I think this sort of affirmative approach is going to become more common as tech is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable.
Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession.
I am 31 years old. When I went to college in 1999, jobs which were considered to be high-status and high-pay: medical doctor, lawyer, engineer (I almost hesitate to include it because American society doesn't bludgeon you with the "engineers are all rich" meme like it does with doctors and lawyers.
Computer programmer is not one of them. In fact, we were constantly being told by the media that the future for programmers was bleak due to outsourcing.
The point I am making is that medical school and law school are viewed societally as risk-free, guaranteed paths to wealth. This is of course turning out to be a myth for law school. They are huge magnets for smart people who are following the standard path of university to job.
The "not enough women in tech" concept never took off until tech became consistently viewed as a high-status job. The vast majority of construction workers and mechanics are men, but you don't see a huge societal uproar about it. This is because these positions are low status in our society.
I can't find a male teacher in my son's elementary school, and yet a highly talented male teacher I know was turned down for a position at his school which was given to a young woman. While this issue (including the self-reinforcing feedback loop that deters men from becoming elementary teachers) has been well documented and discussed in niche circles, its not something that graces the cover of newspapers and magazines like the women in tech issue does.
Now that tech is a high status job, instead of just a high pay job, this will correct itself just like it did for law firms and medical practices.
I can tell you this: anyone who thinks that artificially shrinking the pool of experts which you can pick to speak at a conference won't affect the quality of the presentations is deluding themselves.
I can tell you this: anyone who thinks that artificially shrinking the pool of experts which you can pick to speak at a conference won't affect the quality of the presentations is deluding themselves.
Whether this is true or not, the parent commenter is right - quotas seem to be the direction that Westernized societies are heading for in the 21st century. I remember last year reading that the European Commission put forth a proposal requiring that publicly traded companies must have 40% of their non-executive board posts filled by women by 2020 [1]. Whether that ends up getting approved or not, it seems like a bellwether for how these issues are going to be framed.
IMO, legal risk surrounding hiring is THE reason consulting is growing so huge, so fast (in the U.S. at least). Even if the government were to foist quotas on everyone, hiring consultants instead of employees provides a way around it.
Nobody may be thinking twice about the head of internal medicine being a woman. But they do about just regular physicians.
> We find that the median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been
financially better off becoming a physician assistant. This result is partially due to a gender-wage gap in medicine. However, it is mostly driven by the fact that the median female physician simply doesn’t work enough hours to amortize her upfront investment in medical school.[1]
Banking is more overtly sexist but banks have policies to hire women so you have more women in "front-line" roles. 14% of partners at Goldman Sachs are women. In which tech company are 14% of executives in technical roles (not HR or marketing) women?
I currently work in the UK Medical Careers Research Group at Oxford University. [edit: this post isn't an official communication from our group!]
To give a UK perspective, what our research has found is that, in general, female doctors are only disadvantaged in their career (in terms of career progression and so on) when they have periods out for maternity leave and work part-time for childcare reasons. And then, they are only disadvantaged to a similar level as male doctors who took time out or work part-time for the same or different reasons.
In medicine, in the UK at least, there is a lot greater gender parity than there is in the Tech industry (which being a programmer I also am part of).
This conference looks really interesting, aside from the gender issues, and it's happening right here in Oxford. Its a shame I don't have funding to attend conferences, academia can be very fickle like that!
We might ask why it is still broadly assumed and expected that women will scale back their career hours so much more than men within a given profession. To suggest instead that women doctors should have become medical assistants is astonishingly blinkered.
The study doesn't assume that women will scale back their hours. They use data which shows it. Suggesting that female doctors should have been medical assistants is merely the result of the fact that they would have made more money (i.e., income - cost of education) if they did.
I did read the study. My question is: why do women still take a lot more time off their careers for childcare than men? Presumably most of the children that a woman doctor is missing work to look after also have fathers: why are fathers not taking more responsibility to raise their children?
Most of the time the fathers are taking responsibility. They typically provide income while the mother takes care of the children. Or perhaps you are asking why individual couples choose this particular breakdown of responsibility?
I'm asking why the prevailing pattern in North American couples is for the mother to give up years of career advancement to provide direct child care while the father continues to work, earning more money and a higher income.
You're still begging the question. Shall I jump on the regress treadmill with you and ask why women have a "comparative advantage" with respect to caring for their children? I suspect you'd like us eventually to land on some innate, hard-coded difference between men and women that makes women's relative absence in tech and under-representation in pay and seniority in other industries okay, but that's bullshit.
Men are every bit as capable of looking after children as women, and it is a convenient insult to men to suggest otherwise: convenient because it just happens to uphold the gender imbalance that leaves men in much more powerful positions, relatively speaking, than women.
I don't know why, I haven't looked at the topic in detail. I just suggest comparative advantage because it is generally a good answer as to why two parties mutually agree to some particular economic arrangement.
I don't actually subscribe to collectivist moral theories that declare it somehow wrong when members of different groups are statistically more likely to make different choices. In fact, I believe most of the collectivist theories that do ascribe morality to statistics of this nature are not even well formed.
There are enormous social pressures involved. Families and child rearing are deeply tied up in culture and history. Pretending that it's just parties mutually agreeing to a particular arrangement based on comparative advantage ignores the evidence plainly in front of your face in order to preserve some idealistic theory.
Between my wife and I, there is no comparative advantage when it comes to child rearing. We're attorneys, we both work at big firms, we make similar incomes (hence have similar opportunity costs), neither of us is any better with the kid than the other (thanks to the magic of modern technology, like infant formula). Yet from the moment she got pregnant, the pressure was on my wife to be the primary caregiver. People talked about what a shame it was that she was a busy professional and the baby had to spend all day in daycare (nobody ever said anything similar about my job). People will say things like "she needs her mom" when the baby cries (no: she's either hungry or bored or needs to be changed). When we stroll around in winter with the baby without putting a hat on her, busybodies never tell me to put a hat on the baby, always my wife.
If you're a woman and you have a baby, the deck is totally stacked against you from the minute you get pregnant.
My wife took only 5 months mat leave. I took the other 7. People were generally envious and supportive of me, at least publicly.
My wife, on the other hand, got to hear all the negativity. People treating her as heartless for going back to work and "leaving" a 5-month-old, and being deeply suspicious of "trusting her husband with the kids", which kinda turns my stomache.
Honestly, most folks are pretty positive about it, but it only takes a few throwbacks to make you feel disgusting.
When my children were quite young, I used to bristle when people who knew me would see me out with my baby or toddler and ask, "Oh, are you babysitting?"
A family is not merely or even principally an "economic arrangement". This reductionism of a complex biological, social and cultural arrangement to abstract economic principles is pretty much guaranteed to lead you to clean, rational conclusions that entirely miss the point of what you're trying to reason about. You end up talking about people and their experiences as if they are instances in a multi-agent system.
I can't help but wonder how this guy would go about to fix the lack of white people using public transportation. Reserve special seats in the front of the bus? It's discrimination all the same even though it's well meant.
Please stop portraying the lack of female programmers as a problem caused by males while it's a problem that women just choose to not do it. From what I have seen most United States tech companies are exceptionally welcome to people from all different kinds of backgrounds. All women I ever met were that worked as a programmer or related (UI, QA, etc) always treated with respect. If you're female and you are an awesome programmer you will notice that you have a big advantage in this industry.
Many "women choose not to do it," because of sexist environments composed primarily of men who repeatedly tell them not to be progammers . So, sure, the problem is women choosing not to be programmers, but that's not the underlying cause.
The first-hand experiences of many women in tech, widely available on public blogs, are directly opposed to your second-hand experience of them. Should we take your word for it, or theirs?
There are probably more blogs about Obama stealing your guns than blogs about women in tech being discriminated, does that mean we are about to enter the Obamacalypse? People blog either about awesome stuff or awful stuff and people behaving normally like expected is nothing to write about.
I fail to see why programmers are of a special fascist pig breed of men that are somehow way more discriminating towards woman than for example lawyers are. Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers.
Modern life is full of hazards for women. I choose to not be one of them but they're everywhere and I'm not denying in any way the impact they can have on women. Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other areas they don't feel intimidated.
I had a female boss once and a female programmer colleague and I never ever felt a single bit disrespect towards them because of their gender. Should I start a blog about that? "Today I accepted a suggestion about how to refactor my code from my female coworker and it totally felt like the most normal thing in the world".
> Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers.
> Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other areas they don't feel intimidated.
We're in agreement that it's the programmers who are the problem, and not just "women choosing not to do it," then?
I guess you're trying to attack the validity/veracity/relevance of blog posts in general? That's an interesting discussion to have on its own, but I'm not entirely sure what your first and last paragraphs have to do with the question I posed before:
Women say they are discriminated against, but you haven't seen any of that in your personal experience. That's great, but it's not logically sound to generalize your experience to the entire industry when there's a mountain of evidence to the contrary. So should we believe women who have first hand experience with discrimination, or your second hand account of it?
Unless you have solid proof that male programmers are more machist than male surgeons, male lawyers or male financial experts, all fields that have seen a major influx of women in the past decades, we are in agreement that that is definitely not the thing that keeps women away from becoming programmers.
I am not saying nothing bad in that respect ever happened to a woman in the tech industry, I am saying that the tech industry is not an example of a hostile place to women that prevents them to be successful or accepted.
Amen. Furthermore, if diversity in thought is the goal, surely diversity across nationality and even age produces the greater aggregate effect, no? I.e., if the starting point of discussion were only ever how best to increase diversity of thought, one would undoubtedly expect nationality/age to come up more frequently than they do, compared to gender. It's almost as if certain parties are feigning genuine inquiry while merely paying hollow lip service. But what could their motivation possibly be?
>Tickets for All Your Base are on sale now, and we look forward to seeing you in October.
Given the record of industries that have reformed to include more women, I would not bet on there being very many "naturally male" businesses. Especially not ones that have a lot of sitting and typing involved.
If your use of the word 'compelling' is in reference to the contents of that link, well, I just could not disagree more. a) Surveys are shit - they're as far removed from double-blind as you can get, and b) the framing of cause and effect is highly opinionated, e.g.: "Having just one female director on the board cuts the risk of bankruptcy by 20%" -- superior feminine corporate guidance or well-documented feminine avoidance of risk(y companies, e.g. startups, for whom bankruptcy, statistically, is the expectation)?
Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced performance? MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives?
Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge. Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
> Where has adding women to a previous male bastion caused reduced performance? MDs? Parliamentarians? Senior corporate executives?
I made no positive claims, only negative ones.
>Imagine if we had had ibankers who stopped to think "Maybe CDSs are a bullshit kind of insurance, but with inadequate capital, so the first black swan that poops on a big CDS position is going to blow up the planet."
Doing my best to refrain from username-dropping here. If an iterated game rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of strategy s is inevitable. Don't hate the player.
>Men have a tendency to bullshit their way past lack of knowledge.
I will assume you're referring to Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen here. ;)
But seriously, human beings, lacking omniscience, require strategies to work around their blind spots and keep moving forward. When/if we're lucky enough to be cognizant of our own ignorance, we can either notify the others in the room or we can not - both are real options; neither strategy is universally dominant. Obviously, I'm being nice; it is called 'bullshitting'. But if you have a nose for it, then who's to blame for letting it affect you?
> If an iterated game rewards some strategy s, then the eventual adoption of strategy s is inevitable. Don't hate the player.
When the players are also the people that spent considerable effort getting the rules of the game rewritten in a way that end up causing it to reward the strategy (replacing rules that had been put into place precisely to prevent the kind of collapse that happened after the rule change, after another instance of the same type of collapse), I'm not sure the "don't hate the player" argument applies.
> But seriously, human beings, lacking omniscience, require strategies to work around their blind spots and keep moving forward.
That' a very benign interpretation of what happened, and one that is naive of the nature of financial regulation. Specifically, you can't just rename "insurance" to "derivatives contract that pays out like insurance but with unregulated capital requirements (and please ignore the word 'insurance' - it has consequences)" and expect to get away with it.
Regulations are written to apply to everything that behaves like the regulated product. The people writing CDS knew exactly what they were doing. They just assumed they were so smart they would not be left holding the bag. Which is what everyone participating in a fraudulent scheme thinks.
The highlighted section was not in reference to 2008. It was in defense of masculine bullshitting, which has its time and place just like everything else. Especially at poker tables.
Who buys CDS? Mom and Pop? If a used car salesman sells Grandma a lemon, that's not nice. Unless Grandma is also a used car salesman.
You implied that genders are represented equally in all fields of study, but that certainly wasn't true in my education (CS + EE). So assuming a bell curve of talent, your ideal team would have more men than women.
I agree with the start of the article. The tech industry (and engineering in general) suffer from a distinct lack of women. It's a problem that starts at school and filters all the way through to the top end. It's also a problem that's not getting better particularly quickly - in my mechanical engineering course (graduated 2012) the class was around 12% female. It's a slight improvement on my dad's experience in the late seventies, but not by much.
I also agree that good female role models are important. Selling technology and engineering to girls as a viable route to take is the key to increasing gender equality in the field.
This said, we also need to accept reality. The reality is that the experts in their conference's area are primarily men. Based on my experience, I'd be willing to be that somewhere around 95% of people who work with the database technologies the conference targets are male. Assuming that only a small proportion of people who start working with a particular technology end up being considered "experts" in the area, it's fairly obvious that the pool from which to select women is diminuitive compared to that from which to select men.
My experience of technical presentations is that the level of expertise the person giving the presentation has directly impacts the quality of the presentation. I'd argue that by taking the approach they did singnificantly diminishes the quality of their conference. This isn't unique to gender - if they'd selected based on any under-represented group they'd have a similar outcome.
Promoting female role models in tech is hard. Perhaps a compromise - ensuring female representation was at least a certain proportion - would work. Affirmative action is always a tricky area to deal with, and it is always more complicated than it first seems.
Where is their inclusion of transgender, gender dysphoric, gay, and lesbian speakers? Also, where are all the non-white/asian/indian speakers? I think this is going to require a bigger spreadsheet!
The Tech industry has many male asian speakers, I suspect there is still a strong white-male majority (I can't find any reliable figures) but asian (men) are the other race who seem to be well established in the world of IT .
We do have incredibly talented transgendered speakers:
It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any transgendered men.
I find it interesting that you didn't add black speakers to your list. Our industry has a very notable deficit of anyone from an African, Afro-Carribean & African-American background. Personally I have worked with many more women programmers than I have with black programmers (although I have worked with two very talented black men, both ex-programmers in a senior management role, one military trained). I wonder why?
But you are right. Equality is equality. We'll get there in the end!
> It is notable that both these are transgendered women I don't know of any transgendered men.
Might be because trans men in tech are men and thus "the norm"? Further, maybe most of them weren't in tech or high-profile before transition? Both Tang and Wilson were high-profile before transitioning.
(no evidence or anything, just providing possible working hypothesis).
I am so confused, now. When we speak of a trans[$], is the noun used supposed to be the source-sex or the target-sex? I know it is common courtesy to refer to a person as their current preferred/identified gender, so does that apply to this terminology, too?
That is, a transgender man would not be a man who became a woman, but a woman who is now a man?
Hint: if you leave off the word transgender, it should still describe who they are; Audrey's a woman. Audrey's transgender. Audrey's a transgender woman.
As I understand it (an I may be wrong here) transgender is the movement of gender so you are transgender only when you are in flux. Once you have arrived in your preferred gender you are no longer transgender so would normally be described solely by your new gender but may for reasons of clarity be referred to as transgendered (like I needed to above).
Audrey & Sophie are women. A transgendered man was,usually, once, physically, a woman. A transgendered woman was, usually, once, physically, a man.
I say 'usually' because as society becomes more open about this stuff it is becoming increasingly clear that gender is a sliding scale, not a binary state. A surprisingly large percentage of the population people are born somewhere on the scale between male and female physically (and/or mentally).
Hopefully we'll just get over gender. It's essentially an unhelpful social construct that is too rigid for nature.
Usually, "transgendered" is not preferred by trans* people themselves. It sounds awkward.
For a transgender person, one's gender is always what it is; it's just the body that might need adjustment. Also, it's hard to say when one's "arrived" anyway; there's not really a point when you just say "tada!" and you're all done. It's a very gradual process.
Some trans* people will still rrefer to themselves as trans* even "after" transition (inasmuch as you can pinpoint an 'after') because they internalise that as part of their identity; others don't.
You refer to them by their preferred sex. A transgender man is (usually) female-to-male or FTM, and would be referred to with male pronouns. Using the pronouns of their birth gender is considered rude.
> a transsexual man is a person who was assigned the female sex at birth [but] identifies as a man and is transitioning or has transitioned to a male gender role and has or will have a masculine body.
They're separate components of the person's identity: a transgender man is a man and transgender. From [it is common courtesy to refer to a person as their current preferred/identified gender] it follows that a transgender man is transitioning, has transitioned or will transition to masculinity.
1. Invite straight white male
2. Invite straight white female
3. Invite gay white male
4. Invite gay white female
5. Invite straight black male
6. Invite straight black female
7. Invite gay black male
7. Invite gay black female
etc. etc.
I think the best way to be diverse with genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, is to ignore genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, not to invite male, female, male, female. Simply invite the best speaker, taking into account their sex isn't diverse, even if you do take turns.
Indeed. I can't find anything really interesting about this conference other than a ton of self published links to social media sites (an obvious SEO/media campaign?).
that makes absolutely no sense at all, you should invite the speaker by experience and knowledge and not anything else, the criteria should be technical and not political.
If there was a selection criteria of newbie then you could select women over men more aggressively.
I know a few great female developers but then you have to hope that they have the skills for public speaking.
This needs to be done at the grass roots, not at the top level.
But saying that, any top level female developer should be automatically included. There are some no doubt but they need to turn up.
When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable.
Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession.