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by galoisgirl
2006 days ago
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We're still a society that treats women very differently. For instance, women have to be just the right level of assertive. Too little, and you're not respected nor listened to, you're passed for promotions... Too much, and you're viewed as aggressive. You have all those articles about women leaving tech - they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving. |
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However, this is not evidence of a uniquely bad problem in tech which can explain why tech has a gender disparity (which occurs primarily because women are self-selecting out of it before college) and other areas do not. Tech workers are far less blokey and much more aware/introspective of the issues than finance workers for example, actually the contrast is rather extreme speaking as someone who's worked in both industries, but it has less women proportionately than in finance which is contra to what your hypothesis would predict.
We also have to contend with the fact that women are underrepresented in tech (again due mostly to less women entering technical fields in college, even though they can easily do so if they wanted) across every developed country. Are we to say that chauvinism is such an extensive problem in tech across every single country, and that it's consistently more of a problem than in Law, Finance and almost every other field, and that we can't find a single exception to this in Scandinavia or one miscellaneous country?
I find that dubious and think a genetic explanation (i.e. genetics influencing group means in interests/passions) is a far better fit to the available data, especially since such differences show up at a very young age, across cultures, before significant socialization. Not to mention that these results fit with fairly mainstream science (evolutionary psychology).
This is not an attempt at a value judgement, prescription, or to diminish the very real issues that women face in the workplace (including the tech workplace). I'm just trying to get a descriptive answer to the question "what's the biggest factor behind tech having so few women?".
> they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving.
I see these as anecdotes. They're interesting and worthy of attention, but it's not good data that compares how many women and how many men are leaving tech when compared to other industries.
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I would really like to see a survey of 18 year old women who are enrolling into college, and straight up ask them why they didn't choose tech. My money is on them saying they have no interest, and not that they read some article about tech-unique chauvinism. I will await such results keenly.