[nsp]

Technical jobs are 90%+ male, but our customer base is generally much closer to 50/50. Don't you think it's pretty plausible that having a woman working with you might add a useful perspective when making your product? I've worked at 3 startups(2 as a dev) and interviewed a couple hundred programmers over that time, and don't think I've yet even had a resume from a female programmer, and honestly that really disappoints me - I'd love to work in a coed environment, just to get more opinions and life experiences informing our discussions.

From a purely selfish standpoint, theres a lot of money to be made and a lot less competition in female-customer-oriented startup spaces - take the phenomenal success of Pinterest for an easy example - unless you're only building for yourself, why would you be opposed to adding a perspective that could potentially double your market size.

*I'm personally bothered by the gender gap for a plethora of reasons that go far beyond purely economic, but women control something like 70% of household spending in the USA, and there's a lot of compelling opportunities there even leaving aside any larger equitable society issues.

[ionforce]

So you're conflating your technical groups with your product groups? And you're saying that your product is a function of gender?

[rfnslyr]

I understand you and I fully agree. I actually work with a majority of women. I'm in the corporate sector, and there are more women then men from what I'm seeing.

I still don't get the movement. Everyone knows Computer Science exists. It's just not an interesting or attractive field for everyone. Let's be honest, when you have prospective high school grads you can't make CS more interesting than say, Physics, Bio, Chemistry. A majority of women flock to those fields and humanities. It's not sexism, it's not the patriarchy, it's just statistics.

It just seems like a lot of women just aren't interested in CS, and I get that. It's a fascinating field, but I can totally see why it's not populated with women.

Anyways, all I'm trying to say is when it comes down to it, and I see a good female candidate, I will hire her. I really don't care about the gender, just I get way fewer females candidates. It is what it is.

Why not host more women friendly CS/Info tech workshops to spread interest?

These kinds of blog posts are just hot wind without any real foundation. Affirmative action isn't the way to go about it, spreading interest in the field at an early stage, however, is.

Example: CS classes in high school don't hold a candle to the sciences and are very very poorly taught for the most part. Other sciences are exciting, they out number CS classes like 20 to 1.

[kbambz]

Actually, I didn't know what "computer science" was until mid-high school, and I was extremely lucky to have attended one that happened to offer a few extracurricular CS classes (I'd toyed around with HTML and CSS and built a few Geocities sites when I was around 11, but that's certainly not what I'd consider "exposure to CS"). But I don't think that's an issue of gender so much as a failure of the education system to integrate topics of CS into standard curricula.

The "problem" is the girl with straight As in my high school BC calculus class who refused to take CS because "that's hard, I wouldn't be good at it" (true story, and it confused the hell out of me when she said it). The fact of the matter is people AREN'T just "not interested". I really wouldn't care if only 0.2% of the tech industry was female or <insert-label-here>, so long as it's because they either aren't capable or interested. But I don't buy that. We've come a long, long, long way, but we're not there yet. And all the screaming and finger-pointing, such as that which PG has received (misquoted or not), just distracts from addressing what actually matters.

P.S. We actually explicitly argued AGAINST affirmative action in the post. I could go on about that for ages, but I'll just say this: I want to be held to the same standards as any other demographic, be it race, sex, or shirt color, and I don't want to have to question the legitimacy of my failures OR successes. If I thought I'd been given a handout because I have two X chromosomes, I'd be pissed.

[Crito]

I believe the basic premise is that there is nothing in biology that makes computer science more interesting to men than it does to women.

Since it is not an imbalance that can be pinned on biology (perhaps unlike an imbalance in world weightlifting records?), the cause of the imbalance must be somehow 'nurture' related. Even if we do not consider the imbalance itself to be problematic, the imbalance is considered to be the result of some sort of bias that is assumed to be problematic.

For example, fewer women in tech may not be considered problematic in and of itself (though I believe many people think that it is), but the existence of this imbalance may be evidence of systematic sexual harassment, which certainly is problematic.

I might be getting this wrong, so I welcome corrections.

[rfnslyr]

Well, here's my take on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977753

Most of the men I know and have talked to specifically about fighting for pay, have in fact put up a fight for their pay, while the women I worked with believed that their work will pay for itself and have no fought for a higher pay raise. The women that are top tier managers, were actually just as vicious as the guys, and by being this way, have attained the same things.

People are so quick to hop on to the social justice brigade when in reality its a much more complicated and personal issue, being lumped into the gender category.

[jacalata]

Have you ever read the research available on the different reactions people tend to have when a woman asks for higher pay/displays entitlement to better conditions in general, vs when a man does?

[Crito]

I don't really disagree. I guess my comment is more addressing the "less women than men in the industry" thing, and not the "women negotiate lower salaries than men" thing.