I'm not entirely sure how much effort I want to put into trying to convince people who obviously don't want to be convinced, but here goes, since my above comment has been received well enough.
The industry is sexist. That's the answer. No more, and no less than other industries. This is very very very very very basic intersectionism. I can get a little deeper on this but someone well-versed in this can get a lot deeper.
Industry leaders do not want to listen to these experts. Because it threatens them. I'm lucky enough to work for a company big enough to realize they need to take it seriously. There's employee resource groups and the leadership talks about it, not in every town hall, but in enough of them. But Silicon Valley is run by a tribe of mavericks. They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution. They don't, because sexism.
If it's not more sexist than other industries, then that can't be the reason why there are fewer women.
They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution.
Please enlighten us with the solution that will produce an equal ratio of men and women when 80% of CS graduates are men.
> Please enlighten us with the solution that will produce an equal ratio of men and women when 80% of CS graduates are men.
It's very simple. Exceedingly simple. So simple you'll wish you'd have thought of it, and if you think hard about it after I explain it you'll see your own sexism in why you didn't.
Here it is. The solution is to drop the ridiculous credentialism that's infected the field. You do not need a CS degree to contribute usefully and advance a career in this field. You can have a CS degree and still be largely useless compared to someone without. I do not have a CS degree. I do not have ANY degree. Yet I make more money than many of my peers in my job market. Guess which race and gender I am, no prizes for getting it right the first time.
Systemized racism and sexism are why companies won't usefully invest in the careers of minorities, and why they invested in mine even without the proper 'stuff'. It's elitism, pure and simple. Go ahead and come up with all your reasons. Those reasons support and continue elitism. They're excuses.
And that's my last reply on this topic, I hope more HNers start picking up the torch. Because talking about this shit to people who aren't really interested in the topic more than they just want it to go away makes me unreasonably mad and that's no way to contribute usefully to the discussion.
Someone in this thread asked how it's not a pipeline problem if 80% of graduating CS students are male, and your response is to just stop caring about CS degrees. But how does that make sense unless you think that there is an equally disproportionate ratio of uncredentialed yet qualified women programmers? And frankly the rhetorical techniques you're using here feel dishonest, implying that if I don't accept your argument then either I didn't think hard enough about it or I'm sexist. Or the "this is my last reply on this topic". If people have genuine questions why not answer them?
And after seeing this kind of discourse so many times there is such a sense of relief when someone is willing to say "let's look at the truth even if it's an inconvenient one" because to come up with a good solution you have to start with what's actually true right? For a lot of people that's what SSC represents and that's why they feel so strongly about defending it.
Basically comes down to personal computer games marketed to boys in the 80s.
> Advertisers sold games to boys because boys were the ones buying them
https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...
So there we have it. Girls didn't have access to computers so they were less skilled when coming to college, and the intro courses prioritized prior coding skills, and they didn't have them, lost confidence, abandoned industry.
So its actually rationale explanation, and really not sexism (shock!).
What did girls do while boys were gaming? If a girl had a brother in a household with a computer, why didn't they use it? Was it sexist parents / gender stereotyping?
If women want to code, all they have to do is...code. It really doesn't make sense to blame men here.
I'd be curious how many people subscribe to both intersectionalism and rationalism, I suspect it's very hard to do.
I recently read an interesting take on this from Philip Telock in Superforecasting (unrelated book): Belief systems are like jenga blocks, we arrive at conclusions from myriad assumptions all stacked upon each other. It's hard to change core beliefs once they're tied to a bunch of other downstream beliefs (like blocks lower in the tower), especially if those blocks involve group identity.
All this to say I suspect this thread will consist of people talking past one another because everyone's belief frameworks are very different, and language means slightly different things. E.g. the word "sexist" could refer to either the behaviors, both explicit or implicit (micro-aggressions), or the entire system as measured by outcome, depending on who you ask.
Though neither of those two frameworks are precisely core to my being, I do like reason and rationality a lot, and it also makes sense to me how there can exist intersections of attributes that all add up to a person being more or less oppressed versus privileged.
But what you said here is exactly what irks the 'rationalist' community. Giving "sexism" as the root reason fo something is a terrible position to start from if you actually want to fix it. For those that have seen and experienced sexism in the industry it is blatantly obvious but for all others we need something to help them understand.
The areas I would point to are:
why do women drop out of the industry at greater rates than men?
what causes women to be attracted to CS? Is it something different than what attracts men?
It IS a pipeline problem right now, how do we try and remove barriers and make it a more welcoming place for the women who are interested?
All of these can be investigated and addressed. "Sexism" can not be unless we want to wait generations for our social culture to evolve, but by then something will certainly replace sexism.
However: I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between systemic sexism and actual sexism.
The tech industry suffers from systemic sexism. That doesn't mean that HR departments and senior leadership are all staffed with cartoon villains eagerly waiting for the opportunity to sexually harass a subordinate or assault someone at an office party (aka, plain vanilla sexism), although I think we can all name a couple companies that, it turns out, fit this mold pretty well. It doesn't even mean that senior leadership is full of misogynists who will systematically underpay women and undervalue their contributions and talk over them in meetings (again, it does happen, it's just not the main issue here).
Rather, it means that the entire structure of the industry is one that yields unequal outcomes. There are a lot of different factors here: Things like policies on working from home or flexible hours, expectations about overtime or vacations, the practical impact of the dreaded "culture fit" evaluation or implicit assumptions about what a good engineer "looks like". But also, absolutely, the "pipeline" problem.
My company - like yours, I assume - is eager to hire diverse candidates, but we can't hire candidates that don't exist, and our demand, alone, isn't going to fill up high school, boot camps, or college classes with the missing candidates. But when the graduating classes are overwhelmingly male, your junior devs will be too. And so will the intermediates, seniors, tech leads, principle engineers, etc. And when everyone is mostly male, it becomes self-reinforcing. When everyone at the table discussing policies is male (or even all but 1-2), it's very hard to figure out whether a policy seems sensible to you because you've got twenty years in the industry and know what works for successful teams, or because you're a guy, and knows what works for successful teams of men.
> They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution.
I think you're seriously underselling the scope of the issue. Taking it seriously and being willing to solve it does zip point nothing. We cannot hire engineers that opted to a different career path and are not only not really qualified to apply now but also aren't even applying because they have no interest in tech and haven't even considered it as an option.
In a later comment you say:
> The solution is to drop the ridiculous credentialism that's infected the field. You do not need a CS degree to contribute usefully and advance a career in this field.
Sure, absolutely, one of our better recent hires we made is a woman who took a break from her (non-tech) career after having kids, decided she wanted to give tech a try, attended a bootcamp, and then applied to us. We hired her, she's been great. Which is fine; really that's the bare minimum any tech company should do.
...but systemic sexism is still a thing. One company (or fifty) being eager to solve it doesn't actually do anything. Hiring one good engineer with a non-traditional background is fine, but we're trying to double the size of the engineering team this year, and if we hired every woman who applied without a CS degree in the last year that would go exactly 0% of the way to meeting our hiring goals, because they're not applying.
Your condescending "oh, the solution is so simple, you people just aren't thinking of it because you don't care" is nonsense. The issue isn't that 100% of companies are sexist and won't hire women and/or women from non-traditional backgrounds, the issue is systemic sexism which means the (very large) number of companies that are not sexist and are eager to hire those women cannot do so.
In short: You seem to think that talking about the pipeline problem is way of minimising or avoiding grappling with the hard problems. I think your attempts to minimise the pipeline problem is a way of you avoiding the hard problems. :)
