[komali2]

I understand your frustration, but in my experience recruiting, the primary reason behind there being less women getting hired into engineering roles is almost never raw sexism. Maybe in the 90s, but in the early 10s there was tons of policy around it, bosses were setting the culture, we were doing everything "right." But we were still not hiring that many women, simply because hardly any women ever applied. For chem e, Mech e, EE roles with 100 applicants, usually I'd see at most one female applicant. It was rare to getm but when we did we'd push for the interview and they'd get through with an average success rate (compared to make applicants).

I'm hoping industries that hire young are seeing different numbers than I did, because that should signal a shift in older ones that hire senior discipline engineers after a decade or so.

Edit: that said, companies should continue to do what they can to remediate this, but I am furious that the government has done almost nothing about the issue. The underrepresented remain exactly that.

[trustmath]

Yes, I am female, I am aware of the statistics. It's frustrating because my life literally gets impacted by automated reasoning such as this. It's not frustrating for anyone who says 'there just aren't enough of you'. That's something that is very easy to say by people who never have to experience that sort of discriminatory practice.

The painful stuff is when it's obvious and provable, because it highlights all the times it can be questionable as to whether it occurs.

[21]

I worked in a tech company which was heavily biased in favor of hiring woman, there were special hiring tracks for woman where the interviews were easier and the interviewers received special training in unconscious biases, and the managers received bonuses for having a closer to 50/50 ratio.

It was still just a trickle, for the same reason you stated - very very few woman apply to tech positions.

[arbitrage]

> but in my experience recruiting, the primary reason behind there being less women getting hired into engineering roles is almost never raw sexism.

In my experience in the industry, this is a laughable statement to make. It's a shame that unless one is a victim of unconscious, systemic bias, one is so much less likely to acknowledge it as a problem, that actually exists, and hurts people all the time.

[komali2]

I don't understand what you're saying - is your argument that only victims of unconscious bias will recognize it as a problem?

If that's your point, I guess my counter argument is myself, not a victim, very aware of the problem, and acknowledging it as a problem as my post.

There's also the victims of conscious bias that would probably be able to acknowledge the problem...

Am I misreading your post?

[trustmath]

I don't believe in unconscious thought, but if unconscious thought were real, it would be obvious that the only people who can be aware of it's effects are the people who can identify a difference between those two states of being, and be able to reduce that down to an model/abstraction/statement.

It doesn't matter if it's intentional or not to a victim. It's still the same system, same cause and effect, same yield of powerlessness.

Whichever way you want to see it.

+ If it's intentional it's not unconscious.

+ If it's unconscious it's part of a culture that tolerates the behavior to the point that it doesn't get questioned.

+ If it does get questioned, eventually people are just playing dumb or it becomes intentional - if it's provable that it continues to occur.

[InclinedPlane]

I find this sort of sentiment almost hilarious in how out of touch it is.

Time and time again people (mostly men of course) keep asking "but why? why aren't there more women in the field?" Time and time again they keep saying "but I don't see any sexism in the workplace, it's nothing like it used to be, it's practically a meritocracy these days!" Yes, indeed, it truly is a giant mystery.

And yet, at the same time there is a constant deluge of stories about rampant sexism in the industry. Of all sorts, at all levels, at almost every company, and often of shockingly regressive character even up through the present time. There are countless stories in the industry of how women in tech are persistently denigrated, how men talk over them in meetings, how their ideas are ignored until they come out of the mouth of a man, how sexual harassment is ubiquitous, how they are routinely excluded from workplace culture through extremely male-centric activities that include things as ridiculous as morale events or even meetings held at strip clubs.

All of this takes a toll, and that toll is ultimately to stunt the careers of women in tech and to push women out of the industry entirely. Working in tech as a woman is climbing a hill with a much steeper slope than it is for guys. Women routinely get passed over for promotions, are routinely underpaid, routinely do not receive credit for their ideas, and routinely experience more hostile working conditions (through bias as well as sexual harassment). So they leave. They find something better to do with their time because they just can't take the stress and harassment anymore or because it just does not provide the same return on investment as it does for guys.

And we know this. We know this from studies and exposes and a torrent of anecdotes from individual women who have been in the field for years or decades. Some people (guys) have a tendency to write off each and every one of these stories and studies as somehow individual aberrations or outliers which don't have any bearing on the fundamental overall character of the industry, but this is a mistake, they are absolutely representative. The problem of over-representation of white men in tech cannot be solved by "fixing the pipeline" in the educational system nor can it be solved by making hiring processes perfectly unbiased (or even biased towards women) because the real problem is much bigger, it's systemic, widespread misogyny throughout the entire industry. That will take a tremendous amount of work to fix, but once the industry stops treating women as second class citizens (or exotic outsiders) and stops pushing them out of the industry through its toxicity then the problem will mostly fix itself.