

Ask HN: How do you reduce the gender gap in technology? - infinitebattery

For quite a while, I have been thinking about this issue. Recently, MHacks (University of Michigan&#x27;s hackathon) made it aware that they were devoting more efforts to bringing more women to their event. Also in the news is Paul Graham&#x27;s comments about the gender gap in tech. After reading articles (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;e034a09248c1) and observing discussions in facebook groups (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;groups&#x2F;1384252878496456&#x2F;), i&#x27;m bringing this conversation to the genius hacker news community. Please answer- what do you think needs to be done to bring more women into technology, programming, and CS related fields?
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001sky
Hypothesis: As long as "technology" is considered playing with "in-animate"
objects, you won't eliminate the gender gap.

Women are empirically more interested/specialized in "animated" objects (ie,
living things and social relatinships), due to human physiology/biology and
social operant conditioning.

The premise that such a (non-uniform) distribution is unethical, unproductive,
or un-natural lacks evidentiary data to support it.

It may very well make (biological or evolutinary) sense; condider a port-folio
effect from social-pair bonds (m,f) with reproductive potency.

In plain english, a team of two specialists may be more powerful than an
aggregation of individuals as "jack of all trades".

These are not easily or trivially dismissed complications.

Also, notice this dimensionalization is not along the axis of a "social
problem", in the game-theoretic sense, like the prisoner's dilemma.

The only assumptions are two: non-uniform preferences, and non-linear returns
to scale from learning-by-doing. neither of these seem overly controversial.

~~~
Bjuukia
I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Back home, there were plenty of girls who were math, physics, and computer
nerds like me. They were curious and had that hacker mentality. But since
moving to USA I haven't met any american girls/women like that. Those I did
meet were immigrants like me, or studying here as exchange students from
another country.

I've been living here for more than 10 years. Why is there such a difference
in the amount of girls interested in technology around the world, and where
I'm from, vs here in America?

Now, I could understand that if I lived in a very diverse state like NJ or NY,
it would be normal to see lots of girls from other places. But in the state I
live, I think the population is 99% white non-immigrant, so it's really odd
that the only females are outsiders!

There's something else at play here.

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notastartup
How many female friends do you have that are into tech or enjoy programming or
have taken it up as a hobby? How many women in engineering classes or
computing science courses? Relatively less than men by a big margin.

Of course there's going to be a gender gap, because the pool is already filled
with men. I've worked with women developers and they are perfectly fine like
any other developer. Yes, there were more men than women. HR has more women
and they are not at all interested in tech.

Gender is not an issue, it's that relatively compared to men, women seems to
be less interested and hence making up a smaller portion of the job pool. I
mean does software development need to be segregated like washrooms too so
that we can have more women? If so, please do it.

Nobody is suppressing women from getting into technology field. How can you
change the nature of the entire gender so that they fit this gap? How can you
change evolution and gender specific social expectations?

