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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)."
I've never heard anyone concerning male nurse and babysitters.
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.
What issue? Not enough women in OSS?
If so, do you think we also need to solve the problem of not enough men in college, which is now 60% women? And that is a huge number compared to the number of people working OSS.
Just because a field isn't close to being 50/50 between men and women doesn't mean the cause is sexism.
Because men and women ARE different.
No, discriminating against white males is never OK. Some people want it ignored. Some people want it ensrhined. But the discrimination is never OK.
Discrimination doesnt get any more "systemic" then when it is actually illegal not to do it.
A century ago discrimination against both sexes was still the law of the land.
Two landmarks in American history cases came up in 1919-1920.
The first was a landmark supreme court ruling in 1919 on the constitutionality of the gender-specific draft. The supreme court ruled that the gender-specific draft was constitutional on the grounds that it was a reciprocal responsibility of that gender because that gender was afforded the right to vote. If you were allowed to vote, they said, then you are also subject to the draft.
The second was a landmark because there have been so few of them: amendments to our constitution. In 1920 we gave women the right to vote, but we still have not subjected even a single solitary woman to the draft.
All this worry over speculative-sexism while there is still literally systemic-sexism on the books as the law of the land... I have just one thing to say to feminists... go fuck yourselves. I will never give one rats ass about any of your speculative-sexism while you continue to defend existing systemic-sexism with your solution being more systemic-sexism. Seriously, go fuck yourselves feminists, and the next time I hear of a talk about male suicide being shut down by feminists I'm going to punch one. Go. Fuck. Yourselves.
"His name was James Damore."
A century ago discrimination against both sexes was still the law of the land.
It is fascinating how things have changed isn't it? For anyone who is really interested, look up the history of child custody laws over the past century or so. What you find is that once upon a time, custody of kids in a divorce was actually automatically awarded to the father believe it or not. Then towards the middle of the 20th century the laws were completely changed such that by default custody was automatically awarded to the mother. Today, we are finally starting to define a way to evaluate who the more appropriate custodial parent is for the benefit of the children but up until recently it was a black and white decision, father or mother by default in all cases regardless of situation. What perpetuates sexism again? Yeah...
We'll make great pets
The only justification for "moving slowly" before getting a date that I can see is in the belief that the act of asking someone out is a profoundly important event in the lives of these two people. This belief is unfounded and probably based on a fallacy.
Sometimes it is a profoundly important event for one person to ask another out on a date, but most of the time it isn't.
Again, if you want to increase the probability that asking a girl out turns out to be a profoundly important event in your life, then sooner is better than later, more is better than less. Lots and lots of girls.
This "move slowly" idea almost seems like a fallacious rationalization that is actually rooted in the fear of rejection.
"His name was James Damore."
Who do YOU think is objectively (measurably) the best of demographic in the world? Who do you think is the worst?
What does this question even mean? There is no such thing as a "best" demographic. The concept makes no sense.
The best-off demographic. The concept makes perfect sense: you can measure characteristics of a demographic and compare those measurements with other demographics. For example, there is a certain demographic of humans who:
Lives the longest,
Has the most college graduates,
Has the highest average income of all adults,
Are, compared to every other demographic, less likely to be the victims of violent crime,
Are less likely to be homeless,
Have fewer special-needs individuals (IQ less than 75)
Get prosecuted less often,
When prosecuted, get lighter sentences (up to 64%) for the same crime,
Has the highest employment / lowest unemployment,
...
If you guessed "white women", you're on the ball. (Yes, average income of white women exceeds avg income of just about every other demographic there is).
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I have a couple of very active female contributor accounts with female pictures etc. on Github despite being male in real life. Yet, I don't experience any new problems, same with Twitter, Steam etc.
Yet, I never really get anything particularly sexist that happens to me when I participate online under those accounts... At best, people on Call of Duty call me a "bitch" instead of "fag" and I don't get really anything negative etc. in other games and so on. But, on stuff like Bitbucket, Github, FOSS mailing lists? Nothing, no difference at all.
I get the impression there is a reason why these articles never tell you to just create a female account and see for yourself and it isn't because people will become traumatized by creating a female alias.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I don't remember him bitching about women or disabled people or on looks
Can't help but notice that TFA doesn't point to any examples of that, either. They just say "felt unwelcome". They didn't say "felt unwelcome, but for technical reasons, so it was understandable."
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.