Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none.
When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.
The start of the funnel is also the most racist and class discriminatory. Almost every school in the USA takes pupils from districts where the property owners pay the taxes for the schools. Rich areas get much more resources and support. Poor students get put into less funded schools and suffer from not having mentorship or peers to look up to.
I live on Long Island and we have a majority white population. Despite that we have 2 school districts that are almost 100% black. That is where the problem is. You are not giving these students a chance. When I am going through resumes I am not getting a diverse pool of qualified candidates because these poor people have been historically oppressed into a caste of poor schooling and neighborhoods.
Washington state pools property tax money and then redistributed it equitably across the state to pay for education on a per pupil basis. This mainly means poorer eastern Washington districts are subsidized by richer western Washington districts, and districts that lose students to private schools take a direct hit in their funding.
This is true many places. But I think the "property tax explains everything" talking point is going to persist a long time, because it's very convenient.
(1) California property tax stays local, and is not pooled,
(2) However, due to Prop 13, property taxes are very small in California, and just over half of total funding for school districts comes from the state,
(3) Distribution of funding (either just the state funds or total funding) is not equal per-student across districts, with per student expenditures ranging widely across districts.
My mistake, I know that most of school funding came from the state but I thought it was because it was from property taxes being collected. In fact it's from state income tax and sales tax.
America spends more money per student, in almost any school district, than any European country. The problem is not "resources and support". We've tried "resources and support" for 50 years, so the (a priori entirely fantastical) notion that just throwing more money at the problem would make it go away has been thoroughly disproven.
There's no a priori reason you would expect student expenditures to become less effective per dollar in richer countries, except the fraction spent on labor.
Education is almost entirely labor and real estate. It’s a classic Baumol’s cost disease situation. Like I guess richer countries can purchase better computer labs?
So yeah, it’s probably true that the US spends more per pupil because we have a higher GDP per capita, but it’s not clear that we should expect to get a lot more out of it.
It's not attracting qualified, talented teachers (though that is A problem).
The main problem is parents and society. Individualism means parents know better than the schools, and teach their kids that attitude as well. This cuts across class, ethnicity, and any other demographic marker you can think of.
If you condition on race, American students do better (e.g. on PISA) than almost any other country with a few exceptions like Hong Kong. American test cores are (slightly better than) what you expect given our demographics, which are by far the strongest predictor of population educational attainment.
as someone who grew up attending a majority black school district, this is not really true.... underfunded majority minority districts typically more than have the gap made up by federal funds and the causal evidence on returns on education funding suggests extremely limited impact if any
That's just false. Nearly every state relies disproportionately on local property taxes to fund schools. Federal dollars tend to be supplemental and come in the form of food subsidies or Title grants. They absolutely do not "more than have the gap made up" unless you're in a state with an equity funding pool (like Washington).
I have heard that Baltimore school performance is the counterpoint here, but I have never dug into it myself. Do you happen to know if there is a material point there or obfuscation of some form?
Title 1 schools can get a ton of money. Smartboards in every class, school supplies fully stocked, not the usual "grim downward spiral" feel of a public school.
Much of our economic disparity in this country remains regional. We have states full of poor White and Black people. Of course, I have never worked anywhere that "diverse" wasn't only about skin color and gender, which means kids in West Virginia and Alabama are treated like they grew up in Malibu. It's gotten worse where I live in recent years since those historically disadvantaged schools are also 50% English as a second language now with no new resources.
Do any tech companies have programs to hire out of historically disadvantaged regions of the US?
In California funding is based upon attendance. The main place wealthy neighborhoods get extra money here is through PTAs rather than property taxes.
This is in addition to what the other commenter said. I'm not very well informed about how other states fund their schools, but even if this blanket generalization is true in some places, there's enough evidence out there that funding isn't the only or maybe even the main problem.
It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school district to a richer school district, and they have children under 13, then those children are significantly more successful than children whose families remain in the poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be a slight negative effect.
A lot of that has to do with who your kid goes to school with. If we take equally funded schools (in WA that’s easy since education is primarily funded by the state), the results are still different: districts with richer families do better probably because they get more support at home, but even lower income students do better since they feel like they need to keep up with their classmates.
The genetic meaning is the most common usage of the word, which is evidenced by a Google search. It’s also the most obvious meaning when referring to racial minorities.
If they didn’t mean genetic, then they really screwed up in their use of language.
that is poor evidence for a school funding effect, but yes - environment is important. i will say that this is the first time i've ever seen MTO cited as a positive example of the impact, my understanding (not very informed) was that it is considered a negative result.
i wish these analyses were pre-registered, but i recognize that is difficult to do for very long timespan studies like this
Yes, class is the root divide. However, rejecting that fact is dogma for the people running these DEI programs.
This is intentional because then DEI is intended to be a self-help religion for the corporate class designed to deflect the externalities that they produce, and not about actual material conditions. And that's at its best. At its worst, DEI is insulting and infantilizing to "marginalized communities."
Mm. It’s certainly good to work at the other end of the funnel (thank you!) but it also won’t help address pattern matching that people do in hiring.
It’s an incredibly natural thing for people to hire people like themselves, or people they meet their image of what a top notch software dev looks like. It requires active effort to counteract this. One can definitely argue about the efficacy of DEI approaches, but I disagree that JUST increasing the strength of applicants will address the issue.
Yes it will! That pattern matching is based on prior experience and if the entire makeup of candidates changes that'll cause people to pattern match differently. If old prejudices are taking a while to die out, it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
> it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!
If the goal is to prevent people from being biased, why not anonymize candidate packets? Zoom interviews can also be anonymized easily. If it's the case that equally strong, or stronger, candidates are being passed over anonymization should solve this.
Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.
Anonymization is probably an under tried idea. Various orchestras switched to blind auditions and significantly increased the number of women they hired.
They can cheat non-anonymous interviews too. An alternative is to have candidates go in person to an office to interview, but the grading and hiring panel only sees anonymized recordings of the interview.
People oppose efforts to make changes at the other end of the funnel too. This is the most popular post about Girls Who Code (the first organization that comes to mind, why I searched it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431
There's a background assumption in this debate that society has a moral requirement to increase the representation of those who are underrepresented. I've never seen this assumption justified.
What if it is actually fine for Asians to be under-represented in the NBA, and over-represented in software engineering?
I guess it depends a lot on the reason why they're under represented. Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense. I'm not so sure companies and schools are just passive in a cultural preference environment. And by not so sure I mean I am pretty confident there is tons of discrimination, I've seen it.
How about advocating for more objective hiring processes then? You could use AI to mask someone's voice and visage during a video interview. This was actually tried btw, see if you can predict the result:
UFC (and all other fighting sports) segment based on weight class. Plenty of flyweight fighters look scrawny when wearing a shirt. Also some of the most intense Muay Thai fighters I've ever sparred are skinny Thai guys from farming villages in Isaan who showed hallmarks of malnutrition (stunted height and extremely thin physique compared to Isaan Thai who grew up in BKK or even towns like Khon Kaen).
And this brings up a good point - you need to make an effort to build a pipeline from an fairness standpoint.
Not everyone has to be a SWE, but everyone should get an equal chance to try and become one. Plenty of kids end up in crap schools with few resources to succeed in a STEM major, or are limited by social or cultural norms from actually trying to major in STEM.
This goes both ways - women and African Americans are underrepresented in CS. No way around that. It should be solved. Same way men are underrepresented in teaching and nursing, and it should be solved as well.
This whole conversation around DEI became unneccesarily heated due to mutual political ambitions.
At the end of the day, everyone should have a fair chance at trying an industry or field, and because the world isn't a fair playing field, it doesn't hurt to try and build an ecosystem by incentivizing a pipeline.
If under-representation is because of preference and not discrimination, then there is no problem to be solved.
I work in a wood shop with a bunch of men. It's a physical job, but there's no reason a woman couldn't do it, but guess how many women apply?
The lack of women in our shop is not because of discrimination, but if we had to get 50% representation with women without a passion for woodworking, the product would suffer, or those women might not enjoy it, or...
Disproportion does not always indicate discrimination.
> If under-representation is because of preference and not discrimination, then there is no problem to be solved
I agree.
> I work in a wood shop with a bunch of men. It's a physical job, but there's no reason a woman couldn't do it, but guess how many women apply
Because it's a chicken and egg situation - if it's all guys you aren't necessarily sure whether or not it's because no women applied or because the shop purposely tried to make it difficult for women to join.
Even making a token statement that "hey, we aren't dicks - we'll accept anyone and everyone who has skills and is motivated" can at least signal to potentially interested women applicants that the shop is friendly.
And this is what plenty of DEI programs are in states like California that have strict laws and regulations against using race or gender based quotas. Plenty of organziations used a de facto quota system (eg. UNC) or treated DEI as struggle sesssions, but plenty of organizations tried to concentrate on the Equity part.
The whole naming of this as "DEI" was itself problematic. Just use simple English - it's about Equal Opportunity or Free Choice.
> Because it's a chicken and egg situation - if it's all guys you aren't necessarily sure whether or not it's because no women applied or because the shop purposely tried to make it difficult for women to join.
We're small, I know the owner. Women have worked there before. Somehow the default assumption is prejudice, where I think we should default to assuming good faith.
There may be social pressure that keeps women from wanting to be woodworkers, but that's not truly the responsibility of a small business is it?
Anyway, I don't think we're disagreeing here. Focusing on immutable traits over skill or interest is wrong, but I think people are to quick to see prejudice where there's is none
This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black people at such a rate that there literally are not enough black people in the country to meet that quota. And yet, this sort of brainless activism continues unabated - why I can't begin to guess.
I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided. It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those careers, that's perfectly fine.
One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel" isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't personally impact you?
I’m 35 now, at no point in my career have I ever been in an environment that would have tolerated that, school- college or workplace.
And I haven’t been trying exceptionally hard to avoid it.
If such jibes had happened those people would not have a job, point blank.
Given the average seniority for a full stack engineer is 10 years, I should have encountered at least one, or worked with someone who had been in such an environment.
I think chud behaviour is an excuse, because it’s not tolerated for at least my lifetime.
One thing to pay attention to is how you influence those around you. I'm guessing, doesn't put up with that kind of shit. People who act like that probably don't act like that when you're around. Because of that, you get a sanitized view of the world.
Even if it's very uncommon, unfortunately even one incident like the one in GP's comment is enough to convince someone that they're unwelcome and abandon working in the field. In fact, an argument for workplace diversity initiatives is that it can re-assure people that they are welcome, and that kind behavior of is fireable. Personally the kind of "DEI" I most strongly support are the initiatives that lay out clear rules and expectations for what kind of employee behavior is allowed, and tell people who to go to if they see it occurring.
if everyone openly has your back, consistently, and for years yet you’re so fragile that a single dickhead (who will be fired) derails your entire career then honestly you were too fragile to do the job anyway..
I don’t know a single engineer who doesn’t get imposter syndrome.
As a man, I have been openly derided for doing something stupid, if I were a woman I might internalise that as if it was sexism- so how do you deal with that? When people are so convinced that if anything critical could be based on gender?
At some point you're treating people like children.
Again I’ll say it: every single educational institution and workplace I have ever been in has intentionally mentioned that anything that could be perceived as misogyny or sexual harassment have a zero tolerance policy.
Am I really the outlier? I’ve worked so many places and across so many countries and industries…
> Again I’ll say it: every single educational institution and workplace I have ever been in has intentionally mentioned that anything that could be perceived as misogyny or sexual harassment have a zero tolerance policy.
Just because they say that doesn't mean they'll do that. People lie, they systematically sexually harass for years, and only if its made public will they actually do anything about it.
In US companies and universities that I have been at throughout my 30-year career: a group of men harassing a woman with strip poker jokes would be dealt with very swiftly and decisively. My 2c.
YMMV, but during my time studying the course coordinators of the first year CS courses had to put out a notice to the male students that the female students (greatly outnumbered) were there to learn and didn't want to be hit on during labs and tutorials. They did that because it had become a problem, especially as these courses consisted of a lot of students who perhaps didn't have much experience interacting graciously (or at all) with the opposite gender.
Your suggestion that bad behavior by all-male teams would be improved by the addition of women rests on a couple of assumptions that are not true: that women are inherently better behaved than men, and that women naturally see each other as being on the same team.
I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
On the other hand, I have often, often worked on teams that were (except for me) all men, but by and large they were men who had mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that they loved, and who therefore had no trouble relating to me with respect and affection. While it is true that some men treat women specifically badly, and that some men treat people generally badly, it is not true that men in general treat women badly. Quite the opposite.
It does take a moment, as a woman, to find your feet socially in an all male space. But does it not always take a moment to find your feet in any new space? I have generally found that what makes it go smoothly is the fact that we are all hackers. If anything, it is all the walking on eggshells about sexism that makes social integration awkward at first. People are trying to figure out how they are "supposed" to behave around me, worried that I will be aggressive socially and legally. When we focus on the work we do together and the love we have in common for the field, we become friends naturally and get along well.
I myself think all the hand-wringing over demographics has been a waste of time at best and counterproductive at worst. I think it makes more sense to focus on developing virtue, civility, and good leadership among the people who find themselves here.
> I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
In my teens my mom tried to reenter the workforce and got an office job, and she absolutely hated working with other women because of this. She wanted to work with men because in her experience, women were so much worse.
I don't think women are inherently better behaved than men, or that they naturally see themselves as being on the same team. It's that the dynamic where it feels fun or funny to tell a joke that makes a minority in a group feel bad is less likely to arise when there are multiple people who wouldn't be laughing, or perhaps even telling them to give it a rest. Nothing to do with comradery, just the natural tendency of people to not like when their personal identity is threatened in some way.
FWIW, I do think most men with wives and/or daughters are generally thoughtful coworkers, but I'm not sure that's a majority in most tech workplaces, especially the ones that skew young. Thinking back to my own experience, I think, I was blind to a lot of the things I'm speaking about (or perhaps even resistant to the idea of calling it out) until I had a long-term partner.
It is always so refreshing to read this kind of thing.
For a number of years I had the sense that I might be going crazy, because it seemed that throughout my whole working life I'd encountered good and bad people of both sexes, but never witnessed the kind of systematic targeting of women that both mainstream and alternative media sources told me was rife. How could it be that I couldn't see what was apparently right under my nose? So it's reassuring to know that there are also women who have had a similar experience.
> Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman?
Sure. One of the women I dated detailed a story about how a man at a conference she attended suggested it'd be more fun if she was roofies. To her face, in front of her co-workers (many of them women). She was in a majority female industry (healthcare).
Why do we just assume that men stop doing cringe stuff just because women are around?
I hear stories like this, but now after 25 years in the industry, no place I've worked at would have ever tolerated this, nor have I seen or heard this happen from colleagues. Granted I've worked mostly in California, but still seems so foreign to me.
I have a first-hand experience once or twice a year that make me stop and think -- if I were a woman in this situation I'd probably be doubting my career path. The example I cited is particularly egregious, but I have seen several other examples from a variety of companies:
- two guys on a zoom call joking that someone's camera was off because they were doing "weird stuff"
- manager from another team drunkenly telling a 24 year old at a holiday party that he would leave his wife for her
- software system named "naggy_wife"
- coworker telling younger coworker to "not get married because you will never have sex again"
I am passing along these anecdotes because they're more easy to empathize with than some of the more general arguments of why it can be hard to succeed in tech as a woman (but they really only tell part of the story). Some of my other anecdotes might also sound closer to things you've seen or heard at the work place, or perhaps it's easier to see how some of these things might have happened without you being aware of them, given their (relative) infrequency and the contexts in which they arise. All of them happened without an HR incident (like, really, should a guy who wrote a system called "naggy-wife" get in trouble? a choice was made like 20 years ago... and maybe the guy doesn't even work there anymore). But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up and contribute to the relatively common feeling among female engineers that they "don't belong".
>But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up
Not really, TBH. I especially can't see why a woman experiencing these (to my mind, rather mild) interactions would think that things would be better in some other career path.
Let's say I, a man, went to work in a traditionally female-dominated field like nursing, and found that the other nurses there had named their cafeteria dishwasher "Hubby" as a joke because it took forever to work.
Would I, a grown man, consider changing my career because of this? No, I wouldn't.
OTOH, if the other nurses seemed to view me with disrespect or suspicion and I found I wasn't able to shift that perception through my actions, then I'd reconsider.
> Let's say I, a man, went to work in a traditionally female-dominated field like nursing, and found that the other nurses there had named their cafeteria dishwasher "Hubby" as a joke because it took forever to work.
Actually, this issue is in nursing. If you talk to male nurse organizations they do actually have issues of e.g. constantly being saddled with the heaviest patients or most physical labor because they're assumed to be strong, not having sexual harassment taken seriously from patients, and to be expected to take one for the team in handling the patients that were sexually inappropriate with female nurses. It does grate over time!
Those sound to me like genuine issues that need to be fixed. (To give an example of something I do think would need to be fixed in a gender-flipped scenario: Expecting only female employees to bring food to office parties, or clean up afterwards.)
This won’t be a popular sentiment among the woke mafia that puruses HN but I’ve seen far more women drop out of tech roles due to the general work environment than due to some sexist commentary. In fact, I don’t know any who left due to some sexist commentary. I know many who left due to how toxic the work environment is for everyone.
Tech workers are one of the least sexist groups out of any. If you think techies are sexist, you’d never last a day in medicine, law, or finance. Yet, women sign up for those in far higher percentages. Genuinely, it is actually hard to find a more left/progressive leaning professional field. It is not sexism that is the one thing keeping women out of tech. It is that it’s not an attractive or high status field to women. The people working in it are not seen as socially competent, it is highly outsourced, and depending on role has relatively little socializing. It’s also insanely competitive and you have to fight to keep your job from an army of H1B workers invading the country due to CEOs looking for slave labor. There are so many reasons to not be in tech and sexism should be one of the lowest reasons out there.
I don’t know any women complaining about sexism in comparison to the level of “holy fuck, when will I ever get a break?” It is an unrelenting field that constantly has you worried you’ll lose your job next month. On top of requiring you study at least 500 leetcode problems before you do any interviews. Go figure, most women don’t enjoy that.
My ex-partner was a consultant at a FANG. It was her first engagement at a customer site after six months of very successful work internally.
She was placed in a group overseen by another consultant. He was from the same firm. In fact he was a principle in the firm.
He immediately started undermining her. He gave her advice that she followed, and then he criticized her for following his advice. He was extremely helpful to women employees from the client, but a complete dick to her. There were many other things he did. She documented what was happening, and complained to the skip-level but he denied it, and they didn't believe her. It looked like she was going to be out.
Then there was a reorganization and several other women from the same consulting company were moved onto her team. They had much more history with the company. They were all high performers. He started doing the same shit to them. When they started reporting the same treatments and complaints management finally listened, and recalled him to the central office.
The story has a great ending though. Once back in the main office, said horrible man then made a wonderful mistake. He started sexually harassing the new corporate council. That ended very badly for him.
> He immediately started undermining her. He gave her advice that she followed, and then he criticized her for following his advice. He was extremely helpful to women employees from the client, but a complete dick to her. There were many other things he did. She documented what was happening, and complained to the skip-level but he denied it, and they didn't believe her. It looked like she was going to be out.
This sounds like what happens to other males too? I'm not sure if that's related to sexual harassment though.
Yeah, exactly. This is the difference. People in tech assume that when this happens to women that it’s sexually motivated. No. It’s motivated by knowing you’re stack ranked and the best way to get ahead is by tearing others down. The industry is insanely toxic and most men just deal with it silently.
How much of this opinion has been shaped by actually talking to the women whose experience you are summarizing? And specifically in a context where they'd give you an honest and candid answer, which probably wouldn't involve you saying stuff like "woke mafia" out loud (as it would put regular people on guard and they'd feel less comfortable being honest with you). I don't want you to answer question that literally, because it's the internet and you can just say "I've talked to 1000 women in tech and have summarized their tabulated their experiences in a spreadsheet on my computer." Just honestly take a quiet minute or so and think about it. If the answer is somewhere close to zero, ask yourself why you felt such a high degree of confidence in the assessment you gave above.
Even in Chicago 30 years ago I cannot imagine that happening where I worked. Women were pretty well represented in tech there, incidentally. My immediate supervisor was a woman and I was the only male on my team. This was in IT in financial services. I would guess the whole department was 60:40 male:female.
Seriously, every instance I'm aware of men having done something like that where I worked (and it's happened more than once), they've been fired either the next day or the same week.
The solution there has nothing to do with hiring more women, and everything to do with zero tolerance for a sexist environment.
I mean, that happening is just insane. This isn't the 1950's.
Extreme examples like this provide a nice attention-grabbing narrative, but they're not responsible for driving the central 99.5% of the workforce distribution
The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's just very difficult to affect these in the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole. Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered folks, come from how parents push their values onto their kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved interests because of ideas they had about masculinity and femininity.
My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."
I'm not sure that's entirely what's to blame when the countries with the least gender discrimination (Scandinavia) tend to be about 20% female in tech. I think that when people are free to choose their fields based purely on personal inclination, without major financial incentive, tech lands at about 20% female and early childhood education ends up being the opposite.
Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20% female and we easily end up with spirals where departments end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring in math instead of cs because of that process at my college.
I would hesitate to advance any theories as to cause based on that data (e.g., Denmark - part of Scandinavia - is >50% and Finland - not part of Scandinavia but next to it - is <30%).
Yeah I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the answers. You might be right.
I guess the interesting point of discussion here is "personal inclination". A lot of my female friends have stories about how their parents encouraged their brothers to fix things around the house, get their hands dirty, read manuals, and set up new appliances. They tell me how they were, conversely, encouraged to make friends, maintain relationships, and steered toward more aesthetic pursuits like art, drama, or music.
My sister, at an age when she had no strong interests of her own, was given paintbrushes and nice paper as gifts by our parents but not Legos because they felt like girls were more likely to enjoy aesthetic things than mechanical things. Funny enough, as an adult she has neither mechanical nor aesthetic interests. The question I guess is how much of "personal inclination" is driven by these small decisions of what options we give to kids.
I will say my experiences are colored by the fact that my family is a low-income immigrant family in the US from a culture with definite gender discrimination and so they hold stronger gender prejudices than probably a high-income Scandinavian family. My guess is also that younger generations have grown up with a much better idea of gender equality and will raise their kids with less of this prejudice.
I also observed in my school that a lot of women felt more comfortable in the math department than CS (though CS had much less prestige compared to now), so thanks for your story and background.
I think I may also have somewhat of a blind spot here because I grew up with a mom who is a software engineer herself and I was bought a bunch of electronics/building toys by engineer relatives on both sides. When I was 13 or 14 I was given the parts for a computer under the instruction to put it together and make sure to dual boot linux. I knew a fair number of other girls my age whose parents really wanted them to be engineers/devs and did similar things, but a lot of them were uninterested and went on to happy careers in other fields.
The math vs CS dept thing is concerning because at the foundations they're very similar fields. It's such a strange phenomenon that my graph theory elective in the math dept was 30 or 40% female, yet algorithms was 5% female. Definitely at my institution there were structural issues in the CS dept that didn't exist in the math dept.
> the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole.
The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.
BTW, if you condition PISA scores on racial groups, any racial group (black, white, asian, whatever) scores higher in the USA than in any other country, except Hong Kong.
> The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.
I've heard this, but will fully admit I don't know how real this is. For one, the US generally has the highest COL in the world, so it's bound to spend more per student than any other country. Moreover, the general concern I've seen is that badly funded school districts in the US are much worse off than well funded school districts. Moreover gender disparities are not as bad in well funded school districts.
I've seen that concern as well, but it's pretty clearly a zombie concern from the days when schools would be funded almost entirely by local property taxes. Most states now equalize funding between local districts.
I don’t know the picture in every state, but in CA schools still receive 31% of their funding from local taxes. That’s still quite a bit. Then there’s other sources of funding like the school PTA which does things like fund school supplies.
Again, the state equalizes. After the 2013 funding reforms, the state gives districts gives districts with high-need students more money to make up for local funding shortfalls. The statistics I've seen (e.g. https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...) indicate that this more than closes the gap.
> Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified
Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.
I totally agree. At the previous company I worked for, we decided to sponsor a 3-year scholarship (paid directly to the student, not just covering fees) at a local uni that targeted high-school leavers from demographics that were underrepresented in both our company and the wider industry we were in (renewables/energy sector). Trying to hire more people from those demographics is futile if the candidates don't exist, so the idea was to encourage people to choose this pathway.
The scholarship is for students who would choose a certain program/specialization relevant for our industry and includes a paid summer internship at our company after their 2nd or 3rd year of study. Having mentored some of these students when they were interns (capable and bright students with promising futures), they said that this scholarship helped them choose this career path whereas otherwise they may have just tried to get into tech like many others at that university.
Note this was not in the USA but in New Zealand where we have a different colonial history we are reckoning with. The scholarship targeted women, Maori (our indigenous culture), and Pacific Islanders (a large ethnic minority in NZ). This less about meeting any ratios or quotas (we didn't have those), but rather we felt a distinct lack of e.g. Maori voices in our company and the industry which is a problem when you are frequently interacting with Maori stakeholders and landowners in energy project development (and indigenous relations and historical landonwership plays a large role in our consenting & planning process).
I think these efforts need to be done at every level at the same time, and I agree that the "lower" or "earlier" levels need to be prioritized. Similar to how prevention is usually preferred to reaction.
You're absolutely correct and I think it's what drives all the resentment about DEI programs. People aren't dumb, when they see some group only makes up 3% of the population of engineers and they see a program trying to balance senior positions, they're going to feel its unfair bs. What's really interesting is that almost every woman I've worked with professionaly isn't from North America, they're all from India, Iran and Eastern Europe (Belarus, Bulgaria etc). There's something deeply wrong with the culture here that's screwing up the top of the funnel.
Another possibility: Women in poorer countries enrol in CS out of necessity. In wealthy countries, they have more economic freedom and there are more jobs available higher up on Maslow's Hierarchy, so they enrol in what they actually want (which is not CS).
Entirely accurate, in ex-communist eastern europe some sort of math/engineering job was about the only way to live somewhat decent, so anyone remotely ambitious would go into that.
This tracks. I got a computer science degree from a large US university. Something like 75-80% of the major was male. The majority of the male CS students were Asian-American*, but not extremely. Way larger share on the female side, like 90%.
Several of my friends in CS said their parents wouldn't have supported their college education if they were getting a humanities degree, with the possible exception of law. Even business was unlikely.
(~2018) In India, women represent 45% of total computer science enrollment in universities, almost three times the rate in the United States, where it is 18%.
The 70% statistic is very prominent, but some of my Iranian friends were incredulous of it. Some speculate that men tend to pick up skills during mandatory military service, so women make up a larger proportion of college graduates. Interestingly when you look for statistics on the workforce itself (rather than graduates with STEM degrees), you see familiar ratios of ~20-25%. E.g. https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/425963/23-percent-of-mobile...
"Women make up 48 percent of internet users, 45 percent of cellphone users, and 23 percent of mobile app developers in Iran, Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said here on Sunday."
I can't seem to find stats on the aggregate gender breakdown of software developers in Iran.
countries in Asia prioritize education a lot, prioritize good jobs and good careers a lot. Children are pushed towards the schooling that offers the best careers and STEM is it at the moment.
I did forget about lawyers, the other stereotypical Iranian-American career that isn't STEM. The part of my family from Iran jokes about this a lot, saying even lawyers unofficially go by the title "doctor" because of the status it holds, idk if that's true.
Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on down the funnel.
There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes elsewhere in the system... obviously.
i think that i've seen in my lifetime AA in hiring absolutely translate to shifts in undergrad composition. not sure if it spills over to highschool, but it definitely does when people are choosing what to do in college.
In my experience girls want to do CS but they lack confidence and are given too many opportunities to opt for something easier where they think they’ll be more successful. (I don’t know about any other of the diversity axes as much.)
I definitely recognize what you're saying and it's fantastic, but hiring managers and execs do indeed need to be active on this too.
The channels to reach out to more diverse candidate are more often than not different to those recruiters use to find your "average white guy in a hoodie". That's decreasingly the case for women (and I use that term very intentionally; I'm not talking generally "non-male" here), but social media and professional networking is quite hostile and/or intimidating to other groups. While the business benefits of putting in this extra effort in are obvious (it's a no brainer to seek out overlooked top talent, let alone the benefits of culture and diverse experiences), those benefits aren't always aligned with the hiring team who are incentivized in most companies to hit numbers. The business goals need to be driven from above by DEI initiatives or - if not - hiring manager allies who'll put their foot down.
When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.