[malandrew]

A few questions:

What does it mean to "leave the field"? Does that mean to no longer practice low-level work or to leave the industry entirely for another industry? If it is the former, does moving into management or another complementary area (like moving from engineering to product management) qualify as leaving the field?

So what I've always been curious about is what percentage of women leave other fields? It would be nice to have numbers to compare it to there.

Also, what percentage of men leave the field? If "leaving the field" is defined as no longer actively practicing software engineering and instead doing more human contact work (like managing), then I would expect a significant number of men to leave the field at all.

I'm not trying to dismiss the number out of hand, but merely demonstrate that it's a useless figure to bandy about with context or comparison.

[rmc]

> What does it mean to "leave the field"?

You can read it in the linked article: http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/

* "716 women who left tech"

* "I have collected stories from 716 other women who have left the tech industry"

* "Of the 716 women surveyed, 465 are not working today."

* "Two-hundred-fifty-one are employed in non-tech jobs, and 45 of those are running their own companies. A whopping 625 women say they have no plans to return to tech

Which strongly implies "left the industry", not "moving to product management" or "managing". 2/3s of them aren't working at all, not "promoted to management"

[malandrew]

How do they make a living if they aren't working at all?

That seems like a shockingly high figure of people who have the means to avoid any sort of labor productivity. I can only conclude that "are not working today" is loosely defined or that these people were unfit for working at all, since someone that has the means to quit work and not have to look for other work elsewhere probably hasn't lead a very rigorous labor existence.

Also, this appears to be study of only the ones that left. I'm certain I could find 716 men that left the tech industry too, and come up with a set of reasons why they left. Looks like a classic case of selection bias. There doesn't appear to be one women who stayed in the industry in that study. Does that mean I should conclude from this study that 100% of women leave tech? Simply put, you need to survey more than just those that left.

That study comes across as far more biased than the biases it's trying to combat.

It's far more interesting to discuss base rates. Start with a sample of women in tech, follow them over n-years (you can get a good representative sample by choosing different cohorts like those that are recent grads to those with 5-10 years industry experience) and do the same with men. After 2-3 years check out how many from from each gender from that sample have left the industry. Interview them to find out why.

My ex was a documentary filmmaker interested in social causes and whatnot and I've seen how the sausage is made firsthand and know how data and statistics are twisted to support an agenda. Good statistics that strive to be impartial almost never produces numbers as "story-worthy" as the ones from that study, which means you need to question the numbers presented and also ask which figures were conveniently omitted.

[atrophying]

> How do they make a living if they aren't working at all?

I'm one of those women who left the field after a 10 year career, and then returned several years late. The answer is, our quality of life drops. We end up in alternate careers that usually don't pay as well as tech, but come without the headaches. I worked as a private chef after I left tech. Some of the women I know have become academics in other fields, some pursue completely different careers in non-technical fields, some drop out completely to embrace a SAHM role or some other traditional gender role.

I'm not going to argue about whether this study is right or that one is wrong; but I can tell you from my own anecdotal experience that every year I see less and less women my age in tech. I rejoined IT after that hiatus and there's not a single woman I work with who has the kind of technical expertise I do. The women who have that expertise have all left for greener pastures; for most of them, tech is an uphill battle against ignorance and bias that just gets to be too stressful to deal with.

[malandrew]

Thank you for participating in the discussion. I have a bunch questions if you don't mind me asking.

When you left after 10 years in the field and were working as a professional chef, how long did you work as a chef before returning and during that time what did you do to remain current on how tech evolved during those years?

When you returned, did you join a company working with a relatively "fresh" tech stack (read: currently popular) or did you return to a company that worked largely with the technologies with which you had worked before leaving?

When you returned, how do you feel about your own technical skills upon returning? Were they as good as before? Were they worse? Were they other softer skills you learned as a chef that you found useful upon returning? (my older brother was a professional chef d'cuisine and it's remarkable career that teaches you how to lead like few other industries do).

The feelings you had as a women in tech after returning, did you feel the same way prior to leaving to become a chef? If so, how was the experience similar? If not, how did your experience after returning differ from your experience before?

What were the primary motivators that originally lead you to pursue a career in cooking? Was it a love for cooking? Were you already cooking a lot and decided you wanted to go to school for that and then pursued it as a career? I'm particularly interested in this question because I've known people who have taken a similar path and also wouldn't mind getting into cooking after tech. A friend of mine was a senior engineer at one of the "unicorns" and is now pursuing a career in baking and plans to open a bakery.

I totally understand the desire to avoid the headaches in tech, and one might choose a different career without those headaches. I'm curious to get your opinion on the women with whom you worked on in tech that chose to become a SAHM and traditional gender roles instead of choosing an alternate career without the headaches you tried to avoid. My instinct suggests that women like you truly left due to the headaches, but I find it harder to reconcile someone leaving due to sexism in tech and then adopting traditional gender roles. That strikes me as a contradictory path to take if their motivation for leaving were the headaches you describe. What do you think about their motivations and do you think many of them probably would have ended up as SAHM and in traditional gender roles even if tech had not had the headaches you endured?

For the women who pursued careers in other field, it seems to me that moving into academia is likely to stimulate people in similar ways as software engineering. They are both similar in that they involve lots of reading, research, learning, problem solving, hypothesizing, and then application and observation. In other words a career in academia is a different way of enjoying the scientific process. For the women with whom you worked that didn't follow a path towards another career that is similarly rewarding in its daily application of the scientific process, what kinds of careers did they gravitate to? Were they strikingly different careers like moving from working with computers and technology to working with people, or something else entirely? What do you think the level of satisfaction is for these women in their new career relative to their career in engineering, once you discount or attempt to control for the headaches women encounter?

Lastly, regarding women your age in tech: when you see fewer women your age in tech, do you also see fewer men your age in tech? How much of the effect of seeing fewer women your age is due to age and how much gender? Which do you believe to be a greater problem? If you worked and returned to work in tech in the SF Bay Area, do you think that housing prices and starting a familiar may account for some of the reason why you see fewer women your age in tech (per the thought experiment I put forth as a hypothesis here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960338 )

(Sorry for the barrage of questions. I know it's overwhelming and can be especially so when there aren't many women in tech who can also help address these questions leaving you as one of the few voices that can offer firsthand perspective. Answer only what you feel like answering)

[rmc]

You're right the whole "sexism in tech" is probably not a problem at all. It's all totally made up. It can't possibly be that bad. /s

[malandrew]

I never said such a thing, nor did I imply that. lawnchair_larry nailed it with his comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960327

"I agree there is a problem, but is it ever frustrating having to tolerate completely fallacious statistics and bogus metrics. That sets the conversation back."

The statistics you cite are quite frankly bad statistics. You could have written the following and it would have been just as meaningless:

* "716 humans who left industry X" * "I have collected stories from 716 other humans who have left industry X" * "Of the 716 humans surveyed, 465 are not working today." * "Two-hundred-fifty-one are employed in non-Industry X jobs, and 45 of those are running their own companies. A whopping 625 humans say they have no plans to return to Industry X Which strongly implies "left the industry", not "moving to this job" or "that job". 2/3s of them aren't working at all, not "promoted to something else"

When you eliminate the nouns that allow our own biases to fill in the blanks and arrive at our own strong implications, it's quickly obvious that those statistics mean absolutely diddly-squat without additional related figures (like base rates) that allow us to perform an informed comparison.

[lawnchair_larry]

What's the point of asking only the ones who left? That's about the worst sampling method I can think of.

[rmc]

It can tell you why people left. Which might tell you the problems in it.

Update: Imagine a company has many people leaving, and they ask why. If everyone says "Got paid better elsewhere" it means you have a problem with salary. If "Sick of commuting out to the sticks", maybe look at relocation. If "Tech is old fashioned and boring", maybe look at what your employees are working on. If "Manager is an asshole", maybe fire/retrain that manager. etc.

[malandrew]

So for the 716 people who left, every single one of them only had sexist reasons for leaving? None of them found out the work wasn't that appealing? None had family issues that forced them to leave to care for a sick or ailing parent? None had a medical issue of their own that meant they could no longer work? None simply found something else they were more passionate about? None simply earned their FU money at a successful company and decided maybe they want to dedicate themselves to philanthropic pursuits or just lounging around? None decided that they prefer a job with more social interaction over one where you spend many hours at a desk solving problems quietly?

All the above are reasons that I've heard as reasons for people leaving our industry and other industries. They apply to both men and women. Where are these other reasons in the conclusions of this study?

Where are the opinions of women like Susan Sons and Meredith Patterson who quite like nerd culture and feel it's misunderstood by many of those writing about what's wrong with tech culture? [0]. This study is so incredibly one-sided in its conclusions that I can only conclude that it went out of its way to cherry-pick the study participants. Or its possible that it was subject to an unconscious bias of its own. Perhaps the author is so thoroughly in her own echo chamber with regard to these issues that when she reached out through her network to find people willing to talk to her about why they left, she ended up recruiting largely from a population that is biased towards confirming the conclusions she wanted to demonstrate because that's what her social network experiences disproportionately. When examining the biases of others, it's important to examine your own and not commit the same mistakes as those you are are trying to correct. Any "study" without a discussion of sampling methodology to control for biases and identifying those biases is typically not constructive.

[0] https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c

[ozim]

There was article on HN some days ago maybe even weeks which was showing IT compared to other fields. It was about how many women work in field and for IT it was lot less than other. It was showing percentage in years so in 80's there was a lot more women in IT than now. Sorry but cannot find article, maybe someone will have link.

[malandrew]

I'm also generally curious about the figures for men in female dominated industries. I'm a senior software engineer now, but I graduated with a degree that would have had me working in an industry that was overwhelmingly female (fashion). I think it's like 95% female. Most of my classmates were female. I didn't go into that industry because other opportunities cropped up and because that industry doesn't pay anyone, man or woman, well and you're expected to work for years for very little to get anywhere career-wise. Not once during school or after it did I feel disadvantaged in a school/work environment where I was very much a minority (straight cis male).

I have been unable to find any figures, but I suspect that fashion was an industry that had a lot more men working in it up until the 1980s.

http://amfi.nl/boys-fashion-industry-gender-ratio/

[ousta]

I worked in the web advertisement on a big fashion account in a 80% female team. the PM was promoting women just because they are women and she even wanted to hire some support engineer interviewed her and seeing that she had a good feeling because she was in a similar feminist assocation than her she hired her as a regional project manager with double pay and they hired a support engineer in india.

trust me. the environment we are making women and feminism grow in is insane for men as for women and against work ethics.

[malandrew]

Strangely, I'm not terribly bothered by your story because an attitude like that strongly held means there is little to no chance I'd end up in such a toxic environment for me. This big upside is that it saves the time and energy possibly I would have invested in a place that is going to suck.

As I grow older I've learned it's not merely enough to know where you want to want. You also need to know where you don't want to work. Extreme overtly environments like that make that choice really simple.

There will always be people workplaces where such bigotry thrives. We should minimize how common such workplaces are. At the same time, there is a benefit of have a few workplaces here and there that attract and retains such people because it keeps those people from entering the labor market and being employed at a company with men and women who would rather not deal with such bigoted bullshit.