Tech Diversity Files

>I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".

FWIW, this is personally my ideal working environment. I can't speak for women in general, and I'm not a moral authority, but this is exactly the kind of treatment I want from my coworkers.

>what should I do to be better?

I don't know, honestly. I know that's an inadequate response, but I'm not sure how to appropriately address ingrained societal sexism either. As far as subconscious bias in hiring goes, having rubrics and standardized interviews goes a long way at eliminating it. I'd theorize that standardized metrics for performance reviews would help on that front, too, though I don't think that's been studied.

If you browse the million and one women in tech posts out there you can see people talking about it at length, though I would be wary of taking somebody's opinion as truth just because they're female, and I would be doubly wary of taking a tech blogger at her word vs an actual female engineer. Your personal set of ethics re: equality of opportunity vs outcome also plays into what you "should do" quite a lot. Some suggestions (like formalized hiring rubrics) are completely valid whether or not you believe in equality of opportunity vs outcome, but others (like instituting diversity quotas in hiring) are not.

This blog post is well cited and worth a read, it has a few good suggestions IMO:…

> I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent.

I don't have too much of a problem with that, it's asking a question you should research first.

It's not that I don't want to talk about it either, I just don't want to explain the basics every time. I'm also not an expert on the issue, many people have much more to say on the matter.

If I could add something to what you've pointed out, I'd divide the reasons into two categories:

1. Why women don't go into IT

2. Why women leave - and boy do they: "Women are more than twice as likely to quit the tech industry as men (41% vs 17%)" per https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/the-real-reason-women-quit-tech-and-how-to-address-it-6dfb606929fd

The second one worries me a lot more. We are talking about women who chose IT, who are trained, who made it. We are talking about a market where jobs and opportunities abound, where you can work from home, move anywhere you want. And yet so many women find this industry unbearable.

From personal experience, I can't contribute much to point 2, as the temptation of leaving is foreign to me, nor do I know women who left. Maybe it's a cultural thing - I live in Europe and while brogrammers exist here, I have no problem finding good and respectful teams. I have worked for startups without staying late and yet got promoted to team leader. I have encountered sexism, but I also have been treated better because of my gender.

I…

I'm asking you to care. Part of caring is doing the least bit of homework on this stuff, on your own. Here are some excerpts from within the first 5 links in that SERP:

-------

> One-hundred-ninety-two women cited discomfort working in environments that felt overtly or implicitly discriminatory as a primary factor in their decision to leave tech. That’s just over a quarter of the women surveyed. Several of them mention discrimination related to their age, race, or sexuality in addition to gender and motherhood.

http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/

--------

> A Harvard Business Review study from 2008 found that as many as 50% of women working in science, engineering and technology will, over time, leave because of hostile work environments.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-women-tech-20150222-story.html

--------

> I first learned to code at age 16, and am now in my 30s. I have a math PhD from Duke. I still remember my pride in a “knight’s tour” algorithm that I wrote in C++ in high school; the awesome mind warp of an interpreter that can interpret itself (a Scheme course my first semester of college); my fascination with numerous types of matrix factorizations in C in grad school; and my excitement about relational databases and web scrapers in my first real job.

> Over a decade after I first learned to program, I still loved algorithms, but felt alienated and depressed by tech culture. While at a company that was a particularly poor culture…

To answer some questions regarding the comments about how these things are different from men to women. They may not be. The reported answers may be the same and related to issues both men and women struggle with.

However, I think theres been some more chatter in the industry trying to get to the bottom of some issues that have come up recently with gender in tech one not so recent and more general. Here's what I mean

1. In the 1980s, for reasons everyone can quantify but noone can understand why, is why women stopped going into computer science in the 1980s: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

Particularly data scientists and computer scientists and economists who are skilled at teasing out data in large and seemingly choatic data sets cannot figure this out, which is ironic considering they are the group in which this gender disparity occurred which such a dramatic and relatively sudden dropoff.

2. On top of the dramatic drop of women in computer science, 41% of the women who do go into tech leave compared to 17% of men: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-in-tech-is-just-a-pipeline-problem-you-haven-t-been-paying-attention-cb7a2073b996#.cuwsh66wd

3. A number of studies have shown that identical job applications, resumes AND VC pitches are evaluated differently based on whether they are labeled with a male or female…

The same people who call attention to gender diversity also speak out for racial diversity. This particular piece focuses on gender because of today's being International Women's Day.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-cant-silicon-valley-solve-its-diversity-problem

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/20/9179853/tech-diversity-scorecard-apple-google-microsoft-facebook-intel-twitter-amazon

https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/thought-on-diversity-part-2-why-diversity-is-difficult-3dfd552fa1f7#.g7677qfr1

take several seats.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/28/why-women-leave-the-tech-industry-at-a-45-higher-rate-than-men/#4f807dd34216

https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/the-real-reason-women-quit-tech-and-how-to-address-it-6dfb606929fd

https://www.cio.com/article/3229355/it-industry/why-are-women-leaving-technology-jobs.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/