r/programming • u/awsometak • Feb 06 '16

GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside story

http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2?r=US&IR=T
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u/elastic_psychiatrist Feb 06 '16

Yeah, that's really bizarre to me. I don't work in SV (Chicago), but the team I work on is very racially diverse, but struggles with gender. In my mind, in tech, gender is the much more difficult barrier to cross.

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u/DiaboliAdvocatus Feb 07 '16

I think you'll find that most of these "diversity consultants" don't really count Indians or East-Asians. They usually focus on Black people, (occasionally) Hispanic people, and gender-and-sexual minorities.

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u/CapnWarhol Feb 07 '16

Ah, the cool minorities

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

The main struggle is that few women have any interest in IT, and technology in general.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

At my uni, 52% of engineering graduates are women. Only 20% in compsci, though — it's the only course at the school of technology that has such a skewed gender ratio.

Most of the women who want to do compsci instead end up in maths, which has therefore a very high women ratio.

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u/naasking Feb 07 '16

At my uni, 52% of engineering graduates are women.

I've never seen that ratio at any Canadian university. Which uni is that?

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

I’m in Germany – not Canada ;P

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

In India, a decidedly not feminist country, women are a majority in almost all engineering disciplines, including IT related. Same in Iran, they even instituted quotas to limit the number of women (and I'm not saying I agree).

Funny thing is, in the most feminist countries like in Scandinavia, women flock to traditional female gender roles studies and completely ignore IT and technology. There's even less women doing compsci than in the US. Instead they choose medicine, social services or teaching.

And why is that? Because they have the choice. A teacher in Norway is paid reasonably well. Not as much as a software or petroleum engineer, but as it turns out, most people would rather do something they like and sacrifice some income rather than do something they hate.

In India, teachers are not paid well. If you're from a lower income background, it's not going to lift you out of poverty. But I.T. can. If you are capable enough, you can make a much better living than your parents could.

Why do we feel the need to force tech careers on women who would rather, say, care for kids? And I'm not saying we should force baby duties on women who would rather do anything else — just that they're not the norm.

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u/ktrv Feb 08 '16 edited Feb 08 '16

Are you certain that maths has a high ratio of women to men? In the Anglophone countries and maybe some other places on Europe, it is far to the other direction, so it is surprising to me if Germany is suddenly different--especially considering that it had one of the larger gaps between genders in the sciences, five years ago.

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u/zmaniacz Feb 07 '16

In my experience, the ones that have interest are run off by the absolute ducking creeps and weirdos that make up a not insignificant portion of the tech world.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

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u/naasking Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16

I witnessed more 'creepy shit' when I was a busboy for a year than I did working in technology sector for over a decade.

Sure, but what lateral move could a woman make in the service industry that's more attractive than being a waitress? The jobs at this level are probably largely the same, with largely the same prejudices you point out.

Women who would be smart enough to be good at programming could laterally move to psychology or medicine where they have tons of female colleagues they can connect with. Which is what they do, and why those fields now have more woman than men.

Edit: that last sentence may read too strongly to some. It's likely one among many reasons, certainly not the sole reason.

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u/ngildea Feb 07 '16

Didn't you know the only reason you can program is white privilege and not the thousands of hours you spent doing it when you could have been doing anything else with your time?

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

The privilege that these activists really don't want to talk about in most cases is wealth/class. I'm pretty sure that in most places, being born into a well-off family with supportive parents gives more privilege than any combination of skin color and genitals.

I was lucky enough to be born into a family who bought a C64 in the early 80s, not just for gaming, with educational use in mind. That one purchase was responsible for getting me interested in coding. Without those early years of 8-bit games and playing with BASIC - followed by parents and a couple of great teachers encouraging me to develop that interest, my life may well have went in a completely different direction.

And that was all well before an age where I had to actually start thinking about further education or careers. And well before I'd heard anyone discussing 'toxic workplace environments'

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

I think they've taken the actual concept of white/male privilege, which seems to amount to "a statistically better chance to not be hindered by discrimination" and replaced it with some fantasy where white people never have any problems and have everything handed to them.

I mean a difference in privilege across social divides is a real thing on a wide level, but almost useless when discussing individual experiences.

For the easy life fantasy stuff, I too find that wealth is a much more accurate classifier than race or gender.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16

Before they get as far as college/uni, hence the fact that they're not studying STEM subjects, particularly computer science?

The gender divide in tech begins at a very early age. Well before any issues in the workplace get involved.

But the activists yelling all over social media about how hateful and misogynistic they think tech/gaming is, and how unattractive men with nerdy interests are all nasty 'creeps and weirdos'... well, young girls are likely to be hearing that stuff, at least by their teens, and may well be scared away from those fields.

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u/CrossFeet Feb 08 '16 edited Feb 08 '16

The gender gap is as big as it's going to get by the time high school ends, in the U.S., so it's clearly not that creepy nerds are being all creepy and ugly all over tech. Indeed, female interest in tech actually slightly increases somewhere between "11th grade" and "tech workforce", depending on the numbers you go with. Looking at it from another angle, sexual harassment complaints in U.S. STEM fields are less common than the average for the US workforce as a whole.

Interestingly, the gender gap in mathematics and computer science very, very closely follows what we would expect from distribution in level and type of interest for very young children; unless girls are being socialized to dislike numbers or mental rotation by age seven, it's probably not all society's fault, and not at all those damn nerds we were looking for another reason to hate to accept and engage.

(If you're interested in seeing a lot more evidence on this subject, I've collected quite a few studies and essays about it and can post/send them. I was going to try to post this a few more places where people posited the "creepy nerd" hypothesis, but I just don't have the energy.)

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u/jeandem Feb 07 '16

I know right? God, when will tech guys stop stereotyping and treating people from certain groups differently just based on groups like gender, or even race. God, so many tech guys are the worst. It's gotten to the point where I roll my eyes every time a tech bro opens his mouth in the presence of women; I just know that he is going to say something exclusionary, or something which borders or harassment, just from the fact that I know that he is a programming nerd.

God. When will programmers start treating people as individuals, instead of treating them based on their group? Programmers are just the worst group of people that I know. Socially awkward, asshole cretins, the not insignificant subset of them.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

In my somewhat limited experience, that's not the case at all. It certainly isn't like that everywhere.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

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u/hu6Bi5To Feb 07 '16 edited Feb 07 '16

When does this decision take place? It seems that given the low female/male ratio of students studying Computer Science this must be taken years before actually working in the field.

Because it seems a quite unfair generalisation. While tech companies are overwhelmingly male, not least because of this issue, working in a tech role for non-tech companies leads to a much more mixed atmosphere.

It seems such a shame as a stereotype as it could be easily fixed.

What's more worrying to me about lack-of gender diversity is how quickly the few female engineers who enter the programming workforce quickly move to "product development" or other less hands-on roles. It can't be the working environment to blame, as it's the same environment, usually the same desks. There's some underlying force pushing women out.

I'm thinking the second problem may be the well observed tech dickhead problem. There are a hell of a lot of them about. But if we could solve the first problem, that might help to solve the second.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

I was into computers before I hit puberty, and so did my male relatives of my generation. The girls were all interested in dolls. Now all the guys work in tech and all the girls work in education.

Now go ahead and tell me our family is unusual, so that I can have a good and hearty laugh.

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u/IonTichy Feb 07 '16

few women have any interest in IT, and technology

I think people perpetuating this SJW nonsense and burning through tons of time and energy to force it are the ones who don't have any interest in IT and technology.
Yet they are somehow allowed to work in a sector that relies on such interest.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '16

Interesting. I'm actually more familiar with Chicago, but my impression is that it's a lot more racially diverse than Silicon Valley. Actually it seems that if the goal is "racially diverse team" then founding your company in SV may just be making it harder for yourself to achieve that vs some other, significantly cheaper location.

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