

More women needed in technology - soitgoes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19884720

======
peteretep
This article appears deeply confused, and doesn't seem to bear much
relationship to its title.

By "more women needed in technology", what it appears to actually be
advocating is "more women needed in designing products for women, because men
are condescending in their design of female-oriented products".

... and ok. Then the author follows it up by saying "it's basic economics!
More women will buy your products!", but doesn't follow that up with "and so
market forces will make it happen!". But whatever. If you want to try and
change how an industry talks to your group, have at it.

But then also the author has taken the time to produce a cartoon book telling
young women to go in to computers and technology, because (from the image
provided) apparently all young women ever hear is badly-spelled messages
telling them that they should focus on home economics (untrue) and that
programming generally involves working in dark cubicles (sometimes true) and
being a nerd (all too true). Why doesn't the author already know that ...?

Because the author, and head of this campaign ... isn't actually a woman in
technology. She's a woman in advertising, who has decided that more women need
to be in technology. Not her, just other women. So how does she know that
women can thrive in technology? How is she able to legitimately address their
concerns? It all feels a bit condescending towards ... people in technology.
"Here I am, a person outside of your field, telling you that you talk to women
all wrong, and I'm going to fix it with a swish advertising and graphics
campaign".

If you want the message to be taken seriously, get Marissa Meyer to say it.
Bring me the opinion of Danese Cooper. Shouldn't tech role models come from,
ya know, tech?

Conclusion: the message I probably agree with. Diversity of every sort in
technical teams is a great thing in my previous experience. But what the hell
is this article about, and who is this advertising exec to tell deliver it?

~~~
netcan
These articles always tend to be quite bad.

They always address the two main questions/premisses "more women needed in
tech" & "why are fewer women in tech" flippantly with weak, unthoughtful
arguments & cliche explanations. Both are genuine questions that need to be
addressed. Even if you are willing to accept that women need to be equally
represented in tech as self evident or fundamental, you should still find out
the real reasons why things are this way if you want to fix it.

Any answers that you come up with to the "why" question need to answers it in
a way that doesn't equally apply to law, medicine, academics & government.
Professions that women entered a generation ago.

In any case, I'm only half convinced about the economic rationale given by
this article: _We need women to design stuff for women_. It is a definitely a
real problem people designing tech products are disconnected from many of the
people using tech products. But women are the one "group" that technology
designing men _do_ interact with. I think if you want to add useful
perspectives something to encourage might be technology as a second career.
People who spent 10 years as farmers, nurses, builders or rodeo clowns.

~~~
rayiner
Law firms took concerted efforts to recruit women into the profession. Today,
those efforts are no longer necessary because the representation of women in
the field (about 55/45) seems to be self-propagating.

~~~
netcan
Engineering departments have been taking concerted efforts to recruit women
into the faculties for years, with less effect. I assume some technology
companies have too.

I'm not sure how to quantify the efforts put in by different fields.

------
Tichy
"Examples of getting it wrong are abundant: A common 'for-the-ladies' strategy
is to take last year's product, re-release it at a slightly lower-price point,
slightly smaller and clad in pink plastic."

The fact seems to be, pink gadgets sell. So I am not sure that the companies
are "getting it wrong". Not saying that there couldn't be a better way.

Also wondering about the oft cited former communist East European states with
their high percentage of female engineers. I have heard that not many of them
actually work as engineers. Don't have numbers, though.

I wish more women would go into engineering, but to be honest, my attitude has
become a bit cynical: I think women have more attractive choices (not in the
least becoming stay at home mums, or working for unattractive salaries in fun
jobs because husbands bring in the big money - fun jobs including
kindergardener, nurse, fashion shop owners,...). Engineering, or let's talk
about programming, is not actually that much fun in the real world. You sit in
front of a screen all day long and wreck your brain. Talking with people is
better for the soul, and women are smart enough to realize that.

Yes, bring on the downvotes. I am not saying this is a law of nature, just
that it is the current state of things for a variety of reasons.

~~~
rayiner
> I think women have more attractive choices

Possibly, but what makes engineering different from say law? My engineering
class was 28% female, and the engineering team I worked on after graduating
was 5% female. My law school class was 45% female, and my law firm starting
class is about 45% female as well.

I can't think of a principled way to distinguish law from engineering in terms
of gender attractiveness, other than the culture of the respective fields. I
don't think it's aptitude. The male-female gap on the SAT Math is about the
same as the male-female gap on the LSAT. I don't think it's attractiveness.
Law isn't any more fun than engineering. In your words: "you sit in front of a
screen al day and wreck your brain." It's analytical, detail work, not unlike
debugging code. Yet, women seem to self select into at a relatively similar
rate to men.

I'll also note: women make up the majority of accountants and auditors and 45%
of accountants at accounting firms. Talk about boring detail oriented jobs!

~~~
barry-cotter
_Possibly, but what makes engineering different from say law?_

Higher social status. For any given amount of money the job with more autonomy
wins. Also, just by virtue of being a more verbally focused field lawyers will
tend to have higher social skills than the average engineer. Said differently
engineering has a higher proportion of the socially maladroit than law. Women
have much less tolerance for that kind of stuff.

All of the fields you mention, law, engineering, accounting demand
intelligent, conscientious, hard working people but engineering is unusually
willing to tolerate weirdness if the person can get the job done compated to
the others and is less autonomous.

That doesn't explain everything but it goes a long way.

~~~
rayiner
Here is what I don't get about your argument. You're using one theory of
social conditioning to explain why women stay away from CS (the social status
of the field), while implicitly rejecting the more obvious bit of social
conditioning: the perception that engineering is for socially maladjusted men.

And neither provides a principled reason to maintain the status quo. Why
should the socially maladjusted men already in engineering (as you call them)
get to define the culture of the field?

What if tech companies tried to actively change the culture of the field. What
if, say for 15 years, tech companies put a thumb on the scale by actively
trying to recruit say 25% women. You'd definitely have to take slightly less
qualified candidates in order to meet the quota, but it would be transient.
After 15 years, there would be a critical mass of women in the field, and the
perception of the field as being for socially maladjusted men would be greatly
diminished. Tech companies would have enough women applicants to maintain
their new ratios without putting a thumb on the scale. You can say it's
"unfair" to the men who would have gotten those jobs in the interim, but is it
any more "fair" for a group to keep another group out of a lucrative
profession by defining a particular culture?

~~~
barry-cotter
Absent a large rise in the earnings of engineers relative to lawyers the
skills demanded by both professions are such that the average lawyer will
always bemore verbally facile than the average engineer. Whoever has better
facility with words has better social skills, on average. So lawyers have
higher social skills.

Your thought experiment in which companies discriminate against men in hiring
might work. It would need to be forced upob all participants in a
field/economic sector because if it was voluntary those who were not
discriminating would be hiring from a superior talent pool. They'd win, on
average. I thonk it would be unfair to women who could have made it on their
own merits too, but hey.

~~~
rayiner
Nobody had to force law firms to try and increase their representation of
women, at least in any systematic way. Law firms did it because lawyers are a
very liberal bunch and demanded it from within.

I don't see why the same couldn't work for engineering. Would engineering
companies have to dip into a slightly less talented pool to begin with?
Probably. But here is an interesting statistic. At my alma mater, the entering
men have about a 30-point higher average SAT math score than the entering
women. Of course, the school has gotten more competitive over time, so the
women entering today have about the same SAT math score as the men who entered
as freshman in my class (about a decade ago). Think about that--the cohort of
"affirmative action" women today have about the same level of mathematical
aptitude (measured purely by test scores) as the cohort of experienced male
engineers who are 5-6 years out from graduation. That's the magnitude of the
thumb on the scale, and I'd argue it's very small.

I think the bottom line is this--there is no reason there should be fewer
women in engineering than can be explained by any difference in aptitude of
women for engineering. In terms of aptitude for engineering, the starkest
difference we see is in standardized test scores, particularly the Math SAT.
In the range that characterizes engineers from good schools (~700) the pool is
~40% women. That's the upper bound. I honestly think you could get an
equilibrium in the engineering field with ~40% women, an equilibrium that
would be stable, once established, with no affirmative action.

~~~
barry-cotter
Your point about possible stable equilibria I don't have any beef with. But
honestly I think the “problem” is more on the supply than the demand side.
Fewer women find engineering/technology attractive than men. Women have better
options given their preferences than tech.

Normally this would be where I linked to the Study of Mathematically
Precocious Youth paper showing girls who entered math competitions withr
similarly skilled boys to leak out of the tech/science/engineering path much
more but I'm on my phone.

Bowing out.

------
shanelja
Here is my $0.02:

I believe that the tech industry is dominated by men, that's a given, but I
don't necessarily believe that we need more women, or even more men. At the
moment, the tech industry has a surplus of jobs and not enough bodies to fill
the desks, so what we need is more people, irrespective of age, gender, race,
etc.

In my opinion, it is extremely sexist to even suggest that we need more women
in tech, it implies that the (large amount of) men who are currently in the
industry are not doing their jobs correctly and should be replaced by women,
that women would do a better job; granted, some women would do a better job,
but so would some men.

You can not force equality (a thing which you already have) upon the masses,
but look at it like this, there aren't less women in tech because men don't
want them there, there are just less women who are inclined to go in to
technology, this isn't a case of "Male oppression is forcing us not to follow
our dream", it's merely a case of less women having this dream.

Let's be honest, from our earliest childhood years, we are given this
impression that certain activities are for certain genders, and yes, to some
degree this is wrong, I happen to like the colour pink and my sister
absolutely loved playing in dirt, to my mothers disdain, but these young
character building years are what defines us, the fact is that there are two
genders, not one, and they are not always equal, we need to celebrate these
differences instead of trying to subdue them in to none-existence.

Personally, the finest developer I have ever met was a woman, so I have
nothing against women in tech, but let's look at the fact, from a young age,
boys are taught that playing computer games is a boys thing, playing these
games often fosters a natural ability to understand computers.

If you play model of honour enough times, you begin to recognize the path
finding model which the computer takes, and at a very primal level you begin
to understand the most simple AI elements, this experience builds your
understanding of how computers works. I'm not saying this is the _only_ way to
get in to computers, I'm just giving the example which was relevant to myself.

tl;dr: Stop blaming men for the lack of women in tech, take a look at your own
base camp, men have given you equality for years now, just accept that most
women don't want to go in to tech; not because they are women, but because,
let's face it, we're a big bunch of nerds and foreveraloners and most sane
people would do anything they could to stay out of this space.

~~~
rayiner
If you took all the male foreveraloners and replaced them with normal people
and women, would more women be attracted to the field? If so, why not do that?

It's one thing to say that women don't select into a profession because they
don't have the aptitude to do it. I think the number of women who score 700+
on the Math SAT proves that at least a lot more women have the aptitude for
tech than to into it. If its not aptitude, then it must be culture, and why
should the male foreveraloners get to dictate the culture of the field?
Because they were there first?

~~~
prodigal_erik
It's the forever-aloners who spent half a decade obsessively learning how
computers work before college. If the women you're talking about are being
driven away by something so tangential as the culture (which isn't between you
and the keyboard), do they still have enough insatiable curiosity to be coding
alone as a hobby? If not, how do you figure they have the aptitude?

We need more qualified people, but mostly fewer unqualified people. Most of
the men we already have are worse than useless, and I don't want to attract
anyone who isn't markedly better.

~~~
rayiner
Culture is not tangential.

------
Wintamute
This article is odd. Isn't the real issue here that there are so few female
programmers, computer scientists and researchers, i.e. the people actually
_making_ tech? Whether there are insufficient numbers of women in tech company
marketing roles to effectively market products at a female audience seems to
be a totally separate issue and ... well, somehow less problematic to me. It
also seems quite demeaning to suggest that the only reason a girl would want
to get into tech is to work at targeting advertising and PR at her own gender.

How about a campaign to drastically improve science, math and computer science
teaching at school from a young age, and work hard to ensure both genders get
enough exposure so that the kids with the most aptitude and passion, whatever
their gender, get a real chance to choose tech as a career path, instead of
this marketing and PR bullshit?

------
rayiner
As someone with a -4 week old daughter, this is a subject at the forefront of
my mind.

I always see tremendous skepticism whenever an article comes out saying that
we need to reduce the gender gap in tech. The attitude seems to be that if a
gap exists then it is natural and there is no point in taking affirmative
steps to reduce it. What I find interesting is that these same people probably
wouldn't apply this reasoning to many other situations. They're often totally
willing to believe that we have too many people in liberal arts programs and
not enough in engineering programs, or not enough people going to college or
too many people going to college. They're often willing to believe that we
have a "digital divide" that needs to be corrected, or that there aren't
enough people with science backgrounds in Congress, or any of a number of
other ideas predicated on the presumption that positive action is required to
address some imbalance in society.

~~~
alid
Amen! Thank you for highlighting this. I've been following threads such as
these on HN - I'm surprised and saddened at the level of sexist (sometimes
even misogynistic) comments they seem to procure. To me, the overall weight of
comments show an undue amount of skepticism. They'll fastidiously pick apart
the research or article semantics, and keenly pull out standard diversionary
or derailing tactics. Strange considering we're far from living in a
meritocratic society (as illustrated by studies such as these:
[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-
prognosis/201...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-
prognosis/2012/09/23/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-
matters/)). On the upside, I've created a program to log everyone who flaunts
sexist comments on HN and elsewhere - they will never do business with me. All
the best!

~~~
Tichy
I think you have to take into account that people value their personal
experiences. We all have encountered women in our lives and sometimes in Tech.
Since I never attempted to rape a tech woman, or diminished their
achievements, I tend to find the typical portrait of male tech environments
insulting. From my personal experience they are not true, and you have to
provide a lot of arguments to override people's personal experiences.

~~~
rayiner
Discussions of gender equality: the only subject on Hacker News or Reddit
where someone will, with a straight face, try to refute an empirical study
with anecdotal evidence.

~~~
Tichy
I think you exaggerate. Most of these discussions are not about empirical
studies but about opinion pieces.

~~~
rayiner
You were replying to an article involving an empirical study.

~~~
Tichy
I did not say the study is false or anything. I just tried to explain the
sentiment of people accused of fostering a sexist industry.

For what it's worth (although this is tangential), I think the study is
interesting but I can still think of a lot of questions to ask. And it wasn't
about IT, the experiment was done with lab jobs.

------
nadam
I hate the expression 'working in technology'. Because it does not say
anything about what a person actually does or knows or likes. (For example I
am a prototypical hacker/programmer, but not working in the 'tech industry'. I
work as a software developer in a different industry right now (with lots of
woman coworkers by the way).)

So the author wants more women in _marketing_. (tech-marketing) Ok. But if my
now 5 year old daughter will be interested in programming, math, algorithms, I
will not force her to learn marketing just because Belinda Parmar says so. Yes
I will be happy to talk about marketing with my daughter when she grows up, I
am interested in marketing, but I equally happily will talk about the beauty
of Hindley–Milner type inference with her.:)

------
adaml_623
_"It's time to change things. Any chief executive with half an ounce of sense
should be putting their blood, sweat and tears into ensuring that the make-up
of their company mirrors the make-up of their market."_

What if my target market is teenagers...

------
countessa
oh the irony - the article notes that "pink it and shrink it approach
represents typically shallow thinking" and then we are invited to check out
the twitter feed and website of "Belinda Parmar who is the author of _Little_
Miss Geek".....

