[ericedge]

To some extent I wonder if the difference between the two environments is the acceptance of more junior engineers into the ranks. Even the original link suggests that female coders need to have the same skills as the male coders in order to succeed in the field, whereas one of the main bullet points for Carnegie Mellon's success was specifically encouraging students with no prior experience to join the program:

http://blog.play-i.com/carnegie-mellon-study-on-gender-and-c...

But how often in web engineering do you see postings for junior employees? Everyone wants someone who already has experience, the more senior the better. How do we get more people of any diversity to work at our companies if there are no entry-level positions in the field?

I think some of this might arise from the fact that web engineering is still a relatively new field. People making staffing decisions feel like they're taking on enough risk as-is, and don't want to take on the additional burden of training up junior engineers.

But if we don't train them, gaining diversity will be much more difficult, and we may some day find ourselves with a quickly-dwindling pool of experienced engineers to draw from.

I'm not sure we're there yet, but when we reach that point, already having a solid training program in place at a company will be an incredible market advantage. So we might be shooting ourselves in the foot by not starting those training programs now.

[ama729]

> But how often in web engineering do you see postings for junior employees? Everyone wants someone who already has experience, the more senior the better. How do we get more people of any diversity to work at our companies if there are no entry-level positions in the field?

Unfortunately, it's true in most field, it's extremely rare to find an ads that doesn't ask for a diploma and job experience (it didn't ask for experience, but I saw an ads where they asked for a diploma in a call center position...)