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The Diversity Pipeline


zelticgar

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39 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Lol thanks. 

 But there is a deeper point that both Pebble and I are making. It isn't just corporate culture, though that's part of it. It is clients. It is acquaintances. It is every time someone remarks when you meet them that not many women do what you do and ask why you do it.  The point we are making is that it isn't just liking the subject or workplac structures. It isn't just getting the training. It is all the other crap you have to put up with and it is exhausting. 

I didn't mean it as a personal reflection. But the deeper point I was trying to make is that to get to the top in these kind of firms, you have to sacrifice a lot in terms of family-time, personal relationships and swallowing crap. I mean, who in his right mind enjoys socializing with dumb fratboy clients and sucking up to psycho bosses and work on weekends while your wife is pregnant at home etc.

Unfortunately, there is a lot more pressure on men to make these kinds of sacrifices, because somehow all we get to be are those money machines without any feelings or desire to to anything else.

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6 hours ago, Jo498 said:

But you don't have a hypothesis either. You only say that there must be some social factor. If I ask which social factors could have changed decisively in the last 10-15 years, nobody has a substantial idea.

The most obvious is the rise and ubiquity of social media.

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1 hour ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Lol thanks. 

 But there is a deeper point that both Pebble and I are making. It isn't just corporate culture, though that's part of it. It is clients. It is acquaintances. It is every time someone remarks when you meet them that not many women do what you do and ask why you do it.  The point we are making is that it isn't just liking the subject or workplac structures. It isn't just getting the training. It is all the other crap you have to put up with and it is exhausting. 

 

I'd be curious to hear women's views in comparable Government positions.  There are roughly twice as many women in SES (Senior Executive Service) positions as there are equity law partners.  Many of these positions are as prestigious or even moreso than their private sector counterpart.  Those women aren't settling for an inferior job (just an inferior pay check).  Why can the Government place women in leadership positions in significantly greater percentages (though not ideal)? The allure of work/life balance and robust affirmative action policies certainly help.  How much of the leadership gap between Government and BigLaw can be attributed to not having to retain clients?  How much of the bias against women in leadership positions is inherent to the law firm vs the client?

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I would guess that some of the reasons behind the drop.

When I went into Engineering, there where a few women before me.   not many percentage wise  but they where held up as examples.   We where told they had to work twice as hard for half the recognition.  but they are respected.  and things are getting better.   Its no longer rare for young women to go into engineering.    (8 women out of 100  seems quite rare to me) and as more of us go into it the better and more accepting it will be.     I was told that the first few women in Engineering where extra special and had super resilience because there was literately no-one like them and they had to lead the way.  but it would not be like that for me.  (and it wasn't   there are other women around in my building doing trade jobs, I just don't work with any I could probably name each one without too much difficulty)

 

however now there is enough of us that we are not a total anonymity,  things have not gotten any better.   Yes there is diffidence in attitude between the people who did the apprenticeship with me and younger, than the older trades people.  So in that sense it is getting better as we wait for the old farts to retire.        But its not just the OLD farts.   the biggest problems come from the lower grades, those who did not do the apprenticeship  and general members of the public.      So I guess girls today are hearing far more examples of just how they will be treated by everyone else, and the truth that change will take such a long time.  its really putting them off.   And that despite the push to get more girls into engineering most of us are not sticking to it even if we do take it up.   Change is not happening fast enough to counter the amount of stories out there and with the internet now its so much easier to share these stories with a wide audience.       - When I started I was using dial up,  mobile phones where new and brick sized, with no pay as you go with expensive contracts for very limited talk time.   and no predictive text.    To hear my experiences you would probably need to speak to me directly.

 

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7 hours ago, Jo498 said:

But you don't have a hypothesis either. You only say that there must be some social factor. If I ask which social factors could have changed decisively in the last 10-15 years, nobody has a substantial idea.

I don't have a specific hypothesis, no. But I do have a general idea of what's the most likely area, ie social factors. We agree that it can't be biological factors, so unless this just happened for no reason, we must agree that this was because of social factors. And indeed, you go on to talk about some social factors (eg a reaction to pressure to go into STEM) which I find deeply unconvincing, but are definitely social factors, so...

7 hours ago, Jo498 said:

 In the last ca. 20 years touting STEM for women has been *everywhere*? Could it be that this was overdone and some people refuse to be talked into something they do not feel inclined towards.

You're not actually answering the question here, just reformulating it. Why would fewer women feel inclined towards STEM subjects than men?

7 hours ago, Jo498 said:

Again, I think that Datepalm has a very good point here. These are not a hugely attractive subjects for many people. So I think another factor might be that there are now subjects like "web design" or communications degrees focussing on new media that did not even exist in the mid 1990s and maybe of the 5000 potential CS persons quite a few went into such subjects.

If true, then stats for these subjects should show disproportionately high numbers of female students. I don't have access to such figures but I'm going to bet they don't.

And again, this is simply a reformulation. Why would there be a difference between men and women in how congenial they find the idea of studying communications or web design, instead of 'harder' CS subjects?

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2 hours ago, Alarich II said:

I didn't mean it as a personal reflection. But the deeper point I was trying to make is that to get to the top in these kind of firms, you have to sacrifice a lot in terms of family-time, personal relationships and swallowing crap. I mean, who in his right mind enjoys socializing with dumb fratboy clients and sucking up to psycho bosses and work on weekends while your wife is pregnant at home etc.

Unfortunately, there is a lot more pressure on men to make these kinds of sacrifices, because somehow all we get to be are those money machines without any feelings or desire to to anything else.

I think this applies a lot more to gender imbalance in big law than CS, but it's definitely worth considering that gender conditioning for men could be just as influential as gender conditioning for women in contributing to gender imbalance in the highest pay/prestige jobs.  There does seem to be a cultural expectation for men to be providers and to compete successfully.  This has softened since that huge increase in women's labor force participation since the 1970s, but it still seems to persist.  It's especially noticeable in assortative mating: highly educated & ambitious women tend to marry similar men, but if kids or career relocation eventually require them to prioritize one career then it's still more likely to be the man's and then the woman is knocked off the direct path to the top.  

Men don't necessarily want to work longer hours, have more stress and see less of their kids but competition usually makes it more valuable for the couple to have one member pursuing their career at full speed than for both to take an equal step back.  Comp increases in a non-linear fashion near the top.  I've heard several female colleagues over the years wish for a wife at home because married male colleagues can work longer hours and make more business trips with that kind of support at home. 

Perhaps highly educated and ambitious women should instead be marrying less ambitious men who would be content to compromise their career, but so far that tends to increase marital strife because the men struggle with the reversal of the gender norm. 

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4 hours ago, mormont said:

If true, then stats for these subjects should show disproportionately high numbers of female students. I don't have access to such figures but I'm going to bet they don't.

This can easily be remedied.

http://ladiesthatux.com/do-men-really-dominate-the-field-of-ux/

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/gender-disparities-in-the-design-field/

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12088/full

There are a number of possible explanations given in these articles. One of them is the fact that even when IT is used for communication, there are still technical skills to be mastered (bringing us back to the interest in programming). Another is the fact that the internet is not female-friendly (an interesting hypothesis).
Of course, the elephant in the room is "the social expectations and stereotypes about what is appropriate for both genders."

4 hours ago, mormont said:

And again, this is simply a reformulation. Why would there be a difference between men and women in how congenial they find the idea of studying communications or web design, instead of 'harder' CS subjects?

There are different levels of "social factors" imho.
On the one hand there is the problem of social expectations and stereotypes. We all know that women are discouraged from pursuing careers linked to mathematics because of these.
On the other hand it's still possible that even without the pressure of social expectations, women still have some reasons for disliking computers or programming. There would still be social factors at work, but on a slightly different and more subtle level.

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On 2017-06-23 at 4:03 PM, Datepalm said:

Could it be that engineering is just boring?

Because clearly the gender gap is closing fast (or reversed) in a few prestigious and traditionally male dominated fields, like law and medicine, but STEM is holding out. This is a bit of a random hypothesis and I wouldn't defend it particularly strongly unless I could find some data, but going into STEM and particularly CS could appear a very workmanlike career choice at this point. To me at least, if I was going to make a decision, somewhere in my late teens, that I'm going to be a career-oriented woman and push into male fields, I'd pick an exciting one - like, say, law or medicine. Being a programmer (again, at least to me) seems both difficult AND uninteresting.

This was my thought aswell.

Another thing though, this repeated idea that there isn't enough female students that are smart enough for STEM/CS seems really misguided. The top performers at my school are girls, year in and year out, that the STEM/CS jobs go to their somewhat mediocre male peers should tell you something about the *lost* potential.

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I work for an IT company (about 700 employees worldwide), and over the past few years we've been making a big push in the last few years to make sure we're hiring a diverse set of employees. There's been a lot of discussion internally about the structural issues in the industry as a whole and how we can work past them. Until recently there was a feeling that the pipeline meant there just weren't enough qualified women and minorities, and that as a result we couldn't really do much better than we were doing, but after the company started analysing the recruitment breakdowns we realised that wasn't quite true and took some steps to change that (things like improved training for interviewers, subtle tweaks to the marketing literature, that sort of thing). It has worked pretty well! Over the past few years the new hires have been noticeably more diverse. I've noticed a few interesting things about the process:

  • The younger generation of new hires are much more proactive about raising diversity issues and fostering discussion. In part I think this is because they can see that there is a willingness to actually listen to their concerns, but also possibly because this is an area that young people (women in particular) are much more clued in to.
  • The older women I've talked to in the company say that as a result of the increased focus on diversity and gender issues, they're much less willing to put up with little things that they previously would have just ignored (eg. emails to the whole team addressing them as 'gents').
  • Despite the better balance in new hires, because the company has pretty low turnover the vast majority of the software engineering part of the company is still very stereotypical - white males with university degrees. That's unlikely to change any time soon, so there's still going to be a majority/minority paradigm going on.

As a result of all this, we quite often end up having interesting discussions on topics like this one. A few articles that I've ended up seeing as a result that feel particularly relevant to the discussion:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/programmer_privilege_as_an_asian_male_computer_science_major_everyone_gave.html

This article focuses on the idea of how subtle differences in people's expectations can end up having big differences in terms of final outcomes. Particularly in a field like software, there's a huge benefit in being given the time and opportunity to 'fake it til you make it'. People who don't look like 'proper coders' often aren't given this, and I think this could explain a lot of the gender gap in areas like software. It's an effect that starts at an early age and tends to build up over time, which seems to fit the data pretty well.

https://medium.com/@nickyknacks/working-while-female-59a5de3ad266

Two co-workers did an experiment where the man signed emails with the woman's name and visa versa. Mirroring the experiences of some of the women who have posted on this thread, they found that signing your emails as a woman made their job significantly more difficult when interacting with customers.

ST

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On 2017-06-23 at 9:37 AM, Happy Ent said:

One perspective that I find eye-opening and depressing is that the problem becomes larger, the more feminist a society becomes. The ultra-feminist Scandinavian societies have even more of a problem than the US. Societies that put a lot of values on individual self-actualistation and self-expression, and give large individual economic freedom to women, have very few women in CS.

Crudely put, women’s liberation is well measured by their absence from CS educations.

This confuses me.

Nah, this conflates a couple of things.

Firstly, it conflates being equal in practicality with being culturally equal. If the Scandinavian societies was this ultra-feminist bastion, then we'd see it reflected all across society, i.e. in that men are more often becoming nurses and women programmers, in that our culture consumption (TV, magazines, movies, fashion etc) would become significantly more feminist (go into any retail store and check the kiddie clothes section and tell me it wasn't more unisex some 25 years ago), it would mean significantly lower rates of sexual assault/rape than other Western countries, etc etc and these things? Just aren't happening. Instead we are SUPER busy patting ourselves on the back for being ultra-feminist. Good going, us. We are great at telling ourselves how great we are. Heh.

Secondly, lets have a look at what happens to women who show interest in computers, tech etc. and actually do things like venture out on the internet to hang out with the boys in the gaming, tech etc. places. HEAPS of abuse, cyberstalking, gamer gate etc. Mmmm, nope, not spotting any reason why women would go "Actually, I'm not sure hanging out with engineers all day long and then in my spare time would be a constructive use of my time". As I hate life, I have done this a lot, but it's...effort. 

Thirdly, in a social context, women hang out with other women, and from a peer pressure perspective, it is FAR easier to get some understanding for wanting to become a doctor, a biologist or a lawyer than a computer scientist. Becoming an engineer is often perceived as being "really boring" by many, and it includes "a lot of maths" which women are told over and over again that we are bad at. Spatial reasoning, maths? Why, women are bad at it, according to pop-sci. While our lady brains may be smaller and more deficient, we can also read, and comprehend, and since evopsych tells us we suck at this, why go against the flow? In other areas, we are told we aren't deficient. Not to mention teachers often undervalue women's capability, so the thesis that women just aren't that clever gets enhanced through this bias.

Fourthly, since men still aren't stepping in to become preschool teachers, nurses and care workers, women fill the roles. Feminism in so far at it deals with "women becoming equal to men" i.e. stepping into male jobs, is one thing, but it hasn't taken into account that men in that case needs to step into women's jobs.

Fifthly (is this even a word?) if women then succeed in academia, you have other issues rearing their ugly heads. But we're equal, right, right? Ultra-feminist bastion, was it? Cool.

I mean, I am sure there are other reasons too, but this is off the top of my head.

 

EDIT: I mean speaking for myself, anecdotally, after some 15 odd years in IT-related fields, in both private and public sector, I think things have definitely become better, undoubtedly so. Personally, the only thing that really offends me often is that as a woman employee, it is clear to me my conclusions are far more likely to end up in the "we need a second opinion [from a man]" category than if it came from directly from a man. Now, this has also got better, since in my late 20s, I hate to present them via a man (as in, I'd give them to a co-worker who knew what was going on, and he'd present them to the project), while now I can generally push things through easier. On the other hand I am also both older and a freaking ENTJ so I am not that easy to overlook. Without my pushiness I think I would very easily have dropped out and done something else that took less effort, tbh, but I am a dumbass and more stubborn than a mule.

 

EDIT2: Work experience also from two countries, the UK and the Feminist IKEA-land Bastion of ABBA.

 

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On 25/06/2017 at 1:23 AM, Kalbear said:

The most obvious is the rise and ubiquity of social media.

Lyanna already named dropped it, but I would be shocked if gamer  gate hasn't had a drastically chilling effect on the rate of women going into CS. I'm really struggling to see how "push uphill against sexism from your peers, from your teachers only to enter a work force where your achievements are belittled, you are not taken seriously and you'll face significant amount of gender based harassment that your peers will gaslight you by insisting doesn't happen" is hard to understand as a huge deterrent. As more women are open about having these issues, it puts even more women off wasting their time trying to push into this in the first place. It permeates every single level of CS and for most women the small amount of additional money they can make relative to a different career just doesn't justify the depressing impact it will have on their emotional well being.

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Ly, good post. Thanks for taking this seriously.

Many of the issues you raise have nothing to do with CS. (1, 4, 5.) Since we are seeing very different patterns in, say, law, or medical professions, or the clergy, than in CS, it would be surprising if the very general (though highly plausible) explanations you mention in 1,4,5 had much explanatory value. (They’d explain the absence in Law just as they’d explain the absence in CS. But women completely dominate law. This is not a good sign for the quality of those arguments.)

The CS-specific arguments are more interesting, you summarise them well, and I take them very seriously. (Books have been written about this, countless conferences held, etc.) I find it difficult to disentangle them from attitude and aptitude, but this may be a bias.

Here’s an interesting aspect: CS, in contrast to almost every other profession and science, gives a road to mastery that is entirely alone and anonymous (namely: sit your ass down, learn to program, engage with the open source community, hack the linux kernel for 5 years. Now you’re golden and can have any job you want.) This road to mastery is followed by many, many men, a significant fraction of software developers has no formal education. They are self-thought and un-certified.

If, indeed, structural or social aspects should have strong explanatory value, then we’d expect relatively more women to follow this path than women who go the certified way (go so school, get a degree). But we aren’t seeing that at all. If anything, women seem to be much less inclined than men to avoid the social environment that is said to hold them back. This seems very strange. If women shared the attitudes and aptitudes of men, yet are held back by social structures or a special sensitivity to social cues, then CS should be single most female-friendly road to happiness. Imagine if you could become a practicing doctor, bishop, or judge without getting any of the respective degrees! But in tech, this is exactly what you can do! Uniquely. And you could find a coding job with minimal social interaction.

You can live most of your professional life pretend you’re a pasty, overweight white male with bad eyesight, or some other group that you find is never made fun of. Harassment-free life awaits! 

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I think you vastly overestimate the amount of people that can self-learn in that way, and the amount of companies that will hire based on that same self-learning. That might have been true a while back, but unless you're shit hot that's not how you'll get in the front door of any company - and that is especially true for women, who are already shown to not do that.

Plus I think you're underestimating the barrier to entry of that self-learning. How many women get a computer, or are even encouraged to get one when they're growing up? When a woman logs in to talk with the open source community, how many of them are going to be immediately talking about misogynistic stuff right off the bat - either assuming you're a man and thus 'with it' or finding out that you're a woman and then harassing? 

Mostly, the number of humans in general who are capable of self-directed learning to the point where they're actually very competent is pretty small, period, and might be linked to testosterone or autism. That said, the days of highly functioning autistic people dominating code environments is not as big a deal as it once was. 

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53 minutes ago, Happy Ent said:

Ly, good post. Thanks for taking this seriously.

Many of the issues you raise have nothing to do with CS. (1, 4, 5.) Since we are seeing very different patterns in, say, law, or medical professions, or the clergy, than in CS, it would be surprising if the very general (though highly plausible) explanations you mention in 1,4,5 had much explanatory value. (They’d explain the absence in Law just as they’d explain the absence in CS. But women completely dominate law. This is not a good sign for the quality of those arguments.)

The CS-specific arguments are more interesting, you summarise them well, and I take them very seriously. (Books have been written about this, countless conferences held, etc.) I find it difficult to disentangle them from attitude and aptitude, but this may be a bias.

Here’s an interesting aspect: CS, in contrast to almost every other profession and science, gives a road to mastery that is entirely alone and anonymous (namely: sit your ass down, learn to program, engage with the open source community, hack the linux kernel for 5 years. Now you’re golden and can have any job you want.) This road to mastery is followed by many, many men, a significant fraction of software developers has no formal education. They are self-thought and un-certified.

If, indeed, structural or social aspects should have strong explanatory value, then we’d expect relatively more women to follow this path than women who go the certified way (go so school, get a degree). But we aren’t seeing that at all. If anything, women seem to be much less inclined than men to avoid the social environment that is said to hold them back. This seems very strange. If women shared the attitudes and aptitudes of men, yet are held back by social structures or a special sensitivity to social cues, then CS should be single most female-friendly road to happiness. Imagine if you could become a practicing doctor, bishop, or judge without getting any of the respective degrees! But in tech, this is exactly what you can do! Uniquely. And you could find a coding job with minimal social interaction.

You can live most of your professional life pretend you’re a pasty, overweight white male with bad eyesight, or some other group that you find is never made fun of. Harassment-free life awaits! 

Well, I'm not sure that is the case.  The woman has to get the job in the first case, and I wonder how seriously the application for the job by Jane Doe (uncertified, but self-taught) gets.  That is, to have success in the arena, women may feel like they need the official certification, otherwise their abilities would not be recognized in the first place.

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7 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Well, I'm not sure that is the case.  The woman has to get the job in the first case, and I wonder how seriously the application for the job by Jane Doe (uncertified, but self-taught) gets.  That is, to have success in the arena, women may feel like they need the official certification, otherwise their abilities would not be recognized in the first place.

Yeah; I know at my work that most of the 'self taught' people don't even get in the front door, nor is MS actively looking for them in any reasonable way. You might get through if you have a long successful career elsewhere, but otherwise? No dice.

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All the reasons women are avoiding / disinterested in STEM have already been highlighted here.  My PERSONAL addition as an educator in such fields is about critical mass.

At my school, we have a 60% minority population.  It is STILL not unusual to have one woman student in each class of 25 Calculus based physics course.  That one student is a minority about 60% of the time.  In years that we have 3 / 25 women in the course, one will complete.  ONE.  Every time they get to be "the girl".  This just sucks.

I am having a hard time as a role model telling them how great it is to go work as an engineer.  At best, I try to coerce them into science.  This sucks.  This sucks for them because it makes me a shit role model.

They often come talk to me because of their experiences in group projects.  100% of them have complained about bullshit dismissal in their lab courses in Engineering.  The worst thing is that nothing is done about it.  These courses are expected to be a reflection of "real life" and sadly, they are.  Until critical mass is reached for women in these fields, women are going to deal with an exhausting uphill slog and it ISN"T WORTH IT.

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14 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

Here’s an interesting aspect: CS, in contrast to almost every other profession and science, gives a road to mastery that is entirely alone and anonymous (namely: sit your ass down, learn to program, engage with the open source community, hack the linux kernel for 5 years. Now you’re golden and can have any job you want.) This road to mastery is followed by many, many men, a significant fraction of software developers has no formal education. They are self-thought and un-certified.

If, indeed, structural or social aspects should have strong explanatory value, then we’d expect relatively more women to follow this path than women who go the certified way (go so school, get a degree). But we aren’t seeing that at all. If anything, women seem to be much less inclined than men to avoid the social environment that is said to hold them back. This seems very strange. If women shared the attitudes and aptitudes of men, yet are held back by social structures or a special sensitivity to social cues, then CS should be single most female-friendly road to happiness. Imagine if you could become a practicing doctor, bishop, or judge without getting any of the respective degrees! But in tech, this is exactly what you can do! Uniquely. And you could find a coding job with minimal social interaction.

You can live most of your professional life pretend you’re a pasty, overweight white male with bad eyesight, or some other group that you find is never made fun of. Harassment-free life awaits! 

Eh, I disagree with this. While there are *some* who are certainly self taught, even in my local geschäft where formal education is EXTREMELY rare (GIS programmers) you will find that the people who go into Open Source are generally already engineers, have a science related education, or are researchers in climate/geology etc. And sure, there ARE women here too, but then they also have similar backgrounds.

If you are a tech luddite, you are NOT going to sit down on a bench and just teach yourself enough to get a coding job.

In addition to this, since you are pointing out this is a "lonely" environment, should you have got over the first hurdles, started up Open Source, then as a woman, you generally have more social obligations, women are rarely as socially isolated as the "geek men" since it is simply not the Done Thing. Not to mention should you try and combine this, from a middle class/working class environment, as a woman, and try and tell your friends you spend 20 hrs a week learning Open Source programming, 90% of them would think you mad or worse, deluded. In fact, one of my good friends in high school (daughter of a lorry driver and the school kitchen assistant) went to Uni to study physics and math (and this isnt even "computers" but something that could, theoretically, mean she could become a teacher, even tho she ended up as environmental engineer at Volvo) and her parents and relatives had ENORMOUS issues with this. It took them YEARS to accept that she'd go for something so unfeminine and not a real job, and why didn't she do something proper, like become a nurse. Our Math/Phycics teacher told her "I dont think that is a good idea, you are probably not clever enough for Maths". Had she decided to spend hours and hours in her room learning programming? That would have been completely unacceptable.

Things are likely somewhat better today, but why fight and uphill battle when you can have smooth sailing? Nobody will question your sanity if you are both a woman and studying to become a lawyer. But a computer programmer? With peers almost only weird introverted men with no fashion sense who might also overlap with Gamer Gaters? If women do this, it is *despite* the uphill slog.

As for the woman self taught programmer getting through the door? Kalbear nailed it. She will be places dead last, after male programmers with education, female programmers with education and self taught female programmers. The most insidious form of sexism I still encounter in the workplace is exactly this: the subtle devaluation of my abilities, that I get questioned more than male co-workers on similar issues, that a second opinion must be found when I recommend a solution. In almost all cases, this is unconscious behaviour, and I imagine, would be denied had I pointed it out. Yet it is there all the same.

Regarding pretending to be a man, no thanks. I want to be able to be me, without being ashamed of being female. I do not want to hide the fact that I am a woman. I shouldn't have to, and it shouldn't be a perk that I *can*. If I was gay, should it be a perk to "pass" as straight? In other types of jobs hiding that you are a woman isn't even something that would enter people's minds. If it offers similar money then why wouldn't women pick that type of career instead?

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16 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I think you vastly overestimate the amount of people that can self-learn in that way, and the amount of companies that will hire based on that same self-learning.

I made no claim about any volumes.

I merely claim that Ly’s model (which I largely share) predicts a trend for women to be more active in the Open Source community than outside of it. But we’re seeing the opposite

What we need to explain is the underrepresentation of women even in the unique areas where the arguments from social cues, workplace culture, self-image, etc. are as irrelevant as they can be in any profession. There is nothing like this: no self-thaught lawyers, doctors, priests. But we observe the opposite phenomenon: Woman are even less likely to engage in tech exactly in settings that maximally (but not perfectly) avoid the most powerful explanation of their absence. 

(On the other hand, women do spectacular work in fanfiction. So an explanation that pretends to address their perceived inability to interact with the open-source community, or just editing bloody Wikipedia, must avoid being used to falsely explain their absence from fanfiction.net.) 

I think this is a mystery. I’d like to understand it better.

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2 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

Regarding pretending to be a man, no thanks. I want to be able to be me, without being ashamed of being female. I do not want to hide the fact that I am a woman. I shouldn't have to, and it shouldn't be a perk that I *can*.

I should have flagged my sarcasm. My point was that nobody wants to be a software developer. It is a socially ostracised group, made fun of on an industrial scale. Belonging to this group is unattractive, no matter your chromosomes.  

(However, it is possible that your chromosomes determine how much weight you attach to group membership. So while both sexes are disincentivized by the prospect of belonging to that group, they may react to that marker with different strength. Morlock/Eloi etc.)

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