Sorry, but we've been through this tedious flamewar so many times that it's plain off topic on HN. This site exists to gratify intellectual curiosity—the polar opposite of drumming on dead horses. Those of you with a passion for nursing diversity need to find some other place to further the cause.
It's really saddening to see that the idea that humans are not a blank slate[1] is considered a "tedious flamewar topic" while articles such the one that started this thread this are not.
Not everything is a product of society and there's a mountain of science to support the fact. It's increasingly politically untenable (at least in the anglosphere) to acknowledge any biological differences between demographic groups, but that's weak reason for shutting down discussion.
The issue here is mostly not ideological [1]. It's about discussions that have been had a thousand times, never lead anywhere new—and therefore are never interesting—and always turn bilious. It's impossible to pull these weeds with full consensus but I'm pretty sure most readers of HN are bored by angry tape loops.
At some point, moderation has to be opinionated or we end up with the brown you get when all the finger paints are smeared together. Except in this case it's brown battery acid, because it's so nasty.
HN can't be for everyone. The reader who wants that type of argument should probably find some other websites.
[1] I'm giving you a "mostly" because yes, everything is ideological—I did go to grad school.
I'm no fan of angry tape loops and prefer a civil, moderated area. It's just powerful actors enforcing their politics, which seems to be getting more popular in every camp these days, is also highly undesirable. If I found that worthwhile that, I'd just stick to Chinese media.
They're not pleased with a majority female program. They're pleased with a half-male / half-female program. They don't want it to be lopsided in either direction because they believe programming as a skill is orthogonal to sex.
I think making computer science assignments and quizzes fun and less intimidating is a very different idea from the extreme of macho nursing.
Your article shows that teachers were making girls feel unwelcome because they didn't understand the cultural in-jokes. There's a big difference between cultural predisposition and predisposition towards a skill. I find it really hard to believe that programming and problem-solving is something men are just generally better at compared to women. If we measure problem-solving ability by IQ, then women are just as capable as men, though it looks like there are more males than females on each side of the spectrum of extraordinarily good at problem-solving and extraordinarily bad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige...
I can believe that. But I would never argue it's orthogonal to interest. I would be fighting a losing battle if I argued men and women have exactly the same interests. IMO a 50/50 split is not going to happen naturally, and it won't be self sustaining. As we've already seen, the way to get closer to 50/50 is to peer pressure women into it. Whoopdee doo. Progress!
The biggest bias women in tech face IMO is impostor syndrome.
> Your article shows that teachers were making girls feel unwelcome because they didn't understand the cultural in-jokes.
I wonder if anywhere has tried running a female-only CS path (e.g. at a private non-coed institution) long enough to generate its own identity/culture, and then what would happen if you "transplanted" some of those teachers and students into a mixed-gender situation.
Could that "prime the pump", providing a cultural anchor point for more females in the mixed-gender place?
I wouldn't call the act of attempting demographic balance in a field 'stubborn'. History often teaches us that differences between groups are contextual rather than intrinsic. When I say contextual I mean they are often for reasons that have to do with specific social forces at work during specific historical periods.
For example, there was a time that software engineering was dominated by females. At the time, software development was considered a feminine task. Should we have concluded, at the time, that females were more inclined toward software development?
Any time a particular group dominates a particular field, we should question ourselves as to why. Because history shows that the reason is usually some form of erroneous preconception. Of course that won't always be true, but it is often true and should be questioned until it is obviously not true.
The benefit of continually questioning particular groups' dominance is obvious: once a particular narrowly conceived field is opened up to more people, the talent pool behind that field will grow.
Never female dominated (at least, in terms of degrees), but there was much less of a gap.
I couldn't find occupational statistics, only academic. I did find a lot of anecdotes about software being a stereotypically female activity, but I couldn't find actual data.
Some people argue that more diverse teams will produce better results but I have yet to see evidence that this happens in Computer Science related tasks.
In addition I remember being taught that you ultimately want teams to "jel" much more than some marginal productivity gain you might get from diversity. Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Notice that I mean this in the limited scope of programming I know there is evidence to the contrary at the management level.
In my opinion, no. It's been my experience that a large portion of programmers are the type to easily lose track of the real goal (delivering a product that generates business value) in favor of relatively unimportant details.
To make this short and blunt: I've watched a pair of mega-nerds geek out for a week, over-engineering and prematurely optimizing an unimportant feature. I've also watched an adult have an absolute emotional meltdown over curly brace placement.
In my opinion, diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.
Gender and race are orthogonal to shortsightedness and nerdiness.
>diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check.
The term diversity by itself has no meaning. One needs to specify how groups of people are split up whenever using the word "diversity". Are we splitting the groups up by race, gender, economic class, technology experiences, etc.?
There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
There's a happy gray area between less c/overt bias/discrimination and promoting people whom aren't qualified/interested to ameliorate guilt of the former.
I'm not particularly interested in gender and race, I'm interested in culture. Gender and race happen to be pretty easy metrics to break up monoculture on a typical programming team.
The term diversity by itself has no meaning.
Yes it does.
There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.
Homogeneous in what sense? It seems likely to me that things like sense of humor and work ethic would be lot more important than maleness when crafting your measure of homogeneity there.
If I tried to apply that logically, it is probably an argument for diversity in the field overall rather than intra-team. There should be more all-women software teams/companies, half-half, etc rather than a domination of all or mostly male teams.
>The American Assembly for Men in Nursing (AAMN) is encouraging men to enroll in nursing school, with a goal of increasing male enrollment in nursing programs to 20% by 2020.
>Recruiters for schools and hospitals are placing targeted ads in publications and on websites that see more male users.
>The Oregon Center for Nursing undertook a recruitment campaign in 2002 titled, “Are You Man Enough to Be a Nurse?” which has recently been the focus of new attention.
I think that's the problem. It seems most of these criteria go along gender, race or sexual preferences lines. Nobody talks about shy people, disabled people, people with the wrong accent, fat people, older people, ugly people and so on. These groups get discriminated a lot against but nobody seems to care.
My company is rated as one of the most diverse companies in the but the diversity ends at race and gender.
I think that the term "diverse" has many definitions. For example, if a gender split at a tech company was 50/50, but everyone was white, would we still consider that company diverse? What is the right definition of "diversity" and which groups (gender vs race vs socio-economic vs ...) should we spend our time working on? You can see how identity politics become problematic very quickly.
Depending on the profession, "diversity" means black people or women. If you are diverse but don't have many women, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. If you are diverse but you don't have enough black people, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring.
Which sports field in the graph below is the most representative of US demographics? Which one would be recognized for achievements in diversity?
because "diversity" means black people, not "representative of America's diversity."
In tech, if your ethnic demographics match the population, you are not diverse. To be diverse you need to hire less white people. Pinterest was not diverse because women were only 27% of tech hires. Ethnically the hires are 60% Asian, white males 35%, but the conclusion was too many white males.
Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences.
Now with "diversity", we have to specify how we split up the population into groups. We can use gender, race, country of origin, income, etc.
The media and general "diversity officers" use race and gender. However, this type of group division is not efficient for the goal of different perspectives and experiences. Female Americans have very similar experiences and perspectives compared to male Americans, as do black Americans and white Americans.
Differences in country of origin provide much higher differences in perspectives and experiences. A black American would have a more similar viewpoint with a white American than a black African immigrant. Dividing the groups by country of origin is MUCH more effective at satisfying the goal.
When viewed through the lense of country of origin, the tech field is very diverse in comparison to every other field out there. The field has a high immigrant %, and even the Americans are generally first generation Americans with immigrant parents, providing an extra boost in diversity.
Ironically, using country of origin to divide up groups shows that tech is much more diverse than fields like journalism/HR/etc. that vehemently advocate for diversity in tech.
If we're going whole hog we also have to include the various drug users and people of differing ages. What if that 18 year old prostitute druggie has a perspective that isn't covered in our scrum standups!
> Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences.
I don't think that's all of it. People have been pitching that as a politically-correct argument for diversity, since "There are actual racists and actual sexists among us and they have successfully biased the industry" is too offensive to say out loud. But diversity of perspective isn't the fundamental reason.
Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.
So, if these candidates truly are qualified and there's no scientific reason why they're statistically worse at the job, why are they being underrepresented? Because we have racists and sexists among us and they're in power.
Which is why it makes sense to look at race and sex and so forth more than other axes like viewpoint or country of origin: first, race and sex are particularly arbitrary, and second, that's what we know people have particularly discriminated on. There is discrimination on other axes, and it's absolutely also worth looking at, but it's a bit less egregious.
>Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.
There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact.
If you want to cry foul on why they are less qualified, citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism.
Sexism, racism and discrimination are useless concepts unless properly and concisely defined before discussion because everyone's definition is different. It is very annoying to have people classify everything as "racism" or "sexism" to lazily avoid the need to justify arguments.
> There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact.
I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified.
> citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism
Sure. But it is the simplest hypothesis; other hypotheses have a higher burden of proof. Serious, straightforward racism and sexism are within living memory; FORTRAN, for instance, is older than Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement. There's good reason to believe sexism and racism could cause the discrepancy we see.
There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.
>I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified.
The question you were answering was "On average, do some races/genders make better tech workers than others?". the answer is, yes some races/genders are more qualified to work in tech than other races/genders because on average, they are more likely to spend the time to become qualified (see college and CS major demographics) and to gain CS knowledge. That is why the tech field skews toward a gender or race over others. Because some races/genders are literally more qualified for tech work than others.
No company is "skipping qualified candidates" because female and underrepresented minorities have not spent the time to become qualified to work in the tech field. They are, on average, literally less qualified to work in the tech field, given their current, average CS and programming knowledge.
>There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.
Denying that sexism/discrimination against minorities is the cause of unequal representation is not the same as saying that the cause is biological differences. Some easy explanations for unequal representation could be society's pressure on men to make money, Asian/White parents' pressure on kids to do well, etc.
Unequal representation is not enough to prove racism/sexism against females and URMs.
> yes some races/genders are more qualified than other races/genders because on average, they are more likely to spend the time to become qualified (see college and CS major demographics). That is why the tech field skews toward a gender or race over others. Because some races/genders are literally more qualified for tech work than others.
OK, sure.
But this article is about fixing the demographics at the college level: figuring out why it is that some races/genders are more likely to become CS majors, and un-skewing that - so that the number of qualified people graduating with a CS degree is no longer biased on some unrelated demographic attribute. Is it not?
That FC article skims past, but doesn't quite touch on a very important point that's very central to the article:
> Silicon Valley companies are going after the same small pool of nonwhite, nonmale candidates
There's a limited pool of female software engineers and of non-white-or-asian software engineers. Universities are only graduating so many women, somewhere around the rate that Pinterest is hiring (~20%), if you hire more than this, you're just making sure that other companies can only have less than 20% women.
The change needs to start at the bottom, there need to be more women doing software engineering at university. You can't just hire all of the existing pool of female software engineers, or black software engineers, and then call yourself diverse, and shame on all the companies that now have only 5% female engineers.
You're overcomplicating things. In the ideal if we erased biases in education and staffing, we'd expect the various distributions we measure across tech companies to match a random sampling of the population at large. When we see large deviations from the population at large, it's a clear signal that something is going on.
This isn't that obscure, and we certainly don't need to engage in a false, hand wringing, semantic debate derailment along the lines of "but what IS diversity REALLY anyway?" Please. You know exactly what we're talking about here.
Your post is an exercise in identity politics as well. Welcome to same bowl the rest of us are in.
My query is more along the lines of how to invest resources to correct large deviations from the population at large and which deviations are more important than others.
For example, HMC is attempting to address diversity, but only along gender lines. There is no attempt to address racial diversity in any means.
Further in very progressive companies like Google and Facebook, Hispanic and Blacks in leadership positions are less than 1%, compared to a US population of 17% and 12% nationwide (respectively).
In these companies, 24% of leadership roles are held by women. That means that with regards to women, they are hitting 48% of their target (if the target is to get a 50/50 gender split). Whereas, with regards to race, they are hitting 5% of their target with Hispanics and 8% with blacks (if the goal is to get close to the population sample at large). So why is that that most "diversity" program only focus on gender? I know that the two aren't mutual exclusive, but it's no secret that far more resources are spent on gender diversity than anything else.
> For example, HMC is attempting to address diversity, but only along gender lines. There is no attempt to address racial diversity in any means.
This particular article is about gender imbalance, but I'm sure HMC has policies and controls that address race as well. I'd be curious about the numbers. I visited there 2 decades ago and it was definitely a very white student population.
>In the ideal if we erased biases in education and staffing, we'd expect the various distributions we measure across tech companies to match a random sampling of the population at large
Has anyone actually proven that, or is that just an assumption?
When it comes to a single tech company, just by the reason of statistics, I can understand how it's hard to worry about diversity because you're basically taking a small N sampling of the distribution. When you're talking about all tech companies as a whole it makes more sense...and similarly, all colleges, or even individual colleges, who tend to enroll a larger sample of the population.
Of course, when we're talking about Google or Facebook, we at big N territory, so if you don't expect biases, the make up should reflect the general population.
I'm having trouble reading that Quartz article as arguing that men and women have intrinsically different interests, and I think you acknowledge that by saying that there are social differences. It doesn't seem like they're arguing that there's anything in Star Trek posters that deters people with certain hormones, but that socially, Star Trek posters convey an association with a closed male culture.
Thing is, this is already social manipulation on arbitrarily-constructed criteria. It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found). But we're arguing that these purely artificial constructs of geeky men bonding over Star Trek are worth upholding. And for what advantage? Keeping qualified people out of an industry that badly needs them?
It seems to me like it's entirely legitimate to plan social manipulation to disrupt existing social manipulation that gets in our way.
Nobody's arguing that geeks shouldn't be geeks. What they're arguing is that collections of geeks shouldn't be allowed to organize their workplaces to only accept geeks, or to prefer geek culture over other cultures.
And, in fact, no true geek has any trouble understanding why this is important. There are so many branches of geekdom that there is (or was) an elaborate geek code that broadcast ones affiliations. There are Star Trek geeks, and there are vampire LARP geeks. The Star Trek geeks are generally not OK with the idea of a clique of vampire LARP geeks refusing to hire anyone who doesn't look like they enjoy Bauhaus.
It's a common trope --- not among geeks, but among chauvinists of varying stripes --- that efforts to reduce discrimination are really thinly veiled attempts to persecute geeks. Don't fall for that. These really are the droids you're looking for.
> It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found).
Given that males and females have vastly different reproductive strategies, the extraordinary claim is that male and female minds don't display the same sexual dimorphism as male and female bodies.
Oh no, I totally believe that the minds exhibit dimorphism. The claim I think is extraordinary is that the dimorphism is correlated with tech thinking, which, for starters, isn't a well-defined term. Is it raw programming ability? (If so, there are lots of reasons to believe that women are more suited to it than men, which were common folklore in the middle of last century when programming was low-status.) Is it project management? Business sense? Insight into emerging industries? The ability to learn new complex systems? The ability to work with other people effectively?
Once you have that, what's the argument that male brains are better at that particular type of thinking? The fact that more men happen to be employed to do this thinking isn't an argument; at best it's initial evidence that would inspire you to create a hypothesis, but it's not the end of the study by any means.
The interpretation that seems most likely to me, but which is unfortunately horribly politically incorrect, is that men are more likely to be territorial assholes about high-status positions in society, and we'll preserve our exclusivity when we have it. This manifests as us being better at $field for any $field because we don't allow women to have a chance to succeed. (We might allow enough of a chance to succeed so we can avoid accusations of sexism, which would risk our exclusivity, but we don't want to go so far that we concede the exclusivity on our own.) At least this hypothesis has the advantage of the known fact that having an aggressive personality is correlated with gender.
This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk.
This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (wood working, model building, car tinkering, etc. being largely male hobbies)
In addition to that, until recently, programming was a pretty high risk career choice. I think most people would not have predicted the sheer quantity of upper middle class careers that now exist in technology. I know when I was in college the received wisdom was that you became a doctor or a lawyer if you wanted a low-risk path to an upper middle class lifestyle. And I think those two professions are much more evenly balanced between males and females as a result.
I'm not sure I buy the tinkering argument. There are types of tinkering that are stereotypically male, but also types that are stereotypically female: see "old wives' remedies," cooking, sewing / knitting, etc.
I buy the risk argument in theory; anecdotally, friends who are women in tech seem to worry a bit more than friends who are men in tech about long-term career stability. But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades. Even when I was very young I remember being aware that Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, and he did programming, and programming was a thing I could learn. And the number of women in tech has been dropping since approximately the time Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.
I think the risk argument could apply well to high-risk tech career decisions, though, of which there are still quite a few like founding startups. But becoming a rank-and-file software engineer at a big corporation has been a low-risk high-reward career choice for a good while.
See, for instance, this graph of the proportion of CS graduates by gender (from ComputerWorld):
> But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades.
We only know that because we have the benefit of hindsight. But for somebody growing up in the 80s, 90s, and 00s outside of Silicon Valley, I don't think that it would have been seen as low risk when they were deciding what career to pursue.
Think about it. The reason software engineering has been a great profession for the last 3 decades is because an unprecedented number of software engineering jobs have been created in that time span. But most of those jobs didn't exist 3 decades ago (or even just one decade ago).
Somebody who can hack it as a software engineer can probably also hack it as a doctor or a lawyer. Choosing software engineering over law or medicine was definitely taking a risk. You probably had to relocate for a job, whereas jobs in law and medicine exist in most of the country. People were making good money as software engineers, but you couldn't be sure that would continue (I mean, there was the crash in 2000).
Again, not in hindsight. In hindsight, it was a reasonable choice, especially since you avoid huge additional schooling costs. But if you were making that decision 10 or 20 years ago, it was definitely taking a risk vs. the established career paths that law or medicine offer.
For every male I know that has strong opinions about IPAs and Overwatch, I know two women that spend their weekends working on things we call "maker projects" when dudes do them, but other things when women do them because women have been doing them forever. Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.
> Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.
Yes, my wife sews and knits. Hence my position that it's not really about raw ability.
I think the entry route to programming has historically had a lot in common with how somebody starts tinkering with machines (cars, appliances, farm equipment, timepieces, etc), despite the fact that programming is about manipulating abstract concepts and tinkering is about manipulating physical machines.
When telling their origin stories, many programmers will start by recounting the first physical computer they owned and how programming was a result of learning how to manipulate that machine. To me, it sounds an awful lot like how car guys talk about their first cars.
Is anyone not going to bring up Star fucking Trek is that beautiful fantastical future where women and men are equal in almost every respect, and humans all band together as a single race? Star Trek is a globalist/liberal's wet dream. Even TOS which had Captain Pike mumbling about "women on the bridge" was diverse for the 60's not just in representation of women but minorities, and clearly TNG was everything most of the SJ crowd would hope for.
