Yes they have. There's a nice article in PNAS about a technical job in biosciences. They randomly assigned a gendered name to CVs. CVs with female names got fewer job offers and a lower salary offer than male ones.
Interesting, though I'm not sure it demonstrates the same in non-academic hiring in a different field (computer science). In particular, the biosciences show a strong discrepancy between gender of graduates and in academic positions; there is no such discrepancy between CS graduates and professional positions requiring CS degrees. It certainly fails to support the "horrible men" hypothesis, given that gender bias was independent of the gender of the evaluator.
It also fails to show institutional sexism, though that's a matter of terminology. There's no policy or procedure resulting in the difference. This is (apparently pervasive) individual sexism.
The next question is what you do about it. Beating up on men obviously won't help. You can remove gender distinguishers from resumes prior to evaluation. But in most positions it isn't practical to make a final decision without an in-person interview.
There does seem to be a rash of political idiots lately. They're failing quite a lot it should be noted.
They shot their wad on Gamergate. They've long been moving into positions where they could control the narrative, both in old media and new media. But they hadn't achieved complete control yet, and when they tried to clamp down on Gamergate it both slipped away AND in the process revealed the extent of their machinations.
Add to that the collapse of the "rape culture" narrative with the phony "Jackie" story, and they've suffered from serious setbacks lately. Can't count them out yet, alas, but they're going to find it much harder going in the future.
That said, I don't understand how you can dismiss out of hand the idea that the culture of, say, software developers or gamers in the US (there is a culture, isn't there?) might include more sexists or contain an ideology that allows for sexism more so than other fields.
It's that there are certain other fields -- e.g. sales, advertising, finance -- which are notorious for being filled with macho men who don't take women seriously and will "hit on anything with a skirt". Based on knowing people from some of those fields, this notoriety is not un-earned. I've known very few software developers fitting that description, and all went into management early on. And yet all those fields have a more balanced gender ratio than software development.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I have no sympathy whatsoever with the whiners that get all defensive when the topic of women in tech comes up, and it's not because I give one shit about whether someone self-identifies as a nerd or not. (Why does anyone?)
Well, I'm personally through being defensive and have decided that going on the offensive is better. Because as Ratzo has so clearly demonstrated, getting women in tech isn't really the object. The object is to bully the male nerds out.
One other thing I definitely don't have any sympathy for (and again, only speaking for myself) is crappy debate. So where are the arguments that are actually intended to persuade those with an open ear?
Is there anyone left with an open ear?
If I sound critical, it's only because I've yet to see a single post on here complaining about alleged bias on gender-related stuff in tech that sounds like it's from someone open to debate.
Probably because no one left is. The topic's been beat into the ground.
The number one argument their side -- the side that claims some sort of pervasive institutional discrimination -- has is the gender ratio. There's no denying it's lopsided. After that, all they've really got is anecdotes about harassment. Many of these are spurious (such as Julie Ann Horvath's problems with the wife of GitHub's founder being spun as sexism), but they hold that even questioning these anecdotes is itself sexism and proof of their proposition. At point there's no point in arguing further; they're arguing in bad faith.
I've heard plenty of talk from your side about men being men, so why don't you man up already and prove yourself right?
I don't know that the "men being men" theory is right either; the strongest evidence of that is the "gender equality" paradox, that as sociologist Susan Pinker notes "in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced". But separating nature from nurture is fiendishly difficult.
What I do know is the "misogynerd" theory, that holds that the reason for the disparity is that men in tech are uniquely awful to women, in ways that men in other, more balanced professions like sales and medical doctors and advertising professionals are not, is utterly ridiculous.
I knew there would be at least one person claiming Linus is just being "blunt." Wishing that someone dies in a car accident due to sabotaged brakes is not being blunt.
There's blunt like an old pencil, and there's blunt like Mjolinar.
Bad narrative. It's not the nerdiness that makes you obnoxious. And everybody's a nerd now, so it just doesn't matter. Nerds are over. Nerds are dead.
Nerds are over like gamers are over. How'd that work out for you? Oh, right. When the mainstream media made a Nightline segment for your side, it got less than 900 likes and over 22,500 dislikes.
See above. Nerds aren't the only game in town for tech any more.
Ex jocks may be able to use Tor. They sure as hell aren't going to build it. Like I said, it's not enough to steal the nerds' ideas any more.
And the truth is, you're not as nerdy as you think. Compared to some twenty-something girl with blue hair and piercings who writes perl code for fun, you're not the king of the nerd hill any more.
Didn't she just get laid off?
And yet...http://www.cnet.com/news/intel-pledges-300m-to-build-a-more-diverse-work-force/
You're not getting it. I'm not talking about gestures, I'm talking about results. Intel can throw $300M to minority scholarships and the most likely result is nothing. How do I know this? Because it's been done before. It's a gesture of appeasement, nothing more.
Men in tech are just pitiful. Reading these mewling, whining comments, one does not need to wonder why big tech companies are trying to encourage diversity.
The funniest part is that male Slashdot readers actually think their opinions matter on the topic of diversity. So, just for the record, nobody cares what you think. The industry is trying to recruit women because you are so awful to be around, and you are not half as irreplaceable as you think.
Ah, thank you. Remember when I said SJWs were the same male-nerd-bashers we've dealt with our entire life? Case in point right here.
Yeah, we know; we're nerds. Non-nerds hate us and when they're not using us for punching bags or as the butt of their jokes, they wish we'd just go away. Too bad the world has provided two ironies
1) You need us. We are, indeed, as irreplaceable as we think. You can't do tech without nerds. And you need us more than ever; the days where you could simply steal the spear-inventor's idea then drive him out with his own invention are over.
2) SJWs manage to be even more awful to be around than nerds. Once they run out of external targets they turn on each other, and with the same viciousness.
Our opinions on diversity don't matter? Perhaps not. But yours don't either; we can see that from the fact that you've been beating the drum for a very long time, and you haven't gotten what you want; not even a significant move towards it.
It's called the Reid technique and the police in the US have been deliberately exploiting it for years to obtain false convictions.
I've had that used on me. As soon as I realized what they were doing I called them on it (didn't know what it was called at the time) and they ended the interview right there. In Step 1 they implied they had certain evidence of my guilt and knew I was guilty; they screwed up Step 3 because I said I didn't do it, and somewhere in Step 6 or 7 realized they had no such evidence (because it didn't fit their alternatives) and called them on it.
It's not "fudging", it's just releasing the numbers the companies have available. They're not compiling ethnicity statistics based on "employees who were US nationals when they went to US-based universities", because no one's asking for that. And they certainly aren't doing the same for all foreign nationals and foreign university systems.
I find it unlikely that the tech sector will ever even get close to parity. Too many boys get interested in tech as a reaction to be ostracized from other groups. They develop a culture all their own, and that culture is usually not particularly friendly to people that are different from them
ROTFL. Talk about blaming the victim. It's mainstream culture that is particularly friendly to nerds.
When one looks at scandals like "gamergate" and other situations where women are finding themselves subject to personal attack when they disagree with other members of the community
Right problem, wrong perpetrator. It's the SJWs, not the gamers, who maintain a reign of terror via personal attack and outright censorship when someone disagrees.
The SJW posts will continue until the commenters acquiesce. Not holding my breath. It's not like we don't recognize the SJWs as being the same damn male-nerd-bashers we've dealt with our entire life, only now claiming the moral high ground of "diversity" too.
The disclosures showed what everyone knew already - there's a lot of white males around, a disproportionately high number of Asian males, not so many Hispanics and blacks and relatively few women. Do you really think picking at the details is going to make things look significantly different?
And why bring up H-1Bs when talking about only counting employees who have Social Security taxes withheld? H-1Bs ARE subject to withholding for Social Security.
There are any number of sanctimonious jerks who will use demands for civility and manners the way a shepherd uses a sheepdog -- as long as you're going in the direction they want, you can do and say what you want, but if you oppose them they won't oppose you directly but just tone-police you. If you can't beat them at their own game, smashing through the bullshit with some bluntness can work, provided you're powerful or popular enough to get away with it... and Linus is.
it's been criticized for interviewing practices that put female candidates on a "horrifying steeplechase [by] careless and non-people-oriented technologists."
Who do you expect to interview candidates for tech jobs, other than technologists? And "people-oriented technologists" is a contradiction in terms; there are some few technologists who are good with people, but that's by definition not their focus.
I work for another tech firm, and while we DO in fact offer candidates refreshments and bathroom breaks (and I'm sure Amazon interviewers are supposed to), it's STILL a grueling process. If you want an interview where you deal with outgoing people who engage in all the proper extravert body language and who are evaluating you on your own conversational skills rather than on technical merit, tech jobs probably aren't right for you, whether you're a man or a woman.
But then, the article shows itself to be BS when it talks about "brogrammers". Folks, brogramming was and remains (aside from some cases of life-imitating-art) a hoax. Further, careers where the men ARE actual bros have a far higher proportion of women in them than programming. So if culture is the issue, a "brogramming" culture would probably be an improvement.
"He and his colleagues also conclude that their findings help explain why African-Americans are underrepresented in STEM professions while Asian-Americans are not."
But isn't the stereotype (not without basis) of the Asian-American an average or slightly above average student who is driven (perhaps by his "tiger mom") to excel through hard work and practice rather than innate brilliance?
This would seem to argue against their findings, not be supported by them.
I'm pretty sure that as a tech worker I'm making more net income than most master electricians and master plumbers. For those who aren't running their own business it isn't even close. And I'm never hip-deep in actual shit, only metaphorical shit.
We're talking primary and secondary education here. You never needed that much intelligence to get through it, you only had to not more than 1 sigma below the mean. And the curriculum isn't getting any harder intelligence-wise. Further, certain common pedagogic techniques (e.g. large numbers of similar homework problems) reward persistence over intelligence. "A costly and inefficient success" gets you the same grade, if not better, than an easy one.
So "grit" is probably more important than intelligence in K-12 education. The more intelligence you have, the less "grit" you're going to need, except when faced with one of those teaching techniques that demands "grit".
The claim of the above OP (AC signed "Wendy", I assume the AC is claiming to be Chilling Effects founder Wendy Seltzer) that "it was not our intent to remove the site from search engines " doesn't square with these from the article.
After much internal discussion the Chilling Effects project recently made the decision to remove the siteâ(TM)s notice pages from search engines, Berkman Center project coordinator Adam Holland informs TF.
Our recent relaunch of the site has brought it a lot more attention, and as a result, weâ(TM)re currently thinking through ways to better balance making this information available for valuable study, research, and journalism, while still addressing the concerns of people whose information appears in the database.
Yeah. Balance. I know what that means -- in the words of Michael Jackson, it means "They'll kick you, then they beat you / Then they'll tell you it's fair"
Aww, poor baby copyright holders, have to give their legal address to have someone else's URL suppressed. Never mind that the DMCA _counternotice_ requires not just a legal address, but an invitation to sue. And the legal address part has been used by false claimants to commit terrorism
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, though I'm not sure it demonstrates the same in non-academic hiring in a different field (computer science). In particular, the biosciences show a strong discrepancy between gender of graduates and in academic positions; there is no such discrepancy between CS graduates and professional positions requiring CS degrees. It certainly fails to support the "horrible men" hypothesis, given that gender bias was independent of the gender of the evaluator.
It also fails to show institutional sexism, though that's a matter of terminology. There's no policy or procedure resulting in the difference. This is (apparently pervasive) individual sexism.
The next question is what you do about it. Beating up on men obviously won't help. You can remove gender distinguishers from resumes prior to evaluation. But in most positions it isn't practical to make a final decision without an in-person interview.
Ah, "neckbeards". And further back, "autists" used as an insult. Yes, there's someone's ugly side exposed indeed.
A workforce that you pay but doesn't get the work done is far more expensive.
They shot their wad on Gamergate. They've long been moving into positions where they could control the narrative, both in old media and new media. But they hadn't achieved complete control yet, and when they tried to clamp down on Gamergate it both slipped away AND in the process revealed the extent of their machinations.
Add to that the collapse of the "rape culture" narrative with the phony "Jackie" story, and they've suffered from serious setbacks lately. Can't count them out yet, alas, but they're going to find it much harder going in the future.
Did that kool-aid taste good, or did it burn going down?
It's that there are certain other fields -- e.g. sales, advertising, finance -- which are notorious for being filled with macho men who don't take women seriously and will "hit on anything with a skirt". Based on knowing people from some of those fields, this notoriety is not un-earned. I've known very few software developers fitting that description, and all went into management early on. And yet all those fields have a more balanced gender ratio than software development.
Well, I'm personally through being defensive and have decided that going on the offensive is better. Because as Ratzo has so clearly demonstrated, getting women in tech isn't really the object. The object is to bully the male nerds out.
Is there anyone left with an open ear?
Probably because no one left is. The topic's been beat into the ground.
The number one argument their side -- the side that claims some sort of pervasive institutional discrimination -- has is the gender ratio. There's no denying it's lopsided. After that, all they've really got is anecdotes about harassment. Many of these are spurious (such as Julie Ann Horvath's problems with the wife of GitHub's founder being spun as sexism), but they hold that even questioning these anecdotes is itself sexism and proof of their proposition. At point there's no point in arguing further; they're arguing in bad faith.
I don't know that the "men being men" theory is right either; the strongest evidence of that is the "gender equality" paradox, that as sociologist Susan Pinker notes "in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced". But separating nature from nurture is fiendishly difficult.
What I do know is the "misogynerd" theory, that holds that the reason for the disparity is that men in tech are uniquely awful to women, in ways that men in other, more balanced professions like sales and medical doctors and advertising professionals are not, is utterly ridiculous.
There's blunt like an old pencil, and there's blunt like Mjolinar.
Nerds are over like gamers are over. How'd that work out for you? Oh, right. When the mainstream media made a Nightline segment for your side, it got less than 900 likes and over 22,500 dislikes.
Ex jocks may be able to use Tor. They sure as hell aren't going to build it. Like I said, it's not enough to steal the nerds' ideas any more.
Didn't she just get laid off?
You're not getting it. I'm not talking about gestures, I'm talking about results. Intel can throw $300M to minority scholarships and the most likely result is nothing. How do I know this? Because it's been done before. It's a gesture of appeasement, nothing more.
Ah, thank you. Remember when I said SJWs were the same male-nerd-bashers we've dealt with our entire life? Case in point right here.
Yeah, we know; we're nerds. Non-nerds hate us and when they're not using us for punching bags or as the butt of their jokes, they wish we'd just go away. Too bad the world has provided two ironies
1) You need us. We are, indeed, as irreplaceable as we think. You can't do tech without nerds. And you need us more than ever; the days where you could simply steal the spear-inventor's idea then drive him out with his own invention are over.
2) SJWs manage to be even more awful to be around than nerds. Once they run out of external targets they turn on each other, and with the same viciousness.
Our opinions on diversity don't matter? Perhaps not. But yours don't either; we can see that from the fact that you've been beating the drum for a very long time, and you haven't gotten what you want; not even a significant move towards it.
I've had that used on me. As soon as I realized what they were doing I called them on it (didn't know what it was called at the time) and they ended the interview right there. In Step 1 they implied they had certain evidence of my guilt and knew I was guilty; they screwed up Step 3 because I said I didn't do it, and somewhere in Step 6 or 7 realized they had no such evidence (because it didn't fit their alternatives) and called them on it.
Can't fool me. I didn't do it. I've got a record of the charges being dismissed.
It's not "fudging", it's just releasing the numbers the companies have available. They're not compiling ethnicity statistics based on "employees who were US nationals when they went to US-based universities", because no one's asking for that. And they certainly aren't doing the same for all foreign nationals and foreign university systems.
ROTFL. Talk about blaming the victim. It's mainstream culture that is particularly friendly to nerds.
Right problem, wrong perpetrator. It's the SJWs, not the gamers, who maintain a reign of terror via personal attack and outright censorship when someone disagrees.
The SJW posts will continue until the commenters acquiesce. Not holding my breath. It's not like we don't recognize the SJWs as being the same damn male-nerd-bashers we've dealt with our entire life, only now claiming the moral high ground of "diversity" too.
The disclosures showed what everyone knew already - there's a lot of white males around, a disproportionately high number of Asian males, not so many Hispanics and blacks and relatively few women. Do you really think picking at the details is going to make things look significantly different?
And why bring up H-1Bs when talking about only counting employees who have Social Security taxes withheld? H-1Bs ARE subject to withholding for Social Security.
There are any number of sanctimonious jerks who will use demands for civility and manners the way a shepherd uses a sheepdog -- as long as you're going in the direction they want, you can do and say what you want, but if you oppose them they won't oppose you directly but just tone-police you. If you can't beat them at their own game, smashing through the bullshit with some bluntness can work, provided you're powerful or popular enough to get away with it... and Linus is.
Who do you expect to interview candidates for tech jobs, other than technologists? And "people-oriented technologists" is a contradiction in terms; there are some few technologists who are good with people, but that's by definition not their focus.
I work for another tech firm, and while we DO in fact offer candidates refreshments and bathroom breaks (and I'm sure Amazon interviewers are supposed to), it's STILL a grueling process. If you want an interview where you deal with outgoing people who engage in all the proper extravert body language and who are evaluating you on your own conversational skills rather than on technical merit, tech jobs probably aren't right for you, whether you're a man or a woman.
But then, the article shows itself to be BS when it talks about "brogrammers". Folks, brogramming was and remains (aside from some cases of life-imitating-art) a hoax. Further, careers where the men ARE actual bros have a far higher proportion of women in them than programming. So if culture is the issue, a "brogramming" culture would probably be an improvement.
"He and his colleagues also conclude that their findings help explain why African-Americans are underrepresented in STEM professions while Asian-Americans are not."
But isn't the stereotype (not without basis) of the Asian-American an average or slightly above average student who is driven (perhaps by his "tiger mom") to excel through hard work and practice rather than innate brilliance?
This would seem to argue against their findings, not be supported by them.
I'm pretty sure that as a tech worker I'm making more net income than most master electricians and master plumbers. For those who aren't running their own business it isn't even close. And I'm never hip-deep in actual shit, only metaphorical shit.
We're talking primary and secondary education here. You never needed that much intelligence to get through it, you only had to not more than 1 sigma below the mean. And the curriculum isn't getting any harder intelligence-wise. Further, certain common pedagogic techniques (e.g. large numbers of similar homework problems) reward persistence over intelligence. "A costly and inefficient success" gets you the same grade, if not better, than an easy one.
So "grit" is probably more important than intelligence in K-12 education. The more intelligence you have, the less "grit" you're going to need, except when faced with one of those teaching techniques that demands "grit".
OLED kicks LCD and Plasma butt. Unfortunately it costs as much as an LCD screen did 10 years ago.
The claim of the above OP (AC signed "Wendy", I assume the AC is claiming to be Chilling Effects founder Wendy Seltzer) that "it was not our intent to remove the site from search engines " doesn't square with these from the article.
Yeah. Balance. I know what that means -- in the words of Michael Jackson, it means "They'll kick you, then they beat you / Then they'll tell you it's fair"
Unicode is a clusterfuck. 7 bits is good enough for anyone.
Aww, poor baby copyright holders, have to give their legal address to have someone else's URL suppressed. Never mind that the DMCA _counternotice_ requires not just a legal address, but an invitation to sue. And the legal address part has been used by false claimants to commit terrorism