
We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring - leeny
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-really-is-a-pipeline-problem-in-eng-hiring/
======
supernova87a
With such politically charged issues, it's always a problem of people wanting
to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads
against what is true and actually possible.

If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for
the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats),
how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representation?

A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG
companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the
rest of them. Look at these percentages and you can see unsentimentally that
this must be true.

Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little
control over the constraints? If we put actual performance metrics and pay on
the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be
fired.

~~~
hnick
I generally agree with you, but such smart and resourceful companies could do
something about it. They are not powerless.

Companies used to train internally - watch an older TV show (or even something
like Better Call Saul) and see how many characters "worked their way up from
the mail room". The death of company loyalty goes both ways but I'm sure it
can be mended with some effort. Where I work one of the better programmers I
knew was an immigrant from south east Asia who started in the warehouse and
had an interest in programming. I don't know whether or not he had a degree,
but the point was he worked hard to prove himself, and they took a chance to
give him a go.

So I guess my point is, graduate statistics isn't the end of the story.

~~~
greggman2
> Companies used to train internally

Please no. Japan is that way. Japan pays programmers $20k to start, no better
than working fast food. Their salaries go up to $60k at the top end at most
big Japanese companies and they have the attitude that anyone over 35 is too
old to code. I feel the fact they hire grads with zero experience is one of
the reasons. Why pay someone $$$ if they can't actually do the job yet?
Conversely interns at Google make $70k-$100k yearly equivalent. The two might
not be connected but I feel they are and so AFAIK the "pay for experience" is
better than "pay with free training" for employees.

It also seems better for the employer. Japan still has a culture of lifetime
employment so the employer invests the equivalent of a college education into
the employee and gets a lifetime commitment. That would never work in the
west. People would take the free education and then leave for greener pastures
the first chance they got.

~~~
cforrester
I'm wondering if they don't have a different idea of training internally than
you do...

When I was younger, my mother worked as a freight forwarder. After she'd been
there for awhile, the company paid to send her for training and certification
to work with hazardous materials. If I recall correctly, she signed a contract
agreeing to repay the costs of the courses if she left the company before a
certain period of time had passed.

Essentially, rather than hiring externally a freight forwarder who is already
certified to handle dangerous goods, they identified their strongest existing
employee without that certification and paid for them to learn what they
needed for a more advanced position, with conditions to assure they recoup
their investment. The way I read it, I thought the person you replied to was
suggesting identifying existing employees with potential and paying to expand
their skillsets for a different role, e.g. with bootcamps or MOOCs, not hiring
fresh graduates for low pay.

~~~
majewsky
> she signed a contract agreeing to repay the costs of the courses if she left
> the company before a certain period of time had passed.

I had a similar clause in my first contract. Since the team I was hired into
was a Perl shop and I hadn't done any Perl before starting there, they sent me
on a week-long Perl training early on. The contract said that if I quit within
the first year, I would have to reimburse them for the cost of the training
(going down progressively by 1/12th of the price per month that I'm staying
with the company).

------
uwuhn
I'm going to preface this post by saying that I don't have a problem with most
of my coworkers (male and female) being Asian. In fact, I prefer it. I'm not
Asian, but the majority of my friends, classmates, and coworkers throughout my
life have been, and that continues even now during my career in tech.

Whenever I see anything related to affirmative action being discussed
nowadays, I think that it's only a matter of time until Asian women are
treated the same way as Asian men. Once you've managed to close the gender gap
in engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity
among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class. A continued
pursuit of diversity will require discrimination similar to that exhibited by
prestigious American universities.

My coworkers (past and former) and friends who are women SWEs overwhelmingly
fall into two buckets: American-born Chinese with parents who are middle-class
or higher, and PRC-born Chinese with wealthy parents.

I get the strong impression that gender diversity is viewed as more important
than race and class. I'm a male of color who has been in the industry for more
than four years now, so I no longer have to worry about breaking in. If I were
applying to CS programs or looking for my first job right now, I would feel
some resentment. I've convinced and helped three of my friends to do a career
switch because there's just so much assistance (financial, educational, and
otherwise) available for women. From what I've seen, there is just so much
more provided to help women get into the field.

I commend the big tech companies for lumping male URMs and all women together
when it comes to prioritization, but this isn't the case for most companies,
who are expending great effort on balancing the gender ratio while treating
men of color as second-class URMs, or even ignoring their status completely.
It's fortunate that the best jobs are the most fair, but even if a place
sucks, a first SWE job is still a first SWE job.

What I predict will happen is the gender gap will begin to close, but the
aforementioned diversity issues not related to gender will remain. This will
be due to a combination of various factors, with the most significant being
fatigue with affirmative action practices, and that discussing socio-economic
and race is much more sensitive than discussing gender, Saying "stop hiring
men" or "only hire women" is easy, even if you are asking people to
discriminate against candidates similar to themselves. "Stop hiring Asian
women" is not. And if you are willing to make that request, why would anyone
listen?

~~~
fennecfoxen
> I think that it's only a matter of time until Asian women are treated the
> same way as Asian men. Once you've managed to close the gender gap in
> engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity
> among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class.

The blanket catch-all term "Asian" is not doing this conversation any favors.
You assert a monoculture, but Asia is a huge region with many cultures, not a
monolith. South Korea is unlike India is unlike the Philippines is unlike
Vietnam is unlike Iran is unlike China.

Can you narrow this down so we understand what kind of monoculture you're
actually talking about?

~~~
uwuhn
The terminology used by modern institutions is vague for a reason. Being too
specific is excessively and indefensibly discriminatory.

~~~
Jamwinner
I am not sure I grok your reasoning. How is being specific 'excessively and
indefensibly discrimintory'? Honest question, your words are strong.

------
stormbrew
I don't think the point of criticizing "it's a pipeline problem" is that there
isn't a pipeline problem, but that it's an easy out to avoid taking action at
whatever stage of the 'pipeline' you happen to be working at.

If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say "it's a pipeline problem" you're
probably saying that there aren't enough candidates because not enough women
graduate from ST programs. If you're a program development person at a
university you're probably saying not enough enroll. If you say it as a high
school guidance counsellor you probably are saying there's not enough push for
girls to do well in science and math classes and apply that to their higher
education even if there is.

The point is that whatever stage of the pipeline you're at, if you want things
to improve, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. You can't wait
for universities to both increase enrollment and increase graduation (two
separate problems as well). As this post points out you need to look for other
ways to find talent that bypass that problem and recognize that the path to
your job for a minority in your field will probably look drastically different
to yours. It's just never going to be enough to wave your hand at the problem
and blame the stage before you.

The post does get at this for sure, so I'm not really criticizing it for its
conclusion, but the first couple of paragraphs build a strawman that I think
is very unhelpful to understanding the nature of the problem.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And the point of criticizing the criticism of "it's a pipeline problem" is
that, wherever you try to improve the pipeline, you cannot expect to make
things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment. Working near
the end of the pipe, you'll quickly hit diminishing returns. If the input at
your segment is biased 4:1, then you can't improve past it. Sure, if your
output is 8:1 then it's bad, but you won't get it better than 4:1. You
definitely won't achieve parity, despite what the people screaming "it's not a
pipeline problem" the loudest would want from you. For further improvement,
you _have_ to work on earlier segments of the pipe.

EDIT:

And another point: moving through the pipeline takes time. So e.g. if you're
working on university recruiting and trying to fix the input bias at the high
school->university interface, you can't expect to see improvement at the
output (university->job) earlier than in 3 to 5 _years_. But the "it's not a
pipeline problem" activists rarely have that kind of patience.

EDIT2:

"you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your
pipe segment", unless you're willing to start doing corrective discrimination
- i.e. throwing overrepresented people out from the pipeline.

~~~
commandlinefan
> you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your
> pipe segment

People have been fired from Google for suggesting exactly that.

~~~
ajross
This isn't a fair characterization.

Damore's memo (which I assume is what you're talking about) absolutely did
_not_ attribute Google's lack of women candidates to a lack of graduates in
the pipeline. It went with a straight on (and largely unsourced) "women are
biologically different" argument. Wikipedia's page on the controversy is
relatively good:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber)

And even that didn't get him fired per se. He got fired once it went viral and
embarrassed his employer.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You're misreporting the very link you quoted. Indeed, the Wikipedia
description is pretty fair. I'll quote the relevant paragraph directly:

"James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he
attended solicited feedback.[2] The memo was written on a flight to
China.[12][13] Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber",
the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all
disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct
disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that
male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological
differences.[1][14] Damore said that those differences include women generally
having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be
more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality
trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace
to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without
resorting to discrimination.[1][14]"

In terms of pipeline argument, the memo can be viewed as arguing that the
pipeline is biased at every stage, which is "partly explained by biological
differences"[0], and that it's wrong to try and solve this by reverse
discrimination at the tail end of the pipe (i.e. throwing perfectly good
candidates out to improve the ratio). Instead, the memo proposed means to
reduce the bias near the end of the pipe without resorting to discrimination.

\--

[0] - Note that some of the differences - "stronger interest in people rather
than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to
neuroticism" \- can be also plausibly explained by social factors (instead of
biological), but that's orthogonal to those differences existing and biasing
the entire pipeline.

~~~
16bytes
Damore wasn't fired because he argued that the pipeline shortages largely
explain gender disparity, he was fired because he made women felt excluded and
othered. He wasn't fired because he argued against diversity, he was fired
because he threatened inclusivity.

To quote:

"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences
may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and
leadership"

"Abilities" is the operative word there, as in women, on average, aren't as
able. Pointing that averages don't imply individual ability doesn't make it
better.

See also Sundar's quote:

"to suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less
biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK ... At the same time,
there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their
views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too
feel under threat, and that is also not OK."

~~~
naasking
> "Abilities" is the operative word there, as in women, on average, aren't as
> able

Except that quote doesn't imply that women are _less_ able. You could read it
that way if you wanted to be uncharitable of course, but strictly speaking,
that sentence simply says that women have different abilities, not lesser
abilities. One way that sexism presents itself is an underappreciation of
valuable skills, where traits that are typical of the dominant group are
recognized as valuable and marked for advancement instead.

This is a standard feminist claim about work place sexism, and so a charitable
reading of your quote is basically agreement with the prevailing wisdom.

> Pointing that averages don't imply individual ability doesn't make it
> better.

Sure it does. If you've made it, then you clearly have the skills required to
be where you are.

"6 foot tall basketball players are at a serious disadvantage in the NBA".
This is a clear fact. However, height doesn't determine individual ability.
This too is a clear fact. Therefore, 6 foot tall players that make it into the
NBA should feel reassured that they earned their place.

> he was fired because he made women felt excluded and othered

There was nothing exclusionary about the memo, and "othered" is a meaningless
term. He was fired because his memo caused a PR nightmare, and through no
fault of his own.

> See also Sundar's quote: "to suggest a group of our colleagues have traits
> that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK

Also not something that Damore claimed. This whole debacle has been a grand
exercise in strawmanning.

~~~
16bytes
The original argument was that it is uncharitable to claim that Damore was
"exactly" fired for pointing out pipeline problems has an impact on closing
the gender gap. That's not what he claimed, and it's not why he was fired.

> One way that sexism presents itself is an underappreciation of valuable
> skills, where traits that are typical of the dominant group are recognized
> as valuable and marked for advancement instead.

I agree, but Damore positioned the differences in gender abilities as a
"Possible non bias cause" and not because of systemic sexism (of or relating
to "implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech
and leadership").

> "6 foot tall basketball players are at a serious disadvantage in the NBA".
> This is a clear fact.

This is a bad example because, unlike height in basketball, there is no
evidence that dimorphism in humans (size, psychological, hormonal or
otherwise) causes any difference in preference or ability in tech culture or
software engineering in general.

> There was nothing exclusionary about the memo

You're welcome to that opinion, but many at Google felt otherwise.

> and "othered" is a meaningless term.

The editors at M-W feel otherwise [1] and a one sentence definition is
returned by most dictionaries and at least one search engine[2].

> He was fired because his memo caused a PR nightmare, and through no fault of
> his own.

Again, you're welcome to this opinion but that doesn't change the original
claim that he was fired for merely having an opinion about "pipeline" issues
affecting the speed at which the gap can be closed. That claim would be
uncharitable.

[1] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/other-as-a-
ver...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/other-as-a-verb) [2]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=othered+definition](https://www.google.com/search?q=othered+definition)

------
sakoht
The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is
talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your
competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being
good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding
benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won't lose female talent
you find later when they refuse to join a team of all guys. But you have to be
careful too, to not hire someone just because they fit a social profile you
want more of on the team. Talented women don't want to be on a team where all
of the women there were "tossed a softball". It's not only condescending, but
it fosters the bias it intends to combat. Whoever is at fault, it is that
there is a gender imbalance is worthy of debate. But addressing it is best
viewed as opportunity, not an act of charity, if seen through the right lens.

~~~
throwaway8692
Given the complexity of the feelings a lot of people have and are developing
over time, I think it's worth emphasizing how the push for gender balance can
backfire. The linked writeup mentions "diversity fatigue", and it can turn
people who would otherwise support fixing the pipeline into cynics.

We have a woman who was hired on my team at work. As soon as management saw an
actual woman had applied, the interview process was just a formality. She has
been with us for several months now and has performed abysmally. If she were a
white guy she would not have made it in the front door. Working with her is a
constant frustration - explaining basic programming concepts and constantly
reminding her what the current task is when she gets distracted looking at cat
pictures.

The issue is that the male members of the team resent her and our bosses
because she's unfireable as a woman. We want in good faith to support women
and other demographics that might be interested in our field! We'd love to do
whatever we can to foster interest among any human beings at any stage of the
pipeline! But what we're coming to realize is that because management needs to
meet some "quota", we'll be providing a subsistence for a net-negative-
productivity member of the team for the foreseeable future. Nobody can say a
word about it to our manager or director for fear of being labeled a sexist.
It's making us resent the whole push for diversity as a whole.

~~~
iovrthoughtthis
“When she gets distracted looking at cat pictures”

This is not the behaviour of someone who is comfortable and enjoying their
job. Has anyone reached out to your female colleague to ask if everything is
ok. What their goals and aspirations are and how the company can help them
reach those?

Could you all just be sitting back watching a team member fail not helping
because of their gender and your fear of talking to them / management about
them?

This whole situation could it’s self be a manifestation of sexism. Not even
intentionally.

~~~
thu2111
Surely it's the behaviour of someone who is very much comfortable and enjoying
their job. Getting well paid to waste time on Instagram all day without risk
of being fired is many people's idea of a dream job!

~~~
iovrthoughtthis
Perhaps. My experience of people comfortable in, and enjoying their job is
that they are good at it and do it, usually quite socially.

Procrastination or “wasting time on instagram” would be better described as a
symptom of dissatisfaction or discomfort.

~~~
thu2111
For developers sure, because we tend to intrinsically enjoy our work. Sadly,
many people don't.

------
sokoloff
Is the right thing to assume we should target 50-50 gender representation as a
first-principle outcome target in all fields? If so, it’s a negative sign that
the marquee companies analyzed hired at about the gender split of universities
they targeted.

Is it equally plausible that we should be looking bottoms-up from the
perspective of a fresh college graduate entering the field and asking the
question, “am I likely to get a systemically fair shake when interviewing?”
From the data presented, it seems likely that the answer is “yes”.

By all means we should work on the pipeline. I’m supportive to the idea that,
by default, we should expect 50-50 representation, but when we find pockets
where that does not hold, we must be open to understanding possible reasons.
Army/Marines, oil/gas work, and airline pilots are other readily identifiable
fields without a 50-50 representation. Is this good, bad, or indifferent?

If women who enter those fields achieve success at the same rate as the
overall population, is the hiring and evaluation system (basically after their
decision to enter the field) “fair”? If not, why not?

~~~
ryandrake
I’ve got a bunch of hobbies and none of them are even close to gender parity.
Go check out poker rooms in Vegas and find me a single table where the players
are 50-50 men-women. Visit flying clubs, carpentry groups, engine mechanics
shops, you won’t find gender parity in any of these. And nobody is really
tackling any of these as some urgent problem to solve. Why do professions need
to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies?

EDIT: Also, why do we think it can be fixed? Can the gender balances in
hobbies be fixed? Is the lack of female metalworker hobbyists or male quilters
attributable to a “pipeline problem”?

~~~
bcrosby95
It's all about the money. People care about professions because "female"
professions tend to be paid less than "male" ones.

~~~
stonejolt
I assume you mean something like care professions? They don't pay less because
it's mainly female workers, they pay less because they can't easily scale the
generated profits.

~~~
sukilot
[https://www.onlinefnpprograms.com/features/men-in-
nursing/](https://www.onlinefnpprograms.com/features/men-in-nursing/)

"The ACS also reported that men are more likely to gravitate toward high-
paying nursing jobs. The highest representation of men is in nurse anesthesia,
a role that often pays six figures. According to the ACS, about 41 percent of
nurse anesthetists are men, and their median earnings in 2011 were $162,900.
Among nurse practitioners, 9 percent were men making $96,400 per year on
average."

------
nradov
My alma mater Harvey Mudd College has had rough gender parity in Computer
Science for several years now. It's a small school but other colleges could
learn from their practices.

[https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-
college-...](https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-
achieved-gender-parity-computer-science-engineering-physics.html)

~~~
majos
For anyone who didn't read the linked article (it's short), it suggests that a
key element is careful design of intro courses.

Students with computer science experience get a more advanced course that is
explicitly designed not to make them more competitive in second-year courses
(instead, it starts on material that will re-appear in third-year courses).
Students with no computer science experience get their own intro course. And
there is yet another "green" intro course tailored to biological applications.

The article suggests that these practices help level the playing field in the
first two years of the computer science major, by which point people have
enough invested to finish.

On reflection, these aren't new suggestions. _Unlocking the Clubhouse_ , a
2002 book on women's experiences studying computer science, made similar
recommendations. But I guess most colleges are struggling to handle the glut
of first-year computer science students, let alone teach more courses to
encourage more of them.

~~~
HeroOfAges
How does this level the playing field? Why would this not reduce the overall
rate of learning for everyone to suit the needs of the slowest students?

~~~
spamizbad
It's a matter of perspective taking.

If a "Never saw a line of code until I took this class" sits between two
"Coding since 11" students, they're going to watch their neighbors
effortlessly breeze through the curriculum. If they don't know those student's
background, it's not unreasonable if they come to the (false) conclusion that
they're not cut out to be a developer because it's just so much easier for
"everyone else" (N=2).

If you "track" your intro classes, you can put the first-timers together and
likewise keep the experienced students from falling asleep in class by
tracking them into something more challenging

~~~
HeroOfAges
Even if you do have a "fast" track and a "slow" track, the only ways I can
think of to get travelers on either of these paths to the same place at the
same time is to either slow down those on the "fast" track, or speed up those
on the "slow" track. What I seem to be witnessing is a willingness of people
to slow down those on the "fast" track instead of expecting people on the
"slow" track to work harder to catch up.

~~~
naasking
> Even if you do have a "fast" track and a "slow" track, the only ways I can
> think of to get travelers on either of these paths to the same place at the
> same time

They don't have to get to the same place at the same time, they just all have
to cross a finish line. The finish line is the same for everyone, even if the
fast track students get to take a more fun route and play doing other things
they enjoy along the way.

Certainly the fast track students will still have a competitive advantage
since they will probably have worked on more challenging problems, but it
fixes the graduation stats. Who knows if it will have positive downstream
effects.

------
btilly
I know it is not politically correct to say it, but I remain unconvinced that
gender parity is a desirable goal. Particularly given the current state of
research into differences in gender averages.

Here is a real example. Per
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#Gender_differences)
men have about a one standard deviation advantage in spacial reasoning over
women. Assuming that both distributions are normal with the same variance,
that means that if we pick the top X% of the population on spacial reasoning
where X is fairly small, we will get about an 80/20 split of male/female.
Within that top group there will be no remaining difference between men and
women.

Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering.
This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of
engineering students. Decades of hand-wringing later, women are still about
20% of engineering students. Based on spacial reasoning ability, perhaps women
SHOULD be about 20% of engineering students.

What happens if we force gender parity? If the research on gender differences
is right, selecting on spacial reasoning except making sure to select 50%
women would result in a situation where you had 50% men, 12.5% women who are
as good as the men, and the remaining 37.5% women who are worse than EVERY man
at spacial reasoning. The result is that 3/4 of the women are worse than all
the men. Is this a better outcome? Why?

Now I picked an example where men have an advantage. But men don't in all
fields though. According to other research, women are better on average at
management. This is an argument to accept the data and do our best to hire and
promote on competence.

Now that argument applies to hard engineering. It isn't software development.
I do not know why the ratio is so extreme in software development. (More
extreme than in, say, mechanical engineering.) However I have also never seen
data suggesting that sorting on interest and ability shouldn't result in the
ratios that we see. Before we double down on equality as a mandate, I would
like to see that data collected.

As long as, on average, the men and women you hire are equally good, your
hiring process is not broken. If your data finds that there is a difference in
average ability, then adjust your practices to get higher average competence.
Encourage everyone to have the opportunity. Make it clear that all people with
title X are equivalent regardless of secondary characteristics, AND work to
make that true. (I believe that it is pretty true today.)

~~~
abathur
I wrote a few direct responses, but they all felt patronizing. Apologies for
the length, but I'm hoping to avoid that by showing my math, as it were:

About 7 years ago, I started to wonder about a cluster of concepts that I've
yet to successfully explain to anyone without getting a confused look...

Roughly, it's a curiosity about what (if anything) is in the joints and gaps
and shadows around the more salient features of our existence. An example is
like: how (if at all) does having systems for getting rid of unpleasant things
(human waste, trash, unwanted products, corpses, people who are
disabled/invalid/elderly, criminals...) shape our thinking and understanding?

Privately, I think about this as _unraveling_ : pulling on loose threads
anywhere I catch myself or others taking something for granted.

A consequence of picking around in these gaps and cracks is that I've grown
frustrated with most of the discourse, research, and subsequent popular-press
reporting that has any overlap with a human/social system. The problem is
pretty ubiquitous. The kindest diagnosis I can give is that there may be a big
hole in our language(s)/grammar.

So, the methodology of the 2003 study
([https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03196134.p...](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03196134.pdf))
cited first in the paragraph you link at Wikipedia documents its sample: "The
participants were 60 men and 60 women who were each paid the equivalent of
$4.50 U.S. Between 20 and 30 years of age (mean age, 22.2 years), all were
right-handed students enrolled in either undergraduate or graduate programs
(in social science, French, or administration) at the Université de Montréal."

Likewise, here's the first sentence of the discussion: "The present results
revealed relatively high accuracy levels overall. Although men did not supply
significantly more correct answers than did women across the three conditions,
they needed, on average, less time to carry out the mental rotation of the
structures illustrated in Vandenberg and Kuse’s (1978) items."

I want to draw a few threads out of this:

1\. A more honest summary of the research is something like: "60 male and 60
female college students at a single university in Montreal, between the ages
of 20 and 30, when studied in the early 2000s, representing 3 majors, selected
by an unspecified strategy which involved compensation of $4.50 and then
broken into 3 subgroups of 20 and given a similar mental rotation task in a
different format, performed the mental rotations with similarly high levels of
accuracy, though the selected male students groups did so around 33% faster."
This is an improvement, but it still doesn't well-reflect how low our
confidence still is that it measured anything accurate (let alone valid) about
statistically indistinguishable groups ~now, let alone our roughly total
inability to answer whether this relationship is fixed and durable across
meaningful timescales.

2\. There are _reasonable_ alternatives to the headline treatment of the
result. Since there was no statistically significant difference in the
accuracy of their results--only the response time--the _narrative_ about men's
superior performance this task merits scrutiny. Is the difference explained by
differences in confidence? Cautiousness? Familiarity with similar tasks? The
study makes a halfhearted attempt to address cautiousness by asking for a
self-report on whether they double-checked their answers, and on how difficult
they thought the task was. Women consistently rated the problems as more
difficult (but answered as accurately). Why did they rate it as more
difficult?

3\. The study discusses two main reported rotation strategies in the
literature--holistic and analytic--and that the holistic strategies tend to be
faster than the analytic strategies. It also notes that "The literature thus
suggests that, in the standard visual presentation condition, the holistic
strategies preferred by men are more efficient than the analytic strategies
preferred by women." I haven't read the whole study, but I don't see any
attempt to tease out to what extent response time differences persist or
disappear when controlling for strategy. I see no discussion of or attempt to
investigate why men and women are using different strategies. _But_ , the fact
that the primary difference is response time, and a response-time difference
is noted between strategies, and strategy differences are noted between the
genders, and how cultural/experiential and non-intrinsic strategy selection
appears as a variable, I'm a bit slack-jawed that this isn't the headline
result.

4\. I see no examination or breakdown of demographics/activities that might
matter. Keep in mind that while they covered 120 students in total, each
individual test group is 20 students with no discussion of how they were
selected. These groups are small enough to be vulnerable to weird samples even
if they did draw statistically random samples. How many of these students
played sports? Which one? How recently? At what level? What about adjacent
recreational activities they might not consider a sport, such as shooting,
skating, skateboarding, bowling, rock-climbing, kayaking, mountain-biking,
yoga, running, etc. How many practice some sort of art or craft? Do they play
video games? Pilot any sort of vehicle? Does controlling for any of these
affect the observed gender difference?

Moving beyond the study itself:

5\. If the response-time difference is durable and intrinsic, it's not obvious
what if any bearing a response-time difference the measured task has on how
well men and women can perform an engineering job. They might not even be
meaningfully correlated. Is an engineer's performance strongly bottlenecked by
how quickly they rotate objects, or is this delta largely leveled in practice
by other factors (e.g., my typing speed is _rarely_ the thing that limits how
much code I write in a day).

6\. Even if such a speed difference does have a bearing on how well men and
women perform an engineering job, there's no basis for assuming the magnitude
of the speed performance difference would equal the magnitude of the job
performance difference (which could be larger, smaller).

~~~
btilly
The Wikipedia article picks one of many pieces of research to quote. Your
criticism are fair as a criticism of that specific research paper. But after
you've looked at a dozen of them, continuing to say that it is just an
artifact of terrible methodology (even though most actually are terrible)
becomes much harder to support.

But that said, here is a classic test showing strong gender differences
accidentally discovered by Piaget. Draw two cups, one tilted. Assuming that
both are halfway full of water, ask the subject to draw the water line.

Until puberty, neither gender can perform this task well. After puberty around
90% of men and 30% of women find it trivial, while the rest do not. (The most
common answer that I have seen from women is to tilt the water line with the
cup. The second is to tilt it double!) Performance on this task is not
particularly correlated with education.

Ask a few friends and family, and it isn't hard to verify for yourself that a
gender gap exists.

Interestingly I have yet to encounter a programmer, male or female, that
doesn't find it trivial. I have no idea why programming would select for
people who find this task easy. but it apparently does. And the population of
people who find this task straightforward has 3x as many men in it as women.

~~~
abathur
Thank you for taking the time to read this; it took me long enough to write
that I was afraid it would be for naught.

I think you are reading me more narrowly than I _want_ to be read, but I don't
fault you there. I am not good at communicating this concept yet.

I picked the first study because I start at the beginning, and look for loose
threads.

I didn't _pick on_ this study because I think its methodology is terrible. I
just picked on the first few loose threads I found, and pulled.

I pulled on the threads to (try to) model and promote how I go about searching
for things that aren't facially obvious, and to demonstrate _how_ applying
this process (showing my math) leads me inexorably to one conclusion: _it is
very hard to think and communicate about things like this in a sound, lucid
manner_.

I'm not here to poke holes in individual studies or "prove" anything, but to
encourage you to look for loose threads in the epistemic fabric, here.

In closing, and to be more specific: listing a bunch of issues with the study
doesn't make it _wrong_. Proving the study wrong is not the point. The issues
highlight some of the epistemic hubris in the study, and hopefully to expose
how that sort of hubris can compound as we summarize work like this and weave
it into higher-level narratives. It may help to see this as laundering
unearned/unexamined assumptions at lower levels.

~~~
btilly
If you haven't already, you may be interested in the Replication Crisis and
various related research on metascience.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)
has an overview and you can dig in from there.

That said, I've run across enough lines of evidence, both from anecdote and
research, that this particular phenomena seems likely to be real.

~~~
abathur
Last fall, my father asked what I thought about a video on YouTube that took a
passage from the Book of Revelation, upcoming astral events from Stellarium,
and interpreted them into an end-days prediction.

I said that it held about as much water as predictions based on numerology.

And then he asked what I would think if the astral event happened when and as
described in the video.

I said I had no reason to assume Stellarium was wrong, but that the fact of
some arrangement of astral bodies doesn't inherently validate any
interpretation that the arrangement is significant, nor any subsequent
interpretation of what its significance is.

~~~
btilly
And the relevance of your example is...?

Hormonal differences are known to cause a host of physical differences between
the genders, a host of behavioral differences (have you read the research on
what testosterone does?), and a tremendous amount of mental differences in
other species. But political correctness causes us to reject out of hand the
idea that biology could cause modest differences in average mental abilities
and interests in homo sapiens.

There is no question that a few decades ago people casually accepted
conclusions about gender differences that we today recognize are fallacious.
But the current consensus is an absurd overreaction.

~~~
abathur
It feels like you're lobbing points from trench to trench. I am not in either
trench, and wouldn't like to be (there are weird things in both trenches), so
I'm doing what I can to avoid the established battle lines.

I am not trying to debate or argue or win, so there is no satisfying crunch. I
am just hoping to say a few things you can chew on (without being too much of
a jerk along the way).

------
mlboss
In the article they talk about more women in tech in India than in US. India
is a highly sexist society having a male child is preferred over having a
female child. Still more females are in CS than in a more egalitarian society
like US. I think it is because there are less economic choices in India.

So if you are going to college in India you will choose a subject that makes
more economic sense. Even if that means studying a subject that you don't like
that much. When there is freedom to choose profession without economic
constraints people will choose subject that interests them the most.

Edit: I might be downvoted for last sentence.

~~~
mberning
It is a curious phenomenon.

[https://womenintheworld.com/2018/02/27/study-finds-women-
in-...](https://womenintheworld.com/2018/02/27/study-finds-women-in-countries-
with-better-gender-equality-are-less-likely-to-pursue-stem-careers/)

------
gjmacd
Not one mention of age as being a factor as passing over good talent because
of ageism. I'm 54, I walk through the door to interview and people run the
other way before I even sit down with them because I probably look like their
Dad -- meanwhile, i'm not only as current on skills than anybody I'm talking
to, I'm probably the best option at a startup since I've seen it all (three
and four times over). It's ridiculous that you age out of this industry at 45.

~~~
downerending
I'm about your age, and it is indeed depressing. On my last hunt, after
passing the all-day at a FAANG, I was declined at the executive review because
of my "career trajectory".

Guess who doesn't have career trajectories. (Spoiler: It's young people.)

------
meristem
Underneath all this: although companies need talent, interviews are
adversarial and not structured to create a supportive environment so
candidates are at their best. Quite often the interview setup is to see how
the candidate performs at their worst-- stressed, time pressured, on the spot,
performing for fragments of time to a number of people while in what
(feels|is) an asymmetrical power relationship.

~~~
dijit
> Interviews are adversarial and not structured to create a supportive
> environment so candidates are at their best.

This is a really broad stroke and it may even be true to a high degree. But
I've had (and given) plenty of interviews where we engage a topic and just
talk about it openly as if we were already colleagues. Maybe that's a Swedish
thing?

~~~
unishark
I suspect the grueling interview process is the result of CS being overrun by
people who cheated through their programming classes and/or exaggerated (lied)
on their resume, things which have become extremely prevalent in recent years.
Plus in the US you can't get a meaningful reference anymore because of fear of
lawsuits (former employers will often only confirm employment). There's
nothing left to trust. Worse, I have come across a number of CS graduates who
can't write a working program to save their lives, though many (particular
international students) seem to be very well-prepared to talk all day about
the technologies and all the cool projects they supposedly did. Not that a
surprise exam is a good solution.

------
commandlinefan
Well, the gist of this is: there aren’t enough women in “tech”, so different
standards should be applied for women until there are. Setting aside all the
other problems I have with this: law and medicine have much stricter barriers
for entry. There are no practicing doctors or lawyers without advanced
degrees, but there are plenty of women in both professions. So even if you
accept the premise, it’s still pretty clear you’re barking up the wrong tree
here.

~~~
ajross
Alternative hypothesis: law and medicine started proactively working on their
"pipeline problem" many decades earlier, and have had time to reach parity.
Computer science, in the sense of the modern job market of elite grads going
to bay area employers, is barely into its third decade of existence.

Seriously: go back to the 50's and 60's and you'll find all these same
arguments about how women can't be good doctors and law is a man's world. _And
they were all wrong._

Why is computer science special in a way that medicine isn't? Why can women
heal but not code? Isn't _that_ the harder point to prove than "it's a
pipeline problem"?

~~~
AdrianB1
Have you considered that women may prefer to heal than to code and when they
need to choose a career they choose healing, so this is the real explanation
why most doctors in my country are women and most people in IT are men?

~~~
sukilot
What are lawyers healing?

Did women suddenly discover an interest in healing in the past 50 years?

~~~
Draiken
They learned that being a lawyer earns you prestige and lots of money.

Compare that to computer science and being viewed as a geek, nerd, loner. Even
though it's less bad at this day and age, it's not even comparable to medicine
and law.

Equality of opportunity does not generate equality of outcome as soffits
revealed on Scandinavia. And it shouldn't.

People are individuals and they should not need to conform to a flawed notion
that everything should be 50/50

------
sbilstein
I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I
absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as
someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and
minorities going through these programs.

After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of
men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating
class. I heard anecdotally from those majoring in EE how they had professors
actually discourage them from continuing because they were 'too anxious' about
grades and other stuff.

I'm male and I was the only LatinX person in my CS major; there were several
more in EE by comparison. Part of the problem might be cultural pressure...my
parents were extremely disappointed when I decided to major in 'Computer
Science' rather than a major with 'Engineering' in the title. They did not get
that it was part of the school of engineering, that for all intents and
purposes I was an engineer, and the job kicks ass. They wanted to be able to
say I was an 'ingeniero' to family in Peru. I ignored them.

As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to
understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I
grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there
is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't)
feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on
edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white guy personality type and somehow
these feelings of being poor, being bilingual, going to a shit public school,
etc bubble up in my head while I'm trying to rotate a binary tree. The two
times I interviewed onsite at Google I couldn't escape the feeling. It felt
like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds
or James Damore or someone like that. The fact they didn't seem coached to be
friendly added dramatically to that effect.

It feels stupid to say but when I interview with people of other races, I feel
more confident. When I interview with immigrants as well. It's my personal
bias that I need to work against.

EDIT:

I'm not arguing that these anxieties are rational or desirable...they simply
exist in my mind and that makes interviewing more challenging. Just as a
musician may fear they'll forget their parts when they go on stage even if
they are virtuosos, these sources of anxiety are real. For engineering
interviews, not acknowledging some of these issues lowers your signal to noise
ration. Someone might be a fantastic engineer but a 45 minute interview might
present enough anxiety that they won't be able to show it.

~~~
whb07
So I'm ready for the downvotes, but its worth it. I don't think it is
generally good to look for divisions and more ways to separate from the whole.
I don't know if that is because you're out somewhere in super woke SF or
similar but you've already used terms like "LatinX" and "person of color" like
someone who is already woke but maybe stop for a sec?

Why don't you see yourself as a person who likes CS/tech and likes doing XYZ
things with ABC tools? Or maybe believe for a brief second that the "caucasian
American", is probably thinking about what show to watch on Netflix rather
than some shitty thoughts about how you don't fit in.

I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places
doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. I'm willing to bet there are way too
many Asians (yellow and brown) for that to be true.

Also, seriously wtf is LatinX? Seriously.

<\--- this author is also an immigrant from that small country north of Peru.

~~~
sbilstein
I think you might be reading into what I wrote a bit. This is just _how_ I
feel...not how I WANT to feel. Obviously, these are biases and anxieties that
exist in my own mixed-race low-income immigrant brain that i wish weren't
there. As another latino founder told me..."walk into a VC pitch meeting with
the confidence of a tall white man."

Like I don't hate caucasians but sometimes can't help but notice these
differences. I also can't just focus on fucking Netflix during an interview!
These anxieties and nervousness creep into our heads whether we like it or
not!

~~~
AdrianB1
As a tall while Caucasian I think you need you have a problem with the
environment, not a racial one. I live in Eastern Europe and we don't really
know what racism is because we have no history of problems in the past; I had
direct reports that were Latino and Latina, Europeans (Caucasians), black
(African): they were friends more than subordinates. In Bucharest my South
African colleague, the Brazilian one and the Chinese lady are cool and they
attract attention in a positive way, they have absolutely no issues living
here. I think the problem is the US with the long history of treating poorly
other races, not with your race.

~~~
lmeyerov
Unfortunately, Wikipedia finds your experience to not be universal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Europe)
. I hope this continues to change, however!

More relevantly, it is useful to understand the VC process as selling to a mix
of individuals. The horrible ones stink and need to be written off. It sucks,
but that's life. (You probably don't want to work with them anyway: should you
really trust them with your life's work through all the closed door activities
that happen?) At the same time, there is a strong wave of individuals and
firms that view non-traditional backgrounds as a valuable leading indicator
for key difficult aspects of company building. Fundraising is a form of sales.
You only really need one yes, so having access to otherwise closed off sources
of capital is an amazing advantage.

It's a weird world and something I care about, so I'm genuine in my offer to
folks here.

------
rofo1
I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Be it
women, or black, or whatever. Why? Why can't you just hire the right person
for the job?

To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups
of people.

Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn't
make sense, that's not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end
up doing is crunching the numbers to "make it work on paper".

Are women or black or whatever group we discuss equally represented across all
jobs across the whole universe, everywhere?

It's a ridiculous concept, I don't understand who came up with it.

~~~
VRay
Look into "unconscious biases"

Basically, someone similar to you will naturally seem like a better and more
skilled person

~~~
pksdjfikkkkdsff
Unconscious bias has been debunked.

------
whinythepooh
> STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented
> backgrounds > hostile university culture in male-dominated CS programs >
> biased hiring practices > non-inclusive work environments

Is there any actual proof of any of this rather than some bogus numbers from
noname Kapor Center who admit they are just evangelists?

[https://www.kaporcenter.org/our-work/](https://www.kaporcenter.org/our-work/)
> Our pioneering work ranges from education programs and community building to
evangelism and investing.

------
seangrogg
I'll preface this with the usual "my views are my own" but I do think that
diversity in the workplace is a very deep and interesting problem and that we
do a major disservice to it by creating ridiculous metrics.

I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender;
"We aim to have 50% women in the workplace" is a prime example of this. If
this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is reached the intent will
not be (one could be a female by sex but a male by gender and thus from a
diversity standpoint is largely contributing as a male). If this is by gender
assignment not only is the metric focused on a fluid concept but it's also not
a binary - in order to reach 50% women we'd only have 50% for the remaining
non-women, which represents a broad range of gender expression and is not
exclusively male.

I do respect that many companies (not just in tech) see diversity as an issue
and are trying to do something about it. However, I do hope that they spend
more time investigating the full range of the issue and begin by making small
attempts at approaching the problem space before declaring metrics as
objectives.

~~~
romwell
This is a strawman argument.

The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that
in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software
corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things.

It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year
(arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance
that I am not sure which universe your comment applies to.

And yes, what you said matters, as does race, country of origin, and economic
background. Intersectionality is a fancy word, but it's useful, and the
article mentions it.

So that said, 50% is a useful number. It's useful to say that if the actual
hiring rate is at 15%, _we still have a problem_.

~~~
AdrianB1
Why is 50% the useful number? Why not 25 or 40 or 60 or 75%? Any number needs
a justification, 25% or 75% alike, so why 50%? We have 80% females in the
marketing department and it is actually much larger than the IT department.
Should we have 50%? Why? Actually we have a pipeline problem there too, not so
many males interested in marketing. Is that a problem that needs to be solved?

~~~
romwell
>We have 80% females in the marketing department and it is actually much
larger than the IT department. Is that a problem that needs to be solved?

It depends on whether it has been a consistent trend across the vast majority
of marketing departments and companies, like it is wit software.

Just like having one software company with 80% women is not a solution, having
one company with 80% women in marketing is not a problem.

50% is a useful number because that's about the proportion of women in the
world (did I really have to spell that out?).

------
billti
This stood out to me, and aligns with my observations in the (limited) female
representation in the workplace:

> In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s
> 16%

Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part
of the problem to? What is India doing so well in this space to have over
double the percentage of female software developers as the U.S.?

~~~
sdnlafkjh34rw
In India, your major is largely determine by your academic results and social
pressure when you finish up secondary schools.

If you score at the top in your entrance exams, you will applying to medical
or engineering schools. The good schools are hyper selective and only take the
top scorers (at a rate more selective than our ivy's). Very, very few people
consider majors outside of these areas. Secondly, there is a huge amount of
social pressure to be an engineer or doctor. It is quite often that parents
choose your major, or at least heavily push their kids into one. There are
lots of Bollywood movies whose plots are centered around parents forcing their
kids into engineering.

Since your choice of major is largely determined by academic and social
reasons there isn't a big gender disparity. Females do just as well on the
entrance exams, and there is no societal view that engineering is a male
major. If you are a parent who wants your kids to earn well and marry well,
you will push your kids towards medicine or engineering regardless of gender.
If you are female who scored well and got entrance into a top engineering
school, dropping out would be unthinkable. It would be an insult to your
family. You would be throwing away years of hard work in their view; some kids
start preparing for entrance exams when the hit 14. There is even a suicide
problem when people fail out of the top schools (see the movie 3 Idiots).
Essentially majors and careers have a hierarchy which is the same regardless
of gender.

As to why there isn't a societal bias that engineering is a male major, I'm
not sure. It was definitely a quick change as it was only in the 1960s when
most engineering colleges started admitting females.

There is definitely still a gender gap (many women are not supported to even
finish basic schooling), but there isn't a huge societal bias that engineering
major or STEM is a male profession.

I have heard that some of the USSR countries (Russia, Ukraine) have a similar
culture and don't view engineering or STEM as "male" majors.

Maybe the problem is parents don't bully their daughters and sons into
engineering here :)

~~~
billti
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response. On its face that seems
plausible.

I wonder if gender bias still kicks in once in career. I seem to see way less
than 35% Indian women vs men in very senior or management roles. (Just my
anecdotal data point of one, I don't have any numbers to back that up).

~~~
sdnlafkjh34rw
That's probably the case, but I believe it's a slightly different issue. I'd
assume it's harder to break into management as a women because:

1) women entered the field later than men (so the distribution on the
experienced end is less) 2) women have a significantly higher societal
expectation to be the caretaker. Many pause or stop their careers when they
have kids. 3) Indian society is heavily patriarchal

Regardless, I personally think the situation is better in India. It's pretty
hard for the US to improve if not enough women enter the field in college. If
the bottom of your funnel is weak, all the efforts on managing the middle and
end are largely fruitless. We (Americans) need to take a better look at how
our education and culture is causing the gap at the university level. I think
that some of the approaches Harvey Mudd has taken is something we need to
implement across universities.

------
jdmoreira
at my workplace we try very hard to hire women programmers and we are at about
10% - 15% which is still quite low but better than other companies around us.

At the same time I noticed that the majority of engineering managers, product
owners and agile coaches in our company are women. Some of these women were
programmers at some point in their career.

I'm not deducing anything from this (especially since it’s a single datapoint)
but it sure is interesting.

~~~
rofo1
> at my workplace we try very hard to hire women programmers and we are at
> about 10% - 15% which is still quite low but better than other companies
> around us.

Are you actually counting how many of you are woman and conclude based on
that, that you are better off than other companies?

It's not low, or high, or medium. It just is. As long as you are not rejecting
perfectly capable women/females (just because they are so), you are not doing
anything wrong and you are not worse off.

~~~
jdmoreira
True. But I also believe that a diverse workplace is a better workplace
because of a combination of different perspectives. I also believe women are
underrepresented in programming, the main consequence being the infantile
machismo we all know exists.

------
romaaeterna
HR is far more of a nepotistic clique as regards as hiring their own for race
and gender, and they often wield power over everybody else on those terms.

------
scythe
To me the question is not why this statistic looks a certain way, but what is
the actual experience of women in software engineering. And if you ask women,
the problem doesn’t usually seem to be getting hired. It’s the work
environment that is alienating.

So if you want a number to target, it’s not a proportion of female employees,
it’s the retention rate. And that’s not affected by pipeline problems.

~~~
belorn
This is a pretty old and well established research fact: For most people being
a minority in any environment feels alienating.

The problem look very similar if you want male employees in a female dominate
work place or female employees in a male dominated work place. Retention rate
is going to be problem, and it is going to be a consistent problem from the
first year as a student to 30 years later into the career.

The common result is that people move into local groups where they can be part
of a majority. Male teachers going into physical education where most the
other physical education teachers are also male. In IT we see female
programmers go into design or team leader, where most other designers and team
leaders are female.

It is a very hard problem to solve.

------
thorwasdfasdf
I have a 4 year old daughter who I'm trying to get interested in programming.
The first step is to teach her reading/writing and math.

Every time we start with basic counting, after just 2 minutes, she's
constantly telling me "daddy, I don't want to count anymore". I'm not giving
up yet. But, we have to accept the fact that certain genders don't like math
and don't like programming.

Sometimes, I see the same thing playing out at older ages. We once hired a
female intern and our PM was like "ok everyone, now do your best to make
programming seem as fun as possible so we can get this person to go into CS".
I'm thinking, at that age, I would have killed for an internship, you wouldn't
have had to convince me to "think it was fun", I already knew it was.

There's so much focus on gender equality in programming but where is the
gender equality talk in other industries like: cosmetics, football, ballet
dancing, etc

~~~
downerending
I have a very specific memory of the first moment I encountered a "math" book,
in kindergarten. It was literally just a book of the numbers from one to ten,
with pictures illustrating what those meant, etc. I wouldn't have been able to
verbalize it, but the feeling was "I am going to f___ing _love_ this.".

And indeed I did, and took to math and CS like a duck to water.

No idea whether that's common, nor whether it might be more common for males,
but it's hard to see how someone with that intuitive drive wasn't going to do
quite well in the subject.

------
stevev
Sure, 50% of boot camp graduates are women. What’s the ratio if we include
actual university undergrads gender ratios?

If I’m not mistaken, there are more men going into cs than women here in the
US. I don’t think a parity can happen unless equal number of women pursues cs
degrees. I believe the disparity is more inline with career choice/goals.

Unfortunately factoring in case studies involving the technical aptitude’s of
women versus men in technical hiring, the results are bleak for women;
hopefully this changes and I am not saying women are not able to compete; it
could be a cultural issue and the low numbers of women entering the field
makes it even harder to achieve gender parity.

I find relevance when discussing gender disparity represented in the trucking
industry.

------
kevintb
Key point:

> there really aren’t enough women to meet demand… if we keep hiring the way
> we’re hiring. Namely, if we keep over-indexing on CS degrees from top
> schools, and even if we remove unconscious bias from the process entirely,
> we will not get to gender parity. And yes, there is a way to surface strong
> candidates without relying on proxies like college degree.

I am all in favour of reducing the industry’s reliance on fancy name schools
for hiring.

~~~
brightball
Several of the best developers I know have no degree at all. I know one guy
who did a boot camp 2-3 years ago and since then has self taught himself so
much that he's one of the most knowledgeable people I've been around.

He was recently told in an interview that he otherwise passed with flying
colors that, "someone with a boot camp education couldn't be seriously
considered."

It's mind blowing to me that anyone in charge of hiring for technical
positions can be dense enough to think that your education stops when your
career starts.

~~~
x0x0
You're going to find any stupid choices in a wide enough pool. That's not
representative: I know boot camp grads at FAANGs.

At smaller companies -- like mine -- it's not that we won't hire out of boot
camps. We do, and have. But we're very conscious of search and training costs.
Search costs can be somewhat fixed with money by using internal recruiters;
training costs are horrific. Bootcamp grads are nearly useless in a
professional environment without enormous amounts of senior / staff eng time.

~~~
bsder
> Bootcamp grads are nearly useless in a professional environment without
> enormous amounts of senior / staff eng time.

To be fair, this is also true for standard undergrads.

The difference between a cooperative engineering student and a standard
undergrad is quite staggering--9-12 months of working experience causes a vast
differential.

~~~
x0x0
Our experience is similar. The skills gained in the first year -- how to
actually use git, basic db skills, bash skills, bundler/nvm/etc, better
debugging, better problem solving, working outside of greenfield projects, etc
make a huge difference.

------
papreclip
They keep saying "top schools", but lower tier schools have the same gender
disparity. And 40% of bootcamp grads might be female, but how much of that is
due to the fact that there are bootcamps, apprenticeships, etc. that exist
purely to pluck women & underrepresented groups from the mass of mostly-male
non-traditional candidates? And other bootcamps that give scholarships
preferentially to those groups?

I am pretty confident I would have gotten into LEAP or ADA if I were a woman.
Instead I went fully self-taught because I didn't want to pay $20k for a
bootcamp.

------
vinceguidry
It's important to give the right answers to questions, answers that signal the
right intentions. Giving the wrong answers means you don't really understand
the situation, and aren't really invested in solving the problem.

So when a young female applicant asks you a question that might not
_precisely_ be worded as "why is your company all men with only the white ones
in positions of power," it's important to not frame the _reason_ why this is
as a pipeline problem. She's not dumb. She knows that.

Because she's not actually asking for the reason. She wants to know if your
company has the wherewithal to overcome the diversity problem _in spite_ of
the fact that there just aren't a whole lot of women looking for tech careers
at present compared to men. Everyone already knows there aren't that many
applicants. Everyone knows you can't just hire a woman just because of her
gender. That's not the point.

The way you answer this question is to, without right out stating there's a
pipeline problem, make sure you've put into place all the _other_ pieces that
will cause women to not run screaming to all their friends what insensitive
clods you are. Talk about your code of conduct. Talk about your contributions
to the cause of diversity. Talk about any issue you had in the past relating
to you not understanding people that have very very different life
circumstances than you and what your failings were in obtaining a resolution
satisfactory to all parties. It's hard to talk about but well, diversity is a
hard topic.

Anything but passing the buck.

------
avgeek23
The bit where she says 39% of Hires from india are women.Thats because parents
decide what major their kids take which is completely opposite of the west.
Thus the more no of female grads.The college i go to has a 50:50 ratio.
Majority of the people there both men and women have no idea why they picked
cs,they just are there because it pays ways and their parents told them to
rather forced them into cs.

------
jariel
When ~15% of CS graduates in a nation are women, it's going to be nary
impossible for most companies to get too far beyond that.

If companies are hiring commensurate with that level, then that's good on
them, it gets very impossible to much beyond that at scale without serious
distortions.

'The Pipeline Problem' shouldn't be used as an all out excuse - but - it's a
fundamental reality, like gravity.

It's shameful that someone would get sidelined for pointing out the blatantly
obvious fact that 'the pipeline' is the problem.

Of course the pipeline is the problem, on what planet do the laws of gravity
not apply?

There's always room for discussion, but avoiding the Elephant in the Room is
smacks me as a lot of koolaid.

There's a few things that can done beyond that surely, particularly
highlighting women and minorities in certain fields so as they don't lack
encouragement/role models etc. - but no single company, not even Google is
going to move any needle in a short period of time.

Finally, consider this: "The 'problem' may never be solved". There is evidence
that as societies evolve, that gender disparity in fields doesn't necessarily
increase or decrease. (The classical progressive thinking would have us
believe that as we gain more rights etc. gender difference goes away, but this
doesn't seem to be the case) We may have to try to create the most 'fair world
we can' given that genderism may be an innate feature of human culture, at
least for a very long time.

So a) the Pipeline is the primary thing b) we can help make sure people are
encouraged and not systematically pushed out c) no one group will change
anything d) there may always be differences between genders.

------
musicale
Regarding the enrollment chart, as recently as 2015 CS was the most popular
undergraduate major among women at Stanford University:

[https://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/10/12/computer-science-
no...](https://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/10/12/computer-science-now-most-
popular-major-for-women/)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
One year later:

[https://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/11/08/graphic-gender-
rati...](https://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/11/08/graphic-gender-ratio-in-
select-stanford-majors-2015-2016/)

It would seem declared majors aren't following through to the end of their
programs.

~~~
musicale
The percentage of undergrad women CS majors didn't change significantly
between 2015 and 2016.

It appears to be slightly lower (26% vs. 30%) on the 2016 chart because that
chart includes grad students.

However, even if the percentage of undergrad majors had dropped from 2015 to
2016, that by itself wouldn't tell us anything about the retention or
graduation rate over time, since we don't know what the breakdown was for 2015
graduates, CS majors declared or dropped in 2016, etc..

------
TimTheTinker
In software development in particular, the "pipeline problem" has only existed
since the 1980s in Western nations. Prior to that, I've heard it said that
women were _over_ -represented in software development compared to men (which
wouldn't have been a bad thing), or at least that there was much less of a
gender gap.

I have a theory about why this changed in the 1980's in particular.

\- The 1980's saw the dawn of personal computers, and many people either
bought them or brought them home from work.

\- Personal computers, especially the inner workings and programmability
appeal very much to people with Asperger's and high-functioning autism, as
they present a highly complex but perfectly logical and predictable user
interface. Because of this appeal, a much higher proportion of young people on
the Autism spectrum learned to program computers (that their parents had at
home) long before they went to college.

\- Autism and Asperger's occur more frequently among boys than girls.

\- Because so many "geeky" (i.e. autism spectrum) kids, mostly boys, got into
computers during their high school years. This in turn likely caused
neurotypical people (of whom more are girls than boys - remember autism occurs
more frequently in boys) to associate computers with "geekiness" and caused
them to gravitate towards less "geeky" hobbies and interests.

The key, I think, to making computers more appealing to girls is to dis-
associate computers with social "uncoolness", and a lot has been done towards
this end in the last 10 years.

EDIT: I'm getting some downvotes and I'm curious - do people disagree with or
not like my theory about the connection between male representation in
software and autism? I really don't think it's sexist to observe that autism
occurs more frequently in men...

~~~
oh_sigh
Can you provide a source that women outnumbered men in 'software development'
before the 80s? I hear it thrown around a lot, and it usually revolves around
counting human computers as software developers, which is akin to counting a
CPU a software developer.

~~~
sukilot
Human computers were mathematically technical people, the sort of job a modern
programmer would fit well at if programming didn't exist.

------
HeroOfAges
One thing I've found very interesting is that even though the majority of
software developers in an enterprise or organization are male, with the ratio
being as high as 80/20, the ratio of male to female managers directly managing
software developers is closer to 50/50\. I would say this is evidence of bias
in favor of women.

 _edited for clarity_

~~~
sukilot
I'm curious where you got that measurement from. It's quite common to
overestimate small fractions, do see 3/10 and believe it's half, because one
stops noticing the multiplicity of the majority.

~~~
HeroOfAges
Here's a link to an article by the Guardian:
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-
are...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are-there-so-
few-women-in-tech-the-truth-behind-the-google-memo). It was published in 2017.
The third paragraph points out that 20% of Google engineers are women, and
they further go on to claim that statistic is roughly matched among big tech
companies. I work for a large employer (30K+ employees), and 4 of the 5
software developer managers I interact with on a daily basis are women. I work
on a team of 8 developers. We have one female developer. Two of our sibling
teams of about the same size have three female developers between them.

------
luckydata
You can see how toxic the discourse has gotten around this kind of issues if
you get 20% of the article dedicated to disclaimers.

------
pksdjfikkkkdsff
So her claim is that going to t top tier university is a complete waste of
time and money, because boot camp graduates end up being just as capable?

What are top tier universities doing to keep being competitive with those low
cost boot camps? It seems to me for the additional money, they should be able
to provide some additional value?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _What are top tier universities doing to keep being competitive with those
> low cost boot camps?_

Students from top tier universities go on to jobs where their education is
actually useful. (Usually; there are always a number that don't quite make
it.) Somebody has to write all the system software, database engines,
compilers, and frameworks that the boot camp graduates use to do their jobs.

------
xupybd
From my experience many women are put off by the way they see the average
computer science student. The geeky weird stereotype scares many off. There
does seems to be more socially awkward people that choose computer science
(myself included). I'm not sure how you can address that.

------
DoctorMckay
Spanish guy here. Just to give ya'll some context of why bootcamp hiring does
not work here.

I had to go through the "do I go to a bootcamp or get a CS degree" conundrum 5
years ago. The answer was quite clear for me.

All the serious and stable jobs that were offered in the entire nation except
for the capital city, Madrid, required you to have a CS degree + bootcamps/X
years of experience for a specific language.

Either that or they outright asked for a Master's degree or a PHD in a
specific field.

------
mcguire
Hmm.

[https://nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-14.html](https://nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-14.html)

"Science and engineering" bachelors degrees have been about 50% male and 50%
female since 2000, growing from about 400,000 degrees in 2000 to 589,000 in
2012.

From 2000 to 2004, women's share of computer science degrees were between 25%
and 28%. From 2007 to 2012, they stabilized at about 18%.

Now, the question is, did men preferentially enter computer science, or did
women preferentially leave? Hint: the latter.

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp)

[Edit: more recent.]
[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_325.35.a...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_325.35.asp)

In 2004-2008, degrees granted to men decreased by 6%, 10%, 9% and 8%. Degrees
granted to women decreased by 20%, 18%, 20%, and 13%. (The other big drop in
degrees, from 1986 to 1993-6, shows the same pattern and is when degrees
granted to women went from 35-37% of the total to 27%.)

Whence comes this pipeline difference?

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_222.10.a...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_222.10.asp?current=yes)

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
mathematics scale score, the difference between boys and girls up to grade 12
has been stable for years and doesn't really amount to a hill of beans. Same
with science.

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.70.a...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.70.asp?current=yes)

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74b....](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74b.asp?current=yes)

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74a....](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.74a.asp?current=yes)

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.73.a...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_224.73.asp?current=yes)

The Technology and Engineering Literacy scores for 8th graders don't have any
difference to write home about.

~~~
JimboOmega
It's also worth remembering that the problem continues in the workforce;
there's fewer women reaching senior roles, fewer taking EM positions, etc.
Those steps are entirely under the control of employers - women drop out of
tech faster than men even when they get jobs in it.

------
29athrowaway
A funnel representation would be clearer.

If you start with 50% women at age 0, which steps are leaking the most? High
school, university, company interviews, people leaving companies/switching
careers?

I think the answer is that many of these steps are losing women in the
process.

But in my opinion, companies are only responsible for: hiring fairly,
retaining fairly, promoting fairly.

------
unishark
"If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed
to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you
probably won’t make many friends (or many hires)."

Am I the only one who thought this was some kind of double entendre at first?

------
DoreenMichele
I'm just going to leave this here as food for thought:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684088)

------
yarg
(Politically inconvenient differences across various human subgroups aside) if
you're trying to deal with this situation as late as hiring, you already
fucked up.

There are unresolved social issues in terms of racial disparity in America
(and this comes with an inherent inter-generational cycling).

The place to start dealing with this is per-capita equality of resourcing for
primary and secondary schools (and make sure the kids are fed).

Even if that weren't a political no-go from the initialisation perspective,
the 20 year latency on emergent benefits means that any progress will be
demolished at the next swing of the political pendulum.

Short of the extinction of regressive political ideologies in America, this is
an intractable problem.

------
mcguire
Is it just me or is this an advertisement for interviewing.io?

------
austincheney
These selective biases are far more pervasive than just sex parity at all
stages of the pipeline and result in all kinds of malformed decisions.

> And even if we could meaningfully increase the number of women enrolling in
> CS programs overall, top companies have historically tended to favor
> candidates from elite universities (based on some targeted LinkedIn
> Recruiter searches, 60% of software engineers at FAAMNG hold a degree from a
> top 20 school).

That is a hiring bias offering very little to qualify a candidate's potential
longevity in the field or their potential innovation performance. If employers
really wanted to fix this sex parity problem (without sacrificing applicant
quality) they could, but they would have to be willing to abandon certain
premises they hold dear about hiring, candidate sourcing, and qualification
criteria.

\---

One example of a naive selective bias is the notion of the standard 4-year
computer science degree as the path to excellent in corporate software. The
4-year degree exists to take a person off the street make them a credible hire
as an entry level developer in the most generic way possible. That's it. You
don't need any formal education to be an incredible developer might result in
a far wider distribution of skills from self-education.

If your goal in life is to do something other than write C++ or Java, the most
commonly taught languages in most 4-year degree programs, you need to find
experience or training elsewhere. The inherent bias is that a person with a
degree from an excellent school is well prepared for any aspect of software
development, because its all just software. This is why so many entry-level
front-end developers want their front-end technology to behave like Java or
impose frameworks to make it so.

Its also why many software developers are over confident in their
understanding of security when in reality they are grossly ignorant of it with
a severely misplaced understanding of what security actually is. As an example
many software developers might believe security is limited to something like
intrusion prevention. Information security is actually: confidentiality,
integrity, and availability (CIA). If you cannot keep your application from
crashing or cannot keep it online that is classified as a priority security
failure without regard for intrusion.

\---

Another example, the one that convinced me to delete my Reddit account after
being flamed multiple times by impassioned echo chambers, is the notion that
Web Assembly will free the front-end from JavaScript. The most interesting
thing about that conversation is that people most supportive of the idea that
Web Assembly will replace JavaScript is that the DOM is a fantastic technology
that will be the key to ultimate salvation without any understanding of or
experience with the DOM.

As an aside most JavaScript developers dreadfully HATE the DOM and also have a
poor understanding of its mechanics. Even still injecting the page's DOM
directly into a Web Assembly instance was seen as ultimate salvation to
replace JavaScript despite all evidence to the contrary merely because some
developers hate JavaScript more than many JavaScript developers hate the DOM.
This was 3 years ago, and this fantasy still has not come to pass, because its
based on a dillusion of wishful thinking opposed to an investigation of
technologies available or any consideration of data.

There is a technology that has made great strides in, at least superficially,
replacing JavaScript: TypeScript. This is the opposite line of thinking of
abandoning JavaScript for some drop in alternative. Instead TypeScript is a
superset that requires embracing JavaScript.

\---

The pitfalls of selective bias are personality failures rather than anything
related to education or intelligence. Bias is formed either out of
intellectual laziness or out of reinforcing some deeply held personal belief,
but both are an absence of objectivity. When a bias is formed to reinforce
some personal opinion it is done so emotionally, often non-cognitively, and
often for a perceived security motive. Because a bias can be deeply rooted,
non-cognitive, emotionally-based, and defensively focused in can result in
really bad decisions resulting in subjective positioning to maintain a poorly-
formed belief at hand (digging in). This is a cultural problem and education
alone will not fix it.

------
spicyramen
Jordan Peterson and James Damore explained this as well...but we'll yeah the
narrative of SJW and Google don't like science all the time

------
tasogare
Collective madness is largely reached at this point: the writer is complaining
about a totally self-made issue. If I was trying to recruit men for nurse
jobs, or people of color in Korea I would ran in a similar pipeline problem.
The real issue is that "diversity" had became a metrics to reach for its own
sake by companies instead of simply recruiting people that fit the job.
Moreover, you can’t complain about so-called systemic sexism or racism when
your policy is to not recruit white, asian or men that could fulfill the job
precisely because of their race/sex.

~~~
rocqua
The desire for diversity is not for its own sake.

Recruiting people that 'fit the job' leads to a mono-culture. Besides being
unfair, this is bad for companies. It means you get collective blind-spots,
collective hype-trains. Moreover, you reduce the effective hiring pool.
Because, if you have a mono-culture then there is significant disruption to
adding things outside the mono-culture. This reduction in the hiring pool
means there is a lot of talent left on the table.

This means you hit a local maximum that is not a global one. Trying to move to
the global maximum means moving away from the local maximum for a while.

> Moreover, you can’t complain about so-called systemic sexism or racism when
> your policy is to not recruit white, asian or men that could fulfill the job
> precisely because of their race/sex.

You can however complain about systemic disadvantages conferred to women and
people who aren't Caucasian and have a policy to prefer people who are women
or not Caucasian. Especially if you think that these people would have a
positive effect on your company.

~~~
TurkishPoptart
While we're at it, can we stop using the word Caucasian to talk about white
people?[0] It's completely historically and factually inaccurate. Unless
you're talking about Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Dagestanis, Chechens,
etc. [0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples_of_the_Caucasus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples_of_the_Caucasus)

------
age_bronze
I find it extremely ironic that those opposing discrimination and racism are
now the ones to view people as just statistics. The whole reason why racism
and sexism is bad is because it doesn't look at people as individuals.

Behind every person who goes to an interview there's whole life, and every
interviewer has so much more information about that person than just her being
a female or black. Pretending that by knowing only 1 piece of information, you
know they made a mistake, when they clearly have so much more information than
you, calling it bias or whatever, is insult to their intelligence. Who the
hell are you to know they made a mistake, when you literally know nothing
except one little piece of a giant puzzle?!

It also goes for women / black people who didn't choose a career in tech.
There are people behind these decisions. They have freedom and free will. You
can't just pretend that they are all stupid and don't know what's good for
them.

Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things
like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in
the first place for this to even be a problem.

The whole diversity conversation reeks of so many self-contradictions and
fighting windmills, but the defining feature is envy. envy for people who
succeeded. and a deep need to excuse their failure with someone else.

~~~
JimboOmega
This whole thing is ignorant to the point of being offensive.

> Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things
> like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset
> in the first place for this to even be a problem.

I have felt this very acutely and it's offensive to assume I'm sexist just
because I don't see people like me at the higher levels of the org, and
struggle to figure out how to balance my identity with what the org wants as a
result.

Women can have male role models, but it's not the same - there are behavioral
expectations of men and women that are just different. A woman can't simply
"act like a man" and get the same response, and saying that's a perfectly fine
solution is quite ignorant. In any case you shouldn't have to give up your
identity when that has nothing to do with what actually gets the work done.

When you enter a new workplace and realize that there is nobody like you there
- especially in the higher ranks - you are fighting a very difficult battle.
You aren't sure what behaviors get rewarded and which get you attacked. You
get left out of the little friend groups and other opportunities for
connection, and you feel like an outsider.

It's not about envy at all. It's about feeling seen, about feeling accepted
and like you belong in the workplace. It's about getting the group that can do
the best job, and that often means a diverse team, not a homogenous one.

~~~
age_bronze
So that's the only defining bit of personality? That you're a woman? What
about your personality? Up-front / discrete? Introvert / extrovert? Mannered /
rude? So many other traits? I'm pretty sure there are man with much more
similar personality to you than just a random woman. You've just been
brainwashed to have a single bit when judging people, by the same 'diversity'
advocates. There is no one like you, and that is not a bad thing. There is no
one like every other single person. You don't need someone like you to know
you can succeed.

------
rb808
Honestly for young children I wouldn't want any of the girls to become
software engineers. Most Software Engineers including myself are friendly but
also grumpy, nerdy and annoying, with poor communication skills and an
unhealthy lifestyle. For some reason for men its OK because all they do is
work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer
environment - esp one without developers in it. Yeah its sexist when I write
it down but that's how I'm sure a lot of parents feel, which is one reason why
there aren't so many women at the entry to the pipeline.

~~~
choppaface
One of the most effective ways to make devs less “grumpy nerdy and annoying”
is to inject the dev community with voices that are different. There must be
bottom-up pressure for there to be positive change.

~~~
tomp
I like it being needy and “annoying” (I actually enjoy awkward jokes and
general asociality).

------
ghjyui
Am I the only one who sees the elephant in the room? 15-30 is the prime time
when women make relationships and men make money. Software engineering needs
full time commitmentent and no personal life is a part of the deal. Someone
who learns programming only in college will be mediocre at best and FANG
doesn't want to hire mediocricy. so women have a choice: go into programming
and forget about personal life, because the money they earn by 35 won't help
them, or choose personal life and have no time for programming.

------
crawfordcomeaux
There's also a cultural issue driving this that starts with programming gender
and biases into kids at or before birth. It is driven, in part, by common
confusions between gender, biological sex, and genitals. My partner and I
didn't know what our child's genitalia was until 20+ minutes after birth. We
witnessed so much unconscious (and conscious!) gendering from people
throughout pregnancy and labor we decided to not share what's between our
kid's legs with people. They only just turned one, so we're not sure about how
this will affect them. We're doing a considerable amount of work to counter
cultural programming in the hopes of raising an empowered person in such a
traumatizing and disempowering world. We're planning on homeschooling them in
order to focus on learning how to learn what they choose in an environment
without bonds to capitalism to limit the impact of that hot mess of
programming, too.

This is a collective issue and will generate pipeline issues until we
collectively get our cultural programming shit together.

I think we need to collectively focus on modeling culture through the lenses
of category theory and computer science, ie. maths of relationships and
programming.

