[saas_co_de]

I don't think the tech industry can really change unless it makes gender balance a priority.

How many tech CEOs will stand up and say: "I have an 80% (or 90% or a 100%) male tech team because there are not enough qualified women to achieve gender balance."

No CEO will be caught dead saying that explicitly but they are saying it implicitly every single day with how they are staffing their companies.

From reading HN it seems like a large percentage of people here believe that the gender gap is due to a qualifications gap and they might dump on people like James Damore for being dumb enough to say it in public but most of them believe it and the way they act shows it.

The bottom line is that if you are not achieving gender balance on your teams what you are telling women and what you are telling the world is that you believe men are superior to women and that women are not qualified for these jobs.

Actions speak louder than words and as long as the actions of companies and individuals reflect this attitude no amount of words is going to change anything.

Achieving gender balance in tech is possible and is only a matter of choice.

There are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men.

It doesn't happen because (among other reasons):

1) The people doing the hiring are overwhelmingly men and set rules and standards for hiring that discriminate against women

2) Companies believe that young men are more profitable employees and so they do nothing to seriously discourage discrimination

Unless this changes the experience of women in tech will be a negative one.

All a woman has to do to know that she is undervalued and seen as an inferior is walk into a company that has a overwhelmingly male tech team and that is most of them.

[tzs]

> There are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men

Even if that was true, having enough qualified women is not sufficient. You need enough women who are both qualified AND want to fill tech jobs.

When you look at measurements of STEM ability and of reading comprehension in high school students in the US and Europe, an interesting pattern emerges. For boys who are good in STEM, STEM tends to be what they are best at. For girls who good in STEM, they tend to be even better at reading comprehension [1] [2].

Scoring high on reading comprehension correlates well with being good at things that are important in various non-STEM fields (or in the "soft" sciences part of STEM).

People generally have to narrow their focus as they move on to college, maybe graduate school, and into a career. They strongly tend to narrow that focus to what they are best at. That means we lose a lot of those "good at STEM" in high school girls because they are even better at non-STEM.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150132.h...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

[psyc]

I had two separate preliminary phone interviews today (different companies) that both left me fuming, and I've experienced similar many times in the past. My resume says, to summarize drastically, 1999-2015: C++; 2015-present: C#. These interviews were for C++ positions. Both interviewers specifically used the term 'red flag' referring to the C# part. Either they believed one section of the resume and disbelieved the other, or they believe I only know C# now and the C++ went completely out of my head and isn't coming back. Both interviewers spent the whole interview tsk tsking and communicating the lament "Yeah we really need a C++ person, and I'm just not seeing that you have that."

The conduct of interviewers when hiring cold is stunningly asinine for everybody, so I have the utmost sympathy for women who have to deal with gender bias on top of that. Talent shortage my ass. Interviewers make up their mind based on something - some kind of projection that isn't you - and then make clowns of themselves while trying to rationalize whatever the prejudice was. Take this gem, from the lead engineer: "Well we get a lot of applicants who know C#, but they don't understand low-level." And? How is that my problem? Now how many idiotic interviewers out there are secretly thinking, "Yeah actually all the hardcore low-level coders I know are men, so..."

I've been ranting for years about how there is no talent shortage. It's just that hiring is broken, asinine, and fear-driven. I think I'll pivot to: There is no shortage of talented women. Not to the extent that it is made out to be. TL;DR: parent is correct. It isn't that they aren't there; it's that whoever isn't hiring them.

[mkeedlinger]

While I can't speak for others, I'm not sure that most people here think there is a gender gap because of inability on the part of women, but instead maybe a difference in general interests between the sexes.

I'm also not so sure about your claim that "there are more than enough qualified women to fill tech jobs in roughly equal proportion with men." I rarely have the chance to talk to women who are similarly interested in computers, and at my university there are very few women who are in any of my CS classes, despite that I feel that those who are there feel welcome (hopefully. I am not all-knowing, this is my best guess).

I think a better solution to the problem than pressuring people into hiring women simply for the virtue of being female and aiming for 50% would be to call sexism what it is. Call out when people who do the bad of hiring a less qualified man instead of a woman (this is a contrived example, hopefully you're understanding my point).

Solving sexism with more sexism probably won't work.

These are my honest thoughts, hope that's ok.

[saas_co_de]

> I rarely have the chance to talk to women who are similarly interested in computers

This is probably true, but the idea that you have to be "passionate about computers" to do the job is one of those things that men have made up to exclude women.

In order to have gender equality you have to identify these areas of gender difference and eliminate them from hiring criteria.

> pressuring people into hiring women simply for the virtue of being female

That is the mischaracterization that everyone falls back on. They assume that if you have a gender balanced team it is because you hired people "because they are women."

That logic implies that those women are not qualified for the job and that you could never build a gender balanced team with qualified women.

Until we make gender balanced teams the norm people are going to keep thinking like that, which is why it is so important to take corrective action.

[mkeedlinger]

> the idea that you have to be "passionate about computers" to do the job is one of those things that men have made up to exclude women.

I didn't say that they need passion. I am saying, however, that I am less likely to go into medicine because I am not interested in it. Maybe the same could be the case for women? (meaning, if there is a general trend that less women are interested, then less will join said field of work, because it is their choice not to).

> That logic implies that those women are not qualified for the job and that you could never build a gender balanced team with qualified women.

You have a good point. This sentence does have a negative connotation as you say, but it is not exclusively said. Could it also be possible that a push to hire more females (explicitly because of needed gender balance, something that is, in my opinion, contrived) has happened enough recently that people's minds go there first?

> Until we make gender balanced teams the norm people are going to keep thinking like that, which is why it is so important to take corrective action.

Interesting point. I'm not willing to say you're wrong, because you might be right. I'll admit, I thought that less women graduate with CS degrees than men though. Am I wrong? If not, how do we get more women to enter that major? And what if they don't want to simply because they're not interested?

edit: I appreciate that we can talk about this btw, and that you seem to respect my opinion. I think this is a valuable part of this discussion. Thanks.

[saas_co_de]

> thought that less women graduate with CS degrees than men though

This is absolutely true but it is also true that there are many successful people working in the tech industry at all levels with very little formal comp sci education.

If men can get software engineering jobs with no formal comp sci education, which they certainly can, then the fact that there is an imbalance in degrees does not mean that we have to have an imbalance in employment.

The low representation of women in CS at university level needs to be addressed as well but the best way to do that is by making software development a job that women want and believe that they can succeed in.

People go to college to get training for a career and so if women feel like software development is a profession that excludes women they aren't going to waste their time and money training for it.

"the percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since, even though women currently earn 57% of all undergraduate degrees."

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...

The fact that there has been a sharp decline in female participation in CS in just the past few decades demonstrates that this is a temporary anomaly and not some "fundamental difference between genders" and further demonstrates that large changes are possible with the correct policies.

[slededit]

> the idea that you have to be "passionate about computers" to do the job is one of those things that men have made up to exclude women.

I mean if you've been programming since you were 8 and consider it your identity its not that far to go into believing that anyone who is good has to have the same background. Gender doesn't have anything to do with it.

For what its worth I thought this way until it was proven otherwise to me after enough time in the industry.

[gowld]

50:50 is not going to happen as long as there are cultural and also indisputable biological biases toward women being child-rearers, but getting from 90:10 to 80:20 or 70:30 would relieve a lot of the pressures of minority -- diffusing harassment, reducing loneliness, and the like.

[saas_co_de]

> 50:50 is not going to happen

It is just a matter of choice. If companies make it a priority they can do it.

I don't think companies should ever hire someone based on anything other than their qualifications for the job so of course the actual distribution should vary from company to company but if it is 60:40 m/f at one company then it should be 40:60 m/f at another (SHOCKING CRAZY IDEA) and the average should come out somewhere near the middle..

[mkeedlinger]

This is assuming, however, that the work force has an equal number of women and men. Some women choose to and want to be stay-at-home moms. Should we try to persuade them otherwise?

[mantas]

Isn't that's what the modern culture is trying to do for the past few decades?

[saas_co_de]

The US DOL says that 47% of the labor force is female and there is a significant gap in educational attainment between women and men in younger cohorts so the available pool of college educated women under 30-35 probably exceeds men.

https://blog.dol.gov/2017/03/01/12-stats-about-working-women https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...