
Our approach to gender diversity - johnwards
http://blog.whiteoctober.co.uk/2013/09/12/our-approach-to-gender-diversity/
======
rayiner
I think this sort of affirmative approach is going to become more common as
tech is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role.
Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50
years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story.
Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital
being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified
female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions
have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a
profession.

~~~
spindritf
Nobody may be thinking twice about the head of internal medicine being a
woman. But they do about just regular physicians.

> We find that the median female (but not male) primary-care physician would
> have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. This result
> is partially due to a gender-wage gap in medicine. However, it is mostly
> driven by the fact that the median female physician simply doesn’t work
> enough hours to amortize her upfront investment in medical school.[1]

Anyway, I think ibanking is in line before tech.

[1]
[http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/Gende...](http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/GenderNPV_WorkingPaper.pdf)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
We might ask why it is still broadly assumed and expected that women will
scale back their career hours so much more than men within a given profession.
To suggest instead that women doctors should have become medical assistants is
astonishingly blinkered.

~~~
yummyfajitas
You clearly didn't read the study at all.

The study doesn't assume that women will scale back their hours. They use data
which shows it. Suggesting that female doctors should have been medical
assistants is merely the result of the fact that they would have made more
money (i.e., income - cost of education) if they did.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I did read the study. My question is: why do women still take a lot more time
off their careers for childcare than men? Presumably most of the children that
a woman doctor is missing work to look after also have fathers: why are
fathers not taking more responsibility to raise their children?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Most of the time the fathers are taking responsibility. They typically provide
income while the mother takes care of the children. Or perhaps you are asking
why individual couples choose this particular breakdown of responsibility?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I'm asking why the _prevailing pattern_ in North American couples is for the
mother to give up years of career advancement to provide direct child care
while the father continues to work, earning more money and a higher income.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Most likely more than 50% of women have a comparative advantage (relative to
their husband) in caring for children.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
You're still begging the question. Shall I jump on the regress treadmill with
you and ask why women have a "comparative advantage" with respect to caring
for their children? I suspect you'd like us eventually to land on some innate,
hard-coded difference between men and women that makes women's relative
absence in tech and under-representation in pay and seniority in other
industries okay, but that's bullshit.

Men are every bit as capable of looking after children as women, and it is a
convenient insult to men to suggest otherwise: convenient because it just
happens to uphold the gender imbalance that leaves men in much more powerful
positions, relatively speaking, than women.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I don't know why, I haven't looked at the topic in detail. I just suggest
comparative advantage because it is generally a good answer as to why two
parties mutually agree to some particular economic arrangement.

I don't actually subscribe to collectivist moral theories that declare it
somehow wrong when members of different groups are statistically more likely
to make different choices. In fact, I believe most of the collectivist
theories that do ascribe morality to statistics of this nature are not even
well formed.

~~~
rayiner
There are enormous social pressures involved. Families and child rearing are
deeply tied up in culture and history. Pretending that it's just parties
mutually agreeing to a particular arrangement based on comparative advantage
ignores the evidence plainly in front of your face in order to preserve some
idealistic theory.

Between my wife and I, there is no comparative advantage when it comes to
child rearing. We're attorneys, we both work at big firms, we make similar
incomes (hence have similar opportunity costs), neither of us is any better
with the kid than the other (thanks to the magic of modern technology, like
infant formula). Yet from the moment she got pregnant, the pressure was on my
wife to be the primary caregiver. People talked about what a shame it was that
she was a busy professional and the baby had to spend all day in daycare
(nobody ever said anything similar about my job). People will say things like
"she needs her mom" when the baby cries (no: she's either hungry or bored or
needs to be changed). When we stroll around in winter with the baby without
putting a hat on her, busybodies never tell me to put a hat on the baby,
always my wife.

If you're a woman and you have a baby, the deck is totally stacked against you
from the minute you get pregnant.

~~~
Pxtl
Yup.

My wife took only 5 months mat leave. I took the other 7. People were
generally envious and supportive of me, at least publicly.

My wife, on the other hand, got to hear all the negativity. People treating
her as heartless for going back to work and "leaving" a 5-month-old, and being
deeply suspicious of "trusting her husband with the kids", which kinda turns
my stomache.

Honestly, most folks are pretty positive about it, but it only takes a few
throwbacks to make you feel disgusting.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
When my children were quite young, I used to bristle when people who knew me
would see me out with my baby or toddler and ask, "Oh, are you babysitting?"

I'd answer, "No, I'm parenting."

------
dep_b
I can't help but wonder how this guy would go about to fix the lack of white
people using public transportation. Reserve special seats in the front of the
bus? It's discrimination all the same even though it's well meant.

Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by
males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I
have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to
people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that
worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect.
If you're female _and_ you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you
have a big advantage in this industry.

~~~
dgempesaw
Many "women choose not to do it," because of sexist environments composed
primarily of men who repeatedly tell them not to be progammers . So, sure, the
problem is women choosing not to be programmers, but that's not the underlying
cause.

The first-hand experiences of many women in tech, widely available on public
blogs, are directly opposed to your second-hand experience of them. Should we
take your word for it, or theirs?

~~~
dep_b
There are probably more blogs about Obama stealing your guns than blogs about
women in tech being discriminated, does that mean we are about to enter the
Obamacalypse? People blog either about awesome stuff or awful stuff and people
behaving normally like expected is nothing to write about.

I fail to see why programmers are of a special fascist pig breed of men that
are somehow way more discriminating towards woman than for example lawyers
are. Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers.

Modern life is full of hazards for women. I choose to not be one of them but
they're everywhere and I'm not denying in any way the impact they can have on
women. Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in
other areas they don't feel intimidated.

I had a female boss once and a female programmer colleague and I never ever
felt a single bit disrespect towards them because of their gender. Should I
start a blog about that? "Today I accepted a suggestion about how to refactor
my code from my female coworker and it totally felt like the most normal thing
in the world".

~~~
dgempesaw
> Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers.

> Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other
> areas they don't feel intimidated.

We're in agreement that it's the programmers who are the problem, and not just
"women choosing not to do it," then?

I guess you're trying to attack the validity/veracity/relevance of blog posts
in general? That's an interesting discussion to have on its own, but I'm not
entirely sure what your first and last paragraphs have to do with the question
I posed before:

Women say they are discriminated against, but you haven't seen any of that in
your personal experience. That's great, but it's not logically sound to
generalize your experience to the entire industry when there's a mountain of
evidence to the contrary. So should we believe women who have first hand
experience with discrimination, or your second hand account of it?

~~~
dep_b
Unless you have solid proof that male programmers are more machist than male
surgeons, male lawyers or male financial experts, all fields that have seen a
major influx of women in the past decades, we are in agreement that that is
definitely not the thing that keeps women away from becoming programmers.

I am not saying nothing bad in that respect ever happened to a woman in the
tech industry, I am saying that the tech industry is not an example of a
hostile place to women that prevents them to be successful or accepted.

------
elnate
> Ours is a male-dominated industry – and weaker for it

Has this ever actually been shown? I hear it a lot but have never heard any
evidence either way. (the latter part)

~~~
Zigurd
The evidence from other industries and organizations is pretty compelling.
Including women gets you better decision-making overall:
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326101616.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326101616.htm)

Given the record of industries that have reformed to include more women, I
would not bet on there being very many "naturally male" businesses. Especially
not ones that have a lot of sitting and typing involved.

~~~
gametheoretic
If your use of the word 'compelling' is in reference to the contents of that
link, well, I just could not disagree more. a) Surveys are shit - they're as
far removed from double-blind as you can get, and b) the framing of cause and
effect is highly opinionated, e.g.: "Having just one female director on the
board cuts the risk of bankruptcy by 20%" \-- superior feminine corporate
guidance or well-documented feminine avoidance of risk(y companies, e.g.
startups, for whom bankruptcy, statistically, is the expectation)?

~~~
Zigurd
Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced performance?
MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives?

Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. Imagine if
we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of
insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on
a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."

~~~
gametheoretic
> Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced
> performance? MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives?

I made no positive claims, only negative ones.

>Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a
bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black
swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."

Doing my best to refrain from username-dropping here. If an iterated game
rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of strategy s is
inevitable. Don't hate the player.

>Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge.

I will assume you're referring to Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen here. ;)

But seriously, human beings, lacking omniscience, require strategies to work
around their blind spots and keep moving forward. When/if we're lucky enough
to be cognizant of our own ignorance, we can either notify the others in the
room or we can not - both are real options; neither strategy is universally
dominant. Obviously, I'm being nice; it is called 'bullshitting'. But if you
have a nose for it, then who's to blame for letting it affect you?

~~~
dragonwriter
> If an iterated game rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of
> strategy s is inevitable. Don't hate the player.

When the players are also the people that spent considerable effort getting
the rules of the game rewritten in a way that end up causing it to reward the
strategy (replacing rules that had been put into place precisely to prevent
the kind of collapse that happened after the rule change, after another
instance of the same type of collapse), I'm not sure the "don't hate the
player" argument applies.

~~~
gametheoretic
Try rewriting that sentence without passive voice, see what you find.

------
leoedin
I agree with the start of the article. The tech industry (and engineering in
general) suffer from a distinct lack of women. It's a problem that starts at
school and filters all the way through to the top end. It's also a problem
that's not getting better particularly quickly - in my mechanical engineering
course (graduated 2012) the class was around 12% female. It's a slight
improvement on my dad's experience in the late seventies, but not by much.

I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology
and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing
gender equality in the field.

This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in
their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be
willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database
technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small
proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up
being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from
which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select
men.

My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the
person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the
presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly
diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if
they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar
outcome.

Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring
female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work.
Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more
complicated than it first seems.

------
batemanesque
this kind of seems like a way to advertise the conference, but well done
anyway

~~~
pstack
Where is their inclusion of transgender, gender dysphoric, gay, and lesbian
speakers? Also, where are all the non-white/asian/indian speakers? I think
this is going to require a bigger spreadsheet!

~~~
sambeau
The Tech industry has many male asian speakers, I suspect there is still a
strong white-male majority (I can't find any reliable figures) but asian (men)
are the other race who seem to be well established in the world of IT .

We do have incredibly talented transgendered speakers:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson)

and at least one very talented asian transgendered speaker:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang)

It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any
transgendered men.

I find it interesting that you didn't add black speakers to your list. Our
industry has a very notable deficit of anyone from an African, Afro-Carribean
& African-American background. Personally I have worked with many more women
programmers than I have with black programmers (although I have worked with
two very talented black men, both ex-programmers in a senior management role,
one military trained). I wonder why?

But you are right. Equality is equality. We'll get there in the end!

~~~
readstoomuch
> It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any
> transgendered men.

Tim Chevalier, of Rust - [http://catamorphism.org](http://catamorphism.org)

~~~
sambeau
Thanks. I assumed it was ignorance on my part and I was right.

His "The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist" is a depressing, informative
read.

[http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Male_Programmer_Privilege...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Male_Programmer_Privilege_Checklist)

------
bloodorange
Do you allow exporting of raw data?

------
jlebrech
that makes absolutely no sense at all, you should invite the speaker by
experience and knowledge and not anything else, the criteria should be
technical and not political.

If there was a selection criteria of newbie then you could select women over
men more aggressively.

I know a few great female developers but then you have to hope that they have
the skills for public speaking.

This needs to be done at the grass roots, not at the top level.

But saying that, any top level female developer should be automatically
included. There are some no doubt but they need to turn up.

