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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 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 (25 versus 15 percent), and twice as likely to be subjected to unsolicited sexual advances (6 vs 3 percent)."
So basically males are 0.88 times as likely to not be stereotyped or made feel unwelcome and 0.97 times as likely to be not hit on and that is supposed to be the crucial difference in recruiting and keeping employees of both sexes? By the way...
six times more likely ... 25 versus 15 percent
...what?
Ezekiel 23:20
The problems people experience with open source projects are very broadly felt. Just as one example, 70% of people reported a problem with rudeness and name-calling. That dwarfs the issues with stereotyping, which was reported by only 10%. What's up with that? We should let the data guide us to what needs to be focused upon. Sure, issues with women in OSS need to be fixed, but I bet if we get better with the 70% issues it'll go a long way towards fixing the 10%, too.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The lead researcher (Anna Filippova) just completed a PhD on the role of conflict expression in shaping distributed teams. She has also studied the collective user experience with privacy management strategies on Facebook, how to crowdsource history, and Twitter brand sentiment following crisis communication campaigns.
I'm too lazy to dig further, since the last time slashdot did a puff piece on women and minorities in tech, it wasn't even by scientists and ... I just don't care enough anymore to try to stop being jaded.
The biggest gap is here: "In the survey, 95 percent of respondents were men", even though an on-line open source collaboration is the perfect place for a female developer to be judged purely on the quality of the code rather than gender. Just pick a gender neutral alias and start coding.
New York has a law preventing male daycare workers from changing diapers.
However in my work environment and my department it is nearly 50/50 male vs female in IT. The difference is the following.
1. I am on the east coast. There seems to be less gender discrimination there.
2. I work in IT but not in a tech company. I have found for the most part woman seem to gravitate towards IT jobs with the focus on supporting the greater good vs trying to be the greater good.
3. I work with an older workforce. This has a few differences.
A. Less horny young men trying to hit on woman.
B. Woman who get hired have already had and raised their kids to a point they are self reliant and they feel comfortable on maintaining their career.
C. Experience is the driving force not looks.
4. A work culture that takes diversity and sensitivity seriously. Harassment just isn't tolerated
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This may seem a bit sexist, but still...
Nobody on the internet knows you have a penis. Nobody knows you have a vagina. You only reveal that when you blab about it.
Pretty much all FOSS work is done in such impersonal settings, over the internet. Unless the developer uses an alias that is super female sounding, like "KittenLove_xoxo" or something, there is nothing to suggest that she does not have a penis. If she can roll with that, and can work in a male dominated environment, there is nothing to prevent her from being just as successful in the group as any other member, assuming her code quality is good.
Nobody sees your tits through IRC, Email, or the like. You might get outed by teamspeak or something, but impersonal digital communications that are the norm for programmer communication? Not so much.
Even if you need to use a real name when doing development work, you dont need to say your name is "Tiffany McCoder", you can use "T. McCoder" instead. Nobody knows if that is "Tim McCoder", or "Tyrone McCoder" or "Tristan McCoder".... or any other name starting with T. There is no reason to out yourself and get the flood of "OMG! A WOMAN! UNPOSSIBLE!" that is sure to happen.
Why is it better not to out yourself? Is it because I think you should just buck it up and accept abuse? NO-- it is because I think you should not set yourself up for abuse. If you happen to be a very rare magical unicorn, outing yourself in front of a bunch of naturalists is a good way to get collected as a type specimen. (note, that means you get killed, and collected for science. Probably something you dont want.) Similar things will happen if you out yourself as a woman in a very male dominated profession, because you are so damned rare. Now, if more women did this, and did it stealthfully, and ended up becoming a more normal demographic, the "Magical unicorn! WOW! AMAZING!!" thing would not happen, and it would be safe to say, "Yes, I am a female developer."
That is to say, if magical unicorns were as common as grasshoppers or normal horses, scientists would not really be all that excited about them, and showing off your magical rainbow unicorn farts in public would not be an issue. Nobody would care, nobody would notice, because rainbow unicorn farts would be everywhere. It is only when magical unicorns are rare that the "OMG! ITS REAL!!" phenomenon happens.
Female developers are rare. Outing yourself as one will cause you only misfortune in this environment. It has nothing to do with sexism. It has everything to do with novelty and rarity. Avoid the temptation to out yourself. Just be another programmer. Make it or break it on the quality of your code. That's all you need to do.
Why does bullshit like this get published? It's a non-random survey. It provides no useful scientific evidence. It doesn't even bother to compare the numbers with other industries. But you can be damned sure people with an agenda link to it.
Just another day in Paradise
The parent poster's point is legitimate, but somewhat crassly expressed.
We live in a social sphere with literally centuries of cultural tradition of men initiating intimate relationships with women. This pattern is ingrained and reinforced throughout our culture, and changing it is an evolutionary process that can take decades and more than a generation to evolve. Further, I think there's an evolutionary biology component to it that makes it resistant to change.
It also suffers from what I would call a bargaining imbalance. Usually in a negotiation, the first person to make an offer bargains from a position of weakness -- they expose their bargaining position and expose themselves to rejection. Thus it seems likely that women generally do not want to give up their default bargaining position, further ingraining the default position of men as initiators.
There's also a signaling problem, which is probably the most complex aspect of this. Should signaling be up front and literal, or should it be subtle and ambiguous? Given that women would want to retain their bargaining advantage, they have have an incentive to keep relationship signaling subtle and ambiguous because it provides them with an advantageous information asymmetry. This further weakens potential partner's bargaining ability because they are both unsure of what terms are acceptable *and* unsure if the partner is even receptive to an offer.
The last complication is the icing on the cake, the growth in general promiscuity. As a culture we've become quickly accepting of low-attachment sexual relationships.
So, why is it women get unwanted sexual advances? Men know that there is some possibility that a woman will be willing to engage in low-attachment sexual relationships. Women are ambiguous in their signaling as to their receptiveness to intimate contact. Men have internalized their role as initiators, and also know that since they are bargaining from a position of weakness, they face a high probability of failure. But since they know there is some chance of success generally, they know they have to make a lot of offers in order to achieve successful bargains. Intermittent reinforcement is a very powerful reward mechanism.
In my opinion, women just need to be more vocal in stating their unambiguous disinterest in intimacy. Don't be subtle, it only confuses the person into believing that you are engaging in bargaining somehow.
You don't know who it was performed by. It just says, "this survey was designed by GitHub." That you assume it is a womens studies major (which by the way would not prevent it from being rigorous) reflects your bias.
Actually, yes - the fact that a study is performed by a women's studies major does indeed mean that it would not be rigorous, in much the same way that an "IQ study" performed by the KKK would also not be rigorous.
FCOL - Women's studies make no attempt to hide the fact that they are for the advancement of women, in much the same way that the KKK make no attempt to hide the fact that they are for the advancement of caucasians. A study by a group for the advancement of women that produces a "women are victims" conclusion would get the same skepticism from normal people that a study produced by the KKK that concludes "whites are victims".
Btw: Who do you think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
There is no gender barrier to starting open source projects on GitHub. There is no barrier to recruiting talented women into your feminist collective femputer software project. If women are just as interested and productive in open source as men, they wouldn't need the munificence of men in order to have them work on male-dominated open source projects, there would be lots of open source projects run by women where women could go to feel welcome.
The lack of women-run open source projects, female developers, etc. is a simple consequence of straight women being statistically much less interested in starting or participating in such projects. (Note that, despite facing discrimination and prejudice, gays actually are overrepresented among GitHub open source developers.)
> If a project needs a Code of Conduct, I don't want to be part of that project.
If you find the very existence of a Code of Conduct objectionable, then not being part of the project is probably best for both you and the project.
But no whining if there's a dearth of co-members who are actually pleasant to work with.
Reverse discrimination is like unicorns. Often spoken about but never seen.
Actually, more like air. Spoken about, but so pervasive you stop even noticing it.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Please cite the New York law. I believe some daycares might have that policy, and it's probably illegal because it's sex discrimination.