[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Women have the same options to attend university as men. It seems more likely to me that the proportions of applicants without a degree are similar to the ones with degrees.

[Spooky23]

The focus on Computer Science is a female filter. I’ve rarely run into a colleague who claimed their education truly prepared them anyway.

You’d be better off being diverse in major. When I think of the smartest developers or IT people I know, one was a sociologist who learned programming as a labor department statistician, another had an MFA in Piano, and the other was in pharmacy school and dropped out after an injury.

[jki275]

There are certainly people like this. What you generally find about them though is that they are highly motivated and deeply interested in the concepts of computing. They don't grow on trees -- they're quite rare.

Oddly enough, I've never met a single one that was female, though that's only anecdotal of course. The only female devs I know have CS degrees.

The focus on CS is important. Developers who don't have it are generally not educated in how to write good code. Many people do get into the field without the degree, but many of them are very bad at programming. I've had to rewrite O(n!) algorithms written by some of them, and they really didn't even understand why the algorithm was bad even when I broke it down to them.

My CS education absolutely gave me many of the tools I need for a career in software engineering. It didn't give me everything to be sure -- there's a lot of learning that still goes on in the job, but having a solid foundation is crucial to being a good engineer.

[braindouche]

Hello! Now you've met a female dev with no CS degree. There may be a reason we're thin on the ground, too. My "training" as a software dev consisted of 10 years of self-employment as a freelance web developer, and when I decided to transition to working for a company, I faced massive hiring discrimination. I couldn't pay someone to interview me! And I did demonstrate that it was discrimination, too. My resume was getting something like a 2% response rate with my name on it, but I put a man's name on it and sent out a bunch, and suddenly I was getting a response to more than 80% of them.

Anecdote is not data, and it's only my individual anecdote, but it's my experience that breaking through into the industry to be incredibly hard. Since then I've made up for lost time and advanced faster than a college grad would expect (junior dev in a shitty agency to enterprise lead dev in about four years), and I attribute that to spending so incredibly long as essentially a junior dev freelancer and just being older.

So it can be done, certainly, but I strongly suspect there are several filters working against self-taught developer women making that transition into the industry, and one of them is definitely gender discrimination. And no, aside from sending out resumes with a man's name on them, I don't know how to fix it.

[jki275]

I suspect you'd have had far easier success with a BSCS on your resume. I can't imagine trying to get into this field without having had a degree -- it is a hard industry to get into.

I keep hearing about gender discrimination, and maybe this is a market segment thing, but everywhere I've worked is actively recruiting female devs. Also the places I've worked as a dev typically require a CS degree though for what that's worth. Many of them even require an MSCS -- I've actually been turned down for one job because even though I have an MS it wasn't an MSCS (gov contracts get very specific).

[braindouche]

Oh you're almost certainly right, it would have been easier with the degree. I don't have any degree, and programming is a second career for me, so in a world where 26 year old senior developers are a thing, it's just one more thing putting me on my back foot. My biggest regret is not starting down this path 10 or 15 years earlier, honestly.

I am absolutely willing to believe it's a market segment thing. I live in a smaller city full of colleges, so the handful of large companies hiring want all of their jr devs to be right out of college, and that's straight from the recruiter's mouths. I was forced to apply to all the small companies.

And, for what it's worth, my current job and the two before it "required" a degree. From what I can tell, that requirement is to filter people on the low end of years of experience. Old age and treachery counts for a lot more than you may think.

[jki275]

Requirements can certainly be waived -- a good candidate who can "network in" can often bypass gates like that if they're a known quantity to someone in the company. Personal recommendations do make a huge difference -- I've networked my way to nearly every job I've gotten in some way.

[commandlinefan]

> one of them is definitely gender discrimination

Definitely? As in, you have actual proof? Or even some evidence? Because if you do, that’s illegal, and ought to be reported to the DOL.

[braindouche]

The only evidence I have is response rates, and about 12 companies that responded to a man's-name resume that did not respond to an identical resume with a woman's name. I have consulted with a labor lawyer, who told me that this might be actionable if I can get enough women together to also perform this experiment and gather together in a class-action lawsuit. I don't live in a particularly large city, and I believe it's almost impossible without astroturfing.

[commandlinefan]

> responded to a man's-name resume that did not respond to an identical resume with a woman's name

If you can demonstrate evidence of this, you absolutely should, because that would be a particularly surprising finding considering how many organizations state upfront that they have preferential hiring for women. I’ve hired software developers for decades, and the resumes are dominated by Indian-sounding names: I don’t know about you, but I usually can’t tell whether those names are masculine or feminine. I’m shocked on the rare occasion I come across a resume with an American sounding name like Jim or Mary.

[Spooky23]

I don't think that a computer science degree is bad, just that it's a poor filter. I have one, and while the math background is critical for many things, honestly the skills learned there are pretty limited in terms of what I've do.

If you have a background in any science, or even a good analysis ability in a liberal arts field, you can be trained pretty quickly to be a functional developer. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more given the absurd salaries people are getting paid these days!

[jki275]

Lots of people can be "trained" to be functional developers. That doesn't make them good software engineers.

A CS degree is supposed to educate you in how to think, not train you to write software. Being able to properly decompose a problem and use the right data structures and algorithms to solve it is more than just training. You need education in the fundamentals to do that effectively.

I don't believe that it is impossible for someone without a CS degree to be a developer -- far from it -- but in my experience most of the really good ones have CS or CE or EE degrees. YMMV of course.

[hnick]

Options don't exist in a vacuum. I had the option of signing up to the military, but my upbringing, preferences, and economic/social status made it almost certain I wouldn't. I had free will to make the choice but the outcome was almost foregone.

I think women in tech is a very similar situation. The article states that women graduate from bootcamps at a rate twice that of traditional CS courses. I'd say this is because there's less friction to join, so anything pushing them away is more easily overcome.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

I'd like to have more data on the women graduating from bootcamps. Maybe it is a desperate move of aging single moms who find they can't make a living with their degree in English Literature? While most men who are interested took traditional degrees to begin with, so they have less need for bootcamps.

Sorry for the harsh formulation, but the point is, we really don't actually know what is going on. It is not legitimate to just assume women are being pushed away from traditional career paths in IT.

As for Military, I think the idea to become a Software Developer is by now a very common one, you don't have to come from a specific demographic to have heard of that option. Women come from the same backgrounds as men, the odds to have a baby girl or a baby boy are the same at all levels of society.

[jonfw]

to build on this- among younger age groups- women are more likely to be college graduates than men.

Women willingly choose different education paths because of different interests.

[axoltl]

That's not true. Harvey Mudd made changes to their CS program to remove bias and now more than half of its computer science majors are women. There is some very insidious bias in the pipeline that isn't explained away with "but different interests".

https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...

[simonsarris]

A bit of "wait a minute, something else is going on here" comes with the mention that Physics has a even higher % women, yet there's no mention of curriculum changes for that major. This wouldn't happen to be a very small school with a very low acceptance rate, would it?

It is: less than 900 students and less than 13%. They can have whatever gender ratio they want, more or less, with essentially no effort. I'm not sure they have cleverly solved "insidious bias", more than they are simply selecting for the gender ratio they want as they send out acceptance letters. It would be nice if a much larger school with a much higher acceptance rate adopted identical curriculum, so we could have real data on the idea. But until that happens I would be somewhat cautious about declaring success here.

[nwallin]

23% of the women who apply to Harvey Mudd are admitted. 10% of the men who apply to Harvey Mudd are admitted. It sounds like they have one admissions process for women, and a different one for me. That's one way to get 50/50 I suppose.

That wouldn't fly in the workplace. I'm surprised it's acceptable under Title IX.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/1...

[filoleg]

There could be plenty of non-malicious natural explanations for this.

What if there are way more males applying to Harvey Mudd, thus, assuming equal ability levels of people in both groups, resulting in a higher women admission rate?

What if the women applying to Harvey Mudd are, on average, more competent than males applying for whatever reason? E.g., women being less confident about applying to schools like MIT, so a bunch of them would apply to Harvey Mudd instead, while all MIT-capable males wouldn't apply to Harvey Mudd.

I am not claiming whether that specific situation they have at Harvey Mudd is acceptable or not under Title IX, but the numbers your bring up should not be problematic on its own under Title IX imo, it is how those numbers were arrived at and other numbers in the context that make all the difference.

[jonfw]

Obviously with proper marketing you can target the niche.

There are more than enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of a tiny school's program. There aren't nearly enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of the market.

[jki275]

Basically everyone at Harvey Mudd is in STEM -- the article says this. Their results are not really useful in the discussion, as their female student population is already heavily self-selected in favor of the hard sciences.

[hackinthebochs]

Adding on to this, Harvey Mudd puts forth significant effort at outreach and recruitment for their student body. Meaning they're pulling from the existing pool of STEM students to a large degree compared to creating new ones. It's very likely that Harvey Mudd's success cannot be reproduced at scale.

[8note]

The more likely case is that they have a degree that isn't in CSC.

[stale2002]

> But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though?

Well, probably because the environment in all parts of the tech pipeline, is often times toxic the entire way through, and women don't want to deal with that.

So part of solving the pipeline problem means trying to solve it in many different parts of the pipeline, and recognizing that even if a previous part failed, you can still do stuff to fix it, later on.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

It's certainly not "toxic all the way through". That's such an insulting assumption. I bet you for example that at engineering university women are more likely to get help than men.

[Nasrudith]

The accusations against tech have been a decades long Kafkatrap essentially for the sin of "not fitting in with their expectations and being successful" as a trial where the conclusion is guilty but they must deliberate over what sins. Look at the oldest accusations which failed to illustrate it best. I believe one howler was that "It would make cultures homogenous."

At a certain point you are clearly dealing with bad actors and the default assumption stops being any attempt to accomidate them and starts being to tell them to fuck off.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

Sorry I have difficulties parsing what you wrote. What exactly do you mean? Who are the bad actors?

[stale2002]

Have you tried speaking to any women to get their opinion on the matter?

Because basically every women in tech has many many many stories of their bad experiences, all the way through the pipeline.

If you want to talk about universities, the problem with them is often the culture. Women are second guessed, every step of the way, and are often told that they don't belong there, and they have their abilities questions much more often than men.

This very common toxic culture of universities, often drives women out of the industry, because they feel like they don't belong, and aren't as good as their peers, even though they might actually be getting better grades than their peers.

If you speak to almost any woman in tech, they will be able to tell you this, and they will be able to give you many examples of the horrible experiences that they had to go through, every step of the way, through the pipeline.

It might not be all women that have these experiences. But it is most of them. Polling and data collection supports this conclusion.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

Most "studies" of that are rather distorted, you have to read very carefully. For example they may summarize that many women have experienced discrimination at some point. That can mean in 4 years of study, somebody once made a sexist joke in passing. It doesn't imply they had real issues. And the issues of men are not even studied for comparison.

That latter thing might be the biggest issue. The basic assumptions seems to be that things always come easy for men and they are always welcome.

And yes I know many women in tech, as I studied with them and worked with them.

I have also seen many articles by women in tech who say they didn't have issues. But somehow they don't count and are quickly forgotten, because they go against the narrative.

[stale2002]

> I have also seen many articles by women in tech who say they didn't have issues.

And there are many that do have issues. See, thats the thing about this stuff. Some women not having bad experiences, does not overrule the bad experiences of other women.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

Why does it not work the other way round, some women with bad experiences don't overrule the good experiences of other women?

For what it's worth, many of the accounts of "bad experiences" didn't really convince me, either. It is too easy to attribute all of one's issues to sexism. For example the common complaint of being passed over in promotions, or of having one's opinions not being appreciated. That happens to men all the time, too, they just don't get to claim it is because of sexism.

Confirmation bias may play a huge role in those personal accounts, too.

As I said - usually the comparison to actual experiences of men is missing. There are many, many more men who have been passed over for promotion than women who have been passed over, in the tech industry, for example.

Another thing that is missing is an account of the advantages women have, like men being eager to help, extra funding only for women, hiring quotas, and so on.