bus and there's a sign saying "DO NOT SHIT ON THE SEATS".
The fact that someone thinks it needs to exist is a big red flag (or possibly a brown one).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."