I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided. It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those careers, that's perfectly fine.
And I haven’t been trying exceptionally hard to avoid it.
If such jibes had happened those people would not have a job, point blank.
Given the average seniority for a full stack engineer is 10 years, I should have encountered at least one, or worked with someone who had been in such an environment.
I think chud behaviour is an excuse, because it’s not tolerated for at least my lifetime.
That sort of chud behavior is very much tolerated in many places: https://www.romerolaw.com/blog/2021/11/complaint-alleges-ram...
I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
On the other hand, I have often, often worked on teams that were (except for me) all men, but by and large they were men who had mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that they loved, and who therefore had no trouble relating to me with respect and affection. While it is true that some men treat women specifically badly, and that some men treat people generally badly, it is not true that men in general treat women badly. Quite the opposite.
It does take a moment, as a woman, to find your feet socially in an all male space. But does it not always take a moment to find your feet in any new space? I have generally found that what makes it go smoothly is the fact that we are all hackers. If anything, it is all the walking on eggshells about sexism that makes social integration awkward at first. People are trying to figure out how they are "supposed" to behave around me, worried that I will be aggressive socially and legally. When we focus on the work we do together and the love we have in common for the field, we become friends naturally and get along well.
I myself think all the hand-wringing over demographics has been a waste of time at best and counterproductive at worst. I think it makes more sense to focus on developing virtue, civility, and good leadership among the people who find themselves here.
In my teens my mom tried to reenter the workforce and got an office job, and she absolutely hated working with other women because of this. She wanted to work with men because in her experience, women were so much worse.
FWIW, I do think most men with wives and/or daughters are generally thoughtful coworkers, but I'm not sure that's a majority in most tech workplaces, especially the ones that skew young. Thinking back to my own experience, I think, I was blind to a lot of the things I'm speaking about (or perhaps even resistant to the idea of calling it out) until I had a long-term partner.
For a number of years I had the sense that I might be going crazy, because it seemed that throughout my whole working life I'd encountered good and bad people of both sexes, but never witnessed the kind of systematic targeting of women that both mainstream and alternative media sources told me was rife. How could it be that I couldn't see what was apparently right under my nose? So it's reassuring to know that there are also women who have had a similar experience.
Sure. One of the women I dated detailed a story about how a man at a conference she attended suggested it'd be more fun if she was roofies. To her face, in front of her co-workers (many of them women). She was in a majority female industry (healthcare).
Why do we just assume that men stop doing cringe stuff just because women are around?
I am passing along these anecdotes because they're more easy to empathize with than some of the more general arguments of why it can be hard to succeed in tech as a woman (but they really only tell part of the story). Some of my other anecdotes might also sound closer to things you've seen or heard at the work place, or perhaps it's easier to see how some of these things might have happened without you being aware of them, given their (relative) infrequency and the contexts in which they arise. All of them happened without an HR incident (like, really, should a guy who wrote a system called "naggy-wife" get in trouble? a choice was made like 20 years ago... and maybe the guy doesn't even work there anymore). But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up and contribute to the relatively common feeling among female engineers that they "don't belong".
The solution there has nothing to do with hiring more women, and everything to do with zero tolerance for a sexist environment.
I mean, that happening is just insane. This isn't the 1950's.
My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."
Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20% female and we easily end up with spirals where departments end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring in math instead of cs because of that process at my college.
I would hesitate to advance any theories as to cause based on that data (e.g., Denmark - part of Scandinavia - is >50% and Finland - not part of Scandinavia but next to it - is <30%).
I guess the interesting point of discussion here is "personal inclination". A lot of my female friends have stories about how their parents encouraged their brothers to fix things around the house, get their hands dirty, read manuals, and set up new appliances. They tell me how they were, conversely, encouraged to make friends, maintain relationships, and steered toward more aesthetic pursuits like art, drama, or music.
My sister, at an age when she had no strong interests of her own, was given paintbrushes and nice paper as gifts by our parents but not Legos because they felt like girls were more likely to enjoy aesthetic things than mechanical things. Funny enough, as an adult she has neither mechanical nor aesthetic interests. The question I guess is how much of "personal inclination" is driven by these small decisions of what options we give to kids.
I will say my experiences are colored by the fact that my family is a low-income immigrant family in the US from a culture with definite gender discrimination and so they hold stronger gender prejudices than probably a high-income Scandinavian family. My guess is also that younger generations have grown up with a much better idea of gender equality and will raise their kids with less of this prejudice.
I also observed in my school that a lot of women felt more comfortable in the math department than CS (though CS had much less prestige compared to now), so thanks for your story and background.
The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.
BTW, if you condition PISA scores on racial groups, any racial group (black, white, asian, whatever) scores higher in the USA than in any other country, except Hong Kong.
I've heard this, but will fully admit I don't know how real this is. For one, the US generally has the highest COL in the world, so it's bound to spend more per student than any other country. Moreover, the general concern I've seen is that badly funded school districts in the US are much worse off than well funded school districts. Moreover gender disparities are not as bad in well funded school districts.
except that it's not, which is the problem that DEI initiatives tried to compensate for
Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.
