[cletus]

Is it just me or does all this talk about women in tech and efforts to balance things out (artificially) just devalue what good work women engineers are doing?

It's the classic affirmative action problem: if you lower the bar for one group in the eyes of everyone else members of that group are viewed as having less merit regardless of whether or not its true.

I'm all for having more good female engineers because I'm all for having more good engineers (male or female). The counterargument seems to be that women find the male dominance of tech intimidating or engineering careers aren't presented to women as possibilities. If there is gender bias is science/engineering/maths classes or with career guidance and so forth then I'm all for eliminating that.

But as far as the first goes, I have two words for you: Grace Hopper.

[roguecoder]

It is just you: empirical evidence finds that balancing things out artificially increases participation without affecting performance. See, for example, http://www.tirol.gv.at/fileadmin/www.tirol.gv.at/themen/gese...

This isn't a quality problem: it is a cultural problem. There are enough high-quality women programmers out there to have 50/50 gender balance (obviously). It does not usually happen because of self-perpetuating social dynamics.

I notice you are only in favor of interventions that don't require you to do anything. What if overcoming bias required you, and everyone like you, to take a step back and create space where women can participate? Would you be willing to forgo participation in a hackathon to an equally-qualified women so that the other women would find it a more welcoming space?

I would, because the comfort of more-than-one woman is more important to me than my own participation. If I don't have a hackathon to participate in I can always start one of my own; I don't need to see participation as a zero-sum competition with the women and men around me.

[ninetax]

> There are enough high-quality women programmers out there to have 50/50 gender balance (obviously)

Do you have a source for that?

[roguecoder]

I was referring to this specific hackathon, which obviously succeeded.

More generally, Computer Programmers as a whole are 22% women. Many hackathons where I am are wildly oversubscribed; any hackathon that is at least 127% oversubscribed should, if they have average gender representation for the profession, be able to have a 50/50 split. Since I've seen 2x or 3x oversubscription rates, that is not unreasonable.

If you include designers and business people, it takes even less oversubscription to get there. 29% of technical managers are women, along with 54.3% of designers.

[jholman]

So, it's not at all clear that there are, in fact, enough high-quality female programmers to have a 50/50 split in the field at large, which is clearly the important point.

But I really started this comment to pick a few minor nits. So feel free to ignore the entire comment.

1) They didn't achieve 50%, actually, even with all that work.

2) 127 * 0.22 = 28% . Assuming your industry estimates are correct, you're going to need better than 100% oversubscription to get 50% women, actually.

3) And even that only assumes random sampling. Which is actually clearly a crazy assumption. And I would take this hackathon as proof of that, actually.

4) I'm now on a team that's roughly 13% female. That's a new maximum for my career. So with that in mind, I'm curious where you got that 22% figure.

[roguecoder]

2) It's 227*0.22; you still get the original 100% too. If it were 27% oversubscribed you'd get 28%.

3) It is an assumption, though one that fits with my experience of hackathons (they tend to be 15-20% women.) I wasn't saying it's guaranteed that women will want to attend, just that there are qualified women who could.

4) Department of Labor, 2009 numbers: http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2009.pdf Page 29.

[yummyfajitas]

All this paper shows is that men compete just as hard even if you give preferences to women.

It does not address the question of whether lowering the bar for some people will lower the overall average or the average for that subgroup (hint: it will - this is almost a mathematical identity).

[roguecoder]

Who said anything about lowering the bar for anyone? There is no bar to attend most hackathons, no qualifying heats or even resume screening.

You also assume that lowering the bar inherently attracts less-qualified people than the marginal alternative participant. That is not true unless the outcome you care about is whatever bar you are using to measure and people accurately self-assess (or universally apply). For example, there is a 1992 study that found that SAT scores were equally good at predicting success of women and men, but only within those groups. Women performed as well during college courses as men with SAT scores 50 points higher (http://her.hepg.org/content/1p1555011301r133/). In such a case in order to maximize total academic performance, you would need to compensate for that systematic discrepancy and lower the SAT bar for women: what you are actually doing is normalizing the predicted-college-performance bar. That would not maximize total admitted SAT scores, but might maximize the outcome the college actually cares about.

[yummyfajitas]

Who said anything about lowering the bar for anyone?

Cletus, in the post you replied to.

As for using gender as a predictor in admissions, you'd also need to penalize high scoring women (and reward the low scoring ones). I have no particular objection to any of this.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/variance-induce.html

[anthonyb]

Mean SATs, not their variance. I don't think that overcomingbias link is really adding anything to the discussion.

The paper that roguecoder referenced is just pointing out that SAT scores are not a perfect predictor, and adjusting the intake based on gender is probably a good idea if you want to maximise the real effect (academic performance), rather than the predictor (SAT scores).

[yummyfajitas]

The Robin Hanson blog post points out the exact same thing. Why is a positive correction for women useful, but a negative one "not adding anything to the discussion"?

If you want to use gender as a predictor, it could be positive or negative.

[anthonyb]

Counter hint: It doesn't. Look at figure 4 in the paper.

I suspect that the reason for this is that when you exclude women in general, you're also excluding women who are just as good as men are.

Which is the unspoken assumption in your post and Cletus' original post: if you include more women, those women are going to be dolts who couldn't make it in on their own steam. I don't see that that's the case (eg. what if they just don't want to participate in crap hackathons where they're going to be harassed?). Neither you or Cletus are providing anything other than the usual hearsay.

[yummyfajitas]

The paper did not lower the bar for entry, it lowered the bar for women winning. The correct test would be to compare the winners of the competition with the lower bar to the winners of the competition without the lower bar.

Which is the unspoken assumption in your post and Cletus' original post: if you include more women, those women are going to be dolts who couldn't make it in on their own steam.

The unspoken assumption is that lowering the bar has any effect at all. If the bar is normally at 10, but you lower it to 7 for women, then any extra women this policy lets in must be in the range [7,10). Since all numbers in the interval [7,10) are below the previous minimum, they therefore lower the average.

[FuzzyDunlop]

I think cletus was trying to raise a feminist point. I certainly took it that way, anyway.

Beside that, I can agree that the issue is cultural, but I also feel it's ingrained at such a level that it may be difficult to overcome any time soon, and it's entirely to do with our perception of girls and boys as children.

The whole idea of girly girls and boys being boys needs to change before parents will stop being worried about their kids wanting to do something that doesn't conform with the appropriate gender stereotype.

I don't personally see what a collection of Barbie dolls, doll houses with fake appliances, and pink furniture, for example, does to even remotely empower a little girl. Maybe little boys might find it useful to understand the concept of housework and responsibility at a young age, too?

It would then stand to reason that there would be more women in tech because more children would have the appropriate parental support to learn about that sort of thing sooner.

[heretohelp]

>There are enough high-quality women programmers out there to have 50/50 gender balance (obviously)

That hasn't been true since the 60s.

[stcredzero]

It was meant in the specific context of holding hackathons.

[ceol]

> Is it just me or does all this talk about women in tech and efforts to balance things out (artificially) just devalue what good work women engineers are doing?

It's just you. No one is asking to accept sub-par work.

[MartinCron]

This isn't as much about "lowering the bar" affirmative-action-style as much as removing the "no girlz allowed!" sign from the clubhouse.

[ufo]

The problem with the Grace Hooper example is that she is from back when programming was still considered a "secretarial" and "womanly" profession. Software Engineering has become a more male-dominated since then and the percentage of women has gone down.

[jlees]

I'm female and I believe this is true to some extent, but that the good work done by women engineers and women in tech groups outweighs it.

It is hard going to an event and wondering if people think I was invited for free because I'm a woman. Going to a hackathon and having people believe I'm a designer on sight. Having people nod their heads understandingly when I mention I'm a PM, not a full time engineer (any more).

It's rare, but once you get a touch of the impostor syndrome it's very hard to shake. I'd believe rationally that 90% of the people at one of these events would be ready to embrace me for my abilities and not care about my gender. The people I work with certainly do an outstanding job of that. I've just had enough odd comments and sceptical looks that I believe there's a grain of truth to the paranoia.

On the flipside, the last Startup Weekend I went to was SWEDU, where I worked with two other female iOS engineers, a female marketer and a male teacher to pull out an awesome iOS learning game in less than 54 hours. So.. good things do happen. :)

[notJim]

> if you lower the bar for one group in the eyes of everyone else members of that group are viewed as having less merit regardless of whether or not its true.

Meanwhile, the group of people who got in thanks to affirmative action keep proving the nay-sayers wrong, and setting examples for people like them to follow them into the field.

You can't eliminate gender bias simply by removing barriers to entry. You have to actively encourage people to enter, otherwise they will never even consider it. The term of art here is “substantive equality” and I'd encourage you to Google it to read more arguments in favor and opposed to it.