

Struggling with the Gender Gap - garlicbreadftw
http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/05/31/struggling-with-the-gender-gap/

======
microarchitect
Some female academics in the STEM fields have started wildly successful blogs
that talk about gender issues in an academic environment. A few I recommend to
academics/grad students/postdocs of both genders are Female Science Professor,
Academic Jungle and Female Computer Scientist.

My impression is that these and other blogs have been tremendously successful
in letting young female scientists learn about extremely successful female
role models in academia. They've also been extremely illuminating personally
to me (a male engineer) because they call out instances where folks are
"innocuously" sexist, and helped me understand how even certain cases of well-
intentioned male behavior is actually discouraging from a female PoV.

All I can say to the OP is:

(1) she should keep writing so that young women entering CS know that
successful female s/w engineers exist.

(2) encourage other successful female s/w engineers to start blogging.

(3) don't ever hesitate to blog about instances of sexism - well-intentioned
or otherwise - because at the very least this can help clueless male engineers
learn how to behave.

(4) Don't ever hesitate to confront people for sexist speech or actions. The
problem is only going to away if we create a culture where sexism would be
career suicide and the first step to this is confronting the sexists.

------
auganov
If she [the author] cares so much about the social aspects of being in IT
industry then I don't know why she cannot accept the way it is.

All I see is "Look how cool and special I am! I'm a girl and I can navigate in
the men's world!". She tries to bring up a problem but I cannot quiet see a
real problem there.

"Already at a disadvantage, they are playing a seemingly impossible game of
catchup with very little positive feedback or support. The culture, the
standards, and the norms are all male-centric, and the book talks about women
in computing being guests in a male-hosted world."

It's a big problem if you want to become an average programmer that has to
rely on that feedback and support. Guess what? Most truly skilled people
learned almost everything by themselves. Generally speaking most intelligent
people learn by themselves (if there are means to do it) and find themselves a
little alienated from the general culture.

My point is simply if you want to achieve exceptional results you will most
likely be an exceptional person too. And being a woman, being ugly being
whatever will not have much influence. In some situations it will help, in
some it might do the opposite, it's random.

If you want to be average then yea, as a woman it will be harder in IT, but if
you want to be average why not pick a job average woman does?

~~~
tuhin
Disclaimer: The author of the post has been nothing but helpful to me in my
latest endeavor and I have never met her in real life (yet).

 _If she [the author] cares so much about the social aspects of being in IT
industry then I don't know why she cannot accept the way it is._

Why should she have to accept it the way it is?

As human beings we all have the basic right and duty to improve things for the
better. If the situation is not the way it should be and I believe the
comments agree to that premise then WHY should she try NOT IMPROVE them?

If the same topic were addressed by a male programmer we would all be talking
how chivalry and good people are in abundance who want things to change, would
not we?

Thank you for the downvote that you shall soon exercise but someone had to say
this loud even if it shows mildly irrational side of me.

~~~
gaius
_WHY should she try NOT IMPROVE them?_

Because she's not trying to improve them - she's trying to skew the game.
Maybe it's "male-centric" to insist that only the quality of the work matters
- but personally I say that quality of work transcends gender and speaks for
itself. Because my long experience of this industry is that we are the least
biased people on the planet, gay, straight, black, white, boy, girl, fat,
then, it doesn't matter if you can deliver. And if you can't deliver - the
excuses that work in the rest of the world - don't cut it with us.

~~~
jasonyyun
Here's the problem though: if you're interested in meritocracy, it has to be a
true meritocracy all the way through. You can't ignore other parts of the
process and then, only at the very end, say that the quality of work is the
only thing that matters. Sure, if boys and girls at home and in our education
system were treated equally, encouraged to pursue the same things, given the
same opportunities...then yes, you could make this argument.

The problem, though, is that this isn't the case. Women in the United States
aren't shying away from STEM disciplines because they're generally
intellectually incapable of it; it's because they encounter strong societal
pressures against doing so. Other countries--I'm thinking of Romania in
particular, which sent a large number of IMO medalists to my university during
my years there--have many more women in math and science. (And no, they're not
bad at what they do.) Unless you're going to try to claim that Romanian women
are somehow different or more talented than American women, it seems clear
that the ways that our society and educators are affecting them are
responsible for this disparity.

And once you take that into consideration, the argument for improving this
problem starts to become a lot more reasonable. It bears a lot of similarity
to that line from Lyndon Johnson: " You do not take a person who, for years,
has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line
of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and
still justly believe that you have been completely fair." It's pretty similar
here. Jean (and others dedicated to this cause) aren't interested in "skewing"
the game unfairly. Instead, they contend that because of issues earlier in the
process, whatever they may be, the gender gap isn't and shouldn't be the
natural order of things.

------
gaius
From the same author: [http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/02/28/the-benefits-of-
being-a-fe...](http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/02/28/the-benefits-of-being-a-
female-software-engineer/)

 _The odds are really freaking good, and only some of the goods are odd. Sure
there are a bunch of socially awkward engineers, but because of the sheer
scarcity of women in the field, if you are a single female you can have first
pick of a lot of really nice available guys._

I thought the days were past when women only got jobs to find husbands, seems
not!

~~~
britta
Attaching a sexist comment to a post about the challenges of being a female
engineer is not cute or helpful.

~~~
pyre
I think that post is trying to point out the irony of the fact that the same
author was promoting the female stereotype of "just getting a job to find a
husband" in her other post, while lamenting the gender issues associated with
being a woman in computer science in this post.

~~~
gaius
Exactly. She's the sort of person who will use being female to her advantage
when she can - and when not, she'll use it as an excuse.

Me, all I care about is the work, same as everyone else who's not got an
agenda of their own.

------
ctide
Her opening statement closely resembles what I felt seeing another jeanhsu
article about gender. I also thought it was woefully ironic when she mentioned
that she has tried to avoid the topic of gender, when in actuality, that's the
only correlation I have to her at this point.

Jean -- if you don't want to be known as the person who only talks about
gender issues, at the very least, try to intersperse some technical
discussions into your gender articles. Or, better yet, write articles about
tech instead of the fact that you're female.

~~~
fleitz
It's selection bias because it's a hot topic. There are articles in between
those to posts and I don't believe she posted the article to HN. It's just a
selection of her blog that the HN userbase likes. I don't particularly agree
with her POV but I think it's unfair to characterize her blog as about the
gender gap.

As an aside, it's not like men are actively encouraged to become programmers
by their social peers. There are a small group of men who program and support
each other in that vein, in the general population it doesn't exactly
represent the hopes and dreams of parents of male children. (Eg. Mom and Dad
statistically would encourage becoming a lawyer or doctor much more than a
programmer).

I think as a society we should encourage women and men to do what they want
rather than that they should fill some predefined gap that we think needs
filling. I could care less about the gender gap in computing or the gender gap
in nursing.

~~~
pyre
I think that the line of thought goes something like:

* There's a variance between the number of men and women in field X.

* This gap does not correlate with the number of men and women in the general population.

* Therefore field X must be discouraging women from going into the field that would otherwise be interested in the field.

I believe the thinking is that if everyone did what they wanted to do, then
the gender balance in any random field would probably be relatively close to
the gender balance of the general populace.

