John Carmack's "we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn’t matter what they look like." is pretty much all you need to say, over and over, until they give up.
There are two problems w/ 'white male' dominated engineering fields (really, male, unless you insist on the slander that asian+indian are 'honorary white'). One is optical. It just looks bad to shallow thinkers who don't care to pause to find out what the pool of able+willing workers looks like.
The other is that techies are too insecure about their value and virtue; they're inclined to actually respond in good faith to slanders like this one. Big mistake. You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone.
Yes, everywhere I look around me are a bunch of guys. (maybe 10-20% women). Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.
> Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.
How are you certain of this?
If you have an overly-touchy manager, and he never overly-touches you, would you know?
If you have someone in sales who makes not-that-funny sexist comments, but they're not actually bad enough that you should bother caring, would you know if it's rising to the level of being a problem for women?
If you don't offer generous parental leave, and that matters disproportionately to prospective employees who are women but not so much to men, would you know? (Do you know, off-hand, what your employer's parental leave policy is?)
If one of your usual interviewers says something like "You're pretty good for a woman" (and not "You're pretty good for a man"), and your technical interviews are one-on-one, and this is why there's a drop between job offers to women and new hires, would you know?
(The answer may well be "yes" for all these; there are systemic problems far away from all these that can easily get a company to 10-20% women. But I, personally, am hesitant to answer "Is your company a good place to work for women" with anything stronger than "I'm pretty sure it is, but I couldn't personally vouch for it.")
Extremely certain, except of course for workplaces outside my experience, which is most of them. One thing I hadn't considered when I first posted was the impact of H1B workers, which I guess would vary depending on the culture of origin.
Importing foreign workers obviously isn't to make the workplace representative of the local citizens or even residents.
I know that women in tech experience a different brand of socially awkward interactions than men suffer, but to suggest that there's bias against them making it more difficult to succeed (as opposed to the opposite - people rooting for them and ready to to help) is just a bridge too far for me.
You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone.
I posted a question elsewhere in this thread asking why the tech industry has been getting the brunt of the diversity shakedown. I think this is part of the puzzle.
The type of mind that lends itself well to tech tends to have less political acumen and social intelligence. We're prone to taking things too literally and sometimes miss the bullshit below the surface.
Are we really expected to believe that people who write software are any more sexist than lawyers or the population in general?
Let's call the diversity hounding of tech exactly what it is: the playground bully picking on the kid who they know wont fight back.
Ah, but there's an alternative hypothesis. Tech is an industry that people enter because they see a new world being created and want to participate in the making of it with their own hands. Finance, corporate law, so forth, not so much.
So it seems believable that tech is a place where you will find people sympathetic to do difficult, tradition-destroying things to build a better world, much more than finance or corporate law. (The way that tech has publicly embraced things from LGBT rights to non-college-degreed people, more than finance or corporate law has, is evidence in favor of this belief.)
Given that, the pressure on tech to do better than the rest of the world, and thereby set an example for the rest of the world, makes a lot of sense. It's not that tech is the most sexist industry (it isn't), it's that it's the industry that's most likely to get significantly better in a short period of time.
I posted a question elsewhere in this thread asking why the tech industry has been getting the brunt of the diversity shakedown.
That's easy: it's influential. They started with the schools, then moved on to the universities. Next was hollywood, then the media. Every avenue of public debate in this country has fallen in line with the diversity shakedown. The internet is next precisely because it's the last influential arena where you can say what you want without fear of reprisal (for the most part). It's part of why the feminists have launched such an aggressive campaign against gamergate and gamers in general. They won't be bullied.
How many of those women you see are in technical roles?
I'm sure that on the face of it, you _do_ welcome women professionally -- the problem is the bias against women is entrenched, both by the familiarity bias (given two people with the exact same competency you will typically choose the male) and by social bias (working with women is complicated, you will tend to shy away from them).
To paraphrase, you can't buy lunch with good intentions, and despite yours it's obvious they aren't translating into the practical world. To go, "oh well, all the guys I work with don't have a problem with women, so the problem must be no women want to work here, or in technical roles" is a really shallow analysis of a much deeper problem. For example, it's widely known that some managers won't insert women into male-exclusive teams because of "cohesion". But it's not like they'll advertise that motive.
Because of these issues, universities have been advising women against pursuing computer science careers. So less women actually apply, which makes the ratio even worse, which makes it even easier (or more 'logical') to keep women out of technical teams. I've personally heard a manager say that they hired a man over a woman because they didn't think it was fair that he should have to hire the woman in the name of diversity, that it would be setting a dangerous precedent, etc.
Women make excellent troubleshooters, they can see angles and possibilities that men often can't. They can design awesome algorithms, come up with innovative solutions and take projects into bold new directions. Men are better at technical syntax, middleware, configuration, builds. There is an obvious benefit to having women on technical teams, and yet in most cases they aren't there. It isn't because they don't want to be, or can't pull their own weight. But when managers put them in, they often "don't work out" so they don't try the experiment twice. Strategic bias is still bias.
So... I'm a little confused here. When you say something like:
> Women make excellent troubleshooters, they can see angles and possibilities that men often can't. They can design awesome algorithms, come up with innovative solutions and take projects into bold new directions. Men are better at technical syntax, middleware, configuration, builds.
That just comes off as sexist against both men and women simultaneously.
>(given two people with the exact same competency you will typically choose the male)
My experience directly contradicts this. Software companies currently prioritize female engineering hires because people are making such a big stink about the fact that there are fewer women than men in software engineering (and automatically assuming that this is due to sexism).
I recently received an email from my employer to the effect of "If you know any female engineers, please send in a referral!". Yes, they used the word "female".
The reason I'm so confident is that I, and everyone I know, personally welcome and would hire and help competent women and bright-but-just-starting-to-ascend-the-learning-curve ones too. I've coached a female colleague in preparation for a successful job talk at Google, for example (same as I'd help any colleague I thought had a shot and asked me).
I've admitted that I don't know the culture in every company and part of the U.S. and do think if we're serious about protecting women from unfair discrimination we need to screen out whoever, due to cultural differences, cannot be professional in hiring and working with women). Professionalism is a pretty low bar and I'd expect even H1Bs from more gender-traditional cultures to be able to pass it, no matter their private preferences+beliefs.
But even without statistics, if a group of people say they feel unwelcome and another group says "no you're welcome", is your conclusion that the environment is welcoming to the former group? Would you say this if the groups were whites and blacks? Muslims and Christians?
Which are only tangentially related. The contention is there aren't more women in tech because sexism. But there are no statistics that bear on that question directly. All we can say is there aren't a lot of women in tech. But there aren't a lot of women in tech in college, either, despite campaigns to attract them. Like that nonsense "77 cents" statistic, it may be women simply make life choices that don't put them in tech.
None of the women in my graduating class lasted as engineers for more than a handful of years, preferring to go into sales or management instead. When I asked why they said they couldn't stand the lack of human interaction, something that doesn't bother me in the slightest. Maybe... maybe, and I'm just spitballing here... maybe men and women don't have exactly the same motivations, desires, and tolerances.
>But even without statistics, if a group of people say they feel unwelcome and another group says "no you're welcome", is your conclusion that the environment is welcoming to the former group?
You can't assume anything either way. It's a mistake to think you can divine what other people are thinking unless they tell you. If I don't offer a woman a job it's because there was someone else that was a better fit. If she goes away thinking she didn't get it because she's a woman, well, who's in the wrong here?
But the entire focus of the argument is wrong. Nobody went out of his way to make me or any other man "feel welcome". It's a job, not a Christmas party. You match your skills against what employers need and come to an arrangement. If you're such a wilting flower that some nebulous "not feeling welcome" is enough to keep you out of the industry, how can you possibly deal with problems on the job?
When you say 'until they give up' do you mean women and minorities who want a safe and welcoming workplace? Or are you referring to a different 'they' than the one being addressed in the article you're replying to?
How about "amoral 'journalists' trolling for clickbait," "far left-wing nutjobs salivating at the chance to strike at the tender underbelly of a vulnerable target hesitant to defend itself," "people with low social status desperately trying to act 'progressive' for kudos," "people who politick because they can't cut it technically," and "yuppies with no interest in computers who joined 'the industry' purely for the money, who 'appropriate' the culture of the native geeks while shaming and condemning them for the slightest trespass?"
Ask the women - these companies safe and welcoming for me, but I'm a dude.
Just within my circle of friends - direct harassment, direct name-calling, including on the record (email and IM) - with no disciplinary action as a result except a light "knock it off". Sexually explicit messages despite being told they are unwanted - with, again, no disciplinary result. Repeated derogatory comments re: their gender despite being told to stop.
These are just the egregious ones that are impossible to paint with the "oh you're just being too sensitive" brush. There's lots more where that came from.
So no, software companies are not all "safe and welcoming", even the big ones that should know better. If anything software companies are worse than other white collar industries - our rejection of bureaucracy and hard policy means that we rarely take official disciplinary action against abusive employees for fear of appearing too "corporate", and fear that putting a stop to these locker-room antics will compromise the relaxed, informal atmosphere that is sacrosanct in tech.
I disagree in part with the comment above, but why is this opinion being downvoted, wherever you stand on the issue ? Regardless of whether you take issue with the soundness of his argument, a dissenting voice should have a right to be heard. I'm sometimes amazed at the swiftness with which a different perspective is swept under the rug...in the same forums and TOPIC, nothing less, where inclusiveness, Capital I, is being discussed.
There are two problems w/ 'white male' dominated engineering fields (really, male, unless you insist on the slander that asian+indian are 'honorary white'). One is optical. It just looks bad to shallow thinkers who don't care to pause to find out what the pool of able+willing workers looks like.
The other is that techies are too insecure about their value and virtue; they're inclined to actually respond in good faith to slanders like this one. Big mistake. You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone.
Yes, everywhere I look around me are a bunch of guys. (maybe 10-20% women). Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.