I'm just not sure these people are understanding the problem the right way round. Salaries and prestige are relatively low for developers in Japan, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and draw them away from technology. That will be true even if more women are interested in the field than formerly.
In fact, convincing many women to commit to the field early in their educations for reasons of representation, rather than because the economics are compelling to them, would only make the situation worse: relatively more workers competing for jobs with salaries that are already low.
Japanese enterprises do not value software engineering talent and there are probably some underlying fundamentals behind that -- in workplaces with relatively low independence, it's hard to leverage engineering talent for much -- which, left unchanged, will make initiatives like this into a game of musical chairs.
I actually think we have the same problem, to a much lower degree, in the US. Clearly software engineers do get paid extremely well at top companies, and are paid reasonably at lower tiers. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, software engineers on average are only paid a little more than registered nurses and dental hygienists.
(note these are for SF and San Jose, not overall - the source for all this is at US News Best jobs which relies on labor dept data: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs).
I've left a version of this comment a bunch of times on HN over the years, but I'll add the usual provisos - I don't object to nurses making lots of money, or more than software engineers for that matter, but I will point out that SEs overall really aren't remarkably well paid compared to other educated professionals. And while SEs at the top make well above the median, so do many nurses in specialties that require a MS or higher.
I'm just not convinced that women would be well served by leaving nursing, law, finance, or medicine to go into tech. I don't mean this in a work-life balance "do you really want this" way. I mean, if women want to build substantial independent wealth, power, and influence, they may be well served by avoiding tech careers (or, if they work in tech, avoiding SE roles). Honestly, this is pretty much the same advice I'd give men. I'm hesitant to discourage anyone from tech or SE roles, since clearly people do have great careers in them, and it's the right choice for some people. What I resist is the notion that people should be choosing it more often than they do, when in fact, I think the low to medium level of interest in SE careers is probably the product outcome of smart people weighing the demands and rewards of a career relative to their personal professional and life interests.
I consider it very rational that US citizens with choice generally choose not to become developers in the valley in the numbers that Silicon Valley execs think they should. It's not a huge coincidence that the people who staff these positions disproportionately work on visas that limit their range of free choice in career path.
In addition software engineering suffers from the worst ageism of any career which basically means that around mid to late 30s one starts to run into issues. Now contrast that with many other careers where one’s value invariably increases as one gains experience.
Given that, my general advice is even if you start with software engineering, transition out to other roles very quickly unless you’re in the top 1%, can be a founder or truly love software engineering.
I think you're onto something there. Starting out in software engineering can be a great way to enter the workforce, mainly because it allows you to join a team in a very high-value role. If you avoid jobs where you're a cog, and instead find a role where you help build a product with a team, you'll learn a lot - and again, because you can create the software, you'll have a pretty central role. There are plenty of good places to go from there.
The downside to this attrition is that software engineering (or development if you'd prefer to avoid a charged term) really does need experienced people who understand the long term impact of design, technical debt, what to pursue and what to abandon, mentor and develop new talent, and so forth.
> software engineers on average are only paid a little more than registered nurses and dental hygienists.
Software Engineers: ~145k Registered Nurses: ~140k
Don’t recall if they were in the Bay Area or not, but I know someone out in California who is a nurse and wants out because the shear amount of hours they make you work. I suppose many Bay Area engineers may work a lot of extra hours as well, but my understanding was that nursing pay looks much less appealing when you’re working double the standard work week.
Is that Software Engineer salary accurate(despite being far lower than what all the household names pay), or is it excluding bonus and/or equity grants?
Thanks for the link. This is an important part of this discussion, and something I don't understand well. If I'm going to compare compensation in different fields, it's important to know how variable compensation, like stock options or overtime, figures in. This is especially important in software vs nursing, since variable pay makes up a big part of software but overtime is rare, whereas overtime figures heavily into nursing but stock options are unusual.
Note that according to the BLS link you provided, overtime is also excluded. My company stock has never been worth a dime - I worked for Sun Microsystems before it crashed, and later for a startup that went kaput. This is all a combination of timing, luck, choices, the ability (or lack thereof) to pick a winner. Clearly variable pay is worth a lot at google, facebook, and many early startups, but my story is absolutely not unusual - and on the other side of the coin, I can assure you that nurses do get a tremendous amount of value out of overtime. Furthermore, overtime pay is predictable: you work more hours, you get 1.5-2x more money. But this pay is also excluded from the comparison I made above.
Without these considerations, the data is of limited value. FWIW, I have always been a little suspicious of how low the software engineer pay is on these surveys.
Overall, though, I think that in spite of the noise, the general principle does hold, that pay and benefits are good enough in other fields available that there's no reason to be puzzled about the low to medium interest level in being a developer in Silicon Valley, that this all explained as rational behavior in labor markets among hard working, academically inclined people.
It looks like overtime pay and "weekend premium"(I'm guessing this might include third shift pay?) is also excluded from the number which would also paint a different picture for nurses if included.
I suspect the standard deviation is more interesting than the mean or median.
I suspect "software engineer" encompasses people getting 400k at a FAANG and people earning 60k at an outsourcing consultancy or small product shop in a low cost-of-living area.
I'd be surprised if the spread for a RN is as broad.
No... not the salary range for nursing isn't quite that broad, but it is very broad. Consider the salary for a nurse anesthetist in a high cost urban center, vs a registered nurse or nurse orderly in a low income rural area.
The median salary for a nurse anesthetist in San Francisco is around $250k a year (and $285k a year in Akron OH)[1] - keep in mind, that's the median, not the top 10th or 25th percentile. Meanwhile, The median salary for a registered nurse nationally is $73k a year, and the 25%ile is $63k a year[2]
Also - remember (per the discussion above) that the 400k software engineer pay you mentioned almost certainly includes stock (which is not included in these numbers), but the pay for nurses doesn't include overtime. Try using the Transparent California calculator to see some of the higher end total compensation for nurses.
To be honest, considering currency exchange rates, 140k for a nurse is a GINORMOUS salary in atleast 80% of countries other than the USA. I have tremendous respect for medical professionals , but surely , a nursing degree is easier to obtain than one in IT ?
Hmmm. I wouldn’t say surely, but I don’t really know. IT can range from immensely difficult math heavy curricula to watered down technical training. And my understanding is that rigorous nursing does require a lot of science (though I Don’t think it generally requires calculus, let alone advanced math or engineering). As a job it’s pretty tough. Anyway it’s always important to me when making this argument to point out that I consider nursing to be a job worthy of good salaries. I bring it up only to refute the notion that Software developers clearly outearn comparable educated professionals.
You sure about that? I came across two different surveys of Japanese workers that suggest women in tech are paid relatively well compared to women in other industries.
The last source actually presents a table which shows "Education" is the best paying field for women, whereas "Finance/Insurance" is the best paying field for men; and "Information services" is not the best paying field for either sex, although it is near the top. In the USA, in contrast, "Education" is definitely not competitive with tech as far as salaries.
These are not the kind of sources I would use to study these things, by the way, because they break things down by industry or profession rather than role and these sources use incredibly broad "industry" and "profession" categories.
You are looking at this differently than the parent post. You are looking at cross-industry inside Japan. Parent is talking about inside Japan vs outside Japan within the same industry/job.
If you look at public data on somewhere like levels.fyi, there's a big gap in pay even within the same company, at the same level. I'm most familiar with Seattle comp, and same tier of SDE role is a 30+% paycut from Seattle to Tokyo at FAANG companies.
I also know someone who left a FAANG company here to go work in Japan for awhile. They had to move from SDE to Data Scientist + got a senior role at the new company, and even then they struggled to get anywhere close to their previous comp.
I don't see that. I believe parent comment is also talking about "cross-industry inside Japan".
> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for *developers in Japan*, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and *draw them away from technology*.
I agree that difficulty attracting foreign talent is a problem for the Japanese tech industry, but I don't think it's the focus of the article or the focus of the parent comment.
> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for developers in Japan, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and draw them away from technology.
Another aspect to this is that IT is one of the few fields where there is a low tradition lock. Getting into the more prestigious and high paying areas can require either a better diploma, stronger adhesion to stereotypical profiles, or working way longer inside to climb the ranks.
In comparison IT companies will be more focused on competence, accept lower social status in exchange for performance. I think this is true in other countries as well, but Japan looks to me like a poster child for this bias.
>Salaries and prestige are relatively low for developers in Japan
Yeah, I was pretty surprised to hear that a Senior Engineering Manager at Rakuten, the "Japanese Amazon" and one of their top software companies, only has the TC of somewhere around $100k USD. And the position was in Tokyo, not exactly a cheap place.
Many senior engineers at "top tier" domestic software companies get paid somewhere around $70-$90k, which is pathetic for even LCOL areas in the U.S.
Interesting article. The line of argumentation goes like this:
1) The birth rate in Japan has been below-replacement since 1974.
2) As a result, the population is shrinking.
3) Because the population is shrinking, there isn't enough workers.
Alright, I'm with you so far.
4) Therefore, more women need to get full-time jobs.
Uh... ?
I feel like I'm going nuts. Everywhere in the prestige media the solution presented is "women should just have a full-time job and raise 2.1 children at the same time". But does that actually exist anywhere?
I hear about paid child leave in the Nordic countries as a solution. But Sweden has a birth rate of 1.76, Denmark 1.73, Norway 1.56... and the curve isn't even trending up! Paid child leave and government childcare is great and cool, but as a solution to below-replacement fertility it clearly and obviously doesn't work, and for some reason nobody wants to say this.
The other answer is immigration, but the problem then is then you're competing with every other country in the world, and Japanese firms pay way, way, way below FAANG.
"General! Our marines are outnumbered! Zerglings are eating them alive!"
"Send in the SCVs!"
"But where will we get our minerals from? How will we train more marines?"
"Send in the SCVs!"
...
I mean, it made sense as a short-term measure during WW2 to boost arms production. But you can't run a society this way long term. It's insane.
"Help us, we're starving!"
"Just eat more of your seed corn; trust me!"
...
It's like a society that never figured out crop rotation. Yeah, you can grow corn for a while, but you also need to rotate in some cover-crops and nitrogen-fixers. You need to let the soil rest and restore fertility. You can't have it pumping out economic output season after season.
(The USSR had an above-replacement fertility rate under Stalin. Population and GDP growth is not exactly a capitalist thing.)
Barring anything better, we're stuck with the null hypothesis: getting out a ruler and extending the trend line into the future.
If the population is growing, then eventually Japan would have billions of people where there are currently hundreds of millions. There was much speculation in the 50s on how you could deal with that scenario if it happened, but it's not looking very likely now.
If the population is exactly static, one person born for every death: not too bad. You could call it "stagnation" if you wanted to be negative.
If the population is declining: it will eventually hit zero, and the country will cease to exist. Japan's population declined by 1.8 million people between 2010 and 2019. If the decline is linear, (which it won't be, considering their age distribution) then that has them hitting zero in 2089! If you think that scenario won't happen, then please provide your reason. "That would be terrible, so it won't" isn't a reason.
The UN population projections show European and North American fertility rates leveling off and even increasing. That would be very good news, if true! Fortunately, they explain their reasoning: https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Hig...
>The fact that fertility preferences remain close to two children per woman, even as realized fertility has fallen well below that level, suggests that the fertility rate in low-fertility countries may increase as populations learn to manage and mitigate some or all impeding factors. The trend in many countries towards gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as expanded access to sexual and reproductive health care and services, also indicates that it may become possible for more women and couples in current low-fertility countries to achieve their desired family size, eventually raising the average fertility levels. Given that a growing number of countries is expressing a desire to increase the fertility rate and that some have achieved this outcome, supported by government policies and programmes, a rebound in the fertility trend in current low-fertility countries seems the most plausible future trajectory over the long run.
I am not seeing where this optimism is coming from. A graph of fertility rates for a basket of European countries shows a pronounced sub-replacement horizontal trend, with no sustained growth or decay. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... This foretells a gentle decline, rather than the sharp crash that's apparently in the cards for China, Japan and South Korea; but provides absolutely no evidence that more "reproductive health services" will rescue us.
I think it's quite daft to say gender equality leads to higher fertility without further explanation. Gender equality leads to a much higher participation of women in the workforce. At least naively I would assume this correlates with a lower fertility since women now are forced to choose between raising a child or having a career.
The only way I could see this changing if men would take on much more of the caregiving role. But that is not currently happening.
Broken but interesting. We might learn something about the brain by observing what happens when you put it in another body.
I'd like to think that the body would affect the brain in dramatic and transformative ways, but on the other hand the body might just establish a class system that eventually starves both systems.
Meh, the replacement rate issue is a temporary problem. We can't just make more and more kids to sustain the unsustainable... better hit the wall early on and rebuild something smarter than continue in the direction we're heading
Did Japanese companies ever resolve the issue surrounding low tech worker pay yet? If not, then Japanese women interested in tech might face even more adversity since gender pay gap is another issue in Japan.
Some are but there are still a lot of hold outs. I recently struck up a conversation with a female working for one of the larger ones. Probably had 10 years experience but was being paid close to what she would've made at a conbini.
From what I gathered in the Asia region you really only have Singapore or a Chinese tier 1 and maybe some tier 2 cities as a option(financially). Where you can actually earn enough to not waste years of income when you return again to the west.
If they want to attract more tech workers they really need to up their salaries.
People might go for maybe cultural reason or whatever but that pool is not enough to close the gap is guess.
> If they want to attract more tech workers they really need to up their salaries.
Having a good salary is important but the work-life balance is just as important, if not more. I lived in Japan for a years (not as a dev, am now); I can make do with a lower salary due to healthcare being mostly sorted (you pay 30%, government pays 70%) and a good standard of living (better than London IMO), but I don't want to work absurd hours and deal with a toxic working culture, alongside a low salary.
I've met many talented women in Japan via Meetups and Women Who Code Tokyo and there's definitely no shortage of great developers. People just want a fair work-balance and an honest salary, which they are more likely to find at a gaishikei (foreign-run company)
I hear that the seniority is so strong there. Added with commute, bad working hours and mandatory parties after works, I don't think good developers will want to work there.
Yeah I agree on the work-life balance that is why I find it interesting that China banned the unpaid 996 culture.
It was one of the reason I placed China as a lower option then Singapore for me personally.
In Singapore you have more western companies so maybe they also use more western work culture.
I was thinking of maybe work a couple of years in a Asian country
when the world starts opening up again hopefully somewhere in 2023~2024.
So that I why I did some minimal research on salary.
A reason I believe why women won't come tech industry is that tech people is considered to nerdy so uncool, and and programmer is hard work (death march is popular word). But now programming become booming popular for kids (I don't know reason) so maybe feelings are changing.
> the most oppressive cultures have highest number of women in tech
Like the US in the 1950s.
It's not a matter of interest, it's that it has actually been the case that women are locked out of many high paying prestigious jobs, and software is/was the best available, where it isn't so prestigious.
There was a time when women simply could not get an engineering degree. And so, someone might study math, and end up as a programmer whose job title was "engineering assistant" to a male engineer.
Does Japan still have the issue (compared to a US perspective, though it happens here to) where workers are expected to work very long hours to be seen as productive or a team player or whatever?
If that was still a problem and I could get a remote job for a Western style company with better working hours that would be a serious decision point.
Not to mention the salary issue others have mentioned that I wasn’t aware of.
Japanese people can run their country however way they want.
In the Netherlands one always chooses money over religion, race, culture and tradition. Your ridiculous pink hair and absurd American culture will be tolerated to service a higher purpose.
Sure, if Japan wants to screw itself over by keeping tech pay too low and women out of the workforce, there's nothing I can do from America to stop it. But non-Japanese people can comment on the situation "however way they want", too.
they can only up their immigration and import workers from other countries like the US. E.g. there are lots of engineers graduating from Chinese, India, and East European countries. Maybe Japan is becoming less attractive for Chinese since the Chinese coastal areas are getting rich, but they can just compete like the rest of the world for these talents.
The article uses the same "smart riot girrl" marketing that has been used here in Argentina to bring young woman that embraced feminism into programming.
It´s most probably a paid ad in disguise (and I can point this out because I know a big consulting firm CEO that paid local media for this kind of "articles")
Curious thing is these articles always portrait a single cool young woman in their early twenties, never a woman with kids or a woman in their 30s or older.
Sadly this is not about equality at all, it´s about the employers having a bigger workforce so that they can reduce salaries and discard the old.
Japan is a very different society than the US or Europe, the comment on colouring hair being an incredibly rebelious thing in Japan is entirely valid. Not having black hair has lead to bullying so extreme in some situations that it has lead to suicides.
Apparently some schools in Japan have a policy that your hair must be black. At least one student sued because of this, saying she was forced to dye her hair black to satisfy the rule: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56099237
When I was in Tokyo I saw a mother on the subway with candy red hair. There were others but she was the most notable. Also two of the people I met had bleached their hair brown. All were adults. If anything I felt hair color was less taboo in Tokyo than where I came from. It seems odd that they would have regressed since then so I’m wondering where you got your info.
Coloring your hair as a student can get you in deep shit. Someone invented a temporary black hair dye for this, which I found bizarre until this was explained to me.
It's not the 1950's anymore. In any job where workers have a modicum of bargaining power, it's perfectly fine. This goes treble for tech, which skews younger, less conservative and suffers from severe labor scarcity.
Law firm or corporate finance? Sure, agreed, that would be a bit out there. Probably includes some other industries i cannot think of right now.
Tech? Please don't make me laugh. Working at MSFT for a while, I've seen plenty of people in-person (even in management) with visible massive tattoos (even one with full neck covered in ink), piercings, and I am not gonna even start on wild hair styles and colors. One of the very senior people I've gotten a chance to work with had her hair color being split in half right down the middle - half black half white (ala Cruella from Disney's 101 Dalmatians). And mind you, out of all the big tech companies, MSFT is one of those that imo skews a bit of an older crowd, so I don't doubt this kind of stuff is even more common at places like FB.
One of my friends is a doctor in the deep south, and his arm is fully tattoed and is on open display at work (short sleeves). From my anecdotal experience, every time I go for an annual physical checkup with my primary doctor (in PNW), more than half of his nurse staff has either bright-colored hair or tons of tattoos (or, not uncommonly, both).
All of this is extremely acceptable in the US these days, barring few specific industries that still insist on ultrastrict "suit-and-tie" dress code and some rural areas. But in major cities? It would be impossible for me to walk through a block on the street without seeing at least one person with either neon-colored hair or very covered in ink or with tons of piercings.
I work at a Very Large Tech Company in a role where I cross between eng and legal, and the hairstyles on the eng side are definitely not the same as legal.
Absolutely, I've noticed the same as well. But legal also never really felt like a natural part of the company, but more like a completely separate entity tucked away at the edge of the company. For all intents and purposes it is just the same as a law firm, except they only have one perpetual client, and they are on the company payroll with no ability to exist without it.
Maybe in a place that requires customer facing interaction whereby it might be nice to not piss off those hair-conservatives for a few extra % points of sales.
But computers don't care. Not for your skin. Not for your hair. Not for your sexual preferences. Not for your gender. Computers don't care.
If you are "working with computers" and your colleagues are the "ones that care" to make your life hard. Then that is not a place I'd want to work. If society has this as an endemic issue, than that is not a place I want to live.
> Yes. Women are awesome in tech, and the field needs much more of them.
Shouldn't we hire/want people in the field because they are passionate and want to be there rather than some arbitrary skin pigmentation or assigned gender?
> the mass media portraying her as a rebel for coloring her hair, that's like... Tabloid stuff.
I think you're underestimating the stigma against different hair colors in Japan. Japanese culture puts a heavy emphasis on not sticking out, to the point that even having a natural hair color that is different from the norm can be viewed as being rebellious.
Within the context, it's clear to me, that the comment was not sexist. Can we write anything without 5 paragraphs of caveats and clarifications after every innocent sentence?
You’re reading too much into the comment imo - my read is that they’re simply responding to the title: “can it find a place for women?” “Yes, women are awesome in tech”
It's worth pointing out that even by most "legitimately" gendered issues relating to careerism, tech caters pretty well to women's needs. A lot of women do, in fact, want to pursue motherhood, and tech is one of the easiest careers to stay involved in during the time-and-obligation demands thereof, rivaled only by a few other careers like writing.
There are many careers (ones that require you to travel, ones that require lots of in-person onsite availability) that genuinely are really tough for young mothers, and it forces a classic feminism catch-22 on them; namely, an unpleasant need to make a choice between seeking fulfillment via having a career, versus seeking personal fulfillment via motherhood. It's just really unfair that one has to choose and can't just do both.
As it turns out, there are a lot of careers where you can have both with no problem; but there are others that are a bad fit. (For an example of a career that fits this really poorly, take truck driving.)
Tech industry workforce is not a representative body. Normally we'd describe the situation as 'greater female participation in the industry'. The dissonance is reminiscent of Russell's conjugation:
Black lives matter the organization as much as one exists, has also had some fairly unsavory statements. I wouldn't necessarily attribute all of the beliefs of a group to each of its members.
If the way to increase birth rates is by blocking abortions, that's not a society I'd want to be a part of. And those kids probably wouldn't to be a part of, either.
Edit: Did I touch a nerve with people wanting to block abortions?
This is a Japanese publication. How did Americans get dragged in? I’ve heard Americans complain about a lot of things, but never the labor shortage in Japan.
I think you're misinterpreting the article. It's not about women working in general, but women working in technology fields. Due to either explicit bias (per a couple examples in the article, girls being told that math and science was too hard for them) or systemic bias (lack of examples of women in the technology fields, no or very few women educators in STEM disciplines). Which is a very different thing than saying women aren't working, which, again, the article isn't saying.
Women are working in Japan, but structurally speaking they do not work in great jobs. i.e. many Japanese companies operate dual employment tracks with career and non-career tracks; women are hired disproportionately into non-career tracks with lower job security, promotion prospects, training and pay.
Women are substantially under-represented at both middle-management and senior level (i.e. boards); and face the second-largest pay gap vs their male peers in the OECD nations.
Japan's tax and social security systems also create penalties for dual-income households with large benefit cliffs and other similar structures so many types of part-time employment are economically discouraged.
The situation in Japan for population is similar to that of the US. The boomer population is huge, and they had fewer children, so as they're dying out, there's less people. The difference between the US and Japan, is that immigration replaces the difference, keeping the overall population mostly the same.
Japan is difficult to emigrate to, as you need a work visa, and though knowing Japanese isn't a hard requirement for work, in most industries you won't be able to get a job without it. Becoming fluent in Japanese, with daily structured education takes around 2 years.
