All: if you comment in this thread, make sure your comment is thoughtful and edit out any flamey or trollish bits before hitting the button. The same goes for any thread, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's a common misconception, but Hacker News really isn't identified with or immersed in Silicon Valley. Those of us moderating it are largely on the margins of SV and always have been, and the community by no means has its center of gravity there. It's globally distributed and on the whole rather anti-SV in orientation.
(The parent was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182520 but I detached it to contain this offtopicness.)
The rest of the study provides even less information, just tendentious excerpts. What does "30% of underrepresented women of color were passed over for promotion" even mean??
The ACM did a study a while back that contradicted virtually all of the stereotypes[1].
"Men and women in our survey both generally reported a similar level of experience with role models. Women, even in a predominately male work environment did not report a significant difference from men in the influence role models had on their careers in IT. This surprising finding does not support previous assumptions that the lack of females in IT means a lack of role models for women, which was assumed to be a disadvantage for women"
"Similarly, men and women in the survey reported comparable levels of learning and comfort around the social aspects of the profession despite stereotypes that suggest women are drawn more to social interaction [7]. However, our surveyed male IT professionals also reported stronger socialization with regard to the technical aspects of the profession, including familiarity with its language and confidence concerning their own skills "
"Our findings uncovered only one significant gender difference across a variety of work-related experiences. Female and male IT professionals alike reported similar levels of experience regarding the work-family conflict, feelings of burnout, perceptions of work load, perceptions of fair treatment in job scheduling, assignment of job responsibilities, pay and other rewards, and perceptions of supervisor support related to family issues. They differed in regard to their perceptions of supervisor support related to their careers. This finding indicates that women perceive greater support in meeting career goals, recognizing opportunities, and improving their job performance."
Yes, women reported greater support in this ACM survey.
"We found no significant gender differences for these measures of attitude. Male and female IT professionals in the study reported similar levels of satisfaction with their IT careers. They also reported similar (strong) levels of professional identification with the profession. Finally, and perhaps most important to the question at hand, we found no significant gender differences in intention to leave the profession"
Etc.
There was also a huge study done on why women leave engineering[2].
Top reasons (in order):
1. Wanted more time with family
2. Lost interest
3. No advancement
4. Didn't like daily tasks
5. Didn't like culture
6. Didn't like boss
7. Poor working conditions
8. Conflict with family
9. Too many hours
10. Low salary
11. Too much travel
12. Didn't like co-workers
13. Started own business
14. Couldn't find position
15. Too difficult
Oh...and "almost half the women who left the engineering field over five years ago reported working at least 40 hours per week in a current non-engineering position [..] More than half the women in this group reported being in an executive management position, 15% were in a managerial position and 30% reported being individual contributors". So they left "engineering" for "management". The humanity!
And of course when this study was reported, it was "It's the [sexist] culture!!". Sigh. Culture comes in at number 5 and is culture in general.
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-...
[2] https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tid...
If you pushed a bug to prod, knocked out all of Australia, then went home and aren't answering your phone because it's after hours and you're not on call, I'm not going to be happy with you. (Not that we would normally push to prod right before going home, but to illustrate the point...)
If you work 9-5, M-F, never cause any fires, and hit your milestones, then I'm perfectly satisfied with that.
That's just me, though; I intentionally maintain a relatively balanced workplace. Other companies and managers will have different styles. That being said, don't underestimate the importance of likeability [0]; you'll be fighting against human nature and unconscious biases if you do. How that manifests (general friendliness, going to after-hours social events, helping others with tough tasks, etc) will vary by person and team.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-likability-matters-more-at-...
Your first point is empirically false, though I'm too lazy to look for links. The second point seems circular, but doesn't matter in any case, since the idea here is to have good conversation with each other.
The comment would have been just fine with only the first sentence.
Facebook thought it was a better use of its resources to build a Snapchat clone named Slingshot. Google decided it was a better use of its resources to build a social network named Google+.
Animal Farm: "Four legs good, two legs bad" Google: "Don't be evil"
Animal Farm: "Four legs good, two legs better" Google: "You can make money without doing evil" [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil#cite_note-Goog...
In the old days, this was called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
For web developers, it's 34%, which is roughly the same as dentists.
Computer "science" is kinda BS as a field.
Until you do, you're also making a fallacious appeal to conspiracy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
For instance, under "Anti-Caucasian Postings," there's a screenshot of an employee sharing (on internal G+) a link to Tim Chevalier's blog post "Refusing to Empathize with Elliot Rodger: Taking Male Entitlement Seriously." This tells me two things: first, the people who prepared this complaint were so scattershot in their attempt that they stuck something with "male" under "Anti-Caucasian Postings." (The employee's commentary on the link is "The doc considered formally as abuse springing from an entitled worldview. Excellent essay." - so nothing anti-Caucasian there, either. The post itself, which is on the public internet, does mention race a few times, but focuses on gender.) Second, it tells me that the people preparing the complaint think that a white man's link to a white man's essay expressing opposition to the manifestos of mass murderer Elliot Rodger, mass murderer Marc Lépine, and James Damore is somehow either anti-Caucasian or anti-male (giving them the benefit of the doubt that they miscategorized it).
Now, you may certainly argue that it's distasteful, unprofessional, unacceptable, and perhaps even unconscionable to have your coworkers compare you to two mass murderers simply for having written an article that (in their view) makes similar points. I'd certainly agree that there were and still are attacks on James Damore as an individual at Google. But that is in no way anti-white or anti-male, unless you think that the content of those manifestos, and (in two cases) their direct connection to mass murder, is somehow intrinsic to whiteness or maleness - which seems both wrong and a huge attack on white men, more than anything alleged in the complaint.
Plenty of other posts are similarly not attacks on whiteness or maleness, many of which are miscategorized - other "anti-Caucasian postings" include someone writing that "the creator of Dilbert is ... a paranoid sexist dickbag", a link to an HBR article entitled "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?", a truly awful-quality meme conveying "0 days since last ... white male says diversity isn't important," etc.
Finally, remember that this is a lawsuit by one side, which has a story to tell. We don't know that we're not seeing a cherry-picked picture. Maybe these sorts of low-quality memes and overly-political posts on corporate channels affect everyone. It's certainly the case that shortly after Damore's suit, a story came out about an employee with rather diametrically opposed opinions being pushed out by management: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15JokX8thp1TxG_I9aodYUxDw...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-w...
The article actually cites other potential issues such as the quality of the job itself, but traditional gender roles is a big part of it:
> "It seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up. The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are often held by women. Why not get men to do them?
> The problem is that notions of masculinity die hard, in women as well as men. It’s not just that men consider some of the jobs that will be most in demand — in health care, education and administration — to be unmanly or demeaning, or worry that they require emotional skills they don’t have. So do some of their wives, prospective employers and women in these same professions."
...
> “Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?”
> That may be, he said, because other sociologists have found that while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity,” he said.
So at the moment society is trying to figure out if it is OK with nursing being a "woman's" profession.
I know it disappoints some of the systematizers here, but IMO there's no substitute for human judgment being in the mix. HN functions best as a complex system with many feedback loops between community, software, and moderation.
(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182520 and marked it off-topic.)
Literally 99% of white, male, nerds don't fit this description. Every day in Silicon Valley people show favoritism to individuals that, for purely economic reasons, got into Stanford or Harvard.
Investors that went to Stanford invest in founders that went to Stanford because their own investors (LPs) that also went to Stanford will favor them.
This is literally racist because it's a bias against socioeconomically disadvantaged people, of which people of color are disproportionately represented. And yet, this bias is openly accepted in Silicon Valley and even celebrated!
Looking at most investor bio pages, you would think the 99% would have almost nothing to contribute: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/
The 99% need to start a social movement in Silicon Valley to reform it into the semi-utopian meritocracy we all wish it was. We should demand an end to socioeconomic discrimination, which will enable people of all walks of life to lift themselves out of the shadows, turning Silicon Valley into the cross section of society it rightfully ought to be.
We should be calling for investors, universities, and companies in Silicon Valley to move to blind admissions and interview processes, and an end to all forms of "culture" testing.
We should call for #EqualOpportunity.
This article was more about the effect of teacher bias in education, however I think there is a study showing bias having a cognitive effect on how students perform.
http://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/
"The impact of unconscious teacher bias is long understood and well-documented. This new research confirms decades of work done by Myra and David Sadker and Karen R. Zittleman. Through thousands of hours of classroom observations, the Sadkers and Zittleman identified specific ways in which implicit and stereotypical ideas about gender govern classroom dynamics. They, as others have, found that teachers spend up to two thirds of their time talking to male students; they also are more likely to interrupt girls but allow boys to talk over them. Teachers also tend to acknowledge girls but praise and encourage boys. They spend more time prompting boys to seek deeper answers while rewarding girls for being quiet. Boys are also more frequently called to the front of the class for demonstrations. When teachers ask questions, they direct their gaze towards boys more often, especially when the questions are open-ended. Biases such as these are at the root of why the United States has one of the world’s largest gender gaps in math and science performance. Until they view their videotaped interactions, teachers believe they are being balanced in their exchanges.
The two reports released last week were focused on girls. However, the same biases have been implicated in teachers unconsciously undermining boys’ interest in the arts and language, enabling harmful gender gaps in self-regulation, and tacitly accepting certain male students’ propensity to believe that studying is “for girls” – all factors that contribute to boys’ lower academic performance."
Is it possible that a "concerted effort to recruit and retain women" perhaps does more harm than good? Med schools in this country are now very nearly 50/50[1] and law schools are very slightly over 50% female[2]. Did medicine and law achieve this by the same type of concerted effort we've seen in tech? I honestly don't know the answer to that but I think it's an interesting question.
I do feel though that we treat females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors whereas in tech we have a habit of treating them like female developers instead of developers (and I'm referring to when that's done with the best intentions such as female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups).
[1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-gra...
[2] https://www.enjuris.com/students/ranking-universities.html
I don’t think I could get a job at Google, for example; I would not pass their intensive multi-week screening process. I wouldn’t even try.
I'm not sure if I wasn't very clear by what I meant by that in my original comment or if I just failed to understand your response - while I don't dispute the accuracy of anything you said following this line I don't quite understand how any of it is relevant (at least not regarding what I was trying to say).
When I said "we treat females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors" I mean:
* I've often heard people being discussed as e.g. "a female dev" but don't often (never that I recall) hear anyone say "female doctor" (I'm referring to casual conversation, not discussions about who's gonna work the catheter on a patient)
* We have female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups, etc, do similar things exist in the medical field and if such things do exist are they as common? Are there many medical conferences open only to female doctors?
* There are often articles/lists of prominent/powerful/etc "women in tech"[1][2][3]. Are similar such articles published in the same quantity for medicine? A quick google yields almost entirely historical results, where's the list of "30 Inspirational Women to Watch in Medicine in 2018"?
* Is it a common practice for hospitals to make reports publicly available that detail what percentage of their doctors are female and how they plan to increase that number?
* Do hospitals generally do anything to recruit (and/or retain) female doctors specifically or are their recruiting and retention efforts just focused on doctors?
[1] https://www.inc.com/john-boitnott/30-inspirational-women-to-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2017/11/01/the-w...
[3] https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/careers/10-most-po...
You don't have to specify the gender in most cases. It's assumed that nurses are women. You'd only ever specify the gender for men, so you'd say "male nurse" but never "female nurse." I generally don't hear people say anything about their GP, but I've definitely heard women qualify the gender of their male gynecologist. I've never heard of a woman specifically call out the gender of a female gynecologist though.
>* We have female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups, etc, do similar things exist in the medical field and if such things do exist are they as common? Are there many medical conferences open only to female doctors?
Depending on what you mean by conferences, yes. Here's the official list, provided by the Bar itself, of women's legal associations: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/directory.... Though admittedly, I have no ability to provide a sense of scale in comparison to the IT field.
>There are often articles/lists of prominent/powerful/etc "women in tech"[1][2][3]. Are similar such articles published in the same quantity for medicine? A quick google yields almost entirely historical results, where's the list of "30 Inspirational Women to Watch in Medicine in 2018"?
Medicine moves much slower than tech, so it will never lend itself to having a list of top movers and shakers in a particular year, regardless of gender. And it particularly won't be the case because medical breakthroughs aren't in the public sphere the way FB or Tesla is. However, there are definitely awards/medals/prizes that are gendered. A quick google search will find many examples, though you'd likely never hear of them outside the industry.
>Is it a common practice for hospitals to make reports publicly available that detail what percentage of their doctors are female and how they plan to increase that number?
No, not publicly, because openly favoring women or other minorities could open them up to lawsuits.
>Do hospitals generally do anything to recruit (and/or retain) female doctors specifically or are their recruiting and retention efforts just focused on doctors?
Yes, but again not publicly. It's worth mentioning that part of the infamous DaMore memo was pointing out the potential illegality of Google's hiring practices. There's an open secret among HR pros that race and gender-conscious hiring practices are the rule rather than the exception. Since the 1971 Griggs ruling you basically have to have a prejudicial hiring practice in favor of minorities. But speaking openly about it will put you at risk of reverse discrimination lawsuits.
http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/063-the-distribution-...
http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/058-kindness-and-pati...
http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/051-creating-safer-sp...
My partner left finance to work in medicine. She makes a lot less money and likes it a lot better. I dunno where you live, but becoming a physician assistant can be a pretty good gig: much less school, pretty good salaries, pretty defined hours, very little debt.
Personally, I worked at a series of toxic startups and needed two years away to not loath programming. I regret nothing about leaving tech the first time, and after returning, my biggest regret is waiting so long to start my own company. Closely followed by tolerating so many shitty bosses. It helped me to have friends that did things besides work; workaholics are very common in sfbay. Dunno if that helps, but good luck.
Yep. And yet the same effect exists for men (vs. women) and is about six times as strong. Yet our society is "obviously" sexist against women.
https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...
'After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper.'
One key quote: “Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men.”
As someone who has spent a lot of time in academic security conferences, I have to wonder what you are comparing them to. The only field with a worse female participation rate in my experience is networking (e.g. SIGCOMM). Check out this picture from EuroCrypt in 97 and count the ratio of women to men. It looks like under 1 in 10 which is worse than general CS enrollment numbers: http://www.crypto-uni.lu/jscoron/misc/euro_97.jpg
Anyway, back to the main point.
>CS is almost uniquely imbalanced.
I agree. However, a 1/4 female/male ratio coming out of CS programs is going to be reflected in the industry and attempting to bring the balance on the industry side to 50/50 is folly while the enrollment balance stays the same.
Clearly something is discouraging women from enrolling at the college level, but I can't fathom how 50/50 quotas are supposed to help solve that problem. Implementing things like Google's "extra interview retries" for minorities just seems to cause division and make it worse for minorities because some people assume they are there for the wrong reason.
Are you aware of programs focusing on getting more women enrolled at the high-school and college level? It seems like it would be significantly more productive as a community to put a significant focus there in terms of resources (money, advocacy, etc).
I know almost nobody that has a problem with improving enrollment numbers of women in CS (equality of opportunity). However, there is a significant chunk of people that have problems with the "white males are over-represented and we need to give everyone else an advantage" approach (equality of outcomes).
What am I missing here? Why are so many resources being poured into something as fundamentally flawed as trying to get equal representation with a supply that doesn't have equal representation?
We can't exclude politics altogether, nor would we want to. But we can't let it take over the site either, and it's like fire: it consumes everything it touches. This is a conundrum. Our way out of the conundrum is the 'primarily' test:
We ban accounts that use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless of which politics they favor. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We noticed that the most damage comes from users who don't care about much except their politics, while users who are interested in plenty of different things and occasionally post on politics tend to be benign. The first group is abusing the site while the second is using it as intended. That turned out to be a clear line that we can rely on as a standard for moderation.
We try to warn people first, especially when they've been on the site for a while, but if the pattern persists we do ban them. So would you please reread the site guidelines and use HN in the spirit of curiosity, not battle, from now on?
I can see why, before reading that, you might think this was a double standard, but it isn't. The reason is that adamsea hasn't been using HN primarily for political battle (though I grant you his account history is close to that, and a different moderator might have called it differently). The key word here is 'primarily', which is the test we use, as explained in that comment I just linked to. I didn't reply to you on the basis of one isolated comment but rather on your use of HN overall, which is what we care about.
It's false, of course, that you're "only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN". If that were true, we wouldn't have flamewars, and boy do we have flamewars.
One, if we're at the point where we need a how-to guide for people to leave the technology industry, the industry has a really big problem. And I don't jsut mean its "toxic culture" as the article puts it. Women and minorities who make it into a technology career in the first place are probably twice as competent as others, simply because their work is judged twice as harshly [1] and there are no end of people eager to make their life harder, one way or another. So those companies that are losing their women and minority workers, are losing talent they really want to retain, over and beyond any diversity considerations.
Two, this is really not the time to leave a career in technology, not for minorities, not for straight white dudes. Right now, tech skills are in very high demand and it is quite possible to make a very lucrative career out of them. This is a unique opportunity for women and minorities to do vey well professionally through skill and brain power alone. It is adding injustice on top of injustice to allow yourself to be swept by the wayside when you have what it takes to get ahead. Despite the "toxic culture", the industry sorely needs competent technologists. If you are one, you should let nothing stop you from taking advantage of it.
Now is not the time to give up. You give up now, you're giving up on a brilliant future and a great career that you absolutely deserve. Don't allow that to happen. Not "for the good of the industry"- for your own interest.
We need a guide for surviving and thriving int the industry, in spite of its culture- not one for bailing out.
_____________
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-gender-matte...
These studies reveal that in many selection processes, the bar is
unconsciously raised so high for women and minority candidates that few
emerge as winners. For instance, one study found that women applying for a
research grant needed to be 2.5 times more productive than men in order to
be considered equally competent.Sure, but that doesn't convince. Anyone who has ever been in a big company has lots of stories of HR "initiatives" that have been utter garbage. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-07
The path that these women pursued can be countered with "They were actually those icky, squishy HR types to begin with and our failure was in not detecting that. We need to change our hiring procedures to make sure that we don't make this kind of mistake hiring for a "hard" tech position again."
> I used to think (terribly naively) that a company having a particular type as a founder would ensure that all such people would feel welcome there. But I have seen that not be the case.
And that's the crux. Why should that be the case? Apparently that founder believed that their behavior was going to be more successful.
Until someone takes a "diversity" touchstone, founds a company, and blows people's doors off, most offenders will never take these kinds of "squishy" things seriously.
And, if the "diversity" advocates can't do this, well, that's data, too ...
I'm actually in the camp that they probably can't.
Practically all of the biggest successes in any industry which has a schedule component have stories of the carnage of divorces, health problems and relationship damage left in the wake. Probably the only counterexample of a continuous, plodding, sustainable success is the space shuttle software.
Consequently, the diversity advocates need to change the narrative and start focusing on changing the conversation as to what constitutes success in broader society.
Every study however that I have seen has only looked at the highest gross films, be that the top 5 or top 100. Of those only a few will specifically target a female audience like the 2008 Sex and the City that only had women in star roles.
Here is the IMBD ratings: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1000774/ratings
It should not be hard to find a matching movie with the genders reversed where all the star roles are men, the target audience are male, and the ratings flipped.
Of course it also starts before college enrollment. AP computer science courses in high school have about the same gender ratio (19%). [0] Those would probably contain the same minority you mentioned, a few years younger.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/technology/computer-coding...
[0] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010....