For web developers, it's 34%, which is roughly the same as dentists.
Computer "science" is kinda BS as a field.
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.
All of that is stuff that I think is highly tilted towards a certain profile of devs, and going to be hostile towards anyone who didn't follow the typical CS undergrad route. And that undergrad route is very unbalanced, as is the profile of e.g. established tech managers.
If you're not willing to do much more training than most big companies, I don't see good steps to fix it outside of fixing the high school and college pipelines.
Further, for more "general care" men basically have no option but to have a female nurse, since 90% of nurses are female. On the off-chance that a male nurse needs to do something like insert a catheter for a female patient, they will almost always ask if the patient would prefer a female nurse. This option of a same gendered caregiver is not offered to male patients.
When a woman goes to a gynecologist to talk about potentially embarrassing issues related to her reproductive system, basically everyone she sees is going to be a woman, including the front staff. Compare that to a man's experience going to a Urologist. Sure, most urologists are men, but the man will still have to tell the front staff person or nurse, who is almost certainly female, that he has ED, or some other problem.
The traditional job of women in the household was care taking and value transference, meaning the husband brought the money and the woman distribute it and used it. That's why it was only natural for women to work in care taking jobs like medicine, teachers, social worker and such. Jobs like law or banking are value transference, they move money from one person to another without creating any real physical value. Tech generates value so it is subtly but determinately different from what women used to do before going into the work force, it was always the men domain, at least conceptually.
Medicine and Law are very certificate oriented jobs, they are safe jobs. The moment you got the certificate and got into the system you can practice and the experience you accumulate usually path your way to a better position. Tech is something that is valued by your results and innovation, you can be a programmer without any certificate, you must learn new things endlessly and your experience amount to almost nothing when your specific knowledge become obsolete. Women are not innovators in any fields, even in art and music, they hardly create new companies in any field. Law and Medicine doesn't require you to create anything new, you just slot in to the system, the tech world is all about innovation and new value creation.
In the western world women have options and they can do whatever they want. If they are smart and has good intuition, they would rather be lawyers or doctors, if they are not smart they would rather be a teacher and have a stable job for life with benefits. In non western countries like India, Russia or even Israel you will find more women in tech roles because there are not too many other options to earn decently and government jobs like teaching don't pay much. If you give women the options they will go after their hurt, which is not in tech.
Women are attracted to doctors and lawyers and want to be in this environment. That's why you had countless of shows about law and medicine featuring the George Clooneys of the world. Compare it to the IT Crowd and you got a very solid reason why those jobs attracted women in the first place. Women want to be around the highly valued guys of their high school and the same go for society in general. An average white woman will never date an Indian software engineer, that's the sad reality. Women started to look at the tech world only after its status was elevated a bit, they will still rather have a doctor husband over some geeky tech guy, all else being equal.
Bottom line, tech people are not different to any other industry in the way they treat women or minorities or any other group in society. If anything bankers, lawyers, movie producers and to less extent doctors are much more status and class oriented. They invented sniffing coke from strippers butt cracks long before Mark Zuckerberg got his first kiss from his average looking wife. Still a woman will rather work in those environments than in tech from the reasons mentioned above and it is not going to change.
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...
Oh man!! OMG, you just reminded me of something. During the last dot com bubble I was entering college. I was planning on going into the field so I job shadowed a woman at one of the biggest companies in the world at the time. Her title was "e-business" or something like that. It was "e-[something]" like that and the prefix "e" was super popular at the time. Yeah, it was cool at the time...
Anyway,
The entire time I was job shadowing her (which I admit, was only about 4 hours, they gave us presentations and stuff too) she couldn't answer me the question of what she actually does. What her job was. She was kinda like "oh yeah, I work on this program" and showed it to me. I ask "so you built this? Neat!" and she'd answer "oh no, that's not me, that's the guys upstairs did." The entire time she danced around the question of what her job actually is other than "using a computer."
Looking back, holy shit, that was a big sign we we're in a bubble and that bubble was so close to bursting!! I mean, wow, it was like "we are branching into e-business, look at us [smoke and mirrors]"
It was just a really, really bizarre experience at the time - "Job shadow someone who can't tell you what their job is." I'm sure she got laid off 6-12 months later.
She eventually took me to meet the guys upstairs who build the stuff, I wish I got to job shadow them instead. They were polite, humble, friendly, and down to earth. Oh yeah, and they knew what their job was!
Anyway, I feel we're getting the same way here again - a ton of "staff" in the "tech/web business" who are totally superfluous. That's what it seems like to me anyways.
To be clear, I'm not trying to dis women in tech, after all, I am one myself. I'm not saying all women in tech so no work - I'm saying bubbles bring in a lot of smoke and mirrors.
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.
Female-only hackathons are what's wrong though. It implies that women cannot compete at the adult table, which is untrue, but if you treat people separately this is what registers in the collective subconscious. Similar to affirmative action making a lot of people think less of academic achievements depending on race, because it was handed to someone. This becomes a problem for those who don't need AA to be competitive, but have to face the stereotypes of the group they're in. Something like affirmative action should be about poverty, not race, because poverty is the underlying reason why people start at a disadvantage. Similarly with hackathons (I'll admit, I'm a guy who never went to one) the problem isn't that women can't compete, but that they're not attracted to these events for some reason. This has more to do with social dynamics. If you're male and a lot of males are going they will advertise it to their friends. So what we need would be more advertisement of these events geared toward women, with no effect on who gets selected.
Having gone through one of these processes (not with Google, but another big 4 company), I'm quite sure this happens. The CS fundamentals might be easy to test for, but they've had very little impact on real world problems I needed to solve in my career. For someone who's a bit farther away from college and doesn't come from a rote memorization culture (which IMHO is inherently bad for problem solving), this serves as a screening mechanism without actually testing for what's useful on the job.
I've been quite successful at interviews where they ask me to solve a little take-home project. In that case the rote memorizers who get through the Google process usually don't shine, because they're not able to put these things together properly. Recent CS grads still do well on those if they're competent.
(We're reading a blog post written by a woman kernel developer, for what it's worth).
Even worse than forfeiting competition, and particularly sad if women themselves think so.
[0] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010....