
Facebook’s First Female Engineer Speaks Out on Tech’s Gender Gap - gkuan
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/ruchi-qa/
======
jquery
Take two groups of people. We'll call group A the "Bears", and group B the
"Foxes".

The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They were
tinkering and playing with them despite society's mockery that they were
pathetic nerds. When they found out you could make great money, well, that was
just a bonus.

The Foxes joined because they were told the industry was super rad and it paid
really well. The Foxes were given advantages like additional Fox-only
scholarships, special Fox-quotas in good engineering colleges, and lots of
blogs praising Foxes and telling them how special they are, how they bring
unique Fox-only insights to the table, and that The Bears have a
conscious/unconscious agenda against them.

Now ask yourself, which group would you expect to have more longevity in the
industry, the Foxes or the Bears? What would a company have to do to keep more
Foxes? Maybe special privileges, like conferences the companies could send the
Foxes to that would tell the Foxes how great they are, promotion programs to
ensure more Fox visibility, quotas for Foxes in senior management, etc. But
the Foxes are still leaving in higher numbers so clearly the industry has a
bias against Foxes, so funding for Fox-only programs must increase, until the
number of Foxes is equal to Bears (and if eventually there are more Foxes then
Bears, that's just great!) What about the Bears? Well, the Bears better sit
down, shut up, and remember that they are just Bears and there is nothing
unique about a Bear. Some Bears internalize this and start advocating for the
Foxes themselves.

And so it goes.

~~~
rayiner
You lost me at "strong _natural_ interest and affinity." That could've been
said for law or medicine or accounting or any of a large number of professions
that were male-only until they weren't.

~~~
lambdaphage
The interesting thing about medicine and law is that they are professions that
deal with human needs and social relationships. As formal barriers were
removed, the percentage of law and medical degrees awarded to women steadily
increased to parity:

[http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_do...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_doctorlawyer.png)

The graph doesn't show the last few years, but I believe medicine is over 50%
women now.

Compare this to computer science. I can't find easily find data for Ph.D.s or
master's degrees, so here is bachelor's degrees over roughly the same period:

[http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct...](http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/2013/04/04/women2-100386539-orig.jpg)

Lastly, for contrast, look what happened to vet school:

[https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g...](https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g1.gif)

(NB: technically enrollment rather than completion.) That looks to me pretty
clearly like a thumb lifting off the scale.

I do not think the quantity of sexism in CS is zero. Yet from my experience of
CS and law, I have a hard time believing that there is more bad behavior, (on
the order of a 200-300% difference) among computer scientists than among
_lawyers_. Maybe I'm wrong about that?

In any case I think comparisons to medicine and law actually raise more
questions than they answer.

~~~
rayiner
At some level of scale medicine and law are about human and social needs, but
at that same level of scale, programming is about social and consumer needs.
Yet by that chart you posted, the level of CS degrees awarded to women in the
era of Twitter is half of what it was in the era of Lotus 123. And what about
accounting? Big 4 accounting firms are close to parity. And I'm not sure how
different the professions are at the lowest levels. Poring through a
spreadsheet trying to tie-up a number that's off isn't much different than
poring over a core dump. Yet half the people who do the former are women.

~~~
lambdaphage
I debated how to present the CS data, because there are a few things going on
there. Here are the raw counts:

[http://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/...](http://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/ctw/2013/04/04/women1-100386537-orig.jpg)

The two spikes circa 1985 and 2003 are also present in the men's data.

What we see is not women checking out of CS, but much more men getting into
it, hence the percentage of degrees awarded to women goes down.

Your point about accounting is an interesting one. I suspect it's explained by
this: [http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-
students...](http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-
college-major-and-gender-ratio/)

~~~
rayiner
Your first point is a non-explanation. If the conjecture is that the
preference for CS is based on inherent factors, that doesn't explain why the
preference ratio would change over time. Did the nature of programming change
in 1985 and 2003 to make it more attractive to men?

Disclaimer: the sources below are controversial. The below is not necessarily
an endorsement of these conclusions, but an attempt to address them on their
own terms.

Regarding your second point. At the ranges in question, the male-female
disparity is not enough to explain the observed results. I'm going to rely on
SAT Math data, because that's more rigorously studied than what you posted.
The male-female disparity among people with perfect SAT Math scores is less
than 2-1: [http://www.aei.org/publication/2013-sat-test-results-show-
th...](http://www.aei.org/publication/2013-sat-test-results-show-that-a-huge-
math-gender-gap-persists-with-a-32-point-advantage-for-high-school-boys). So
that might explain why only 40%+ of math majors are women. It doesn't explain
why less than 20% of CS majors are women, or why that ratio has fallen by half
even as the field has become less mathematically rigorous.

Also, there is quite a lot of evidence that women outperform their SAT Math
scores relative to men:
[http://esd.mit.edu/Headline/widnall_presentation.html](http://esd.mit.edu/Headline/widnall_presentation.html)
("He found that women outperform their predictions. That is, that women
perform better as students than their math SAT scores would predict. The
effective predictive gap is about 30 points.") It is interesting to note that
men also outperform women at the upper range of MCAT and LSAT scores, by
similar margins. Yet, differences in observed performance in medical and law
school by gender are slim to non-existant, and those professions have an even
number of men and women, at least at the degree and entry level.

I don't think aptitude explains the disparity if you actually delve into the
data. I think it can be explained by:
[http://iangent.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-petrie-multiplier-
wh...](http://iangent.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-petrie-multiplier-why-attack-
on.html?m=1)

------
brandonmenc
> They’re more organized.

Here we go again.

Based on what? Where does this idea come from? Can you imagine if we all just
accepted this as fact about men?

I know plenty of female programmers who absolutely hate this idea that women
are "more organized." The result is almost always that they get pigeonholed
into the "secretary" role on a team.

This idea needs to die. It does no one any good, and it's probably just false.

~~~
joshdotsmith
"There’s more empathy" also bothers me. I'm not sure we're doing anyone any
favors by generalizing large swaths of people, by gender or anything else.
This is pure prejudice, even if it's good-natured and well-intentioned.

~~~
dubfan
Prejudice isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a society, we're fighting over
where the line is between "bad prejudice" and "good prejudice", and the tech
gender gap is just one of many battlegrounds in that fight.

------
arihant
So it is okay for a woman to say that women are better organized, that they
have more empathy, but as a man I cannot claim that men are better hackers?

I'm all for equality, but every single time I read one of these articles, I
seem to read everything but equality. Being a programmer is a job, a male
dominated job, at least in 2014. There are a lot of fields where men work
which are female dominated, like a chef, or interior design, or fashion, or a
nanny, or a nurse. You don't see men throwing tantrums like this. And neither
do great female programmers, they are busy making us feel stupid.

~~~
JamesArgo
Most chefs are male - people don't care because its a low status job.
Programming is now high status, so now this gender gap is an issue. As many
feminists have "misogynistic conspiracy" as their default explanation for any
differnces in outcome among genders, they're not in a very good epistemic
position to judge these things. Unjust discrimination is economically
counterproductive, I don't expect ruthless corporations to support such a
conspiracy when defection is more profitable. Aside from blinded applications
and maybe interviews, not much needs to be done. We are building businesses
here, not collecting data for a census.

~~~
pekk
Being rich, being a VC, being Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is a
lot of status, but despite popular assumptions, that doesn't really rub off on
the programming equivalent of a line cook or plumber.

------
ps4fanboy
"If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to bring more diverse
opinions, but they also tend to build a collaborative culture. And a result,
things get done faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy, which
makes for a better work environment. It’s just better all around."

If the genders are equal any combination of them are also equal.

~~~
brandonmenc
This comment makes a good point.

It's shocking that so many people fighting the good fight for the equality of
women in the workforce also attribute special qualities to women that men just
don't have - the common ones being that they're more organized, and can more
easily think outside the box.

This is sexist, counterproductive, and false.

Women should be represented in a profession because they're fungible with men
and make up half of the general population.

Period.

Once you start saying a team _needs_ women, because they have some special
insight or ability, you have to logically accept that a team that is 100%
women is not as good as that same team plus a man - which is simply not true.

~~~
loteck
The comment does not make a good point. It conflates the idea of equality with
the concept of diversity.

Equality is neither inherently caused or obstructed by diversity.

~~~
jlynn
I think it is important to point out that equality has a huge impact on
diversity.

~~~
malandrew
Most certainly, however you can't say whether that that impact produces a more
equal or more unequal ratio.

Citing a racial example, the greater equality (read: more meritocratic) of
admissions practiced by CalTech results in a disproportionately Asian
composition (~40% Asian whereas Asians are just 4.4% of the population and
only like 2% of the students are African American, which African Americans are
make up like 17% of the US population.

------
simplekoala
Refreshing to read. Her answers are not carefully rehearsed and perennially
regurgitated sound bytes you hear all the time.

From my observation, it seems this gap is prevalent mostly in engineering (not
so much in HR, Marketing, Sales etc).

~~~
mcintyre1994
The gap in HR is much bigger, but in the other direction of course.
[http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chala...](http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chalabi-
datalab-flightattendants-2.png) (compiled from US Census data)

Computer scientists 72.2% male, HR 16.2% male. Of course there are many more
employed in software than in HR.

~~~
jquery
HR knows the score. 83.8% women is only 16.2% away from being 100% diverse.

------
coding4all
Some interesting things were said...

> _Sanghvi - "I don’t like being called aggressive. And that reputation has
> stuck with me. Any company that I go to, any VC firm that I talk to,
> everybody thinks of me as the aggressive person who can get shit done, at
> all costs."_

This is a bad thing?

> _Sanghvi - "Men are just more comfortable with men than they are with
> women."_

Aren't women more comfortable with women than they are with men?

> _Sanghvi - "The first thing I would say is you need to live life with no
> regrets. Always ask yourself—when you’re doubting something or you’re afraid
> of something—ask yourself the question: “What would you do if you weren’t
> afraid and do that?” I say this because every decision in my life, everybody
> told me that I was a fool."_

That's some of the best advice to ever come out of a Wired article.

~~~
malandrew
>>Sanghvi -"Men are just more comfortable with men than they are with women."

> Aren't women more comfortable with women than they are with men?

Exactly. Men are generally more friendly with men and women are more friendly
with men, where the ratio is, 70-30 men to women, 50-50 men to women or 30-70
men to women.

Go look at the fashion industry and you'll see that the women are more
friendly with the women and the men are more friendly with the men. The fact
that men or women are the majority and in power is orthogonal to the issue of
same gender affinity insofar are fraternization is concerned.

------
evincarofautumn
I am a bisexual male programmer. I don’t give a damn what sex you have, and I
would prefer not to think about it at all in a work environment, since it’s
not relevant. But the skewed gender ratio affects interactions amongst my
mostly heterosexual colleagues, and I find it disruptive. This is also true of
race.

Anything we can do to remove bias and create a non-hostile work environment
for everyone is a win not just for our ability to function as a field, but
also to serve as a benchmark of social equality for other fields.

------
malandrew

        "If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to 
        bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a 
        collaborative culture. And a result, things get done 
        faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy, 
        which makes for a better work environment. It’s just 
        better all around." - Sanghvi
    

I don't understand why it's okay for a woman to make generalizations like this
about the things they think women are better at, but it's totally not okay for
a man to openly voice their opinions on what they think men are better at.

If it's not acceptable for men to voice similar opinions, why do we not call
out women when they do the same?

------
jim_greco
Anonymous message boards truly are an ugly place. One very accomplished woman
speaks out about her mostly positive but colored with some negative
experiences in the tech world and the top comment is an anti-affirmative
action rant (bears and foxes) that brings out a bunch of old tropes while
completely ignoring the history of our industry.

~~~
ANTSANTS
How dare people express differing opinions.

------
karsus
The expectation that things work on merit and that you should be able to just
work hard and succeed, seems to hit many people.

Unfortunately, real merit seems to go beyond one's official role. You are
better if you can move stuff forward and facilitate projects succeeding
overall. If you can make things happen.

Schools never taught us to think about life that way.

