[ForHackernews]

> I'm sorry am I supposed to go out of my way to directly extend a hand to women as well?

In a word? Yes.

Women are seriously under-represented in the tech community, so if your recruiting effort only extends to your friends and their friends. (And this kind of 'hey, do you know a good ____ dev?' search is pretty common for small firms) then it's statistically unlikely you're going to get many good female candidates.

I don't think you're morally obligated to hire a woman just for the sake of diversity--you should hire whoever's best for the role. But I do think you're obliged to at least consider qualified women. And I find it laughable to suggest that there simply don't exist good female candidates. They are numerically fewer; you have to make an effort to find them.

[rfnslyr]

Why do we actually care about inequality in professions? Humanities studies are greatly dominated by women, tech is dominated by men, and so is every other field out there dominated by either/or.

[ForHackernews]

> Why do we actually care about inequality in professions?

At an individual level, it's unfair if people are discouraged or denied the opportunity to peruse their interests because of their demographic characteristics.

At a societal level, we'll all benefit by having more people working in fields where they're most productive.

> so is every other field out there dominated by either/or.

That's not true at all. Some fields are near parity. Med schools are basically 50/50 these days.

[rfnslyr]

At an individual level, it's unfair if people are discouraged or denied the opportunity to peruse their interests because of their demographic characteristics.

If the simple existence of a statistic (men dominating tech) puts you away, then that's your own fault.

Med school is 50/50, great, that's an extremely difficult pursuit, clearly women are capable of handling it.

I really truly think it's because IT is not interesting. 90% of it is boring as fuck, working with legacy code at corporations.

How many tech jobs do you honestly think exist in this brand new javascript-scale-haskell everything small company fantasy wonder world? How many of those people, that even know this niche exists, are women? I casually talk about the scene to outside people and 99% of people have no idea what silicon valley is, or what a startup is. To them, computers are just a super boring corporate job, and they don't really know what's required.

This field really just isn't as intrinsically interesting as others. If you're interested in bits and bytes and numbers and problem solving and code and all the other great things that come with this field, good for you. None of this is lodged in the natural world, it's all virtual. Objectively, anything to do with the natural world (medicine, most sciences (life sci/bio/chem) are far more interesting). I think another part of the problem is schooling. In schools you get a PROPER science education, so it's easier to see the merits, versus being in a programming class taught by someone who really doesn't know the first thing about programming. What do you think the women will choose?

It takes a very special kind of person to get hooked on computers and programming.

Look at the field from an external point of view. You can't honestly tell me it looks like the most interesting thing in the world given peoples experience and exposition to it.

I'm really not surprised that there is a gender gap in this field because I really don't see anything that could draw a casual outside observer in unless they already have their foot in the door, which will probably be of their own accord anyways.