[lmm]

> That cause is not pre-graduation -- its effect is. Low participation in the industry causes fewer women to be drawn to the field, to be less interested in math etc.

If it's just that kind of feedback loop, how would the fall have started? Mathematics was once almost exclusively a men's game and early computer science fell in with that; the kids of the '80s would have had more female role models in the computer industry (and certainly as you say more in biology or physics) than those of the '70s or '60s, so why would they have been less interested in numerate fields?

I'm not saying that the feedback loop you describe can't amplify things, but I think the underlying cause has to lie outside it.

I've been thinking more about your decline-since-the-80s point. The narrative I've heard most often is that '90s compsci classes contained women with lower GRE-type scores than men (either through explicit positive discrimination/affirmative action, or because there were plenty of applicants who passed the admission criteria and a roughly-even split were accepted), who went on to do less well in industry (in line with their GRE-type scores), and the crash of the early '00s prompted an adjustment to more natural levels. But that leaves a lot of unexplained questions.

Maybe Yvain's page is right about academia, but those results don't extend to SV where there is more outright discrimination? Maybe it's about men being more able or willing than women to move to SV? Maybe SV's standards are stricter than the GRE cutoff and the difference at the end of the bell curve is even starker?

I still feel like we must be missing something. The simplistic explanation of "it's all innate ability" doesn't fit, but neither does "it's all discrimination/hostility", nor even "it's a 50/50 split between the two". Something remains to be explained here.

[pron]

> If it's just that kind of feedback loop, how would the fall have started?

That's a good question. So these guys[1] have one theory. Another is that changes in SV ethos have made companies less hospitable to women. It's probably a combination of many different effects.

> I still feel like we must be missing something.

Probably lots of things. What troubles me is the pervasive lack of curiosity and lack of empathy. You see people here on HN drool over sci-fi notions of cryonics or believe all sorts of scientific "findings" of dubious nature about nutrition, but dismiss all attempts to really understand this issue. You also see people here express such decisive opinions about pretty much anything, but when a woman tells of a negative experience at a SV company, the responses turn into, "wait, we have to wait and hear the other side first".

If we realize this is important -- and I have more to say about this point -- and investigate this in depth, then I think we will have benefitted already. In the meantime, we should take it to heart that employees in our industry feel distressed by the working environment we create.

Now, why is it so important? Many people confuse sexism and racism with mere discrimination between sexes/races, or unequal representation in various professions. But that women are underrepresented in the waste-disposal industry does not make anyone lose sleep. The reason is that sexism and racism are all about power[2] (the academic shorthand for racism/sexism is "discrimination + power". It is a very serious problem when groups of the population are absent or underrepresented in seats of power, and when that happens, it requires investigation (the assumption being that no group would freely yield power -- over itself -- to others). Because the tech industry, and Silicon Valley in particular, pack so much power these days, and since we share this power and can influence its future, we should be very concerned to learn that we're distributing this power unfairly.

[1]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)

[lmm]

I am curious about good solutions. But I feel like "first, do no harm" is vital here - the reason we're happy to speculate about cryonics is that the worst case is you're still dead, whereas SV is astonishingly productive to the point where we don't want to look at it funny in case it stops working.

And there are specific worries. I've worked at a place that appeared to make a point of hiring equal numbers of men and women - and implemented this by hiring a number of women who simply weren't capable of performing their jobs (whether this was a question of talent or training I don't know). It was bad for me, as in programming incompetent colleagues are not just dead weight but actively harmful. It was bad for those women, who had a frustrating time at a job where they knew they weren't contributing. And it was even worse for the highly-skilled women on the team, as others who hadn't worked closely with them would - understandably, and probably unconsciously - make the calculation that they were probably in the incompetent group, and act accordingly. So naturally, avoiding that particular failure mode is a matter that's close to my heart, and I get defensive when I hear people saying things that I think might lead to that.

[pron]

Well, obviously no one has come up with full solutions, and whatever solutions there are, they will be slow, because changing culture is slow. But just as democratic societies have come to accept the preposterous notion that women should be allowed to vote, so too will it start seeing engineering as a non-manly profession, and one that's perfectly natural for women, too. Right now, I think there are two things we can do: 1) place more women role models in popular culture who are engineers (I think Hollywood has started doing this), and 2) place more actual women role models in engineering positions.

The latter will only be achieved if the level of hostility women feel in the workplace is reduced, and to do that, employers (and engineers in general) will need to undergo some training. Part of that training (though certainly not all of it) would be learning to recognize sexism. Recognizing sexism is very hard if you're not trained for it; there are two reasons for that: one, people confuse sexism with misogyny and assume that since they're not misogynist, they can't be sexist (while actually most forms of sexism are inadvertent/structural/cultural), and two, because sexism is cultural, we just don't think of things that seem so natural to us, and can't perceive the harm they cause. Because sexism and racism are discrimination + power, the best way to recognize them is not to look for discrimination (which is hard to see, and we don't want to find it because it feels we're being judged or doing something wrong) but for power. Once you know what power is, it is relatively easy to see. Once you learn to see power, you see who has more of it and who has less of it. Once you see that, it's much easier to see whether through action or inaction your organization keeps the current unfair power distribution.

[lmm]

One of the other results I've seen posted on SSC (will try to find the link later) is that sensitivity training, at least as it's been actually implemented in the real world, makes people more discriminatory, not less.