What's your opinion on the gender gap in the tech industry?

FleetingWish · 2015-11-07T06:32:36+00:00

I am more concerned about the under representation of left-handed people. Even the tools are designed for right-handed people, it is like they are trying to keep the leftys out.

Fight for your lefts!

3dbattleship · 2015-11-07T06:21:51+00:00

As long as there isn't anything stopping a talented female coder from getting those jobs, we shouldn't be worried about the overall percentages. There are less women who want to do it, that's all. I'm sure in some cases there is actual bias keeping women from entering, but I'd guess that's far from the norm.

[deleted] · 2015-11-07T13:51:00+00:00

The only reason there's a gender gap is because women apparently aren't interested in it. That's not anyone's fault. Women are choosing to go into different fields, they don't wanna do tech shit, I don't either, that shit looks boring as fuck.

3dbattleship · 2015-11-07T10:58:38+00:00

If women actually want these jobs then maybe they should go to college for them and apply.

Instead of constantly whining about not getting jobs they didn't apply for.

I hear oil rig workers make good money and is mostly male.. Maybe women should apply for that to?? Oh wait, that's too much work

[deleted] · 2015-11-07T14:22:08+00:00

if I could have spent 4 years learning gender studies and marry someone who made 150k and be set, I probably would have. Instead, I spent my time in the computer lab debugging my code.

The gap is caused by necessity and drive.

Nazrath2112 · 2015-11-07T15:31:49+00:00

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/20/9179853/tech-diversity-scorecard-apple-google-microsoft-facebook-intel-twitter-amazon

Your link is outdated. Current %'s

Google -- 28%
Apple -- 29%
Amazon -- 37%

[deleted] · 2015-11-07T09:34:41+00:00

I don't like the deliberate diversification of job fields. I use a little coding in data analysis, which I am interested in, but I'm not really interested in coding itself, it's just a means to an end. Also a lot of women plan to take time off for kids and some fields are easier to come back to than others.

I don't think there should be any discrimination and affirmative action is largely discrimination in favour of the minority.

joseremarque · 2015-11-07T15:54:07+00:00

There is absolutely nothing stopping more women from getting in to coding. It's the most meritocratic. The companies and coworkers are the most progressive. There are numerous programs designed to get women in to tech. Hiring managers are strongly motivated to hire more women. Programming actually favors verbal intelligence over spatial. Tech tends to be the most flexible and least formal alerting puerile to work around personal commitments. Most intelligent women are more than capable of being top developers IF they wanted to. Some of the best developers over worked with are women.

I've been in the tech industry for 15 years and I've thought about this for a long time. The reason you don't see more top female coders is because being really talented requires spending ages 16 to 24 behind a keyboard in a dark basement. Most women are not willing to waste the years in which they have been granted enormous social capital by virtue of having grown breasts. Girls who succeed in tech tend to be weird, nerdy, or otherwise different enough that sacrificing a social life at that age is not as costly. I've never met a female programmer of any skill level who was both attractive and socially competent.

ifelsedowhile · 2015-11-07T14:10:17+00:00

men are naturally more competitive so they look for the better paying jobs although I have to admit that western women are on a certain degree spoiled and don't have the obbligation of supporting themselves financially since they have the option of finding a providing partner. in places like China women make a higher pc of engineers because they don't have the luxury to be economically supported by a man.

Atlas_B_Shruggin · 2015-11-07T16:18:48+00:00

Here is why women dont enter STEM in great number and never will

divorcedbp · 2015-11-07T19:50:55+00:00

What's your opinion of the gender gap in the sanitation, coal mining and oil rigging industries?

You are making the classic apex fallacy of only looking at 'pretty' positions. These high status engineering jobs aren't bestowed on people as a prize for being the right kind of person - they're granted to those who work for them and have a desire to do them.

chazzALB · 2015-11-07T14:59:14+00:00

IMHO the pressures on women to not enter the Tech industry come from outside the Tech industry. They come from the woman's own family and friends who say things like "Really? Computer science? Isn't that all full of nerds and shit. Here, here's the latest Glamour magazine."

There's isn't anything biologically innate to women that would steer them from programming or any other field that is overwhelmingly male. It starts young when parents take away Johnny's toy truck from little Susie and say "no, no. That's not what little girls play with."

Ultrablue1973 · 2015-11-07T16:19:36+00:00

I think there is a combination of factors at work. I do think women are less interested in coding, but some of that may be social pressure when they're younger (I was dissuaded from taking higher mathematics by one teacher in HS even though my scores were very high.) There might be also an issue of women needing more sleep and having less stamina. The startup culture is intense.

That said, despite said hiccup in HS I worked in tech at a university and then later as a free agent.

I did face some discrimination, but also I had a lot of support from young guys, and my boss and then clients, too. The big thing was that I had kids. That kind of killed coding for me. I was working at home and nursing a child and I just didn't have the hours of complete silence and lack of interruption I needed for intense problems solving. And then when my first got older I'd fallen so far behind. I'd always been self taught--maybe if I'd been to university and had more formal training I would have had a more solid foundation?

I really think the time off for childcare is a big issue. Women who get into to tech are generally smart--smart women are more likely to have paired off with smart men. Smart men tend to be financially successful. Most parents want their kids NOT to be in day care from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. when they're small. And really, the job I was doing was more hours than that. Someone steps out. (And smart women are very likely to find other things to do that are similarly lucrative. I only earned about 60k this year, but hey, I did it from home and between 8:30-2:30 with lots of days off when the kids weren't in school. I'm like an advertisement. Earn 5K a month working from home part-time!)

Anyway, I think less natural inclination + lack of stamina (which is necessary for the startup culture) + leaving the field after kids is what really drives the dearth of women in tech. I DO think certain companies and cultures are terrible. But from experience I'd say there are niches with teams that are open and supportive. I have worked with a lot of great guys. They all defied the stereotype of programmers though--charismatic with girlfriends and wives, so maybe that's the secret!

mashakos · 2015-11-07T19:03:30+00:00

the gender gap in tech exists in western countries because women there have more options and can't be arsed doing something they don't like just to survive financially.

GridReXX · 2015-11-07T19:37:04+00:00

Some guys like coding more than most women?

And quite frankly I don't even think most men go into high-finance or tech because it's their passion.

Men are more prone to choose a career path based on how lucrative it is because they're more likely than women to be thinking about "one day I may have to support an entire family."

Also more so than women, they're thinking about "the ladies like a guy who can buy her things."

Overall, men do seem to have more incentive to choose high-paying career paths.

fluidcore · 2015-11-07T06:33:22+00:00

Men, generally speaking, actually can't code. They can't do architecture, they can't learn hardcore classical music, and they can't do advanced math. Only certain men and certain women can, and they are a biological minority, but genetically there are less women in that minority.

MRA types tend to express this trend as "men produce more of the complete idiots and technical geniuses, while women crowd around the middle averages". I think this is misleading because it makes the average male sound smarter than the average female, when in fact most men and women are completely unremarkable in their creativity or technical ingenuity. Most human beings spend their life doing derivative, un-creative, non-technical work and never do anything not learned by either habituation or previously discovered science.

BeyondTheLight · 2015-11-07T07:24:25+00:00

It is really fine the way it is. If you have no interest or any kind of drive for it, then you have nothing to do there. Just stay out of it.

goatismycopilot · 2015-11-07T13:04:02+00:00

I struggled in hard sciences as a teen and I did not try very hard, so that one is on me. I only did well in biology. I regret that. Although I am happy as an RN, I find biomedical engineering fascinating especially the advances made in orthopedic joint replacement. So, I do wish I had realized at the time what opportunities doing well in those areas could have presented me later on.

wub1234 · 2015-11-07T18:04:35+00:00

I think it's a good thing that women are working in these fields, and I think everything should be done to ensure that they don't face barriers to entering them. I don't think you will ever get a 50-50 split, or even close, because women are simply less interested in these fields than men.

AnOldRichDude · 2015-11-07T23:39:33+00:00

I've been in tech for over 25 years, in both start-ups and large software companies. When I first started there were almost zero female programmers around me, now it's up to around 15%. As an employer, I try to hard to recruit them...there just aren't that may to choose from. Why do we want them? Multiple reasons exist for it.
1. They make the work place a little bit more fun. Don't know about you, but 25 years in a pure sausage factory can get old.
2. The best ones are awesome to work with, they can often be great developers without the ego and other lack of social and collaboration skills that comes with the best coders.
3. We build software for everybody, not just men. It's good to have multiple perspectives on design.
4. Lack of women in tech also discourages some guys from going into tech, especially tech focused schools that have a high male to female ratio. My son shot down most schools with "Tech" in the name just on that alone.

Our country has a very serious lack of truly talented developers and we frankly need more people of both genders building the right set of skills. At any given point in time, I have tons of reqs I can't fill. I'd gladly fill them with the most qualified candidate of either gender.

betterdeadthanbeta · 2015-11-07T06:25:01+00:00

Women don't have much interest in coding, tech, etc.

Women need to work with people or do menial tasks because they're dependent, weaker and slightly dumber than men, and inside, they know it.

wombatinaburrow · 2015-11-07T07:48:21+00:00

In my experience, women are pretty actively discouraged from these jobs, with them being described as "family unfriendly", "sausage factories" and "not women friendly" by careers advisors and educators. The friends of mine who work within the tech industry consider it to be highly suspicious of women; viewing them as pretty faces there to fill a quota, sluts and unwelcome intruders.

Title	What's your opinion on the gender gap in the tech industry?
Author	gavinok
Upvotes	7
Comments	104
Date	November 7, 2015 6:00 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/3rv059/whats_your_opinion_on_the_gender_gap_in_the_tech/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/whats-your-opinion-on-the-gender-gap-in-the-tech.278608 https://theredarchive.com/post/278608

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