We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

With such politically charged issues, it&#x27;s always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible.<p>If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representation?<p>A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them. Look at these percentages and you can see unsentimentally that this must be true.<p>Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints? If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.

I&#x27;m going to preface this post by saying that I don&#x27;t have a problem with most of my coworkers (male and female) being Asian. In fact, I prefer it. I&#x27;m not Asian, but the majority of my friends, classmates, and coworkers throughout my life have been, and that continues even now during my career in tech.<p>Whenever I see anything related to affirmative action being discussed nowadays, I think that it&#x27;s only a matter of time until Asian women are treated the same way as Asian men. Once you&#x27;ve managed to close the gender gap in engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class. A continued pursuit of diversity will require discrimination similar to that exhibited by prestigious American universities.<p>My coworkers (past and former) and friends who are women SWEs overwhelmingly fall into two buckets: American-born Chinese with parents who are middle-class or higher, and PRC-born Chinese with wealthy parents.<p>I get the strong impression that gender diversity is viewed as more important than race and class. I&#x27;m a male of color who has been in the industry for more than four years now, so I no longer have to worry about breaking in. If I were applying to CS programs or looking for my first job right now, I would feel some resentment. I&#x27;ve convinced and helped three of my friends to do a career switch because there&#x27;s just so much assistance (financial, educational, and otherwise) available for women. From what I&#x27;ve seen, there is just so much more provided to help women get into the field.<p>I commend the big tech companies for lumping male URMs and all women together when it comes to prioritization, but this isn&#x27;t the case for most companies, who are expending great effort on balancing the gender ratio while treating men of color as second-class URMs, or even ignoring their status completely. It&#x27;s fortunate that the best jobs are the most fair, but even if a place sucks, a first SWE job is still a first SWE job.<p>What I predict will happen is the gender gap will begin to close, but the aforementioned diversity issues not related to gender will remain. This will be due to a combination of various factors, with the most significant being fatigue with affirmative action practices, and that discussing socio-economic and race is much more sensitive than discussing gender, Saying &quot;stop hiring men&quot; or &quot;only hire women&quot; is easy, even if you are asking people to discriminate against candidates similar to themselves. &quot;Stop hiring Asian women&quot; is not. And if you are willing to make that request, why would anyone listen?

I don&#x27;t think the point of criticizing &quot;it&#x27;s a pipeline problem&quot; is that there isn&#x27;t a pipeline problem, but that it&#x27;s an easy out to avoid taking action at whatever stage of the &#x27;pipeline&#x27; you happen to be working at.<p>If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say &quot;it&#x27;s a pipeline problem&quot; you&#x27;re probably saying that there aren&#x27;t enough candidates because not enough women graduate from ST programs. If you&#x27;re a program development person at a university you&#x27;re probably saying not enough enroll. If you say it as a high school guidance counsellor you probably are saying there&#x27;s not enough push for girls to do well in science and math classes and apply that to their higher education even if there is.<p>The point is that whatever stage of the pipeline you&#x27;re at, if you want things to improve, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. You can&#x27;t wait for universities to both increase enrollment and increase graduation (two separate problems as well). As this post points out you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem and recognize that the path to your job for a minority in your field will probably look drastically different to yours. It&#x27;s just never going to be enough to wave your hand at the problem and blame the stage before you.<p>The post does get at this for sure, so I&#x27;m not really criticizing it for its conclusion, but the first couple of paragraphs build a strawman that I think is very unhelpful to understanding the nature of the problem.

The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won&#x27;t lose female talent you find later when they refuse to join a team of all guys. But you have to be careful too, to not hire someone just because they fit a social profile you want more of on the team. Talented women don&#x27;t want to be on a team where all of the women there were &quot;tossed a softball&quot;. It&#x27;s not only condescending, but it fosters the bias it intends to combat. Whoever is at fault, it is that there is a gender imbalance is worthy of debate. But addressing it is best viewed as opportunity, not an act of charity, if seen through the right lens.

Is the right thing to assume we should target 50-50 gender representation as a first-principle outcome target in all fields? If so, it’s a negative sign that the marquee companies analyzed hired at about the gender split of universities they targeted.<p>Is it equally plausible that we should be looking bottoms-up from the perspective of a fresh college graduate entering the field and asking the question, “am I likely to get a systemically fair shake when interviewing?” From the data presented, it seems likely that the answer is “yes”.<p>By all means we should work on the pipeline. I’m supportive to the idea that, by default, we should expect 50-50 representation, but when we find pockets where that does not hold, we must be open to understanding possible reasons. Army&#x2F;Marines, oil&#x2F;gas work, and airline pilots are other readily identifiable fields without a 50-50 representation. Is this good, bad, or indifferent?<p>If women who enter those fields achieve success at the same rate as the overall population, is the hiring and evaluation system (basically after their decision to enter the field) “fair”? If not, why not?

My alma mater Harvey Mudd College has had rough gender parity in Computer Science for several years now. It&#x27;s a small school but other colleges could learn from their practices.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;kimberly-weisul&#x2F;how-harvey-mudd-college-achieved-gender-parity-computer-science-engineering-physics.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;kimberly-weisul&#x2F;how-harvey-mudd-college-...</a>

I know it is not politically correct to say it, but I remain unconvinced that gender parity is a desirable goal. Particularly given the current state of research into differences in gender averages.<p>Here is a real example. Per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spatial_visualization_ability#Gender_differences" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spatial_visualization_ability#...</a> men have about a one standard deviation advantage in spacial reasoning over women. Assuming that both distributions are normal with the same variance, that means that if we pick the top X% of the population on spacial reasoning where X is fairly small, we will get about an 80&#x2F;20 split of male&#x2F;female. Within that top group there will be no remaining difference between men and women.<p>Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering. This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of engineering students. Decades of hand-wringing later, women are still about 20% of engineering students. Based on spacial reasoning ability, perhaps women SHOULD be about 20% of engineering students.<p>What happens if we force gender parity? If the research on gender differences is right, selecting on spacial reasoning except making sure to select 50% women would result in a situation where you had 50% men, 12.5% women who are as good as the men, and the remaining 37.5% women who are worse than EVERY man at spacial reasoning. The result is that 3&#x2F;4 of the women are worse than all the men. Is this a better outcome? Why?<p>Now I picked an example where men have an advantage. But men don&#x27;t in all fields though. According to other research, women are better on average at management. This is an argument to accept the data and do our best to hire and promote on competence.<p>Now that argument applies to hard engineering. It isn&#x27;t software development. I do not know why the ratio is so extreme in software development. (More extreme than in, say, mechanical engineering.) However I have also never seen data suggesting that sorting on interest and ability shouldn&#x27;t result in the ratios that we see. Before we double down on equality as a mandate, I would like to see that data collected.<p>As long as, on average, the men and women you hire are equally good, your hiring process is not broken. If your data finds that there is a difference in average ability, then adjust your practices to get higher average competence. Encourage everyone to have the opportunity. Make it clear that all people with title X are equivalent regardless of secondary characteristics, AND work to make that true. (I believe that it is pretty true today.)

In the article they talk about more women in tech in India than in US. India is a highly sexist society having a male child is preferred over having a female child. Still more females are in CS than in a more egalitarian society like US. I think it is because there are less economic choices in India.<p>So if you are going to college in India you will choose a subject that makes more economic sense. Even if that means studying a subject that you don&#x27;t like that much. When there is freedom to choose profession without economic constraints people will choose subject that interests them the most.<p>Edit: I might be downvoted for last sentence.

Not one mention of age as being a factor as passing over good talent because of ageism. I&#x27;m 54, I walk through the door to interview and people run the other way before I even sit down with them because I probably look like their Dad -- meanwhile, i&#x27;m not only as current on skills than anybody I&#x27;m talking to, I&#x27;m probably the best option at a startup since I&#x27;ve seen it all (three and four times over). It&#x27;s ridiculous that you age out of this industry at 45.

Underneath all this: although companies need talent, interviews are adversarial and not structured to create a supportive environment so candidates are at their best. Quite often the interview setup is to see how the candidate performs at their worst-- stressed, time pressured, on the spot, performing for fragments of time to a number of people while in what (feels|is) an asymmetrical power relationship.

Well, the gist of this is: there aren’t enough women in “tech”, so different standards should be applied for women until there are. Setting aside all the other problems I have with this: law and medicine have much stricter barriers for entry. There are no practicing doctors or lawyers without advanced degrees, but there are plenty of women in both professions. So even if you accept the premise, it’s still pretty clear you’re barking up the wrong tree here.

I think it&#x27;s pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it&#x27;s undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs.<p>After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60&#x2F;40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating class. I heard anecdotally from those majoring in EE how they had professors actually discourage them from continuing because they were &#x27;too anxious&#x27; about grades and other stuff.<p>I&#x27;m male and I was the only LatinX person in my CS major; there were several more in EE by comparison. Part of the problem might be cultural pressure...my parents were extremely disappointed when I decided to major in &#x27;Computer Science&#x27; rather than a major with &#x27;Engineering&#x27; in the title. They did not get that it was part of the school of engineering, that for all intents and purposes I was an engineer, and the job kicks ass. They wanted to be able to say I was an &#x27;ingeniero&#x27; to family in Peru. I ignored them.<p>As for bias in interviewing, I think it&#x27;s really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don&#x27;t) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the &#x27;Zuck&#x27; white guy personality type and somehow these feelings of being poor, being bilingual, going to a shit public school, etc bubble up in my head while I&#x27;m trying to rotate a binary tree. The two times I interviewed onsite at Google I couldn&#x27;t escape the feeling. It felt like the &#x27;whitest&#x27; place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that. The fact they didn&#x27;t seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.<p>It feels stupid to say but when I interview with people of other races, I feel more confident. When I interview with immigrants as well. It&#x27;s my personal bias that I need to work against.<p>EDIT:<p>I&#x27;m not arguing that these anxieties are rational or desirable...they simply exist in my mind and that makes interviewing more challenging. Just as a musician may fear they&#x27;ll forget their parts when they go on stage even if they are virtuosos, these sources of anxiety are real. For engineering interviews, not acknowledging some of these issues lowers your signal to noise ration. Someone might be a fantastic engineer but a 45 minute interview might present enough anxiety that they won&#x27;t be able to show it.

I don&#x27;t understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Be it women, or black, or whatever. Why? Why can&#x27;t you just hire the right person for the job?<p>To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups of people.<p>Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn&#x27;t make sense, that&#x27;s not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end up doing is crunching the numbers to &quot;make it work on paper&quot;.<p>Are women or black or whatever group we discuss equally represented across all jobs across the whole universe, everywhere?<p>It&#x27;s a ridiculous concept, I don&#x27;t understand who came up with it.

&gt; STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented backgrounds &gt; hostile university culture in male-dominated CS programs &gt; biased hiring practices &gt; non-inclusive work environments<p>Is there any actual proof of any of this rather than some bogus numbers from noname Kapor Center who admit they are just evangelists?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaporcenter.org&#x2F;our-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaporcenter.org&#x2F;our-work&#x2F;</a> &gt; Our pioneering work ranges from education programs and community building to evangelism and investing.

I&#x27;ll preface this with the usual &quot;my views are my own&quot; but I do think that diversity in the workplace is a very deep and interesting problem and that we do a major disservice to it by creating ridiculous metrics.<p>I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender; &quot;We aim to have 50% women in the workplace&quot; is a prime example of this. If this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is reached the intent will not be (one could be a female by sex but a male by gender and thus from a diversity standpoint is largely contributing as a male). If this is by gender assignment not only is the metric focused on a fluid concept but it&#x27;s also not a binary - in order to reach 50% women we&#x27;d only have 50% for the remaining non-women, which represents a broad range of gender expression and is not exclusively male.<p>I do respect that many companies (not just in tech) see diversity as an issue and are trying to do something about it. However, I do hope that they spend more time investigating the full range of the issue and begin by making small attempts at approaching the problem space before declaring metrics as objectives.

This stood out to me, and aligns with my observations in the (limited) female representation in the workplace:<p>&gt; In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16%<p>Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to? What is India doing so well in this space to have over double the percentage of female software developers as the U.S.?

at my workplace we try very hard to hire women programmers and we are at about 10% - 15% which is still quite low but better than other companies around us.<p>At the same time I noticed that the majority of engineering managers, product owners and agile coaches in our company are women. Some of these women were programmers at some point in their career.<p>I&#x27;m not deducing anything from this (especially since it’s a single datapoint) but it sure is interesting.

HR is far more of a nepotistic clique as regards as hiring their own for race and gender, and they often wield power over everybody else on those terms.

To me the question is not why this statistic looks a certain way, but what is the actual experience of women in software engineering. And if you ask women, the problem doesn’t usually seem to be getting hired. It’s the work environment that is alienating.<p>So if you want a number to target, it’s not a proportion of female employees, it’s the retention rate. And that’s not affected by pipeline problems.

I have a 4 year old daughter who I&#x27;m trying to get interested in programming. The first step is to teach her reading&#x2F;writing and math.<p>Every time we start with basic counting, after just 2 minutes, she&#x27;s constantly telling me &quot;daddy, I don&#x27;t want to count anymore&quot;. I&#x27;m not giving up yet. But, we have to accept the fact that certain genders don&#x27;t like math and don&#x27;t like programming.<p>Sometimes, I see the same thing playing out at older ages. We once hired a female intern and our PM was like &quot;ok everyone, now do your best to make programming seem as fun as possible so we can get this person to go into CS&quot;. I&#x27;m thinking, at that age, I would have killed for an internship, you wouldn&#x27;t have had to convince me to &quot;think it was fun&quot;, I already knew it was.<p>There&#x27;s so much focus on gender equality in programming but where is the gender equality talk in other industries like: cosmetics, football, ballet dancing, etc

Sure, 50% of boot camp graduates are women. What’s the ratio if we include actual university undergrads gender ratios?<p>If I’m not mistaken, there are more men going into cs than women here in the US. I don’t think a parity can happen unless equal number of women pursues cs degrees. I believe the disparity is more inline with career choice&#x2F;goals.<p>Unfortunately factoring in case studies involving the technical aptitude’s of women versus men in technical hiring, the results are bleak for women; hopefully this changes and I am not saying women are not able to compete; it could be a cultural issue and the low numbers of women entering the field makes it even harder to achieve gender parity.<p>I find relevance when discussing gender disparity represented in the trucking industry.

Key point:<p>&gt; there really aren’t enough women to meet demand… if we keep hiring the way we’re hiring. Namely, if we keep over-indexing on CS degrees from top schools, and even if we remove unconscious bias from the process entirely, we will not get to gender parity. And yes, there is a way to surface strong candidates without relying on proxies like college degree.<p>I am all in favour of reducing the industry’s reliance on fancy name schools for hiring.

They keep saying &quot;top schools&quot;, but lower tier schools have the same gender disparity. And 40% of bootcamp grads might be female, but how much of that is due to the fact that there are bootcamps, apprenticeships, etc. that exist purely to pluck women &amp; underrepresented groups from the mass of mostly-male non-traditional candidates? And other bootcamps that give scholarships preferentially to those groups?<p>I am pretty confident I would have gotten into LEAP or ADA if I were a woman. Instead I went fully self-taught because I didn&#x27;t want to pay $20k for a bootcamp.

It&#x27;s important to give the right answers to questions, answers that signal the right intentions. Giving the wrong answers means you don&#x27;t really understand the situation, and aren&#x27;t really invested in solving the problem.<p>So when a young female applicant asks you a question that might not <i>precisely</i> be worded as &quot;why is your company all men with only the white ones in positions of power,&quot; it&#x27;s important to not frame the <i>reason</i> why this is as a pipeline problem. She&#x27;s not dumb. She knows that.<p>Because she&#x27;s not actually asking for the reason. She wants to know if your company has the wherewithal to overcome the diversity problem <i>in spite</i> of the fact that there just aren&#x27;t a whole lot of women looking for tech careers at present compared to men. Everyone already knows there aren&#x27;t that many applicants. Everyone knows you can&#x27;t just hire a woman just because of her gender. That&#x27;s not the point.<p>The way you answer this question is to, without right out stating there&#x27;s a pipeline problem, make sure you&#x27;ve put into place all the <i>other</i> pieces that will cause women to not run screaming to all their friends what insensitive clods you are. Talk about your code of conduct. Talk about your contributions to the cause of diversity. Talk about any issue you had in the past relating to you not understanding people that have very very different life circumstances than you and what your failings were in obtaining a resolution satisfactory to all parties. It&#x27;s hard to talk about but well, diversity is a hard topic.<p>Anything but passing the buck.

The bit where she says 39% of Hires from india are women.Thats because parents decide what major their kids take which is completely opposite of the west. Thus the more no of female grads.The college i go to has a 50:50 ratio. Majority of the people there both men and women have no idea why they picked cs,they just are there because it pays ways and their parents told them to rather forced them into cs.

When ~15% of CS graduates in a nation are women, it&#x27;s going to be nary impossible for most companies to get too far beyond that.<p>If companies are hiring commensurate with that level, then that&#x27;s good on them, it gets very impossible to much beyond that at scale without serious distortions.<p>&#x27;The Pipeline Problem&#x27; shouldn&#x27;t be used as an all out excuse - but - it&#x27;s a fundamental reality, like gravity.<p>It&#x27;s shameful that someone would get sidelined for pointing out the blatantly obvious fact that &#x27;the pipeline&#x27; is the problem.<p>Of course the pipeline is the problem, on what planet do the laws of gravity not apply?<p>There&#x27;s always room for discussion, but avoiding the Elephant in the Room is smacks me as a lot of koolaid.<p>There&#x27;s a few things that can done beyond that surely, particularly highlighting women and minorities in certain fields so as they don&#x27;t lack encouragement&#x2F;role models etc. - but no single company, not even Google is going to move any needle in a short period of time.<p>Finally, consider this: &quot;The &#x27;problem&#x27; may never be solved&quot;. There is evidence that as societies evolve, that gender disparity in fields doesn&#x27;t necessarily increase or decrease. (The classical progressive thinking would have us believe that as we gain more rights etc. gender difference goes away, but this doesn&#x27;t seem to be the case) We may have to try to create the most &#x27;fair world we can&#x27; given that genderism may be an innate feature of human culture, at least for a very long time.<p>So a) the Pipeline is the primary thing b) we can help make sure people are encouraged and not systematically pushed out c) no one group will change anything d) there may always be differences between genders.

Regarding the enrollment chart, as recently as 2015 CS was the most popular undergraduate major among women at Stanford University:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stanforddaily.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;12&#x2F;computer-science-now-most-popular-major-for-women&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stanforddaily.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;12&#x2F;computer-science-no...</a>

In software development in particular, the &quot;pipeline problem&quot; has only existed since the 1980s in Western nations. Prior to that, I&#x27;ve heard it said that women were <i>over</i>-represented in software development compared to men (which wouldn&#x27;t have been a bad thing), or at least that there was much less of a gender gap.<p>I have a theory about why this changed in the 1980&#x27;s in particular.<p>- The 1980&#x27;s saw the dawn of personal computers, and many people either bought them or brought them home from work.<p>- Personal computers, especially the inner workings and programmability appeal very much to people with Asperger&#x27;s and high-functioning autism, as they present a highly complex but perfectly logical and predictable user interface. Because of this appeal, a much higher proportion of young people on the Autism spectrum learned to program computers (that their parents had at home) long before they went to college.<p>- Autism and Asperger&#x27;s occur more frequently among boys than girls.<p>- Because so many &quot;geeky&quot; (i.e. autism spectrum) kids, mostly boys, got into computers during their high school years. This in turn likely caused neurotypical people (of whom more are girls than boys - remember autism occurs more frequently in boys) to associate computers with &quot;geekiness&quot; and caused them to gravitate towards less &quot;geeky&quot; hobbies and interests.<p>The key, I think, to making computers more appealing to girls is to dis-associate computers with social &quot;uncoolness&quot;, and a lot has been done towards this end in the last 10 years.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m getting some downvotes and I&#x27;m curious - do people disagree with or not like my theory about the connection between male representation in software and autism? I really don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s sexist to observe that autism occurs more frequently in men...

One thing I&#x27;ve found very interesting is that even though the majority of software developers in an enterprise or organization are male, with the ratio being as high as 80&#x2F;20, the ratio of male to female managers directly managing software developers is closer to 50&#x2F;50. I would say this is evidence of bias in favor of women.<p><i>edited for clarity</i>

You can see how toxic the discourse has gotten around this kind of issues if you get 20% of the article dedicated to disclaimers.

So her claim is that going to t top tier university is a complete waste of time and money, because boot camp graduates end up being just as capable?<p>What are top tier universities doing to keep being competitive with those low cost boot camps? It seems to me for the additional money, they should be able to provide some additional value?

From my experience many women are put off by the way they see the average computer science student. The geeky weird stereotype scares many off. There does seems to be more socially awkward people that choose computer science (myself included). I&#x27;m not sure how you can address that.

Spanish guy here. Just to give ya&#x27;ll some context of why bootcamp hiring does not work here.<p>I had to go through the &quot;do I go to a bootcamp or get a CS degree&quot; conundrum 5 years ago. The answer was quite clear for me.<p>All the serious and stable jobs that were offered in the entire nation except for the capital city, Madrid, required you to have a CS degree + bootcamps&#x2F;X years of experience for a specific language.<p>Either that or they outright asked for a Master&#x27;s degree or a PHD in a specific field.

Hmm.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsf.gov&#x2F;nsb&#x2F;sei&#x2F;edTool&#x2F;data&#x2F;college-14.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nsf.gov&#x2F;nsb&#x2F;sei&#x2F;edTool&#x2F;data&#x2F;college-14.html</a><p>&quot;Science and engineering&quot; bachelors degrees have been about 50% male and 50% female since 2000, growing from about 400,000 degrees in 2000 to 589,000 in 2012.<p>From 2000 to 2004, women&#x27;s share of computer science degrees were between 25% and 28%. From 2007 to 2012, they stabilized at about 18%.<p>Now, the question is, did men preferentially enter computer science, or did women preferentially leave? Hint: the latter.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d12&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt12_349.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d12&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt12_349.asp</a><p>[Edit: more recent.] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_325.35.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_325.35.a...</a><p>In 2004-2008, degrees granted to men decreased by 6%, 10%, 9% and 8%. Degrees granted to women decreased by 20%, 18%, 20%, and 13%. (The other big drop in degrees, from 1986 to 1993-6, shows the same pattern and is when degrees granted to women went from 35-37% of the total to 27%.)<p>Whence comes this pipeline difference?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_222.10.asp?current=yes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_222.10.a...</a><p>According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics scale score, the difference between boys and girls up to grade 12 has been stable for years and doesn&#x27;t really amount to a hill of beans. Same with science.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.70.asp?current=yes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.70.a...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.74b.asp?current=yes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.74b....</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.74a.asp?current=yes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.74a....</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.73.asp?current=yes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d18&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt18_224.73.a...</a><p>The Technology and Engineering Literacy scores for 8th graders don&#x27;t have any difference to write home about.

A funnel representation would be clearer.<p>If you start with 50% women at age 0, which steps are leaking the most? High school, university, company interviews, people leaving companies&#x2F;switching careers?<p>I think the answer is that many of these steps are losing women in the process.<p>But in my opinion, companies are only responsible for: hiring fairly, retaining fairly, promoting fairly.

&quot;If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires).&quot;<p>Am I the only one who thought this was some kind of double entendre at first?

I&#x27;m just going to leave this here as food for thought:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21684088" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21684088</a>

(Politically inconvenient differences across various human subgroups aside) if you&#x27;re trying to deal with this situation as late as hiring, you already fucked up.<p>There are unresolved social issues in terms of racial disparity in America (and this comes with an inherent inter-generational cycling).<p>The place to start dealing with this is per-capita equality of resourcing for primary and secondary schools (and make sure the kids are fed).<p>Even if that weren&#x27;t a political no-go from the initialisation perspective, the 20 year latency on emergent benefits means that any progress will be demolished at the next swing of the political pendulum.<p>Short of the extinction of regressive political ideologies in America, this is an intractable problem.

Is it just me or is this an advertisement for interviewing.io?

These selective biases are far more pervasive than just sex parity at all stages of the pipeline and result in all kinds of malformed decisions.<p>&gt; And even if we could meaningfully increase the number of women enrolling in CS programs overall, top companies have historically tended to favor candidates from elite universities (based on some targeted LinkedIn Recruiter searches, 60% of software engineers at FAAMNG hold a degree from a top 20 school).<p>That is a hiring bias offering very little to qualify a candidate&#x27;s potential longevity in the field or their potential innovation performance. If employers really wanted to fix this sex parity problem (without sacrificing applicant quality) they could, but they would have to be willing to abandon certain premises they hold dear about hiring, candidate sourcing, and qualification criteria.<p>---<p>One example of a naive selective bias is the notion of the standard 4-year computer science degree as the path to excellent in corporate software. The 4-year degree exists to take a person off the street make them a credible hire as an entry level developer in the most generic way possible. That&#x27;s it. You don&#x27;t need any formal education to be an incredible developer might result in a far wider distribution of skills from self-education.<p>If your goal in life is to do something other than write C++ or Java, the most commonly taught languages in most 4-year degree programs, you need to find experience or training elsewhere. The inherent bias is that a person with a degree from an excellent school is well prepared for any aspect of software development, because its all just software. This is why so many entry-level front-end developers want their front-end technology to behave like Java or impose frameworks to make it so.<p>Its also why many software developers are over confident in their understanding of security when in reality they are grossly ignorant of it with a severely misplaced understanding of what security actually is. As an example many software developers might believe security is limited to something like intrusion prevention. Information security is actually: confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA). If you cannot keep your application from crashing or cannot keep it online that is classified as a priority security failure without regard for intrusion.<p>---<p>Another example, the one that convinced me to delete my Reddit account after being flamed multiple times by impassioned echo chambers, is the notion that Web Assembly will free the front-end from JavaScript. The most interesting thing about that conversation is that people most supportive of the idea that Web Assembly will replace JavaScript is that the DOM is a fantastic technology that will be the key to ultimate salvation without any understanding of or experience with the DOM.<p>As an aside most JavaScript developers dreadfully HATE the DOM and also have a poor understanding of its mechanics. Even still injecting the page&#x27;s DOM directly into a Web Assembly instance was seen as ultimate salvation to replace JavaScript despite all evidence to the contrary merely because some developers hate JavaScript more than many JavaScript developers hate the DOM. This was 3 years ago, and this fantasy still has not come to pass, because its based on a dillusion of wishful thinking opposed to an investigation of technologies available or any consideration of data.<p>There is a technology that has made great strides in, at least superficially, replacing JavaScript: TypeScript. This is the opposite line of thinking of abandoning JavaScript for some drop in alternative. Instead TypeScript is a superset that requires embracing JavaScript.<p>---<p>The pitfalls of selective bias are personality failures rather than anything related to education or intelligence. Bias is formed either out of intellectual laziness or out of reinforcing some deeply held personal belief, but both are an absence of objectivity. When a bias is formed to reinforce some personal opinion it is done so emotionally, often non-cognitively, and often for a perceived security motive. Because a bias can be deeply rooted, non-cognitive, emotionally-based, and defensively focused in can result in really bad decisions resulting in subjective positioning to maintain a poorly-formed belief at hand (digging in). This is a cultural problem and education alone will not fix it.

Jordan Peterson and James Damore explained this as well...but we&#x27;ll yeah the narrative of SJW and Google don&#x27;t like science all the time

Collective madness is largely reached at this point: the writer is complaining about a totally self-made issue. If I was trying to recruit men for nurse jobs, or people of color in Korea I would ran in a similar pipeline problem. The real issue is that &quot;diversity&quot; had became a metrics to reach for its own sake by companies instead of simply recruiting people that fit the job. Moreover, you can’t complain about so-called systemic sexism or racism when your policy is to not recruit white, asian or men that could fulfill the job precisely because of their race&#x2F;sex.

I find it extremely ironic that those opposing discrimination and racism are now the ones to view people as just statistics. The whole reason why racism and sexism is bad is because it doesn&#x27;t look at people as individuals.<p>Behind every person who goes to an interview there&#x27;s whole life, and every interviewer has so much more information about that person than just her being a female or black. Pretending that by knowing only 1 piece of information, you know they made a mistake, when they clearly have so much more information than you, calling it bias or whatever, is insult to their intelligence. Who the hell are you to know they made a mistake, when you literally know nothing except one little piece of a giant puzzle?!<p>It also goes for women &#x2F; black people who didn&#x27;t choose a career in tech. There are people behind these decisions. They have freedom and free will. You can&#x27;t just pretend that they are all stupid and don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s good for them.<p>Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things like women can&#x27;t have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in the first place for this to even be a problem.<p>The whole diversity conversation reeks of so many self-contradictions and fighting windmills, but the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. and a deep need to excuse their failure with someone else.

Honestly for young children I wouldn&#x27;t want any of the girls to become software engineers. Most Software Engineers including myself are friendly but also grumpy, nerdy and annoying, with poor communication skills and an unhealthy lifestyle. For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I&#x27;d rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment - esp one without developers in it. Yeah its sexist when I write it down but that&#x27;s how I&#x27;m sure a lot of parents feel, which is one reason why there aren&#x27;t so many women at the entry to the pipeline.

Am I the only one who sees the elephant in the room? 15-30 is the prime time when women make relationships and men make money. Software engineering needs full time commitmentent and no personal life is a part of the deal. Someone who learns programming only in college will be mediocre at best and FANG doesn&#x27;t want to hire mediocricy. so women have a choice: go into programming and forget about personal life, because the money they earn by 35 won&#x27;t help them, or choose personal life and have no time for programming.

There&#x27;s also a cultural issue driving this that starts with programming gender and biases into kids at or before birth. It is driven, in part, by common confusions between gender, biological sex, and genitals. My partner and I didn&#x27;t know what our child&#x27;s genitalia was until 20+ minutes after birth. We witnessed so much unconscious (and conscious!) gendering from people throughout pregnancy and labor we decided to not share what&#x27;s between our kid&#x27;s legs with people. They only just turned one, so we&#x27;re not sure about how this will affect them. We&#x27;re doing a considerable amount of work to counter cultural programming in the hopes of raising an empowered person in such a traumatizing and disempowering world. We&#x27;re planning on homeschooling them in order to focus on learning how to learn what they choose in an environment without bonds to capitalism to limit the impact of that hot mess of programming, too.<p>This is a collective issue and will generate pipeline issues until we collectively get our cultural programming shit together.<p>I think we need to collectively focus on modeling culture through the lenses of category theory and computer science, ie. maths of relationships and programming.