

Valley gender gap a death spiral - ilamont
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/03/financial/f123331D54.DTL&tsp=1

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rcthompson
Interesting article, but submitting it with this as the title is misleading.
The "death spiral" quote is from the text of the article, and is not used to
describe the gender gap as a whole, but rather what happens when an individual
startup fails to bring on any women in the first 15 to 20 employees (i.e.
bringing one woman into an environment with 20 men is nigh impossible, and
just gets harder as you hire more and more men because you can't hire any
women).

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jack-r-abbit
These articles rub me the wrong way.

 _Unless their parents are engineers, girls also aren't likely to encounter
coders in their own lives the same way they would, for example, a doctor or a
teacher. "We don't really have that same kind of interaction with software
engineers as we go about our daily lives," Goldfein said._

Neither of my parents were engineers (uneducated truck/bus drivers actually)
and I never interacted with engineers growing up. So... simply "being male"
was my influence to be an engineer? I call bullshit.

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kylebrown
No, not you being male. Other engineers being male ("role models in popular
culture" not just day-to-day life).

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jack-r-abbit
I'm not sure what "role models in popular culture" I had in the 80's that
steered me to be an engineer. It sure wasn't anybody on MTV. And assuming none
of my school teachers were engineers, I didn't encounter my first (known to
me) engineer until I got to college. But I started out just wanting to be a
computer repairman because that looked like the future and the money would
probably be good. It was after college that I realized my true passion was
software and not hardware.

~~~
kylebrown
The 80s.. hmm how about Jeff Bridges character in the movie Tron? Or the star
character in the movie Wargames? If you've seen either of those, the main
character being male could have been an influence (the movies certainly were
for me). It wasn't until '95 that Angelina Jolie was in Hackers. Besides such
movies, the other role models in popular culture would be the archetypical
Einstein (Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future), etc. In the west,
engineers aren't held in as high esteem as eg China (where the president is an
engineer), at least not until recently (with Zuckerberg as the modern
archetype).

There are historical female role models: Madame Curie, Grace Hopper, and Ada
Lovelace probably the top three (and for a modern one, how about the founder
of Adafruit? and so on and so forth). Showing their wiki pages to any young
females, if the topic comes up, is a helpful contribution IMO.

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jack-r-abbit
Movies perhaps. I don't recall when I saw Wargames... but at least a few years
after it came out. I didn't get to the theater much so it would have been on
VHS. I didn't see Tron until I was an adult. ( _gasp_ )

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mwd_
These articles typically throw the ratio of female to male employees out there
as a statistic. How do we know that gender discrimination is the biggest
factor in the gender gap? It's not hard to imagine that men and women on
average would have different career preferences even without discrimination.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
This is what crosses my mind quite often when gender is brought up here. The
sentiment is that gender imbalance is a problem that needs to be fixed. And as
you say, any other reason goes out of the window.

I'm also of the opinion that there's a hint of arrogance in saying that men
are the reason there are fewer women in the field. I generally take a feminist
stance with these things, and am of the opinion that women's jobs being at the
mercy of chauvinistic 'brogrammers' or some such bullshit is exactly that:
bullshit.

Given the desire and the determination, any woman interested in the field can
pursue a career in it, and the field does not prevent that.

> _"For Yeung, having parents who were both engineers spared her the sense
> that computers weren't for girls."_

This conveys the real truth, hiding in the mound of rubbish that is the
majority of that article.

It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or
programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's
_society's_ fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't.
Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives to
pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.

~~~
Niten
> It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or
> programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's
> society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't.
> Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives
> to pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.

I agree... there was another good comment along these lines in another thread
on this topic earlier today:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061749>

If the engineering gender gap is an issue we are going to address as a
society, then we need to address it at its roots: childhood social pressures.

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vinayan3
I don't see much evidence of what the title says in the article. It just is
based on anecdotal evidence. This is on par with a blog post by some random
person. I'm surprised SFGate would publish this.

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kylebrown
The Director of Engineering at Facebook is not just some random person.

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roopeshv
yes, it is a random person. an engineer in facebook is also a random person.
what you are confusing a random person with is person on higher rung of career
ladder

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roopeshv
to the people who downvoted: downvoting is not the way to say you disagree.

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roopeshv
i stopped reading articles with "brogrammer" in them. it's overused to the
point of absurdity right now.

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k-mcgrady
That's just the way the press works. e.g. 'Pivot' has been a perfectly normal
business term for a long time, then 1 tech company used it, suddenly dozens of
companies were 'pivoting' and eventually people start avoiding articles using
the term. It'll fade away soon (hopefully).

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bcardarella
While I agree with the point of the article I could help but think this writer
didn't do too much research. Hewlett-Packard's CEO is Meg Whitman. I get the
article was referring to the original entrepreneurs but another could could
have been chosen.

~~~
blantonl
To be fair, Meg Whitman is not a technology person, she is a classic business
executive.

The article makes some fair points that are right on target. There is a
significant disparity between the number of "hacker" types with regards to
gender.

Frankly, I think the article is saying we need more of this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer>

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zerostar07
_Steeped in video game culture and barraged by positive male tech industry
role models, boys tend to dominate conversations around computing early on,
leaving girls feeling shut out, said Yeung_ .

this contradicts the evidence that social network use is mostly from girls

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jack-r-abbit
to be fair... using a social network site is not exactly _conversations around
computing_.

