Reading the comments on articles like this on hacker news always make me deeply uncomfortable to be a woman in tech.<p>I know it's hard to believe, but women don't usually get sent to coding summer camp as teenagers. Our parents don't usually encourage us to take AP computer science, and our best friends aren't in CS and don't refer us for sweet internships at Microsoft and Google.<p>If you're a woman in this industry, it's GENERALLY because it is something that you very much care about and want to do.<p>It's not some feminist conspiracy that women are being promoted, it's just that the women who go into tech are usually already pretty gritty people. You're comparing a very driven and passionate subset of women to a very general subset of men.<p>Here's a really great article I read once -- "I need terrible female engineers": <a href="https://medium.com/@amyngyn/i-need-terrible-female-engineers-1023a2e973dd#.l85nr149d" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@amyngyn/i-need-terrible-female-engineers...</a>
I suppose I could think of a number of explanations for this observed effect.<p>1. Selection- because so much of IT is hostile to women, the only ones who become senior in the field are the very good ones.<p>2. Affirmative action- companies promoting women regardless of merit to seem progressive.<p>3. Some sort of inate or socialized advantage– the "women are better at people stuff" philosophy. If this is the case, then you'd expect more women to be in management.<p>4. Methodological flaws in the survey. I can't find any detailed discussion of their process, but phrases like "Of the senior developers who responded to the survey" seem to imply there could easily be significant selection bias.<p>Feel free to take your pick based on what you already believe. Personally, I'm going to wait for more data before forming any solid conclusions based on this.
This immediately made me think of Paul Graham's article "A Way to Detect Bias". He talks about how a hiring bias (against women in this case) results in those who are hired being above average in skill.<p>Just one hypothesis on this data, but that would help explain why those women who are hired then get promoted faster - because they are actually outperforming their peers.<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/bias.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/bias.html</a>
It's interesting that there is a huge emphasis on the gender disparity, especially in tech, without also bringing race into the equation. When I first read the article and headline, I first thought to myself: "Are we talking about predominantly white women? Black women? Hispanic women? Asian women?"<p>For example, I know that Asians are generally 'over-represented' in tech yet if you look stats which compare professionals by ethnicity (<a href="https://d.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/2015/05/3045954-inline-i-fig-3-1ascendrptmanagement-pipeline-by-racegraph.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://d.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline...</a>), Asians (both male and female) get promoted at a lower rate than white men and women (<a href="https://c.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/2015/05/3045954-inline-i-fig4ascendrptaggregate-execparityindexbar.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://c.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline...</a>). And we could look at specific company's like Intel, Yahoo, and LinkedIn to find similar patterns, namely white people have a much higher likelihood to achieve higher executive positions compared to Asians (even when controlling for difference in company demographic composition).
Following the logic of most mental gymnasts here, the best IT companies should be women-only companies by now. People seem automatically to turn off their brains when discussing anything that might oppose the orthodoxy of affirmative action. This is a case where a bias that first appeared in academia (<a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-over-men-stem-faculty-positions" rel="nofollow">http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-...</a>) and is now bleeding to corporate life.<p>If men or any other subgroup are not rising through the ranks as fast, that is a clear discrimination and it is a problem, not an 'achievement'. It's this kind of ill-logic that brings pro-women policies in a bad light.
There's a common misconception, that technical excellence is a primary skill for managing a team of programmers. It's not the primary skill but a secondary one. The primary skill is managing people. One still needs to have technical competence -- far beyond just being able to code. However, the focus shouldn't be on dazzling displays of technical esoterica. The focus should be on balancing a tangle of conflicting cost/benefits and communication with the team -- logistics and tactics, not fisticuffs.<p>You can be a great manager with solidly average technical skills, so long as you can find a resource to advise you. (Dunning-Krueger trap: You may not know enough to understand if you truly understand the advice.) A team managed by such will usually outperform an average manager with great technical skills.<p>Alexander the Great would probably have conquered more of the world, if he had personally fought less.
As a man, I've noticed the "women promotion difference" very importantly in companies I've been employed in: Since 2006, it's mostly women who are promoted, with configurations like my last job where both my team lead and the manager were women.<p>On the other hand, I've left those companies because I could notice there was no career path for me, and created my own. I identify to a generation of men who've been sacrified for women equality. I'm all for equality, as long as everyone has equal chances, which we currently don't have. I'm very happy that we now start having studies supporting that men are less promoted than women today in some context (a minima in Luxembourg, France and Australia for what I'm concerned).<p>It's now time we study across all countries the mean-time-to-promotion, and it's time we include talks in conferences about the difficulties of men.<p>And it's time we stop having differentiated education and career paths for women. Today, women are equal in the mind if most men, and have a large swathes of explicit advantages granted by laws.
> The study of more than 4,000 UK IT professionals, published to mark International Women’s Day, reveals women typically reach management level three years faster than men (in nine rather than 12 years) and they are appointed CTO/CIO two and a half years faster (in 13 versus 15.5 years for men).<p>> However, the survey also reveals a colossal gap between the numbers of men and women working in top IT roles. Of the senior developers who responded to the survey, only 6% were women; with IT managers the figure was 8%, and of those heading up IT only 7% were female.<p>These statistics are weird together. How can this be?<p>Speculation: There is a bias against average/underperforming women relative to men entering and staying in tech. This means that the women who do stay in are from the upper end of the distribution. It's as if you took a normal distribution (as skill often is distributed) and truncated some segment of the lower half. This would explain why there are much fewer women reaching managerial positions but why the ones that do reach it do so very quickly.<p>Is there any data on how qualified and performant female engineers are relative to male engineers who occupy the same position? A result that would support this hypothesis would be something like women in the same position as men in tech have beefier academic credentials or more awards.
Please don't take this as flippant, it's a legitimate query. I keep seeing the call for "more women in technology", however I don't see a similar rally for say, "more men in early education". Most teachers in early to middle school tend to be females by a wide margin[0], men comprise less than 20%, yet I don't see people screaming there should be more men teaching in those roles? Why is that?<p>[0] <a href="http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers" rel="nofollow">http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers</a>
I've been reading HN for a few years now. The tone of the response to women in IT hasn't changed much. I kept believing that if I were good enough, smart enough, and if people liked me enough, I would get ahead.<p>Turns out, there's a real ceiling on where I can go. Not because I lack talent. I am very good with people. My last manager believed I would be a VP at the company someday. I maxed out at that fake "architect" role made for people that require more money but can't be promoted to management. This was a large F-50 type organization.<p>We found that the HR departments at very large companies definitely improve diversity up and down the ranks. But there is a blockade that eventually presents itself.<p>This blockade can probably be summed up mathematically: The first females to go up stream will always be white. As the number of females up the ranks increases, the less obligation white males feel to grant other minorities the same privilege. Eventually, it works out to where there will be a multitude of white women paving the way at VP level, and until they die off or retire, the blockade prevents advancement for anyone else.<p>I call it the "wall of white women" with a sub-wall of "white male architects" waiting for their chance. If the minority applicant is not blindingly obviously superior to the wall of white males just beneath the wall of white women, there's no chance.<p>Unfortunate. I find it kind of hilarious and enjoy watching it form at every single major corporation.
This seems to be based this survey data: <a href="http://www.emolument.com/career_advice/women_in_it_career_evolution_best_paying_jobs" rel="nofollow">http://www.emolument.com/career_advice/women_in_it_career_ev...</a>
Only because women and men are equal as human beings and should be treated accordingly it does not mean they are identical. Not so long ago everybody said that we need more women in [paste a well paid white collar job]. You wanted positive discrimination. Now you have it.<p>Ironically nobody wanted to have more women on construction sites, in the military service or as a surgeon...
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone given the stated goal by large companies of hiring more women, and the relatively small pool on which they are drawing from
As a sidenote, the USD to GBP currency figures shown in this article really show how much the pound has slumped over the last 6 months.<p>Article: "£52,000 ($74,000)"<p>Current day: "£52,000 ($63,020)"
One explanation would be that women could be said to have a better instinct for power, and they recognize quickly that as a corporate survival strategy, power over people is more rewarding and sustainable than power over things. Feminism isn't about women becoming IT guys, it's about becoming bosses.<p>Sort of breaks with the victim narrative, but provides a more plausible story.
I'm not too worried. I'm sure the feminists are going to condemn these companies and call for the resignations of the executives and stage protests over this blatant inequity. And the media will plaster this all over the news to spread awareness. And these companies will take heat from clients, end users, and advertisers, <i>right</i>?