

Why women are leaving the tech industry in droves - sparkzilla
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gardner-women-in-tech-20141207-story.html

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benjamincburns
I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I'm pushing 30, and I'm only just starting to
realize how insanely _weird_ this is.

The tech industry is, pretty much by definition, at the forefront of _modern_.
It's an industry that thrives over the entire world. In pretty much every
other measure of diversity and equality most mature tech companies do quite
well. For so many people technology skills are a great equalizing force. Why
is it then that over the entire industry, over the entire world, women are
underrepresented? It's a little embarrassing.

More importantly - how do we fix it?

~~~
RickS
Disclaimer: This is a personal theory, and while there's some research that
says similar things, I'm not a cultural anthropologist. Grain of salt.

I think it has to do with the youth of tech as an industry. I'm 25, and I
still very well remember the days when if you wanted to work on a computer, a
screwdriver was required. They were heavy, too! Heavy enough that a ~3rd
grader would have serious trouble carting them around, especially up the
stairs.

You can fit all the computing power you need into a messenger bag today, but
that wasn't always the case.

The women entering/leaving the tech industry today are still almost
unanimously of the age where they were deterred not by the constraints of
programming and computer knowledge, but of the more traditionally male-
oriented tasks like screwing pieces of metal together and lifting heavy stuff.
2 decades ago, it was less cool for girls to get dirty with that kind of
thing.

Of course there are the same kind of systemic problems that plague the culture
as a whole, but I think the problem was exacerbated by the fact that hardware
free, strictly knowledge based computer work is only now becoming the norm.

Hardware is becoming less stigmatized for women (albeit slower than
programming), and it's also becoming less necessary, so my hope is that things
only improve from here.

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wsxedcr
I assume harassment would not happen in the open source world since you can
use an alias to hide yourself, however, why is the portion of female
contributors so low? Tech blog writers, people don't read blogs because it is
written by a man, why is there so much less programming blogger that are
female? I felt the discrimination that is happening is the result, but not the
cause of female leaving the industry

~~~
Retra
You don't have many female programming bloggers because you don't have many
female programmers.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Dear god are these comments awful.

Wonder why there aren't women in tech? The stuff in this comments section
probably has something to do with it,

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sparkzilla
Irony Alert: Ms Gardner was the Executive Director of the Wikimedia
Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, a site which has 90% male contributors and
has had ongoing problems with the harassment of women contributors.

~~~
jameshart
Because she failed to single-handedly reverse the trend in the context of
wikipedia, she loses the right to express an opinion about how bad it is?

~~~
sparkzilla
She wasn't single handed. She had the huge resources and budget of Wikipedia
available to her. She had the power to guide a team in the inner organization,
and many thousands of people beyond. She had access to a huge PR platform.

She did nothing substantive when she had the chance to take action, so why
should we take anything she says now seriously?

~~~
erikpukinskis
Because speaking the truth and being capable of changing it are different
things?

