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)."

Comments

Biggest difference

[religionofpeas]

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.

Re:how 25 versus 15 percent is six times more like

[jellomizer]

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

Re:Another way to put it?

[AmiMoJo]

TFA is much more coherent and accurate than the summary.

The most important thing seems to be this:

"Negative experiences have real consequences for project health. 21% of people who experienced or witnessed a negative behavior said they stopped contributing to a project because of it"

In other words being a dick is a great way to kill your open source project.

Re:As if it's a bad thing

[swb]

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.

Re:Thanks BeauHD!

[goose-incarnated]

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?

Re:I looked at who did the study...

[Ol Olsoc]

These stories always turn into dumpster fires in the comments. A burning pile of ad-hominems, old tyres, a metric tonne of denials and dismissals, with the whole conflagration accelerated by complaints that the story shouldn't have been posted.

Its an old story. And can usually be cured by sliding that old mod level bar to the left.

I try to participate honestly, based on a career working in STEM, and working that career in the most female friendly environment around, where they received preferential hiring, preferential treatment, and the males were stifled. And still it didn't work.

I spent a fair bit of time working to try to get young ladies to get into STEM careers. That one got pretty sad in the end, when questions regarding males not being involved were raised, they allowed boy, but it was painfully obvious that all the attention was given to the girls.

In the end, I came to the conclusion that STEM was a career that the person has to be interested and dedicated, and they know it, not something that they see a video of STEM work, and suddenly think "Yeah - I want to do that!" My lady friends who are in STEM all knew from an early age they wanted to enter this field. Just like me.

Is it sexist to believe that there are some differences in thinking between men and women in the group sense?

My wife, who is roughly as intelligent as myself, and pretty brilliant, is not interested in the same things that I am. She chose a business career - and in of all places, the housing industry. Hardly a hotbed of gender equality. I chose science.

My lady friend Engineers and scientists and I can sit around and talk science all day long. We can joke, we can enjoy each other's company. And some have a really dirty sense of humor.

And as aside note, these successful women who are as liberated as any I have ever met, who put up with no bullshit - are hated by the third wave feminists who are busy installing a concept of the female who is utterly destroyed by any negativity, and must be protected from it at all times.

Regardless, after 30 plus years of work in the field, a fair amount spent in trying to attract and retain women in STEM, my considered opinion is that people will tend to be interested in what they are interested in, and that if the ultimate goal is equal representation by gender in STEM, we have to force males into other career paths, and force females into STEM. Hopefully we'll at least test for ability first, but that might be prejudicial in a world where children are told "You can do anything you want, you can be anything you can dream of if you only try hard enough."