
Why we need to rethink “Women in Tech” - bootload
http://www.thedailymuse.com/tech/why-we-need-to-rethink-women-in-tech/
======
bane
It's interesting that we think the lack of women in tech is a bug to be
solved. Just because half of the population is female, it doesn't necessarily
follow that half of any particular selection of the population must be female.

Put another way, we lament that there are not enough women in tech, not enough
women ceos, not enough women in <insert high prestige white collar work>, but
I can't personally recall seeing a great deal of frustration over the lack of
women in trash pickup, construction, boxing and prison populations.

(full disclosure, I do think it's a bug that more women aren't in tech, but I
thought I'd play devil's advocate for a moment..my technical cofounder is a
woman).

~~~
Lewisham
I don't disagree, but tech isn't the only one that wrings its hands about
gender disparity... lack of male teachers being an obvious one (although the
pedo hysteria basically drove away any of them in elementary level).

It's hard not to feel that tech is missing out on something by not having more
women, we just don't know what we're missing. I would bet money if more women
were in games, we'd have had the social game revolution a good 3 years earlier
at least. As someone else mentioned, working with women creates a more
pleasant and balanced place. Sometimes it's nice to hear about how the new
baby is doing, or have someone to gossip with. Interactions you don't tend to
get with men. I bet that helps with creativity too.

What I largely disagree with is how we go react to it: very large doses of
affirmative action at both the industry and college level. Not only does it
just feel like we're throwing money at women who would have done it anyway,
it's a rather discriminatory set of policies on top. The message is that
females are the weaker tech sex, which in turn breeds things like imposter
syndrome. However, I won't pretend that the locker room antics that is college
Computer Science courses isn't intimidating.

The problem is lower down. IIRC, there's research that says girls of 12-13
entertain the idea of going into science or engineering, but something happens
in middle school age where that interest gets beaten out of them, and by high
school it's all over. You've lost them. We give grants and jobs to those that
had the resolve to go through it, but have nothing to say to those 14 year old
girls that are wondering why they thought they'd make iOS apps at all.
_That's_ who we should be targeting.

~~~
sliverstorm
_there's research that says girls of 12-13 entertain the idea of going into
science or engineering, but something happens in middle school age where that
interest gets beaten out of them_

Which is, coincidentally enough, when most girls hit puberty IIRC.

------
patio11
Both journalism and "journalism" are meta-games. They don't really track where
the industry is -- they track a separate and not necessarily representative
alternative advancement system. You earn journo-points in an entirely
different way than you earn geek-points or engineering-points or startup-
points or money-points. (P.S. All of above available independently from each
other, too.) The criteria for awarding journo-points are set a wee bit by
fashion, a wee bit by tradition, a wee bit by merit, and a whole heck of a lot
by the desire of journalists to have power and privilege and the desire of
media outlets to have the opportunity to sell the attention of people who have
high purchasing power.

If one hypothetically wanted to get ladies more journo-points, one would not
tell them to improve their coding ability, because the ROI on coding ability
in producing journo-points is pretty poor. I don't think most people are
really interested in the social justice maximizing allocation of journo-
points, though. (n.b. There are a variety of activities which are worth zero
or negative geek-points that are worth scads of journo-points which I could
use as an example here. I'm self-censoring because I don't want to accuse the
folks on those Top X Lists of benefiting from them even though, in aggregate,
they certainly benefit from them.)

I would be very careful making inferences from present allocations of journo-
points into how we can better incentivize any group of people into seeing that
startup-points or geek-points or engineering-points are what they should be
optimizing for, if we decide that that is indeed our goal. (On the specific
subject of gender, I think that at least part of the discussion should
probably be "What kind of points do women at the margin want?" and, if that
isn't geek-points, " _Should_ we convince women at the margin to sacrifice
what they currently value for geek-points?")

------
wisty
Old topic. Salient talking points:

1) "Geek" culture is not heterodox. It's very accepting of fat guys who like
faux-Mexican food, and anime; but not so accepting of other non-conformists.
Many women are not fat guys who like faux-Mexican food, and anime.

2) Women are encouraged to work hard. Men are encouraged to be talented. This
is true of teachers, parents, peers, and managers. Coding is something that
requires more talent than hard work (at least, to get started); due to the
high barrier of entry.

3) There is some ugly sexism in parts of tech. There is ugly sexism in other
career paths (finance, sales); but we can do a lot better.

4) Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till
3am coding. It's hard to tell if this is really relevant - Patrick McKenzie
claims to have run business on 5 hours a week. And no-one here (I hope) think
driving code monkeys on 80 hour/week death marches is really a good idea (due
to tiredness-induced bugs).

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...but not so accepting of other non-conformists._

What other sorts of non-conformists find that they are not accepted by the
tech world?

In my experience, the tech world is extremely tolerant of wacky political
beliefs (anarchist/communist, for example), low status hobbies, all sorts of
foreign cultures, gays and other sexual minorities, to name all the groups I
can think of.

Also, there are a few studies suggesting women avoid computing because women
dislike nonconformists and individualistic culture. This would certainly
explain why the corporate world has more women programmers than the startup
world.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20100106021904/http://scicom.ucsc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100106021904/http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20091007234852/http://opensource....](http://web.archive.org/web/20091007234852/http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lin3_gender.pdf)

Also, you realize your points 2) (women work hard, not smart) and 4) (women
don't work hard) are contradictory, right?

~~~
Anechoic
_Also, there are a few studies suggesting women avoid computing because women
dislike nonconformists and individualistic culture._

Those examples don't point to women disliking "nonconformists and
individualistic" cultures, they point to women not liking geek male culture.
Plush Nintendo-shaped stuffed pillows are just as non-conformist as Star Trek
toys, but those UCSC women seemed pretty happy with the environment.

The Lin paper talks about all kinds of different problems (" women within the
software industry have to work harder than men in order to get the same
respect", etc)

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Those examples don't point to women disliking "nonconformists and
individualistic" cultures, they point to women not liking geek male culture._

It might just be certain non-conformist cultures women don't like. The point
remains - if technology were less accepting of differences, it would probably
have more women.

I'm also not sure I agree that nintendo-pillows are as non-conformist as star
trek toys - geek-chic has become fairly mainstream. Plenty of hipsters wear
mario or pacman t-shirts but very few people of any mainstream subculture wear
a borg or lt. data t-shirt.

------
Volscio
There's a generation of female coders coming out of NYC soon -- seeing half my
Nature of Code in Processing class being female and a lot of my female
classmates working with OpenProcessing, Pocode, etc. Likewise in DC there are
already a lot of up-and-coming tough-as-nails journalistas starting to run
stuff. I think they're a little further ahead than the female coders right now
though. You'll see this stuff happen in east coast cities first since the
ratios are so favorable for highly-educated, intelligent, fiercely independent
women there.

~~~
einhverfr
Part of the problem with the article though is that it seems to assume that
"tech" means "hot tech startups." And "startup" here has a specific meaning
that assumes that it does not include the self-employed and therefore involves
a sort of work style that historically women have actively avoided.

A third of the software engineers and developers out there are women. I am
willing to bet though that the numbers in hot tech start-ups are significantly
less than that.

And yet, what of the woman who says "I don't want to work this job while I
raise my kid? I am going to become a freelance tech writer! (or developer, or
whatever)" They don't count in these metrics. Which may also say something
about the sexism latent in the metrics.....

BTW, two of the most talented programmers I have ever met in my life were
women. One worked in academia, and the other, despite her important
achievements, worked at a tech-centric coffee shop as a sysadmin, and later
got a job as a developer for a relatively obscure yet stable company.

------
eplanit
Why is there no similar concern over the disproportionately few women roofers,
plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. etc? Those are skilled trades, and
can lead to solid and stable income for an individual and his/her family, as
well as the potential to grow into a larger business. My point is that there
seems to be bias in where some people want "equality".

~~~
Anechoic
_Why is there no similar concern over the disproportionately few women
roofers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. etc?_

There are - you probably don't travel in those circles so you don't see the
outreach efforts (I work with a lot of union trades and they have outreach
programs for those exact areas you listed).

------
gcb
It's sexist. Period.

