[ubernostrum]

It is very unintuitive to me

Here's an example: look up the historical gender breakdown of computer programmers. Hint: once upon a time there wasn't a "pipeline problem" to use as an excuse, and for-profit free-market competitors were doing just fine with a very different gender ratio than they have now.

It is unlikely that, in the (short -- less than a generation to transform the industry) period in question, women magically became unqualified to work as programmers. Especially since many of them already had worked as programmers and nobody had found reason to complain about their work.

Or, more bluntly: the sudden disappearance from a field of an entire category of people, whose only distinguishing characteristic is being of a gender historically denied economic opportunities, is unlikely to be explained by a similarly sudden catastrophic decline in their qualifications. The continuing absence of people of that category is equally unlikely to be explained by their lack of qualifications.

Here's another example: take a look at what happens to other fields when they introduce effective blind interviewing (in which interviewers cannot discover the gender/race of the candidate prior to making a hire/no-hire decision). It once again does not suggest that previous processes were anything approaching meritocratic.

[Applejinx]

One notable example I've heard of, is symphony orchestras (and if Malcolm Gladwell covers it, it is surely a mainstream concept and dumbed down quite a lot, accessible to a non-tech audience!)

Specifically, it's the Julie Landsman story, where a fantastic French Horn performance of great power and force turned out to be produced by a small woman, and the people hiring lost their shit when they found out.

A funny side note is that, to be a CEO, typically you have to be a TALL white man. Now, in tech, I could see there being a bias for large HEADED people of whatever gender or color, on the (unjustified) assumption that raw brain material volume would help. But surely, the distance from the ground said head is, can't have much to do with it! And yet, it's another 'meritocracy' fail.

AI will be a lot better at this sort of thing (while perhaps inventing its own meritocracy fails). But we're not there yet.

[umanwizard]

Woah, where did I ever claim women are unqualified to work as programmers? You're putting words in my mouth. There are many other possible explanations.

As for your example, it is not "strong evidence". Historical breakdown doesn't mean much since very few people were computer programmers at all back then. You can't extrapolate from that to the distribution of people who would become programmers decades later once it would be a super mainstream profession that a huge fraction of the population would enter.

[thanatropism]

> Historical breakdown doesn't mean much since very few people were computer programmers at all back then.

Programming was a different affair too. You have to be much more detail-oriented to deal with punch cards and spaghetti goto code; this means fewer people get to be big-picture focused.

Going back a couple decades further, computers were huge halls where women did small calculations by hand; someone (Oppenheimer, Feynman or some such) did the big picture work and divvyed it up much like physicists now give Matlab or Fortran work to do.

[balsam]

Hey just saw your reply. Thanks! (This is great comment, too)

[ubernostrum]

If the process produced one gender ratio at one point, and a wildly different gender ratio at another point, and the process is asserted to be meritocratic, then the only explanation is that the relative innate qualifications of people as a function of their gender changed between those two points in time.

Also, your second paragraph amusingly makes a different form of my argument for me (if you can't assume that the ratio at one point in time is indicative of general facts about qualification as a function of gender, you also can't assume that it is at a different point in time -- it may be that a decade or two from now there will be an order of magnitude more programmers!).

[Sacho]

> then the only explanation is that the relative innate qualifications of people as a function of their gender changed between those two points in time.

Sure, for example, boys being encouraged to become computer programmers. There's an article on NPR that discusses this[0]. Also, when you say "the process", I'm not sure you're adequately describing the evolution of programming and its related skillset demands. A strong increase in competition would naturally lower the ratio of women to men:

- time invested in programming correlates strongly with skill

- historically men have been able to put more time into careers than women(who often need a better work-life balance to manage a household).

- the historic SMAM[1](mean age at marriage) gives men an extra ~2-2.5 years over women even if you assume equal parenting responsibility, before men must also make parenting concessions.

[0] - http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

[1] - http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldmarriage/...

[camelite]

Innate qualifications is an oxymoron. Your thinking on the matter is confused.

[dllthomas]

I'm not sure I disagree with your thesis, but a piece missing from your presentation is the tremendous growth of the industry. We don't have fewer female programmers, we have more than before. Just not nearly so many more as men.

[ubernostrum]

The historical breakdown is important because the percentage of women changed drastically. In order for the percentage to drop so much, either A) women as a class suddenly and for no discernible reason became less qualified than men, or B) some other force discriminated against women.

The only possible third alternative is "the women who were programmers at that time constituted most or all of all living women who were interested in programming", which reduces to "women aren't as interested in programming as men" which in turn reduces to being able to prove all sorts of known-false things by asserting that a forced lack of options (through social and legal discrimination) was in reality an innate "preference" of women in general for or against certain things.

[adw]

(For the avoidance of doubt, I agree with you, I'm just expanding on your thoughts...)

You can have effects working both ways at once.

A lot of world-class woman scientists seem to wind up working in either brand-new or highly interdisciplinary areas; certainly statistically more than you would expect. I hypothesize that, based off my own (anecdotal) experience, this is (in part) because many of the major departments are eye-wateringly bigoted, sexist environments.

Male-dominated environments playing power games are, largely, pretty awful places and one of the power games which gets played a lot is sex discrimination up to sexual harassment. You see the kind of egregious shit you see in Silicon Valley just as frequently in academe. It's pretty awful.

I suspect – again, based off what I've seen and what I've heard from people who were there – something similar may have been going on in the early days of programming. When it was a wide-open new field, there was less in the way of straight-up power games because there wasn't wider societal prestige to be won. So it was more hospitable to out-groups than the other professions fishing in the same hiring pool, e.g. wider engineering and science. But then, over timer, perceived prestige came in, and with it came the status games you find everywhere perceived prestige is, and... vicious cycle.

Incidentally, for anyone who hasn't observed this kind of phenomenon before, this is pretty much how patriarchy works. Interlocking systems of power create perverse incentives which, in turn, reinforce those same systems.

As far as I'm concerned, speaking bluntly, these days there are people who get intersectional feminism and there are people who are just not paying attention to how things work. There's not much middle-ground.

I don't expect that to be a hugely popular viewpoint on HN, but, y'know, I'll live.

[Applejinx]

Pretty sure crunch in a negative sense is a largely maleness thing. Ambition and combativeness (and to some extent pervasive dissatisfaction!) seem to be male-led.

These things have their place and if you get lucky (unlucky?) you get a Steve Jobs or perhaps a Travis Kalanik or Jeff Bezos, and you get a predator culture where the company is galvanized to beat the other guys up. Or you get a collective culture where this behavior is all you want and the main thing to reward…

However, looking at it on the larger scale, the more open systems (say, the birth of the personal computer industry that produced a Jobs and Wozniak) could be seen as less competitive, more 'feminine' boom times where cooperation and networking weren't eclipsed by raw power. In those 'less male' times more overall progress was made and the foundations were laid for the big dick-swingin' companies that would come to dominate. Perhaps without times like that, you don't even get the Jobs and Bezos and Kalanik.

Pretty strong argument in favor of open development: though even that will inevitably find ways to turn competitive and be directed by the most dominant. But if the principle is one of extending a common body of understanding, that remains more broadly available.

[roghee0I]

Historically, the percentage of men changed drastically in the teaching profession. Did A) men as a class suddenly and for no discernible reason became less qualified than women, or B), some other force discriminated against men, or C), men have a innate biological reason to dislike or like teaching?

And we can find drastically changes in gender distribution (and gender segregation) in multiple professions. Is those three choices, A, B, or C, the only possible reason for those? Data from Sweden say over 85% of women and 85% of men work in professions which has serious problem of gender segregation, a problem which only got worse in the last 100 years. Which of those tree choices explains why 1917 had less gender segregation in the work place than 2017?

[JoeAltmaier]

Or D) socially it becomes less status-full for men to work in those professions.

[shaiC7va]

Can we explain the drastic change of lower percentage of women because its less status-full for them now than before?

And what happened since 1917 to 80% of the profession in the job market to cause half the population to suddenly get less status from being employed there?

(same account as roghee0I)

[flukus]

The teaching one is interesting actually, it's almost totally explained by ending the requirement for women to retire from teaching when they marry.