[HN Gopher] Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years
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Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years
Author : ushakov
Score : 173 points
Date : 2024-07-10 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (venturebeat.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (venturebeat.com)
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| nytesky wrote:
| Since it's founding, we've seen Gamergate, the rise of
| Brogrammers (https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/07/tech/web/brogrammer
| s/index.ht...), and Changs book on Brotopia.
|
| I could see it if stakeholders feel they are engaged in a
| quiotic endeavor...
|
| As a father of 3 daughters, I still see a push for women in
| stem, but anecdotally my youngest is often the only girl in
| such activities.
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| Very interesting.
|
| At my company (tech) I've noticed that for the past 2-3 years
| grads are almost 50% women.
|
| Now, I have absolutely nothing against this _outcome_. But I do
| wonder - instead of optimizing for a specific distribution of
| employee features shouldn 't we be optimizing for hiring the
| best?
|
| And you could say "they are the best, 50% of the best are
| women".
|
| That's a possible explanation! However.... 5+ years ago when
| grad were roughly 100% men, weren't we hiring the best then?
| Surely back then they also thought they were hiring the best.
| Surely 5 years ago if you'd told the hiring manager "hey from
| those 20 people you hired, 10 aren't the best, 10 the best are
| these other people and they happen to be women", the hiring
| manager would've said "no way, we don't look at gender when
| hiring, we just hire the best".
|
| My point is that we didn't _understand_ why back then we were
| ending up with 100% men despite the fact that 50% of the
| population are women. We just mandated that 50% should be
| women. This is like you believe you have a bug and so you tweak
| something at random. Now it 's different and you think it's
| fixed.
|
| Anyway, they don't pay me enough, so I don't care :-)
| busterarm wrote:
| At least in the US, men dropped out of college during COVID
| in record numbers. Many have not returned.
| dang wrote:
| All: if you're going to post on a topic like this please make
| sure you're not just commenting out of reflexive activation.
| That's not what HN is for, as the site guidelines try to make
| clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| On HN, we want comments that are _thoughtful_ --i.e. that come
| from reflection, not reflex [1]; and _specific_ --i.e. that have
| to do with what's different about a story, not what's generic.
| This is not particular to any topic; it's an optimization
| problem: we're trying to optimize the site for intellectual
| curiosity [2].
|
| The trouble with reflexive comments is that they repeat responses
| that have already happened many times--rather as if they're being
| served from cache [3]. The trouble with generic comments is that
| the generic level is too abstract to say anything new or
| interesting. Put those together and you get repetition, the arch-
| enemy of curiosity [4].
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| [3] This, btw, is why such comments always show up quickly:
| cached responses are the fastest to arise. The kind of thoughtful
| comments we're looking for take longer to "compute".
|
| [4]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| shrubble wrote:
| Non-profits closing means there is a financial reason; were there
| grants monies that ran out? Did another "women in STEM" non-
| profit get corporate sponsorship instead? The article doesn't
| say.
| Hasu wrote:
| The (economic) purpose of Girls in Tech is to create more
| workers in software so that prices for labor will go down.
|
| Given the layoffs of 2022-ongoing, labor costs in tech are
| dropping enough that interested parties aren't incentivized to
| increase the supply of labor further.
| nsonha wrote:
| > so that prices for labor will go down
|
| wut? Any one creating anything is DELIBERATELY driving price
| of that thing down for you I guess.
| randomdata wrote:
| Yes, anyone who deliberately increases the supply of
| something does so in an effort to diminish the price of
| something.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > After all, that's why the opposite situation: Collusion
| - where actors try to deliberately limit the supply of
| something, thereby causing price to rise - is illegal.
|
| Unless they're a union.
| muglug wrote:
| The creation of computer science degree courses did not
| push down the price of software engineers.
| flyingfences wrote:
| The popularization of computer science degrees absolutely
| did push down the price of software engineers on average.
| The Big Names in SV are outliers; the rest of the
| industry employs us at wages far closer to other
| professions than they could a generation ago.
| busterarm wrote:
| This. People really do forget what it was like just
| before the peak of the dotcom bubble. There were
| companies that offered perks like a fully paid lease on a
| brand new Porsche 911. This wasn't just for the software
| engineers either.
|
| If you could breathe on a keyboard, you could land a
| high-paying job.
|
| Demand was that high.
|
| That era of tech minted way, way, way more millionaires
| on average.
| netdevnet wrote:
| Surely, we can all agree that this is not sustainable.
| Companies basically throwing money at people that might
| not have the skills you need is a massive waste of money
| from the companies point of view.
| busterarm wrote:
| Nobody was talking about whether or not it was
| sustainable, we're just comparing salary potential now to
| a generation ago.
|
| To the managerial class, tech people used to be literal
| wizards conjuring the impossible and now we're regular
| commoditized office labor like any other.
| netdevnet wrote:
| Not sure if comparing salary potentials coming from two
| different socio-economic periods is useful or likely to
| mislead.
|
| Tech and people versed in it were not common (to people
| outside tech) and so the high salaries would reflect
| that. Now is not the case. It was always going to be
| temporary. As people become acquainted with tech people,
| the magic vanishes, you see the code behind the pixels.
| At the same time, tech people themselves did cause this
| by making tech easier to understand and manipulate.
|
| It's like a magician, the first few times, it is enticing
| and mysterious but after a while it becomes ordinary.
| Tech wizards are just like that.
| busterarm wrote:
| People with wizard-like skills are out there but
| typically can't command the salaries they used to.
|
| Todays SWEs tend to know far less about how computers
| operate and how protocols work than in the old days.
| netdevnet wrote:
| The reality is that thanks to those tech wizards, most
| companies don't need tech wizards to build tech products
| and most tech workers don't need to know anywhere near as
| much as you would need to back in the days.
|
| The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that
| builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks
| itself while letting big companies extract max value out
| of it and contribute nothing or extremely little to the
| open source world.
|
| Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got
| rejected by the company that uses his software daily.
| This should be in the mind of every dev imo.
|
| Tech wizards wrote their fate on code, compiled it and
| served it to the market. This is the result
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got
| rejected by the company that uses his software daily.
| This should be in the mind of every dev imo._
|
| To be fair, he does not come across as the kind of person
| you would want to work with, no matter what kind of
| software he is able to produce. Once hired, others
| actually have to work with him in such companies. In
| fact, Apple did end up hiring him soon after said
| rejection but quickly determined he wasn't a good fit
| there either. No wizard is worth having by your side if
| they make your life miserable.
| kortilla wrote:
| >Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got
| rejected by the company that uses his software daily.
|
| Why does this surprise you? Google didn't even employ the
| chefs that made the food consumed by the employees daily
| either.
|
| Just because you made a thing that was useful doesn't
| mean you have the skills that Google is looking for.
|
| Homebrew was very useful because Mac osx didn't have a
| good package ecosystem for one-liner installs. The tech
| behind it though wasn't particularly unique or
| groundbreaking. So the author's skill here was finding a
| market with unmet demand for a free package manager.
| That's not what Google was looking for.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The SWE buzz/boom of the last teens into the early 20's
| was largely fueled by VC's with access to tons of capital
| at all time low prices. The game was build a company with
| a shiny exterior and a radiance of hype and hope it got
| bought out. It didn't matter that you were burning
| millions on exorbitant salaries and endless perks. It was
| the cost of shine and radiance. And it drove up the cost
| of tech labor across the whole sector.
|
| In a really condensed and simplified version: Big money
| was placing $50-100MM bets everywhere because the house
| was lending for basically free, and you only need a few
| hits to come out on top.
|
| But now that money is expensive again, they game has been
| crashing down.
| silveraxe93 wrote:
| You're on a boat with a hole in the bottom. The water is
| rushing in. You grab a bucket and keep scooping water
| out, but not as fast as it rushes in.
|
| Throwing water out of boats do not make it more buoyant.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Nonsense. Almost everyone who deliberately increases the
| supply of something does so in an effort to get paid for
| creating more of that something. Diminishing the price is
| at best an unintended second-order effect.
| simplicio wrote:
| I mean, that's the effect of increasing the supply, but I
| doubt its the motivation for most people.
| randomdata wrote:
| It is the motivation when the buyer tries to stimulate
| expansion of the supply, per the topic at hand, though.
| pydry wrote:
| For the corporate donors, sure. Im sure the people running it
| were genuine though.
| csomar wrote:
| > Im sure the people running it were genuine though.
|
| The people running it are getting paid to run it. It's a
| job. There are few people who do charity for charity but
| for most people I met working for non-profits, it was just
| a job for them. Doesn't mean they didn't love their work or
| did their best but at the end of the day they need a pay
| check like everybody else.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| There was a bootcamp by me. They had a squeaky clean image
| but were getting big payouts from placing candidates in a
| local fortune 500. People get used to that money.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > interested parties aren't incentivized to increase the
| supply of labor further
|
| It's good when a profit-driven industry decides to stop
| trying to cut expenses.
| autoexec wrote:
| Also unlikely.
| netdevnet wrote:
| > so that prices for labor will go down.
|
| I don't think that's the reason (it is a side effect though).
| What makes you think that?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| because most of these companies are (run by?) sociopaths -
| as soon as low interest rates dried up DEI initiatives got
| slashed even though these companies are still making record
| profits.
| randomdata wrote:
| Why else would a buyer invest heavily in increasing the
| supply?
| RIMR wrote:
| I like that we're not beating around the bush and
| admitting that businesses only donate money to causes
| they think will financially benefit them. That there are
| no altruistic actions by a business entity, everything is
| either an operational expense or an investment.
|
| This is 100% true in practice, so you're absolutely
| correct here. I just hope that we're in agreement that
| this is a bad state of affairs if businesses have
| completely written off doing the right thing in favor of
| profit 100% of the time.
|
| As a community of entrepreneurs, we should aim higher. If
| this is the only reason that tech companies invest in
| gender equality, then we need to find better advocates,
| or at least come prepared to counter the exploitation the
| current advocates have in mind.
| klyrs wrote:
| Counterpoint: a cynical take posted deep in a comment
| thread in a random corner of the internet may not
| accurately reflect the values of an entire industry.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think that companies think they can make $X with 10
| engineers, but > $2X with 20 engineers. Thus, allowing
| more people to be comfortable as a software engineer
| increases the amount of money they can make.
|
| Right now, with 6% interest rates? Nobody wants to make
| money that badly. But it won't be that way forever.
| randomdata wrote:
| That is a fair thought, but, of course, depends on a
| constant (approximately) per-unit labour cost. After all,
| businesses could poach those 10 additional engineers from
| the company beside them with a $2Y compensation offer,
| without the need for any more engineers. But if you need
| to pay 2x more for each labourer to achieve $2X gross
| return then the appeal is quickly lost.
|
| However, if you can create 10 new engineers that didn't
| exist before, then they will be incentivized to fall in
| line with $Y as well, lowering the unit cost of labour
| and making adding 10 more engineers to achieve $2X in
| return much more appealing. The keeping of the price of
| labour down is exactly why businesses were willing to
| make such investments.
| jrockway wrote:
| Everyone wants to lower the cost of labor, but you can
| only get so much blood from a stone. People will do
| something else if software engineering isn't profitable.
| That's how things are going in the post-0% interest rates
| world. Software engineers aren't individually getting
| paid less, but less speculative software is being
| written. In 2021, everyone thought that the way to get
| rich was by throwing 200 software engineers at a shopping
| cart app. In 2024, the way is to have 10 people making a
| shopping cart, 10 people making a database, 10 people
| running HR reports, ... I don't think this makes the size
| of the industry smaller, but makes "I am sure I will find
| something interesting to do at this super company" less
| likely. There are no super companies anymore. (Except
| Nvidia.)
|
| Anyway, the way we increase efficiency is by automating
| more things. 50 years ago, you had to have a person come
| to your house to collect letters from you, then they
| would be mailed across the country, and another person
| would deliver it to the recipient. Now we have email, and
| you can just send someone a letter with no other humans
| in the loop. That's the efficiency increase that
| engineering brings, and even if we can't envision what
| we're going to do tomorrow, it will continue. What that
| means is that we will always need more engineers, and the
| scope of our role will increase faster than we make more
| humans to be engineers.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Human nature.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| Just skimming the 2022 990, executive compensation was $285,170.
| Total expenses $1,904,475 on $2,005,994 in revenue.
| asah wrote:
| Unfortunately this is normal, because running a non-profit is
| hard enough that suitable candidates command high salaries. I
| was on an NPO board with a similar ratio and we couldn't get it
| down.
| nothercastle wrote:
| 300k isn't crazy especially in SF that s not going up get you
| far
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Perhaps we should stop concentrating so many opportunities
| in areas with exhausted resources that are needed to host
| an economic sector.
| randomdata wrote:
| Buyers are free to choose to buy from the company in
| Poducksville instead, but I suspect that, in the typical
| case, they'll never learn about said company because it
| takes strong network effects to get things off the
| ground.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Every ecosystem - economic, ecological, or otherwise -
| has a carrying capacity.
|
| The SV/NorCal area is reaching that capacity. There are
| only so many dollars customers are willing to pay to get
| a quality product, service, or charitable act before the
| law of diminishing returns kicks in, and those dollars
| are what funds the compensation packages of both profits
| and non-profits. There is no infinite well of value (no
| matter what capitalism says), which means that there is a
| ceiling on things like salary and the things (namely
| residential real estate) that said salary can buy.
|
| If you pay a person $300k to do a job because that's what
| the local job market dictates in SV, are you _really_
| getting the surplus value to cover that salary? Can you
| keep charging customers that amount? Will you do
| increasingly alienating things that causes negative
| externalities (read: regulation) to be passed that impact
| your business model 's ability to pay that much?
|
| You could very well be better off to hire someone at the
| $150k rate in a place like Kansas City or Minneapolis.
| Those aren't "Poducksville" but that's the competition
| the valley will begin to see.
| nytesky wrote:
| Doesn't CEO and non profit operate out of Nashville?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Even so, I'm assuming this isn't like a normal job where
| you have benefits, if they're paying for all of that out
| of pocket, the salary makes perfect sense to me.
| hiatus wrote:
| Why would you assume that? If you are company over a
| certain size (even a non-profit) you are obligated by
| federal law to offer health insurance.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Are they large? I've not heard of them. It has 130
| thousand members, but that doesn't mean they're all
| employees?
| hiatus wrote:
| The law requires only 50 employees. I am not sure of
| their number of employees though.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Certainly less than 50 with revenue of 2m and expenses of
| 1m.
| uberman wrote:
| A 501(c)3 requires at least 50 employees? That would
| surprise me if it was true.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Also not considered in that amount is the fact that this
| person has to pay for benefits (healthcare and such) likely
| directly from this income. This is insanely low when you
| really think of that.
| uberman wrote:
| They were based in Tennessee when she made $280k. When they
| were based in the bay area, she made just shy of $370k.
| bitcurious wrote:
| That comp $ is very reasonable in the abstract, what's not
| reasonable is comp:revenue. You can't be paying 15% of your
| revenue to a single individual, because almost by definition
| they aren't performing well enough to justify that salary.
| pbronez wrote:
| Even when that person is the founder? Who created the thing
| and keeps it going through personal force of will?
|
| Doesn't seem unreasonable to me. You want high quality
| people to be able to focus full time on stuff like this.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Especially when that person is the founder lol
| jrockway wrote:
| I mean, she would make 3x more than that just being a
| software engineering cog in the machine. To me, a salary
| of $200k for this position looks like donating $400k a
| year to it. Plus your time. That seems pretty generous to
| me.
| kelipso wrote:
| Here we go with inflated salary guesses that a small
| percentage of programmers get paid. Also I doubt she
| decided to start a non-profit because she was good at
| coding.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's not necessarily true, because revenue can be a poor
| measure of capturing value and scale in organizations that
| are mostly volunteer.
|
| If that individual is managing the process of successfully
| getting 1,000 people who volunteer 15 hrs/wk, which you'd
| otherwise have to pay let's say $30/hr including taxes,
| then that would be the equivalent of $22.5 million in
| annual revenue.
|
| Suddenly $285K in executive compensation looks perfectly
| fine.
|
| In some mostly-volunteer organizations, you will find that
| most of the money pays the professionals at the top,
| because you can't get that necessary expertise any other
| way.
|
| I worked at one once right out of college, at the bottom of
| the full-time-paid rung, and I had interestingly conflicted
| moral feelings about it. I spent a lot of time with
| volunteers and yet I was being paid. But I needed a job, I
| needed to pay rent. And the tech skills I was providing
| literally none of the volunteers could do. It made me
| question whether it was "fair" that all these people's
| monetary donations were going to paying my salary. But then
| again, I wasn't the one who set rents to be as high as they
| were in the city where the organization put its
| headquarters, and student debt doesn't get forgiven just
| because you work for a nonprofit.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Question about the 2022 990 schedule b part 1. The contributors
| No./amount is restricted. What does this mean? Is it common?
| uberman wrote:
| Just going to note that all of that was one person's salary. I
| question why a smaller non-profit based in Tennessee would need
| to pay their CEO almost 300k. Senior researchers where I work
| make half that while managing grant projects with twice the
| funding.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Tech industry is imploding, there is no need whatsoever to push
| women (or men) into a career in tech that has very limited
| opportunities at the moment.
| imglorp wrote:
| It sure feels like it, yeah.
|
| But is there an objective time series measure somewhere?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| More like easy tech careers that pay big from the get-go after
| a bootcamp are imploding. Those workers with a lot of
| experience and those with the skills, passion and patience,
| willing to push through the rough tides will be rewarded in the
| end.
|
| However, SW dev is still a tough career, requiring constantly
| learning the new things in your free time if you want to stay
| employable, that's not to be understated, especially
| considering the ageism in this racket, and how quickly things
| become obsolete compared to other credentialed professions
| where you're basically set for life once you get that piece of
| paper and not have to go through rounds of hazing interviews
| and take homes every time you want to switch jobs. It's not for
| everyone.
| taylodl wrote:
| I've been developing software for a living for 40 years now
| (even longer if you include when I wasn't developing software
| for a living) and I feel that the pace of change has
| dramatically slowed down in the past 10 years:
|
| - We've stabilized web front ends
|
| - Mobile application development has stabilized
|
| - Architecture patterns are well-known and there are plenty
| of (now legacy) products with which to implement them
|
| - Ditto with integration patterns and APIs
|
| - We finally have security figured out (OAuth) and I now have
| the means to identify and authenticate a person who's not
| even in my own repo
|
| - We have tools such as Copilot taking the grunt work out of
| coding - leaving developers to work only with the most
| interesting bits
|
| - I could go on with lots of stuff that has now matured
|
| I feel like it's easier than ever to develop software, and
| like I said, the pace of change is rapidly diminishing. I
| think software development has finally become a mature
| practice. Admittedly, that takes some of the fun out of it,
| but we knew that day was coming anyway, right?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> I feel like it's easier than ever to develop software,_
|
| It's also inversely proportional more difficult to get
| hired nowadays in those fields though.
|
| Back then when (for example) mobile dev was just getting
| started you could get hired with absolutely zero experience
| since nobody had any experience, but now there's a laundry
| list of requirement even for junior positions which are few
| compared to senior positions and the strict requires there
| in terms of experience.
|
| Good for those who already had 10 past years of experience
| and learned the necessary background knowledge, bad for
| those entering now when the bar has been raised.
| taylodl wrote:
| Isn't that how all mature industries work?
|
| Now that things have settled down and have been
| standardized, there's a set of things that all developers
| are expected to know. It was easier to "wing it" back
| when that wasn't the case. People used to evaluate you
| based off your aptitude and ability to learn new things
| and stay abreast with the industry, nowadays those skills
| aren't so valuable as is someone who knows how to do the
| work and get things done on time.
| randomdata wrote:
| That's how it works when an industry is flush with
| candidates. Software development is the "in thing" right
| now, so software businesses have endless people to choose
| from, and thus get to be picky. All that goes out the
| window when you start having difficulty finding people to
| hire, though.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > it's easier than ever to develop software
|
| I agree that there are a lot more solved problems, but I
| find it much more complicated to develop software now than
| in the past. You used the example of web front ends, but
| how large is that toolchain? How many different steps and
| tools do you need to be familiar with to take a project
| from concept to end user?
| taylodl wrote:
| I do wonder how much of my finding everything so simple
| today is a function of my having done this work for 40
| years? OTOH, there are solutions that can be easily built
| today that would have been nigh impossible to have built
| in the past.
|
| I think the problem now is a pedagogical problem. I don't
| think we need nearly as many computer scientists as we do
| people who are practiced in the craft. We need more
| tradesmen than experts, more blacksmiths than
| metallurgists, so-to-speak. But I don't think the typical
| "software bootcamp" is a good trade school. We need some
| kind of trade school and apprenticeship solution where
| after a couple of years you're a solid developer with
| real-world experience.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Alternatively, we are in a lull period and tumultuous times
| will come back as soon as somebody makes something good in
| a higher layer than we use now.
|
| Personally, I think we are due for some collapse of the
| fundamentals.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| From my purely anecdotal experience, it's not imploding. It's
| just not a way to get a salary that's $250k+ as easily as it
| was.
|
| If you enjoy software engineering and are willing to take a job
| in some place that's not SV, NYC, Austin, Seattle, etc. you can
| still find jobs that will allow an above-average salary and
| comfortable living. It's just not going to be at FAANG or Evil
| Omnicorp LLC.
| analyst74 wrote:
| Since a few years ago, especially as layoffs started at big
| name companies, there have been a massive investment in
| funding and talent into modernizing traditional industries.
| This effect will be felt by IT departments that built in-
| house software and small product or consulting shops.
| netdevnet wrote:
| I feel saying that the industry is imploding is an
| exaggeration. We are just having a room cleanup period.
|
| - Crypto/ML startups built on promises
|
| - Companies built on the latest buzzword (LLM startups will
| have their Judgement Day by 2027 latest)
|
| - Companies giving crazy high salaries to inexperienced people
| straight out of bootcamps
|
| - Companies spending crazy money on "perks" such as free food
| and in-office entertainment
|
| - Companies paying big bonuses to all tech employees
|
| - Companies overhiring so that the competition remains
| understaffed
|
| Money is not free anymore. Everyone is looking where the
| pennies go. Companies have behaved like your average Amazon
| customer and have filled their companies with subscriptions
| they don't really need (see overhired employees, perks, high
| salaries). Belt tightening is the mood.
| dpoljak wrote:
| The reasons for closing haven't really been elaborated on, just
| commented on as sad and devastating; I haven't managed to glean
| anything more from the rest of the article.
|
| However, it's incredible to me to keep an organization like this
| going for 17 years. The landscape is constantly shifting and
| looking back at the world and technology from 2007, and even
| 2014, they've survived a lot. Going down now just shows how bad
| the market is in reality.
| netdevnet wrote:
| How is them going down related to the market? They are a non-
| profit.
|
| This is pure speculation but I would imagine that they reasons
| for closing are likely resource related (most likely financial)
| as organisers and managers can be replaced
| jmull wrote:
| I would guess they get most of their funding from tech
| companies who support and participate in their programs.
| netdevnet wrote:
| That makes sense
| bell-cot wrote:
| > However, it's incredible to me to keep...
|
| _THIS_. In feel-good daydreams, every nice-sounding thing
| lasts forever. (Generally with Imagined Good People
| Somewhere(tm) paying the bills.)
|
| Vs. in the real world? - I'd guess that they outlasted >99% of
| tiny tech non-profits founded in 2007. And >95% of all non-
| profits founded then.
| tristor wrote:
| They outlasted most of the tech companies founded in 2007,
| not just the non-profits. The average life span of a tech
| startup is 5 years.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _However, it 's incredible to me to keep an organization like
| this going for 17 years._
|
| Exactly. Say what you want about the state-of-affairs today,
| imagine what the women in tech landscape looked like almost 20
| years ago! I'm sure they accomplished a lot, and that's
| awesome.
| grobbyy wrote:
| At the risk of posting a reflexive comment, what should we be
| doing here? It seems like everything has unintended consequences
| (not on a cost-benefit basis):
|
| - Minority affinity groups pull people from majority groups and
| decrease integration.
|
| - Anti-discrimination/sexism/etc. movements often add social
| barriers to interactions (e.g. things I do within my identity
| group would be misperceived if done across)
|
| - Affirmative action makes minorities feel like they don't
| deserve to be there (and often leads to resentment and other
| consequences)
|
| Progress in the past few decades has been limited, so it seems
| like we're taking the wrong approach, but I'm don't have a better
| approach to propose.
|
| Green fields, blue sky, what should we be doing to resolve the
| historical issues we have around sex, race, socioeconomic status,
| etc.?
|
| I think looking to countries which made better progress might be
| helpful....
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I have seen data presented multiple times showing the relation
| between a country's wealth and/or economic freedom and women's
| participation in stem fields. It's a negative correlation. I
| often wonder if we should just be focused on maximizing
| individual freedom and let the chips fall where they may. This
| will result in some professions with extreme sex imbalance, and
| we should accept that outcome.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| It is important to understand the reasons for that negative
| correlation. If you do, your conclusions would be quite the
| opposite - sex imbalance is not something to accept, but
| rather to fix. Many authoritarian regimes are expanding their
| economic base by enabling women to pursue professional
| careers. In some developed countries there's no such
| pressure, so they are simply stuck in the past. They are not
| doing better because women are enslaved in the kitchen or
| take only stereotypical jobs. It's just ideological and/or
| religious trap.
| cm2012 wrote:
| The countries with the most female empowerment and equality
| in the nordics have some of the smallest percentage of
| women in STEM in the world.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| And? Have you looked at any research why this is
| happening? Out of context this can tell anything.
| gspencley wrote:
| > It is important to understand the reasons for that
| negative correlation.
|
| Agreed 100%
|
| > If you do, your conclusions would be quite the opposite
|
| This is where you lose me. Your statement here suggests the
| following:
|
| 1. That you know, for a conclusive fact, what those reasons
| are
|
| 2. That the reasons suggest something ominous
|
| Furthermore, you haven't explained what you consider to be
| the reasons, let alone offered explanation or citations
| that would support why you think those are the particular
| reasons. You implied that the reasons are sexism and
| discrimination, but you left that quite open for
| interpretation.
|
| Moving on, you then suggest that minority groups that do
| not pursue careers in STEM are "stuck in the past."
|
| I have two daughters who are in their early, going on mid
| twenties. My youngest daughter is one of the smartest and
| brightest people that I have ever met. Obviously I'm
| biased, but this is a kid that found ways to get herself
| into all sorts of trouble as a toddler by solving problems
| that I would have thought no toddler was capable of.
|
| In her late teens she had no idea what she wanted to do,
| but she expressed some interest in learning to code. Being
| a software engineer myself, I gave her all of the support
| and resources that I could. I offered to teach her myself.
| I bought her Udemy courses and books. I invited her to sit
| with me at work to see what what life as a coder is like. I
| made it as accessible for her as possible.
|
| What has she decided to do with her life? She works in a
| professional kitchen and is on the career path to becoming
| a chef and possibly a restauranteur.
|
| People with your attitude would snub your nose at her life
| choices, look down at what she's passionate about and claim
| that she is a 'slave' living in the 'past' because she's
| currently working in a low-paid service industry. You would
| then blame sexism or classism despite the fact that she was
| raised in a progressive, well to do family that gave her
| every opportunity to succeed at whatever she chose to do.
|
| Of course, one anectode does not refute statistics. But you
| have not offered statistics. You came out with assumptions,
| accusations and a snobbish attitude towards people who
| would make personal life choices that you don't understand
| or approve of. The beautiful thing about freedom, however,
| is that no one needs your approval or understanding.
| rysertio wrote:
| Both boys and girls from Asian countries tend to be more
| interested in STEM.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Because it's a commodity job where they can provide value
| to western corporations without having to be physically
| located there, and there's huge demand for them because
| of their low cost.
| Jensson wrote:
| Japan isn't low cost.
| em-bee wrote:
| _She works in a professional kitchen and is on the career
| path to becoming a chef and possibly a restauranteur._
|
| which to my knowledge is a male dominated profession. so
| good on her!
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| How about calming down and keeping your emotions in
| check? Your whole comment is triggered by a wrong idea of
| what I meant and who I am. It is also ignorant of all the
| data that exists about gender inequality and the root
| causes. It is not something that you can learn from a
| single link to statistics. You need to do your own
| research, read some books and meet gender equality
| advocates to understand better the world in which your
| daughter lives.
|
| Individual free choices are valid and as a father you did
| a good job showing the opportunities you know about and
| then not pushing towards certain career. A woman
| absolutely can and should be able to choose to be an
| engineer, a nurse or a fulltime mother and housekeeper,
| as long as this is free choice. All those jobs are
| important and respected.
|
| However I'm not talking about them or diminishing them.
| I'm talking about the society as a whole and sexism so
| deeply rooted in the culture that even with proper
| education it is still not easy to uncover and combat all
| biases. Gender discrimination starts very early when
| metaphorically speaking boys get cars and girls get
| dolls. Children are programmed by the society to have
| certain interests and play certain gender roles. The
| share of girls who will choose a profession traditionally
| dominated by men is already lower because of that. Then
| it extends to university and first career steps. Women
| too often have to deal with sexism and harassment in
| academia or on workplace. Too often they are told
| (still!) that men can do better. Choosing a more
| traditional role they avoid it, but is it really a
| freedom of choice? And we even have not started talking
| about childcare where exists institutional disparity
| forcing to make a choice between the family and career.
| For example, how long was your parental leave compared to
| your wife? Freedom for all but white men in countries
| like America is only theoretical. On practice the
| circumstances of life do not leave many women a choice.
| The outcomes are speaking for themselves. There are many
| women who are perfectly fit for the most sophisticated
| jobs, yet there are only few who make it there. In
| Germany we at least had Merkel. America, the so-called
| leader of the free world, never had a woman as a
| president. Fortune 500 CEOs? Startup founders?
| Billionaires? Nobel prize winners? You can easily find
| those numbers. There's no genetic predisposition for
| women to not being able to get there. There's only
| ignorance of people like you who think that they have
| done enough and it's the matter of choice.
| ghaff wrote:
| Of course, there are a variety of roles that are heavily
| female-weighted: nurses, K-12 teachers, executive
| assistants, etc. So there are at least some forces driving
| gender preferences for roles that probably can't/shouldn't
| just be wiped out in the West.
| em-bee wrote:
| i don't know the real reasons, but i have the impression
| that in those countries STEM careers give women more
| freedom, and that would be why they pursue them. the added
| freedom makes it worth the potential downsides.
|
| in the west they already have more freedom, and so the
| downside of having to endure sexism does not make it worth
| the effort.
|
| not sure if that is true, but it makes sense to me
| ryandrake wrote:
| > in the west they already have more freedom, and so the
| downside of having to endure sexism does not make it
| worth the effort.
|
| This is a great point. I think a lot of HN simply _takes
| as given_ that tech is a great, pleasant industry to work
| in, for everyone. Let 's say that it isn't. If it isn't,
| then that might explain why people who have a good degree
| of financial/employment freedom would not choose to work
| in tech, leaving people with not a lot of
| financial/employment freedom (but good tech skills) as
| the ones who grin and bear a tech job.
| vundercind wrote:
| I dunno about everyone else, but if "campground manager"
| had comp as good as tech, that's sure as shit what I'd be
| doing instead.
|
| Goes for a _lot_ of other options, actually. Clerking a
| small store is often way more pleasant (depends on the
| store) than even relatively-good tech jobs, at least to
| me. But the pay's not there.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| It depends. In some countries (eg Iran) this is probably
| true from what I remember, in others there are other
| reasons.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen. I spend
| close to eight chained to my computer. If one of us is a
| slave, it's not her. She's not attending daily stand-ups to
| report how teaching our daughter the alphabet is going; she
| chooses how to spend each day with no external pressures at
| all. Her work taking care of the kids is still more
| exhausting than mine, but it's also obviously more
| fulfilling and engaging. When we meet all of our financial
| goals, we'll both be full time parents. As it is now, I
| make more than enough for her to take care of the kids full
| time and still make progress toward our goals. Why wouldn't
| she take that deal?
|
| Consider that when you talk about women doing what makes
| them happy and what they see as important work (because it
| is) as being "stuck in the past" or in a form of slavery,
| it might be you who's devaluing them. We both received a
| lot of that rhetoric growing up, and it took until well
| into adulthood to really understand how wrong and harmful
| it is.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| This dovetails with my central critique, which is that
| the current state of feminism, in my opinion, tends to
| insidiously subscribe to the tenets of the "late stage
| capitalism" that many self-proclaimed x-wave feminists
| (again, in my experience) claim to denounce, as it is
| oriented around viewing people first and foremost as
| economic agents. Yes, individual income affords freedoms
| to both men and women, which is not to be discounted. But
| then you hear criticisms of women such as your wife,
| essentially demeaning them for not striving to be the
| fittest individual economic agents possible. As if being
| an AE for Yelp is the pinnacle of the human experience.
|
| Again, by no means a black & white issue. I have simply
| have a distaste for such an individualist philosophy and
| fear it inevitably leads to an "us v. them" mentality.
| autoexec wrote:
| > But then you hear criticisms of women such as your
| wife, essentially demeaning them for not striving to be
| the fittest individual economic agents possible.
|
| to some extent I think that pressure is put on everyone.
| There's a lot of pressure to always be making/spending
| more money. There's also a lot of jealousy. Almost every
| person I know with children, man or woman, would rather
| be with their kids, and be there for their kids as they
| grow up. Very few couples are fortunate enough to be able
| to afford a good life on just one income.
|
| That leads to people being resentful that they are
| missing out on what they want for themselves and their
| children. They're stuck missing all the once in a
| lifetime experiences they could be having because they
| are chained to a desk for 8-10 hours a day 5 or more days
| a week. That can cause people to resent the few men and
| women who do get to stay home and be with their family.
| They'll make others feel bad for not spending their time
| working for someone else because misery loves company.
| It's crab bucket mentality.
| spookie wrote:
| Hey, I know you know best (talking plural here), but make
| sure that your wife feels accomplished in her own line of
| work and/or getting her dream job. Raising kids is great,
| but as age goes by, she might feel sad about not
| accomplishing other things.
|
| This is coming from someone with a dysfunctional family,
| I don't have much context about your life nor do I want
| to sound as if I'm assuming things. I'm just trying to
| warn you about that possibility.
| autoexec wrote:
| > make sure that your wife feels accomplished in her own
| line of work
|
| "make sure that your wife feels accomplished" sounds very
| strange to me. Ultimately it should be his wife's
| responsibility to make sure that she feels accomplished
| right? I get that it's not a bad idea to talk with your
| spouse about what the two of you want in life and to
| consider other options from time to time though.
|
| > Raising kids is great, but as age goes by, she might
| feel sad about not accomplishing other things.
|
| I think this happens to almost all people no matter what
| they spent the majority of their life doing. Everyone
| thinks about how things might have worked out if they'd
| done something different. As long as people are free to
| make their own choices, and they have the opportunities
| to pursue what they want in life, then people are
| entitled to their own regrets down the road. We each only
| get one chance at life. It's very rare for someone to
| look back and not feel sad about not accomplishing other
| things.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > Ultimately it should be his wife's responsibility to
| make sure that she feels accomplished right?
|
| No. In a healthy relationship partners care about each
| other. This means also enabling them to pursue their
| dreams. It's not just talking, it's also doing something,
| e.g. taking parental leave or sacrificing your own
| opportunities so that your wife could use hers. Without
| this kind of support she won't have much choice.
| autoexec wrote:
| > it's also doing something, e.g. taking parental leave
| or sacrificing your own opportunities so that your wife
| could use hers. Without this kind of support she won't
| have much choice.
|
| Even in a relationship, you have to own your own choices
| and be responsible for your own happiness. Seems like an
| ideal situation at least. As one of the few couples who
| can afford to live a good life on a single income, she'd
| already have far more opportunities than most. All
| choices involve sacrifices. If she wanted to work or they
| wanted to hire someone to come in to help take care of
| the house/kids it wouldn't necessarily change much for
| him.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > All choices involve sacrifices. > If she wanted to work
| or they wanted to hire someone to come in to help take
| care of the house/kids
|
| This comment is perfect illustration of sexism. You don't
| even consider the option of father taking parental leave
| while the mother works. Why is it woman who must do the
| sacrifices? And of course the idea of hiring someone to
| come: this is not efficient and not scalable, so not a
| solution for entire population that would empower women.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| She does accomplish other things/have hobbies. Her squat
| is in the "exceptional" tier on Symmetric Strength. She's
| good at cooking a variety of meals. We've gotten
| compliments from neighbors that live a couple streets
| away about our yard. She generally takes credit for
| transforming me from a video game nerd into a
| weightlifting Chad, and I don't disagree. She majored in
| math and did a couple programming courses in college, but
| by the end she had had enough of those things.
|
| By contrast, I know for a fact that about 2 years of my
| work were for nothing (building products that ultimately
| failed), and another 3 or so had a large amount of
| unnecessary work from way overly complex designs that I
| didn't have the political capital to prevent, which added
| a lot of stress to my life as I still cared enough to
| try. There's been times where I've presented management
| with an analysis showing that some project they want me
| to lead is going to have negative ROI, but the reality
| I've encountered is a lot of "engineering" in software
| runs on vibes and doing what's currently cool/sounds
| impressive, so the conclusion may already be foregone.
| Knowing you did your due diligence to present that
| analysis and then did a good job executing on the
| delivery is fine I guess, and you'll get your raises and
| promotions for doing it, but it's still somewhat hollow.
|
| If someone is really internally motivated by ambitions of
| career ladder climbing, then they should go for it. If
| economics make it a necessary practical choice, then do
| it (though if they are on a path to a STEM career,
| chances are they are in a social circle that enables them
| to find a high-quality spouse on the same path so that
| only one of them has to do it). But in general I'd advise
| young people who don't yet know what they want that they
| should have their prior be that their family and personal
| accomplishments (or lack thereof) will be more important
| to them than their career accomplishments.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > My wife spends around an hour a day in the kitchen.
|
| I don't want to jump to conclusions about your life, but
| cooking meals for the whole family usually takes more
| than an hour a day if you are not just putting frozen
| pizza in the oven. I often spend twice as much. Maybe
| she's very efficient. Maybe you don't really know her.
|
| > As it is now, I make more than enough for her to take
| care of the kids full time and still make progress toward
| our goals. Why wouldn't she take that deal?
|
| I have already spent one year on parental leave and I can
| say with confidence that if you have passion for work and
| enjoy what you do, it is not a "deal". It is sacrifice
| for your children and for your partner. All families are
| different. Maybe your wife enjoys working as housekeeper
| and fulltime mother and doesn't really care if several
| years are taken from her career path elsewhere. Not
| everyone wants life like that. You say it yourself that
| the circumstances of your life pushed you into this split
| of responsibilities. Would you do it differently if your
| wife wanted to get back to work even if that meant less
| money? Would you let her pursue her passion?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Frozen pizza takes like 2 minutes. You literally just put
| it in the oven, go do something else, then take it out
| and slice it. Normally lunch takes about 15-20 minutes.
| Dinner takes ~45. We usually have overnight oats for
| breakfast which takes ~5 minutes every 3 days to prepare.
| Our older one is usually happy to get some combination of
| cut up fruit, toast, sausage, and cottage cheese for
| breakfast, which takes like 2-5 minutes to throw
| together. The time sink is hounding her to actually eat!
|
| My wife never worked a career and never wanted to, so
| there'd be no "going back", but yeah we were happy on a
| small fraction of my current salary when we were younger,
| or half my current salary just a couple years ago. I'm
| not particularly interested in status or materialism; if
| I didn't have my family, I'd already be done with my
| career. There's an endless list of other things to do.
| Even programming is quite a bit more enjoyable when
| you're doing it for yourself. I've actually told my last
| few managers that I'm not particularly interested in
| getting to the top of the career ladder and dealing with
| the extra stress and responsibility, but they inevitably
| push you toward it anyway. Modern corporations don't seem
| to know how to deal with someone who isn't motivated by
| status. One of my managers actually told me he thought I
| was having self-confidence issues when it was exactly the
| opposite! I think a couple years later he's moved closer
| to my perspective for himself.
|
| I've also taken all of my paternity leave including the
| unpaid portions. No regrets there.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > I have seen data presented multiple times showing the
| relation between a country's wealth and/or economic freedom
| and women's participation in stem fields.
|
| This lines up with my experiences as well. I know plenty of
| eastern european women, asians and latinas working as
| programmers. on top of that I've talked to many that didn't
| know how to code but would ask me to teach them as soon as
| they heard I was a programmer. yet I have met only a small
| handful of white women from america that are software
| engineers. furthermore, the ones that aren't engineers (in
| general) seem more dismissive of my line of work as if its
| somehow beneath them.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| If those folks from outside of the USA had been from
| economically prosperous backgrounds, they too would try to
| become nurses or caregivers instead of programmers.
|
| Gender parity in STEM is a sign of the economic desperation
| of a countries people. This is a sociological fact which
| ruffles feathers when it's stated out loud.
| callalex wrote:
| Do you have any citations to back up this "fact"?
| rsanek wrote:
| take a look at the gender breakdowns for employment in
| the Nordics. probably the best social support structures
| / 'equality' in the world, and yet the ratios are among
| the most extreme anywhere.
|
| when you're taken care of, you do what you like. when you
| have an economic need, you'll take the job that pays and
| will pull you out of poverty, even if you don't care for
| it.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| This argument is pretty common, but blaming the victim is
| wrong. It is not like Nordics solved the problem but
| women still choose different jobs.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190831-the-
| paradox-of...
| jimbokun wrote:
| I believe affinity of boys for interacting with "things"
| and affinity for girls for interacting with "people" has
| been demonstrated pretty well in studies.
|
| (This falls into category of "something I read on the
| Internet")
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _This will result in some professions with extreme sex
| imbalance, and we should accept that outcome._
|
| We do accept it, for the most part. I don't see many Men-as-
| Teachers or Men-in-Nursing advocacy groups.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| >or Men-in-Nursing advocacy groups.
|
| thats been changing. mostly because there are more obese
| people now so you need male nurses to help them move
| around.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Ozempic solves this problem in 10 years.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| There's literally an American Association of Men In
| Nursing. Just googling "male teachers" gives me a ton of
| articles about the importance of hiring more men in
| teaching. Apparently NYC recently announced a huge
| investment into hiring more black/latino men in teaching or
| something?
|
| I'm always suspicious of "you don't see much of x" in
| spaces where x isn't the demographic being catered to. This
| isn't Nursing News or Teacher News, not to say that Nurses
| and Teachers can't also be hackers, technologists, etc. but
| this is clearly not a space oriented towards all things
| teaching or nursing, so questioning community advocacy
| within their communities strikes me as the wrong place.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| That's because their woman advocacy is really a not-so-
| hidden lobby to have woman making more money under the
| pretense of equal representation in all jobs.
| simplicio wrote:
| There's a lot of Men-in-Teaching advocacy, in part because
| its thought having male teachers tends to be beneficial for
| male students[1].
|
| I think stuff like that is the main reason to be worried
| about gender imbalances. A 40-60 imbalance probably isn't a
| big deal, but once you get to like, 90-10 or worse, as is
| the case with early education, you start to get a bunch of
| secondary social problems. Kids who associate learning as a
| woman only thing, or the culture around engineering or
| software becoming "boys clubs" that become uncomfortable
| for the women who do want to work in those fields
|
| https://www.cuny.edu/academics/academic-programs/teacher-
| edu...
| jimbokun wrote:
| > There's a lot of Men-in-Teaching advocacy
|
| There are pundits saying this should be supported. Are
| there programs with real dollars behind them making
| actual changes?
| simplicio wrote:
| The one I linked to? But that was just the first one that
| came up on google, seems to be a fair number of similar
| programs in other states.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Your link isn't men-in-teaching advocacy, it's
| specifically about:
|
| _> adding 1,000 male teachers of color into the teacher
| pipeline_
|
| White men need not apply. If they were actually trying to
| solve a gender imbalance they wouldn't impose that
| criteria.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The idea that social sciences can pinpoint a single cause on
| something as full of confounding factors as this... it's
| extremely arrogant.
|
| But then, the same applies to the people that immediately
| explain it as discrimination.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Minority affinity groups pull people from majority groups and
| decrease integration.
|
| Integration === subjugation for minorities
|
| >Anti-discrimination/sexism/etc. movements often add social
| barriers to interactions (e.g. things I do within my identity
| group would be misperceived if done across)
|
| Indeed that's the point. You _should_ be more mindful of things
| you do and say in this context.
|
| >Affirmative action makes minorities feel like they don't
| deserve to be there (and often leads to resentment and other
| consequences)
|
| And it pays their rent and provides social mobility for
| themselves and their families. We can get over the imposter
| syndrome; everyone has it for one reason or another. We can't
| get over being unemployed due to systemic biases.
|
| Ultimately yes, for the prevailing group, DEI efforts will
| always feel like a personal attack. Levelling the playing field
| has that effect.
| jmull wrote:
| Your points draw the tension between two "competing" points.
| But none of these are black and white. There's a wide middle
| ground between each one... people can belong to multiple
| groups. A-holes will take any opportunity to be a-holes, but
| anti-discrimination doesn't have to be exclusionary and
| punitive. Affirmative action can work more at the opportunity
| level, not the handout level.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Affirmative action makes minorities feel like they don't
| deserve to be there
|
| Does it? I see a lot of affirmative action victims saying that
| it _ought_ to make them feel that way, but I never hear that
| from affirmative action recipients.
| influx wrote:
| You've never heard anyone in those groups have imposter
| syndrome? It's very common.
| digging wrote:
| Isn't imposter syndrome just... pretty common in any STEM
| field? Maybe especially in anyone who isn't a neurotypical
| cishet white man.
| Jensson wrote:
| You don't think affirmative action has anything to do
| with that? Affirmative action means you and everyone else
| there knows you had to pass a lower bar, of course that
| makes impostor syndrome worse.
| lins1909 wrote:
| > Affirmative action means you and everyone else there
| knows you had to pass a lower bar, of course that makes
| impostor syndrome worse.
|
| No, it doesn't. But if that makes you feel better, I hope
| you continue telling yourself that.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Wait, what? That's literally the definition.
| Larrikin wrote:
| That's the made up definition of affirmative action, not
| the actual one.
| digging wrote:
| Calling it a lower bar is a completely disingenuous
| interpretation, when the reason for such policies in the
| first place is that the bar for entry is _much higher_
| for minority groups to be hired.
| em-bee wrote:
| true but the problem here is how the programs are
| perceived.
|
| even if i had to pass a higher bar to get into
| university, when i realize that the bar is lowered to get
| a job, then how i got into university doesn't really
| matter anymore to me or to my new colleagues. so all the
| problems that come with the bar being lowered still do
| apply
| em-bee wrote:
| https://youtu.be/LKiBlGDfRU8?t=188
|
| in this video here sabine hossenfelder explains the problem.
| the statement could be applied to any other marginalized
| group
|
| _" I am against programs or positions that are exclusively
| for women.I think that treating women differently just
| reinforces the prejudice that women are less capable than
| men"_
| autoexec wrote:
| I have multiple friends who've told me that they very much
| wondered if they got a job just because they were a
| "diversity hire" and even more who were afraid that others
| would view them that way and resent them for it. I don't
| think that fear was irrational. None of them were ever
| confirmed "affirmative action recipients", but the fact that
| affirmative action and diversity quotas exist at all is
| enough to make them doubt themselves and be doubted by
| others.
| samatman wrote:
| To tackle your question somewhat obliquely: 67% of
| veterinarians in the US are women, according to this link.
| https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/reports-statistics/mark...
|
| The imbalance is even more acute than that, because the
| profession has been trending towards a women-dominated
| workforce for several decades. There aren't as many
| veterinarians as there are software developers, but it's a
| well-paying job.
|
| Does this situation strike you as one which needs correcting?
| I'm fine with it, personally.
| nradov wrote:
| Before selecting an approach we would first have to agree on
| the goal. What would success look like in a few decades?
| jrflowers wrote:
| > Anti-discrimination/sexism/etc. movements often add social
| barriers to interactions (e.g. things I do within my identity
| group would be misperceived if done across)
|
| Can you give a specific example of a thing you do in your
| identity group that could be misperceived if done across your
| identity group
| mikhael28 wrote:
| There is an expression which I think is fitting, in a weird way -
| a successful marriage does not have to last forever. For some
| reason, we always tend to imagine that, once a company or
| organization is created, it must last forever. That for it to
| 'close its doors' or 'wind down' is somehow a failure. And that's
| just not true; a professional athletes career does not last
| forever, and neither does the lifespan of most corporations or
| non-profits.
|
| The organization accomplished what it set out to do; make the
| tech industry more inclusive and accessible to women. To a large
| extent, though it wasn't a primary factor, it aided that journey
| nicely with its thousands of events that it organized over the
| years, according to this announcement.
|
| It didn't last forever, but it was never meant to - that would
| mean the presence of women in tech would never become truly equal
| to the presence of men. While its goal wasn't 'achieved', this
| organization did what it could to move things in that direction
| and now, with its energy spent, it leaves the door open for new
| contributors to take the next step.
|
| The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank
| you to everyone who helped organize the events this organization
| hosted in the last seventeen years.
| muglug wrote:
| This was my attitude when I stopped maintaining a large open-
| source project that I had created.
|
| None of us last forever, in life or even just in this industry.
| To have brought about some sort of positive change is more than
| good enough.
| gramie wrote:
| In fact, we consider a marriage successful if it ends in the
| death of one of the partners.
| microtherion wrote:
| That's certainly a theory that Bluebeard would subscribe to.
| mikhael28 wrote:
| I learned something new thanks to your comment - never
| heard the story of Bluebeard before.
| xattt wrote:
| Qualifier to the GP poster is _not deliberate_ ...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| There are lots of possible definitions for success-- making
| it until death parts you is the obvious one, but "success"
| can also be producing fruit in terms of community, family, or
| even career.
|
| And there are of course marriages that make it until death,
| but the partners and everyone around them spend the whole
| time miserable; that's hardly a success either.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Maybe that's that Hans Reiser thought, but an amicable
| divorce also has its advantages.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Is this still true? If I knew a couple that had a great ten
| years but then decided that it was time to part ways on
| friendly terms for whatever reason, maybe continue being
| great coparents, I'm not sure I'd consider it unsuccessful.
| badgersnake wrote:
| She says she's closing it "with a heavy heart". It sounds like
| she wanted to continue.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I could read it as either way. It could be a sadness to see
| it come to and end, but still having full agreement the time
| has come. It could also be a sadness because financial
| hurdles or other operation hurdles are making it near
| impossible. It's hard, but I get it either way.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I had a similar thing happen to me. I did science and
| posted it on my blog. It helped a few million people, but I
| didn't monetize very hard.
|
| I hated people would call it blogspam, despite it being
| science and it being donation based.
|
| I switched to b2b.
|
| I'm happy there are people who use business to make the
| world a better place. I'm never doing that again, profit
| first.
| RIMR wrote:
| You could read it that way, but she said "with sadness and
| devastation".
|
| You are taking some extreme liberties with your
| interpretation of what she's saying. The sentiment she's
| sharing is clearly quite negative. I don't think she's
| happily wrapping up her mission, I think she's going out of
| business and has no ability to continue her mission as she
| would like to.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| We can still view operating for 17 years to be a success.
| We can still view helping women in tech for 17 years to
| have improved the world, even if it cannot continue.
| pessimizer wrote:
| We can consider winning one basketball game a success
| even when our team is disbanded after one season, but I
| don't know how that's relevant to whether someone is
| devastated about closing a group down that was meant to
| help women, when women still need to be helped.
| autoexec wrote:
| Yeah this terrible article doesn't explain why it's shutting
| down and doesn't link to the source (a newsletter I guess, so
| maybe it's not available online) so people can find more
| answers, but I also go the impression that this wasn't what
| she wanted.
| Melomololotolo wrote:
| When I look around my peers, not a lot has changed in the last
| 10 years for woman in tech
| RIMR wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. It's one thing to close your doors
| feeling like you made a difference. It's another thing to
| close your doors feeling like you have just as much you need
| to do as you did when you started.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| FWIW remote work has opened the door to many women who would
| have left the field otherwise, so they might be less visible.
|
| It's still not great in my opinion, but I think there's more
| senior engineers and managers and an overall better situation
| than a few decades ago.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is an effect of remote work that isn't discussed
| nearly often enough: it nearly completely removes any non-
| work-related "culture fit" filter from the equation for
| hiring and promotions. Without the happy hours, shared
| lunch breaks, or even the water cooler conversations
| "fitting in" isn't nearly as important remote as it was in
| person.
|
| This benefits _everyone_ who struggles to fit in with the
| traditional tech bro class: women, but also the
| neurodivergent, the deaf, the blind, teetotalers, and many
| more who would otherwise end up subconsciously perceived as
| less of a team player.
| matt_s wrote:
| Even though I feel similar and don't have any large data to
| look at, an unfortunate thought is that their efforts helped
| keep status quo. Or to put it another way, without that
| organization's efforts, things could have gotten much worse
| maybe?
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| I don't feel the same. The last decade or so has seen an
| explosion of women show interest in joining the tech
| community. Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly
| increased throughout my career. I've been on several teams
| now where women have outnumbered men. In my experience, the
| ratio is now flipped when you look at the team as a whole
| (XFN, etc). I may be biased though as I've only worked at
| "premier" large tech companies and they are probably in a
| better position to do DEI at scale.
|
| That being said, true senior roles in engineering (VP+) is
| still very male dominated. Part of that is the pipeline
| catching up and part of is that I see women leave engineering
| for other roles more often. For example I would say, in my
| experience, I've seen more women have an interest and engage
| in transitions to PM, designer, etc.
| burutthrow1234 wrote:
| It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say
| women are still systemically under-compensated, under-
| levelled, and _encouraged_ to move into less prestigious
| roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women
| are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out
| of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing
| people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male
| devs. Those career paths lead to lower lifetime comp and
| less "impressive" titles.
| Jensson wrote:
| > and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like
| product, design, etc
|
| Women tend to seek out such roles all on their own, there
| is no encouragement needed. Just adding "design" to a job
| title massively increases how many women applies, even if
| the job itself is unchanged.
|
| Just rebrand software engineers to software designers and
| suddenly you get many women, even though they do the same
| thing.
| ygjb wrote:
| That's a pretty bold claim to make without data to back
| it up.
| Jensson wrote:
| The comment I responded to didn't have any data either,
| not sure why I'd need data for a similar kind of comment
| while they don't?
|
| The university I went to did that and they said it was to
| get more women, and easily got over 50% women into
| engineering fields just by adding design to the name of
| the degree. It is a well known trick, names matters.
| petsfed wrote:
| I wonder if the perception of engineering as a "men's
| field" factors into that.
|
| Like "every engineering role I've ever had, I was
| condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew
| more than me because he was a man, maybe the culture is
| different around 'designer'". Likewise for
| "technologist".
|
| More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of engineers'
| perception of inequity within their field basically
| devolves to "well, there's nothing about the _material_
| that 's sexist, I don't understand why more women don't
| want to do it". It reveals a _staggering_ lack of
| imagination and empathy, especially within a group that
| stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as young
| people.
| bwigfield wrote:
| >I was condescended to by some other engineer who though
| he knew more than me because he was a man In my
| experience this isn't "because he was a man" but because
| he was an engineer. And from what I've seen it also has
| nothing to do with you being a woman. Engineers tend to
| be condensing, and will do so indiscriminately. Or said
| different being "condescended to by some other engineer"
| means they are treating you equally, if you're not then
| you are getting preferential treatment.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I think your comment is a good demonstration why this is
| still such an issue, despite the overwhelming evidence of
| gender based discrimination in tech, people are
| dismissing the experiences of the majority of women in
| tech. Can't really improve if people are still in denial
| about it.
|
| I don't know what to do, you can't teach people empathy
| or not to be sexist. Given how weirdly conservative young
| people are nowadays I don't see it getting much better in
| the future either.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as
| young people
|
| There is actually evidence [1] that suggests that victims
| of bullying often develop long term psychological issues
| / depression, and depression leads to a lack of empathy.
|
| [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254192616
| vundercind wrote:
| Product is a lot _more_ prestigious at most companies.
| Design is too, at quite a few, in that it's often a
| better stepping stone to product, though that depends on
| the org.
|
| In general, programming jobs are low-status. High pay,
| but low status.
| brailsafe wrote:
| People like to think programming is a purely luxury job,
| and in some ways it is, but not compared to something
| where you often have more agency in the direction of a
| product. Programmers at lower levels probably take more
| bullshit and have less influence than anything with a
| title that conveys a higher level of abstract problem
| solving.
|
| Being a freelance website designer likely pays less but
| is more rewarding as a practice than being a random cog
| Kye wrote:
| Positives are diminished when the paths you wanted to
| pursue are closed off. Things that look like privilege
| when you don't have it can be a prison when you're stuck
| in its boundaries.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Management often leads to better compensation.
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| YMMV, but my experience is very different from what you
| mention above. Every company I've been at has paid very
| close attention to ensure that women are treated fairly
| with the understanding that these biases exist.
|
| But there's some truth to what you're saying. I do think
| women tend to be the "babysitters" on the team. I've
| noticed this often on teams I've been on. They're usually
| the ones that are the "cultural heart" of the team and
| organize all the events. Sometimes I've been their
| manager so I've asked and I'd say it's about 66/33 they
| legitimately enjoy doing it vs they felt pidgeon-holed
| into it because they volunteered once.
|
| As for the transitions into other roles, I think it's
| impossible to tell if it's bias and or a natural
| inclination. There's no way to look at the data
| empirically and determine this. In my experience though,
| I think women are often encouraged to take these roles
| not because there's a bias towards "women are good at
| soft skills" but that these are generally the roles that
| provide better career advancement and visibility. It has
| always seemed to be a somewhat mis-guided outcome of
| allyship.
| thatsnotreally wrote:
| Engineers viewing design as a 'less prestigious' role is
| laughable. The compensation for these tracks is pretty
| much equal. I would love to hear you spell out why
| exactly you perceive design as less prestigious.
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| In general, the compensation is much less than engineers
| at the same level but the potential for career growth
| beyond senior is much easier.
| thatsnotreally wrote:
| I would agree on the junior side of things. There is a
| higher threshold for the starting line for engineers, but
| for higher levels, design is by no means seen as a less
| prestigious role. Not in any sense of the word.
|
| For salaries - see e.g. levels.fyi for quick comparison.
| Even Google - a company not really known for valuing
| design that highly: SWE L6 avg. = 520K USD. Product
| Designer L6 avg. = 515K USD.
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| Yeah no argument on prestigious, just noting the comp
| differences.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I won't speak on engineering vs design. but compensation
| doesn't necessarily correlate perfectly with prestige.
| Teaching is the easiest example in the opposite way.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| As a student I have personally experienced "sorry, you
| cannot join the event, you're a boy we're looking for a
| girl" and instead of me they picked a girl whose only job
| was to stand, smile, and tick the box "yes I'm a girl,
| this makes the team diverse". Having such an experience
| makes my brain heavily biased against all actions
| supporting gender equality.
|
| Which are many. And they're almost always about improving
| the position of women. "Gender equality" is rarely ever
| about improving the position of men. The social consensus
| is that it's impossible for a situation to exist where a
| man is discriminated against, and even discussing this
| idea is a very much taboo topic. Which is not true,
| because such situations exist, and the number of people
| who have this opinion but are afraid of voicing it is
| growing.
|
| I'm deeply convinced that a societal shift is on the
| horizon, and what we see as "modern feminism" will be, in
| the future, considered one of those things that aged like
| milk. The only question is whether this change will
| result in a society where people feel equal, or the
| pendulum will simply swing back and it's going to be
| taboo to discuss the hardships of women.
|
| This change isn't very visible in western societies yet,
| but we're starting to see it in South Korea. This
| movement is going to grow and spread.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's not visible on the outside in western societies
| because outright saying "you're a boy and we're looking
| for a girl" is outright illegal (in 99% of roles). They
| need to be a bit more subtle than that. e.g. make a
| "women only/highly encouraged" event that happens to have
| a job fair.
|
| I guess in Asia there is no such barrier. So the results
| and backlash are equally more explicit.
| Melomololotolo wrote:
| The problem is that for you personally it feels shitty.
|
| But you know what? For a lot more woman it feels like
| this compared to man.
|
| It's your duty if an educated person to see thisaccept it
| and move on for equality sake. And I do not mean this
| ironic.
|
| We are not changing our society without some people
| having less chances for having a highly undermined group
| of other people.
|
| I would prefer for all of us just sitting down and
| actually talking how we all want to life but this mental
| gymnastics is too much for most people
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > for you personally it feels shitty. But you know what?
| Woman.
|
| This pretty much illustrates why more and more men reject
| feminism as a way of achieving gender equality.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| There is a great book (written by a female engineer,
| Tanya Riley) called "The Staff Engineer's Path". I've
| learned a lot from the book, but one part of Tanya's
| experience that I could not relate to was having mentors
| who would encourage me and provide "you can do this" kind
| of pep talks. For a male engineer the usual experience is
| the opposite: we are expected to be competitive, and if
| we display any doubts then the only advice we'll get is
| "are you sure you want this promotion enough?" and "are
| you cut out for this?"
|
| It appears to be much easier to advance in one's career
| as a self-doubting woman than a self-doubting man. This
| is probably because women are expected to have a high
| degree of self doubt and there is no assumption that they
| are defective if they admit to it.
|
| And management is absolutely more prestigious and better
| compensated than IC work, despite what some may claim.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Maybe better compensated, but not sure about more
| prestigious.
|
| I have no interest seeing the day to day of that job.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > This is probably because women are expected to have a
| high degree of self doubt and there is no assumption that
| they are defective if they admit to it.
|
| A simpler explanation is that there is a perceived need
| to increase the number of women in management positions.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > women are still systemically under-compensated, under-
| levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious
| roles
|
| Do you have actual data to support this claim?
|
| > into coordinating work, managing people
|
| So promoted into management. Are you saying managers are
| systemically making less than the engineers they manage?
| Which would be interesting, as management is generally
| seen as a more prestigious role than individual
| contributor.
| judahmeek wrote:
| > Do you have actual data to support this claim?
|
| You can easily search "women in tech statistics 2024" and
| make your own conclusions.
|
| My conclusion is that the gender gap in tech is not
| completely resolved.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| > they are probably in a better position to do DEI at
| scale.
|
| Slight tangent, but most large tech companies DEI programs
| were never really great at doing DEI at scale. They were
| mostly funnelling the existing pool of diverse candidates
| into them. The result is that companies without an active
| DEI program end up less diverse through no fault of their
| own.
| leetcrew wrote:
| what is the mechanism for that "funneling" though?
| intentional programs to make diverse candidates feel more
| welcome? more money? if big tech is actively working to
| attract diverse candidates and other companies aren't
| keeping up, it doesn't sound like it's through no fault
| of their own that they can't retain those people.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Corporate DEI can be split into 3 broad buckets:
|
| 1) Recruitment
|
| 2) Retention
|
| 3) Sponsorship
|
| Retention improvements are generally a net positive for
| industry wide diversity. If someone leaves your company
| for harrasment reasons, they are more likely to leave the
| industry all together.
|
| Sponsorship is generally net positive as well.
|
| The funnelling I am talking about is entirely in the
| "recruitment" bucket. If you hire a woman software
| developer, they were already looking for a job. They
| already made a significant personal investment in getting
| the job. The industry is still enough if an employees
| market that they were probably going to get a job. You
| did nothing to bring that women into the industry. All
| you did is increase the chances that they end up working
| for you in particular. On the margins, this is still
| probably a net positive for industry wide diversity, but
| that is a much smaller effect then the chair shuffling
| effect.
|
| Of these three buckets, the most effective way of
| increasing your diversity numbers is in recruitment
| (unless you have horrid retention). In the current
| environment, there is no way for a large company to get
| anywhere near 50/50 without a significant investment in
| the recruitment bucket.
| jimbokun wrote:
| More money.
|
| Smaller companies can't compete with FAANG salaries. So
| when FAANG prioritizes hiring women, and there are still
| many fewer women than men in tech overall, smaller and
| poorer companies can't compete with the offers women are
| getting from FAANG.
| pas wrote:
| ... sure, on the other hand way less competition, and
| smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising
| juniors and do on the job training.
| jimbokun wrote:
| "way less competition"?
| pas wrote:
| excuse my phrasing, I meant fewer applicants for the
| position, so less competition for job-seekers
| Jensson wrote:
| > and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire
| promising juniors and do on the job training.
|
| Not before FAANG hired the promising juniors first, FAANG
| are very willing to give on the job training. Or at least
| were a couple of years ago.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >hire promising juniors and do on the job training.
|
| I chuckled. I yearn for these days, but this isn't the
| experience I had (late millenial/early Gen Z). No one
| trains, you get maybe a week to adjust, expected to go
| full steam ahead, and leave or are laid off 2-3 years
| later.
| simonsarris wrote:
| We train juniors for years (we accept interns as young as
| junior year of high school) and its been pretty great. I
| really don't understand why more companies don't do it.
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| This may be true. As I noted, I've only worked at very
| "desirable" companies so my views are potentially skewed.
| That being said, I can't imagine that DEI has gotten
| significantly worse across the industry while vastly
| improving at the top end but I have no data to back that
| up.
| Volundr wrote:
| > Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased
| throughout my career.
|
| I don't have data on this other than my own anecdata, so
| big grain of salt, but I think it's varies pretty widely by
| company and/or industry. In my last few jobs I've had
| several in which the engineering teams were overwhelmingly
| male, while in my current role it's more balanced. Further
| anecdata but in my most recent job search the engineers
| interviewing me were overwhelmingly male with only a few
| women.
| Jensson wrote:
| Sounds like you went into more and more female spaces, as
| the field as a whole has barely changed, and if you compare
| to 20-30 years go it is worse.
|
| https://swe.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/03/Percent_WomenSTEM...
| jimbokun wrote:
| DATA! Thank you!
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's hard to say, to be honest. In that same decade we had
| some of the most vicious backlash to POC/women yet. Maybe
| that's always been there and the awareness at least help
| clear 5% of the swamp. But in many ways the situation feels
| (in my perception) even worse. If anything, this is the
| time such orgs are needed the most.
|
| But yes, it's definitely a large company thing. I could
| count the number of female programmers at my first job
| (~150 staff, maybe 80 programmers) on one hand. 2nd was a
| huge conglomerate and a better mix, even if older personell
| skewed male. 3rd was a ~150 startup (more like 100
| programmers) and back to the "on one hand" situation. I
| completely agree with more of a shift to management and
| design for women compared to being "in the field" as
| programmers.
| dangus wrote:
| Who are your peers and where do they work?
|
| What I'm getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant
| companies that aren't making a positive change. What I've
| noticed is that there are companies that care to be
| inclusive. It's an active undertaking, not a passive one.
|
| I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo
| chamber, and now I'm on a team that is almost completely
| balanced.
|
| It's also on me to not join teams that have a curious lack of
| women. E.g., if I interview with a DevOps team that had 10
| people and zero women, there might be something wrong with
| hiring. Statistically there should be at least one or two.
| Jensson wrote:
| > What I've noticed is that there are companies that care
| to be inclusive. It's an active undertaking, not a passive
| one.
|
| That is a failure, you don't need to actively be inclusive
| if the problem is solved. See doctors for example, in my
| country kids ask if men can be doctors since they see them
| so rarely, the "women aren't doctors" thing has been
| solved, there is no need to do anything at that point
| except try to ensure it doesn't tip to the other side.
|
| > Statistically there should be at least one or two.
|
| That isn't how statistics works, statistically there would
| be 2-3, 0 is perfectly normal just by random chance. If you
| intentionally try to only join teams with more than average
| women then of course you see more and more women, even
| though the field as a whole hasn't changed.
|
| Edit: And given that SRE often have lots of on-call I'd bet
| there are much less women there than regular SWE roles. Men
| tend to be over represented in roles that sacrifices free
| time.
| scottyah wrote:
| I've heard a lot of women say they won't join a team with
| only men. Not exactly the most productive feedback loop.
| bookaway wrote:
| >Statistically there should be at least one or two.
|
| Well, if the statistics takes into consideration the notion
| that a lot of women don't even apply to certain jobs
| thinking they're under-qualified should we be surprised if
| there are less than we initially expect?
|
| I appreciate the point of being proactive, since the point
| above can be somewhat mitigated by HR reaching out to
| prospects instead of relying on the existing applicant
| pool. But it seems everyone involved in the hiring process
| should be as convinced as you about the mid/long-term
| benefits of having women on the team, otherwise it's a
| uphill battle passing up perfectly acceptable candidates
| when there is so much work to get done. It's much easier
| when everyone believes that the X factor of having a women
| on the team far outweighs the delays and the accumulating
| negative effects of business in the short term.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Statistically there should be at least one or two.
|
| Of course not. Women make up a minority of people working
| in tech, and are highly recruited by the large companies
| able to pay the highest compensation. So it's very
| difficult for other companies to find women willing to work
| at the lower salaries they can offer.
|
| So there likely is a problem with hiring. They don't have
| enough money to afford hiring more women.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The only place I see/hear a lot of female devs is in India.
| In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.
| bookaway wrote:
| The reasons for the numbers in the global south are
| different. It's not necessarily a preferred choice through
| empowerment, more so a profession taken up to propel
| oneself from poverty.
| maeil wrote:
| > In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.
|
| Interesting, in Korea it's not nearly as bad. CS students
| are about 1/3 women, and the large majority of them does
| end up in tech. Of course still overrepresented in front-
| related roles and underrepresented in back-related roles
| but I don't think that's different anywhere really.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.
|
| may change in the coming decade or 2. Late 2010's had
| Japan's version of the US 70's where women entered the
| workforce in droves. But COVID may or may not have stalled
| that phenomenon. I imagine they will bring in more women
| before they loosen their immigration policies.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > not a lot has changed in the last 10 years
|
| Then maybe what we've been doing for the last 10 years wasn't
| the right thing?
| TrueGeek wrote:
| Better article with more information:
|
| https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2024/07/08/girls-...
|
| > In an email Monday, founder and CEO Adriana Gascoigne said
| "Girls in Tech will be closing its doors due to a lack of funding
| in 2023 and 2024."
| igor47 wrote:
| Huh. You'd think all the organizations that attribute their
| challenges in hiring non-male engineers to a "pipeline problem"
| would've spent a small fraction of their recruiting budgets
| helping to fund Girls in Tech...
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| If the problem is solved, the funding disappears.
| digging wrote:
| That would be a complete success, since the funding
| disappeared anyway
| tardy_one wrote:
| Except in the real world, where the infrastructure to raise
| money for a previous problem can out compete new
| infrastructure.
| csande17 wrote:
| For what it's worth, Girls Who Code -- an organization more
| directly focused on improving the "pipeline" through training
| programs aimed at K-12 and college students -- seems to be
| thriving, with over $20M in donations from a variety of tech
| organizations in 2023: https://girlswhocode.com/2023report/
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Our company actively partners with girls who code for that
| exact reason. Our rather empty post covid office space gets
| transformed into summer boot camps for middle and high
| schoolers every year. It is a very productive way to
| improve the K-12 pipeline.
| shmatt wrote:
| this deserves to be much higher than a sub-sub-sub-sub
| comment
|
| the fact one DEI organization failed doesn't mean DEI
| failed. They could be mis managed just like any other non
| profit
| arduanika wrote:
| Agreed, I didn't know the difference and at a glance
| thought it was Girls Who Code that folded.
|
| It could be that as the "vibe shifts" away from DEI and
| the funding gets smaller, we'll see a culling where only
| some orgs survive, hopefully the best ones. "When the
| tide goes out..."
| pedalpete wrote:
| Thank you. I was confusing these as being the same
| organization, and I thought Gils Who Code is doing quite
| well.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| once interests rate went up all DEI initiatives dried up -
| these companies don't really have integrity or beliefs beyond
| doing what is politically correct at the current time.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why would rising interest rates affect what is considered
| politically correct?
| micah94 wrote:
| Borrowing money becomes more expensive so companies will
| focus on their own needs (or surviving) rather than
| giving or outreach programs. Unlike Apple or NVIDIA most
| companies need to borrow money to stay in business.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Borrowing money becomes more expensive so companies
| will focus on their own needs (or surviving) rather than
| giving or outreach programs.
|
| All the (Big tech) companies - not just Apple and Nvidia
| - have higher revenues and profits now than they did
| during the Zero-interest regime. They are _not_ hurting
| for money to fund outreach programs _that meet their
| strategic goals_.
|
| What has changed is their hiring outlook. Online services
| saw unprecedented growth when everyone was cooped up in
| their homes due to Covid lockdowns, and the tech
| companies thought the growth would be permanent, rather
| than a temporary bump, and couldn't hire engineers fast
| enough to meet the anticipated growth: hence the outreach
| to non-traditional hiring-pipelines. After the layoffs,
| they stopped hiring aggressively and the labor market is
| now a buyers market
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Unlike Apple or NVIDIA most companies need to borrow
| money to stay in business
|
| What do you mean by this?
| travisb wrote:
| You can read "politically correct" as "politically
| fashionable".
|
| When money is cheap it's easy to spend a bit of money on
| political signalling. However when money is no longer
| cheap that pure cost centre is the first on the list for
| cuts.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Almost as if they are organizations formed around the goal
| of optimizing profits, and not the general benefit of
| society.
| DopplerSmell wrote:
| Nobody inside the org cares about gender ratios, but they do
| have to react to people outside of the org who care a whole
| lot.
|
| It's easier to explain reality than to try and change it.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Idk, I've read b2b contracts that have demands similar to
| this. They arent explicit, its softer.
| DopplerSmell wrote:
| I have as well, but I'm more of a cynic. Usually you can
| trace requirements back to either DEI dependent funding
| or government contract requirements. Less common is an
| attempt to market or build positive brand association by
| making a public commitment. With the occasional case
| where one individual uses their position in a company to
| sneak their personal agenda in.
|
| Mostly the behaviour is determined by tangible external
| benefits rather than any kind of real belief that gender
| ratios should be acknowledged.
| falcolas wrote:
| That would require an monetary investment into DEI, which has
| become a negative investor signal for many large companies.
|
| It's a shame, because I've met several developers who
| benefited from Girls in Tech's work.
| em-bee wrote:
| _monetary investment into DEI, which has become a negative
| investor signal for many large companies_
|
| can you please explain that or point to some articles about
| it?
| runako wrote:
| https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/inclusion-equity-
| dive...
|
| https://www.axios.com/2024/04/02/dei-backlash-diversity
|
| etc. There is a backlash underway against any effort to
| expand workplace diversity beyond the representative
| fractions circa 1990.
| Jensson wrote:
| Women were a much higher percentage in the field 1990.
| Women abandoned the field after the IT-bubble and it
| never recovered.
| neilv wrote:
| Thanks. Following a link from there:
|
| https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2024/06/06/girls-...
|
| > _Nashville-based Girls in Tech Inc. may be forced to shut
| down by the end of summer. [...] needs to raise $100,000 or it
| faces imminent closure. [...] Girls in Tech has a membership of
| 130,000 "women and allies" across 50 cities and 38 countries._
|
| Was the membership base already tapped out, or the org didn't
| reach out to the membership on this, or the org had larger
| near-term funding needs than the immediate $100K?
|
| Also, is it possible that funding isn't the only consideration?
| For example, even if the org could be saved with heroics,
| there's opportunity cost to leadership (personal,
| professional)?
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, they seem to offer a "premium membership" for
| $9.99/month [1] and presumably that hasn't raised enough. If
| the aim of the charity is to get career resources in front of
| as many women as possible, they probably don't want to put
| their most impactful resources behind a paywall - that would
| be contrary to their goal.
|
| I suppose they could try an appeal to generosity instead?
| Depends if they've got a network of grateful people they
| helped 17 years ago who are now making six-figure salaries.
|
| [1] https://girlsintech.org/membership/premium/
| neilv wrote:
| I know almost nothing about non-profit fundraising, but
| this benefits tier membership model looks very familiar as
| a tech for-profit service, rather than a charitable non-
| profit for the benefit of all.
|
| (Specifically, in a tech, like a SaaS, the free tier are
| sales leads and inflated "market share" numbers, and the
| premium tier are the real customers of the service value
| you're providing and is your whole reason for existing. In
| a charity, however, you don't measure out benefits based on
| how much that person is paying you. Though a charity will
| have special recognition for exceptional donations, like
| the donor's name listed on some page, or mentioned as a
| sponsor of an event.)
|
| Given the dire runway situation they were in, I wonder
| whether they sent out a recent urgent appeal to their free-
| tier, as more like a charity, asking for donations? (And if
| so, was the obvious benefits tier model hurting any
| charitable goodwill they might've otherwise generated?) Or
| did they try to push their free-tier members an upsell to
| their premium tier, like a business? Or neither?
| specialist wrote:
| Like many orgs, probably, their funding model was working,
| and then got hammered by COVID-19, and were stuck holding on,
| hoping for return to "normalcy".
|
| It's very hard to pivot. Fund raising costs money. Some one
| needs an idea, a plan, a strategy. Everyone needs to agree to
| it. Meanwhile, an org's (remaining) execs and board members
| are doing triage. To execute a new plan means even more work.
|
| And so on.
|
| I've met and worked with terrific fund raisers. For me,
| personally, fund raising is just the worst. I've done enough
| to know a) it's very hard and b) I suck at it.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| 130,000 members x $1/member = $130,000
| specialist wrote:
| Funding for many, many worthy orgs crashed with COVID-19, and
| has barely recovered. From the outside looking in, it seems the
| whole administrative capacity (ecology) of the fund raising
| world just dried up and needs to be rebuilt.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| That's a bummer I was hoping it was more of a "mission
| accomplished" kind of closure.
| glitchc wrote:
| Running out of money is a common cause of business failure, non-
| profit or otherwise. Seems like their donations dried up with the
| economic slowdown.
|
| I'm sure they'll be back up and running once things pick up. Orgs
| such as these are easy to restart.
| netdevnet wrote:
| Easy is relative. And just because it might be feasible to do
| it in 5-8 years, it does not mean that the founders will be in
| a position to start it
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| What/which economic slowdown?
| glitchc wrote:
| COVID of course. And then once the economy recovered circa
| 2022 given all of the stimulus pumped into it, markets became
| soft again due to escalating interest rates in an effort to
| curb inflation. Just have to look at the long term trend for
| DoW Jones, NASDAQ and S&P. You can see the patterns reflected
| in the curves. If I could attach annotated screenshots to the
| message, it would become very clear. In lieu of, if you look
| at the 5 YR S&P value [1], you'll see the drop in Mar 2020,
| followed by a recovery until Jan 2022, and then a cooling
| effect as interest rates start ratcheting up. 2024 is looking
| better, but that ~2 year soft period from Jan 2022 to Nov
| 2023 is enough to tank any business operating at margin.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?sa=X&ve
| d=2...
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > Without explanation, Gascoigne said in closing, "Though Girls
| in Tech is closing its doors, the movement we started must and
| will continue.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| Judging by current distribution of interns, coding is becoming a
| female dominated field. I think this has more to do with
| pragmatic mindset of asian parents and less with any DEI efforts.
| How many other fields:
|
| - Are not dangerous or unreasonably physically strenuous
|
| - Pay good money
|
| - Keep you surrounded by respectable, educated people
|
| - Can be mastered in 4-6 years rather than running risk of
| getting old while still in college
|
| Not saying it's a negative, those are rational factors. We do
| need to make sure that young men are also able to become
| successful and equals of female SWEs.
| Spivak wrote:
| Where? The experience of being the only woman in your math/cs
| class doesn't seem to have changed among the women we
| interview. Is it the non-uni "bootcamp" path? We don't get very
| many of them for whatever reason around here. I imagine because
| our in-state college is both good and affordable but obviously
| can't prove that.
| footy wrote:
| This is interesting to me, because it runs so counter to my own
| experience with young/early career developers. I run into more
| female devs close to my own age than younger (relative to male
| developers specifically).
| rsanek wrote:
| latest data still only has them at 21% of cs graduates
| https://ngcproject.org/resources/stem-statistics-higher-educ...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| That would be an improvement over my anecdata of my final
| project class for my CS degree in 2014 having ~30 men and
| exactly two women.
| Jensson wrote:
| Then your class had lower than average women for the time.
| The overall numbers hasn't changed since then.
| deathanatos wrote:
| The numbers here are "and mathematical scientists"1, so
| it's not (as upthread implies) CS grads, it's CS grads +
| other studies. I lived with a physics major; she did some
| code, would she have been counted?2, but she was not a
| SWE in the making3.
|
| My gut would not think other math degrees would
| necessarily be more women heavy. But like upthread, my
| class was 2 women in a class of ~160, or <2%. Around that
| time I recall seeing a Stanford T-shirt with their ratio
| at something like 1:16, and they're prestigious enough
| one would expect their ratio to be above average.
|
| Not sure what to say, aside from I cannot reconcile it
| with experience, and the numbers being used here _aren 't
| the ones we need_.
|
| (1as this is how the source for the data, "National
| Survey of College Graduates", has uselessly lumped them
| together. The "mathematical" portion includes degrees
| such as statistics, "Mathematics, general", and other
| unspecified-by-the-methodology degrees. Even the
| "computer sciences" portion _isn 't just CS degrees_,
| they've also lumped, e.g., IT in there.)
|
| (2no, probably not; when I wrote that I was looking at a
| graph another poster posted, but that graph seems to
| munch the category names. Likely physics would be under
| "Physical and related scientists", but also I can't find
| the methodology of then what a "mathematical science"
| is...)
|
| (3and in lecture, the in-lecture ratios changed rather
| dramatically once you got past the point of "other
| degrees require 2 courses of CS cross-training")
| Jensson wrote:
| This chart isn't lumping them, it has never been close to
| single digit percent for the past 50 years. Any class
| with sub 10% women is a big outlier. And as you can see
| from the graph, things hasn't really improved, classes
| used to have way more women, the single digit percent
| examples are low outliers at a time when things had
| already gotten really bad from where they used to.
|
| https://www.aei.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/12/cs.png?x85095
| deathanatos wrote:
| That graph (which is from here: [1]) lists [2] as its
| data source; none of the tables under "326 Completion
| and..." match the data they're graphing; it never breaks
| it out by degree+sex, AFAICT; there are a lot of tables,
| and I did not exhaustively search them, nor did the
| article include enough information on their methodology.
|
| The phrasing of "Over the weekend, I..." implies some
| exogenous data source, but it's not shared. One can't
| even begin to replicate the conclusion reached.
|
| > _Any class with sub 10% women is a big outlier._
|
| You claim, but what is being asked for here is evidence
| to support such; Occam's razor implies that not only
| should it not be, that it would be an outlier _in the
| other direction_. Hence the desire for something that
| lays out its methodology well enough that we can tell
| that it 's not in that lovely third category of
| "statistics".
|
| [1]: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-
| declinin...
|
| [2]:
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/current_tables.asp
| chx wrote:
| https://swe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Percent_WomenSTEM...
| cchi_co wrote:
| The increasing number of women entering the tech field is a
| positive development
| newsclues wrote:
| Good, less gender division!
|
| Hopefully in the future programs to encourage the future
| generation of tech workers won't be prejudicial and will help
| anyone with interest and talent regardless of their gender.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| Although you'll probably be flagged for such a statement on HN,
| you're absolutely right. If there was an organization such as
| "Men in Tech", it would be criticized and shutdown in a week.
| the fact that even such organizations like "Girls in Tech
| exist" is biased.
| callalex wrote:
| From my Bay Area perspective, Girls who Code is still going
| strong and doing great work. Any reports that all diversity
| initiatives have died are greatly exaggerated.
| j45 wrote:
| I wish sustainability planning that was more a part of community
| initiative.
|
| While it's absolutely the right of the organizers putting in
| their time to decide their participation - where regret is
| expressed about something ending - it would be interesting to
| know any coulda/shoulda/wouldas for others to learn from.
|
| Baking it into the bread, early, of "why we do it this way" and
| learning it together, helps create a culture of ensuring things
| can be entrusted a little easier to the next group "who gets it"
| and then can grow it.
|
| The job of equality isn't done yet. Where equally capable and
| competent people both in potential and actualized to the table
| that normally aren't there is critical.
|
| It would be nice if something could take it's place, or continue
| it's work, and not start from scratch, or maybe someone can step
| forward to continue some of the work under the brand.
|
| Quite often new things end up re-learning the lessons of the past
| to get to a point of effectiveness again.
|
| Clay Shirky has a great essay about a group being it's own worst
| enemy, and I wonder if some of those themes in that essay were
| present at one point or in hindsight.
| matrix87 wrote:
| Just fyi, Supreme Court has an upcoming case on affirmative
| action
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/us/affirmative-action-law...
| elric wrote:
| This is such a difficult topic. When I started my undergraduate
| in CompSci, the department of 300 students had exactly 3 women.
| The faculty had way more female instructors than it did students.
| The Commucation Sciences department, which was on the same
| campus, had the inverse student population.
|
| I'm all in favour for letting students making their own study
| (and career) choices, but when the imbalance is this great, I
| can't but help think that valuable perspectives are lost. And
| that's just looking at the sexes, that doesn't even take into
| account what could be gained from interacting with folks with
| different socio-economic backgrounds, who were equally
| underrepresented.
|
| Trying to keep barriers for entry low seems worth while.
| Organizations which help people break into non-traditional fields
| (for their background/sex/whatever) also seem to be worth while.
| Funding them seems like a no brainer. This isn't limited to girls
| in tech. Also boys in nursing, poor kids in law school, brown
| kids in politics, whatever.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Trying to keep barriers for entry low
|
| But the barrier is already low - you need to complete an
| undergraduate degree in a related field. That's it.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| > Trying to keep barriers for entry low seems worth while.
|
| With Section 174 (increasing business taxes on SWE salaries) +
| high interest rates, this is a big ask for US employers who
| loath hiring at the entry level in the best times.
|
| To me, the real problem seems to be solving US employers'
| unwillingness to hire anyone without experience, after which
| the rest (hiring underrepresented groups) will follow. But why
| would they do this when they have all the experienced and
| senior engineers they want?
|
| Is this not the exact problem DEI was created to solve, and is
| now being dismantled?
| jimbokun wrote:
| You seem to have very little curiosity into WHY those ratios
| are so skewed.
|
| It's impossible to change these distributions without
| understanding the underlying causes for how they got that way.
| elric wrote:
| > you seem to have very little curiosity into WHY those
| ratios are so skewed
|
| That's a weird take. How would you know what I'm curious
| about? Pardon the strawman, but I'm not interested in
| handwavy explanations which tend to border on bigotry
| ("$category simply isn't interested in $topic"). I suspect
| the fundamental reasons are myriad and complex, but that
| doesn't mean $field wouldn't benefit from more diversity.
|
| > It's impossible to change these distributions without
| understanding the underlying causes for how they got that
| way.
|
| Maybe, maybe not. The ratio is certainly a lot less skewed
| now than when I was a student over 20 years ago. My
| understanding (or lack thereof) certainly didn't have an
| impact, but throughout my career I have always tried to be
| supportive of people who are in some way different from me.
| Heterogeneity is a good thing. Monocultures result in
| weakness.
| Sinthrill wrote:
| They can tell you aren't a curious person from your use of
| punctuation. This is why I always add ;`'([] at the end of
| every sentence ;`'([]
| jimbokun wrote:
| > ("$category simply isn't interested in $topic").
|
| First link that came up in my Google search:
|
| https://www.psypost.org/women-like-working-with-people-
| men-l...
|
| It is almost certain that differences in interest play a
| large role in the different distributions of men and women
| in different occupations. The studies showing this are well
| known and I have not seen them debunked.
|
| Please note that labelling a claim with strong backing in
| empirical evidence "bigotry" does not magically change
| reality to conform with what you would like it to be. You
| need to produce actual evidence to the contrary.
| cauch wrote:
| I find that interesting because I see more and more
| successful developers that explain that a successful
| developer is someone who has good people skills.
|
| If you think about it, there not intrinsic ground to
| support the idea that computer science activities in
| themselves are more "things" than "people". They may be
| more "things-oriented" right now _because_ it is
| currently male dominated, but it does not mean it is a
| fundamental characteristic of the computer science
| activities.
|
| I find it interesting because it shows the vicious circle
| of bias:
|
| step1: "Computer science is male dominated" + "men prefer
| X and women prefer Y" -> "Computer science is therefore
| fundamentally X"
|
| step2: "men prefer X and women prefer Y" + "Computer
| science is fundamentally X" -> "Computer science is
| therefore male dominated"
| jimbokun wrote:
| At some point, some one has to sit down and write or
| debug the code.
|
| It's never going to be as human oriented as something
| like teaching, being a therapist, or managing people full
| time.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's more human oriented than writing math proofs! Why is
| the gap between those two fields double digit percentage
| points?
| Jensson wrote:
| Statisticians works directly with managers, almost all
| math professionals are statisticians and not doing
| theoretical maths.
| cauch wrote:
| Statisticians are working less with managers than
| developers. Developers are supposed to be constantly fed
| back from the product users, and in practice, it means
| they interact with a bigger surface than statisticians.
| They may find ways to avoid interactions, but it is not
| "because developer is not people-related", it's because
| they want themselves to not be people-related.
|
| So, no, computer science is not less people-oriented than
| statistics. You may personally interact less with people,
| but it is just because you are personally less people-
| oriented, not because your job is fundamentally less
| people-oriented.
| cauch wrote:
| But it is as human-oriented as other science fields that
| are typically considered as more people-oriented and
| these fields attract a bigger proportion of women.
|
| Also, one of my point is that the "non human oriented" is
| also part of the image, but not of the reality. I see
| more and more successful developers that explains that
| "sit down and write or debug the code" on your own is not
| a fundamentally big part of the job, but it is in
| practice a big part because of the current mentality and
| because some developers want to work like that.
|
| I keep seeing developers thinking that they are
| "special". But in practice, it is a job very similar to
| other role in a company. An accountant, for example, also
| need to sometimes sit down and do careful work that
| requires not being disturbed. It often feels like
| developers are talking about "breaking the flow" or "all
| these useless meetings" or "the managers that invent work
| to justify their role" or ... as if it is not identical
| for all the other roles (there are small differences, but
| nothing justifying that developer is somehow less human
| oriented than accountant).
| Jensson wrote:
| > The ratio is certainly a lot less skewed now than when I
| was a student over 20 years ago
|
| You mean more skewed? The data shows there are less women
| now than 20 years ago. There is a lot more talk about women
| in tech today, but that doesn't mean there are more.
| tptacek wrote:
| Why do you think they're so skewed? Why are there so many
| women working in mathematics and particularly in cryptography
| compared to general computer engineering? Why are women so
| well represented in other hard science fields, both in
| absolute terms (especially in fields like biochemistry) and
| in relative terms compared to computer science and
| engineering?
| nsagent wrote:
| Having worked with Girls Who Code and been in many DEI
| discussions with faculty, industry, and current/prospective
| students, a lot of the disparities in supposed interest
| comes down to women feeling like they don't fit into the CS
| culture -- they often feel especially alienated in the
| introductory courses [1].
|
| Basically, students who were previously exposed to CS
| education in high school excel in the introductory courses
| and often downplay the difficulty of the concepts. This is
| a very male-oriented perspective to take.
|
| That's why programs like Girls Who Code try to address the
| gap earlier in the pipeline, since it's hard to
| fundamentally change the attitudes experienced individuals
| have in early CS courses. Other approaches some schools
| have tried include separating intro CS courses by prior
| experience.
|
| Interestingly, studies have shown that women who stick with
| the CS curriculum perform as well their male counterparts
| in higher-level CS courses regardless of their initial
| exposure to CS, though women often think more poorly of
| their own abilities [2].
|
| [1]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-
| code:-why-are... [2]:
| http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017771
| cchi_co wrote:
| The legacy of Girls in Tech will live on through the successes of
| the women it supported
| sciencesama wrote:
| Ai took software out so no more need for more software engineers
| so the funding for such programs from companies dry up !!
| Corporate want cheap labour that's all !!
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzmQVejR6a8
| Neonlicht wrote:
| The idea of spending all day with tech bros was enough to make me
| suicidal so I went into the healthcare industry.
|
| I am from a culture were people don't just work for money or
| status.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I thought there would be lot more in healthcare that are in it
| for money or status? Or is that just doctors?
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