Microsoft Uses US Women's Soccer Team To Explain Why It Doesn't Hire More Women 212
theodp writes: "It is not surprising that the U.S. women have been dominant in the sport [of soccer] in recent years. The explanation for that success lies in the talent pipeline," writes General Manager of Citizenship & Public Affairs Lori Forte Harnick on The Official Microsoft Blog. "Said another way, many girls in the U.S. have the opportunity to learn how to play soccer and, as a result, they benefit from the teamwork, skill development and fun involved. That's the kind of opportunity I would like to see develop for the technology sector, which presents a different, yet perhaps even more significant, set of opportunities for girls and young women. Unfortunately, the strength in the talent pipeline that we see in female soccer today is not the reality for technology. The U.S. is facing a shortage of Computer Science (CS) graduates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent." Going with the soccer analogy, one thing FIFA realized that Microsoft didn't is that if you want girls to play your sport, you don't take away their ball!
Interesting.. (Score:5, Informative)
There are more women working at MS that women contributing to the Linux community.
Re:Interesting.. (Score:4, Informative)
As anybody that wants to can contribute to the Linux community, that should tell us something. (No, prissy, huge-ego women that barge in, want to tell everybody how to do things, predictably get ridiculed and pushed out again and then start to whine about that do not count as "wanting to contribute". Neither do female "kernel developers" where you are hard pressed to find a single meaningful commit. Those that actually want to contribute are welcome. Those that want to do politics are not.)
This whole thing is about equal opportunity and women have had that for a long time now. It is not about equality, which involves forcing people to do things they obviously not want to do.
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Ah I see you're talking about Randi Harper [archive.is] and her harassment against the Free BSD community for someone daring to have a different opinion then her. Yes, that Harper, the one who claims to have an anti-harassment group called "OPAI" and engages in harassment.
The problem of course, is that the FOSS community operates on merit, to SJW's and radical feminists merit and meritocracy are verboten. They'd rather have racial and sex based quotas. If people want to see how bad it's gotten look at Github, and the [readwrite.com]
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Actually, I have never heard of Randi Harper. Just shows that the problem is real.
Personal feelings have no place in technical decisions and in grading technical merit. Anybody that does not understand this has no place in any parts of the STEM field.
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Actually, I have never heard of Randi Harper. Just shows that the problem is real.
Personal feelings have no place in technical decisions and in grading technical merit. Anybody that does not understand this has no place in any parts of the STEM field.
Consider yourself lucky. She's been attacking a kernel developer in BSD for the last 4 months because he doesn't give a shit about her feelings, and she's trying to insert herself into the development by flagging down the misogyny train.
Re:Interesting.. (Score:5, Funny)
They lack the beard growth required for OSF commits.
Re:Interesting.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Linux community doesn't really stand a chance since Microsoft isn't 100% technical where as most of the "linux community" doesn't have any overhead or advertising or accounting or datacenters or call centers or executives or web designers or game developers or.... For instance up until recently Microsoft's highest level woman employed was in HR. There is no HR (although maybe there should be :P) on a github project.
The other contributing factor is that Microsoft does hire a lot of women in technical positions but a lot of them are international where tech is viewed as just a "Good high paying job" not as "A bunch of geeks and mouth breathing virgins". That's why I always bang my head on the table when stories go something like this: "Tech is a toxic soup of misogynistic assholes... and we need more women to choose computer science!" Regardless if it's true as long as that stigma sticks around women aren't going to be knocking down the doors to be the first person to be victimized and discriminated against. However while women are far more likely to pursue tech in a developing country like India, it's mostly because "Tech is a good high paying job" not "Tech gives you the opportunity to contribute to an ideologically driven project that is an unpaid position in your free time!" That's the opposite of a "Good high paying job" that's a no paying job.
Also the "Linux Community" is all around pretty small. It doesn't take *that* many people to create an operating system. Even if the Linux community had the same demographics as Microsoft it's safe to say that Microsoft employs about as many people to develop windows as the number of people working on the linux project. Both projects are similar in scope and design. By comparison, Microsoft not only makes windows they also have Office and Xbox and Azure and Microsoft Game Studios and Movies and Music and Hotmail and MSN.com and Cortana and Bing and Here and Lumia and Surface and... So you would need to do an apples to apples comparison of Microsoft's Windows Team vs the 'Linux Community'.
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"Tech is a toxic soup of misogynistic assholes... and we need more women to choose computer science!"
Please, *please* submit an article with this title to the Firehose.
Re:Interesting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there are not 140,000 new jobs. There are a whole bunch of layoff's, office closures that puts a bunch of programmers out of work [like, say, Microsoft did not too long ago].
There are a whole bunch of already-graduated programmers that are explicitly rejected from these 'new jobs' because they can't afford to work cheap enough.
H1B's to the rescue!
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Forget IT! If your typical SJW really cared so much about gender "equality" they'd be focusing on the lack of women working in construction jobs!
Bad calculation (Score:5, Insightful)
"every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent."
And this would be a logical inference if the only people looking for jobs were that year's college graduates.
But, actually, very few job openings are filled by fresh-outs.
Conclusion: mIsleading and false.
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Indeed. I am convinced the reason behind that number is that at this number the industry could hire the best and pay them peanuts. (Not that the best will stay good or even reasonably proficient if that happens: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys...)
BINGO !!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
#1 the companies want a glut of workers so they can pay them nothing and use them as tools discarding when completed.
#2 Women being slightly smarter than men don't WANT to go into an industry built on virtual slavery and worker abuse. In general they aren't as flexible or willing to commit as much to a career given the option of a family, there are of course exceptions everywhere, but as long as the IT industry is run like a feudal system that thrives on worker sacrifice it is unlikely to achieve a balance of genders. You can't hire those who don't apply, and you can't force women into a educational course they don't want to pursue.
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I just did a very simple litmus test. I went to indeed and searched for:
Jr Developer in San Diego. Results: 82
Sr Developer in San Diego. Res
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Couple this with the fact that 120,000 of those 140,000 positions don't really need a CS degree to do the work the position requires, and you have a better picture of the problem a lazy HR department causes.
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If we want more CS graduates, we need more kids learning computing on Commodore 64s where your operating system is BASIC.
These days the Commodore 64 has been replaced with the substantially cheaper Raspberry Pi and Arduino as well as the Linux desktop and Android devices, experimenting with computing has become easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before. But just because the technology sector has expanded doesn't mean the number of people interested in computing has expanded at the same rate.
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That's not surprising. It costs thousands of dollars for an MSDN subscription to get the IDE for the Microsoft platform. How many young girls have that kind of cash laying around?
But you dont need an MSDN subscription to get the IDE.
Visual Studio Community 2013
A full-featured IDE – Free for students, open source contributors, and small teams. Start coding the app of your dreams for Windows, Android, and iOS.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx [visualstudio.com]
Luckily you don't need just a CS degree (Score:2, Insightful)
Some engineering degrees (Computer, Electrical), math degrees, etc. can be used in lieu of a CS degree provided you can prove you can code.
This is all pandering to the need that companies HAVE to go get H1-B's, when the reality is no, there is PLENTY of local talent that can do these jobs.
Re:Luckily you don't need just a CS degree (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone in IT even needs a STEM degree. A lot of position are more about soft skills anyways. There are also people who thrive in tech positions without a STEM degree.
I even know someone that managed to get promoted into IT off of a factory floor.
This is more about the consequences of large corporations treating their employees like disposable cogs to be laid off by the "Two Bobs" guy during the next business lull. They are no longer wiling to invest in their own people, even the ones that have gone to great effort and expense to be desirable as new hires.
You don't have to be terribly talented to be a tech worker in the large companies. Actually, it helps if you're not.
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You don't have to be terribly talented to be a tech worker in the large companies. Actually, it helps if you're not.
Yep. I once worked for a talented manager and he was able to find a place for just about everyone. He put the "lesser" talents on projects that would bore the shit out of the "geniuses". And many times, the "lesser" guys did some excellent work - even genius work.
People are too quick to discount others in this profession these days. It wasn't like that when I started 25 years ago. If you loved tech and learning, you were part of the crowd. Now things have gotten cliquish and even elitist where the entry ti
Too Many People (Score:2)
Re: Too Many People (Score:2)
Re: Too Many People (Score:2)
Pepperidge Farms Remembers...
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Of course Microsoft has to shuffle everything around with each new release. How else do you expect them to make a fortune to re-certify everyone if they kept everything the same between versions?
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You had to have at least 3 years of experience to even read a script at the helpdesk. And with that 3 years of experience, the pay sucked.
That's more of a recruiter and/or HR manager problem. I once applied for a tech position at a legal firm. The HR manager rejected the resumes for "lacking tenure" (i.e., at least three years each in the last three positions). The recruiter had a difficult time explaining to this person that short-term contracting was perfect normal after the Great Recession and anyone who had three years in the last three positions already had a new job. A year later the position was still vacant.
Re:Luckily you don't need just a CS degree (Score:5, Informative)
Some engineering degrees (Computer, Electrical), math degrees, etc. can be used in lieu of a CS degree provided you can prove you can code.
In fact, a CS degree is not proof that you can code, it is proof that you understand the theory of Computer Science. An associates degree in computer programming from a trade school proves you can code.
More than likely, a CS major can code. Almost certainly a Computer Engineer can code. Lots of people can code. There is no shortage of people who can meet the demands of these 140,000 jobs. In fact, Microsoft just laid off 6,000 people that can fit the bill.
Looking more closely, the article says that 100,000 jobs require a CS degree. So they are being specific here. They need 100,000 people who went through college to understand the theory of Computer Science. Not programs, very specifically they need Computer Scientists. I'm not sure why. In fact, I think that they don't understand the requirement they are asking for. I am guessing they want code monkeys, not Computer Scientists. In which case, we have those available in spades.
Re:Luckily you don't need just a CS degree (Score:4, Insightful)
Alright I have to say it... if there are 140k US jobs for CS each year in a decade that will be 1.4 million jobs and will employee over one third the entire population not the workforce which is smaller the population includes everyone. Anyone with a CS degree should be able to get great pay in their field since only 28% of new jobs will actually be filled, and that doesn't appear to be the case.
No I think there is something funny with their claim.
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Damn I got an extra decimal... now you know why I'm not a mathematician.
Still if only 28% of the jobs are being filled why the heck aren't they paying more.
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Damn I got an extra decimal... now you know why I'm not a mathematician.
Still if only 28% of the jobs are being filled why the heck aren't they paying more.
Game/set/match.
Presumably, in the inviolable laws of supply and demand, the pay will go up, until the demand is met.
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No I think there is something funny with their claim.
Not necessarily. After the Great Recession came and went, a lot of the old farts are still hanging on to their jobs, refusing to retire and make room for young whipper-snappers like myself to make big bucks. The shortage of skilled tech workers TODAY is the reason why I went back to school to learn computer programming after the dot com bust. Too many old farts can't afford to retire.
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More to the point, it's proof that you have massive student debts so you're likely to put up with abuse to keep repaying them.
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More than likely, a CS major can code. Almost certainly a Computer Engineer can code. Lots of people can code.
Are you sure [codinghorror.com] about that?
Subject (Score:4, Insightful)
When I studied CS there were 5 women and 200 guys in my class. With that in mind, complaining about an IT company not hiring many woman is nonsense.
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Same here. And the women in my CS starting year (where I knew 5 of the 9 by random accident) universally had a very dim view of women that went to study easy subjects. Their explanation of why so few women study CS was that "the little ladies do not want to work hard and get their hands dirty doing actual work" (translated literal quote from one of them). This whole idea of looking at gender statistics and then deducing there is a problem is stupid. As such, it is quite in line of what SJWs usually say and
Re:Subject (Score:4, Insightful)
This whole idea of looking at gender statistics and then deducing there is a problem is stupid.
That part isn't stupid. What is stupid is deducing that the solution involves creating new incentives for young women to go into computer science. It's a far deeper cultural phenomenon*. People don't like to admit this though because addressing deep seeded cultural phenomena require generations to change. That's no good for politicians who can't see any further than the next election cycle or executives who can't even see further than the next annual earnings report.
* Note I use the word "phenomenon" and not "problem". Whether or not any cultural phenomenon is a problem is besides the point.
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Well, I used the word "problem" and for a reason. Because this is universally sated as a problem. If you downgrade it to "phenomenon", then rationality sets in and the determination of whether something needs to be done or not is still open.
Here is another one: It seems that 100% of babies are carried to term by women. By the same reasoning as above, this would be a "problem" and statistics urgently need to be adjusted on that. See how stupid that is? I was merely pointing that out.
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What is stupid is deducing that the solution involves creating new incentives for young women to go into computer science.
All you need to do is ask a 8-12 year old girl what she wants to do and figure out how to get software to help her do that. "Programming" is just a means to an end to let lazy us lazy people take over the world. Find something, anything, repetitive and boring and figure out how to automate it. That's what software does for me. Software, for me and thousands of others, isn't the end game it's a tool to allow me to be lazy. If a 10 year old girl is tired of having to do _________ on the computer teach her how
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Exactly my point. Now, if women wanting to go into STEM were prevented from that by society, that would be a problem. But there is really no indication of that happening. Anything else is decisions by individuals and I am certainly of the opinion that women are free to decide to _not_ go into STEM and that their reasons are their own and are not to be trifled with.
Equal opportunity and equality are two completely different things. We do have equal opportunity for the genders. Enforcing equality would be fas
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Exactly my point. Now, if women wanting to go into STEM were prevented from that by society, that would be a problem. But there is really no indication of that happening.
The women in STEM problem is real.
But they got the goddamned solution backwards.
The solution isn't t castigate and alienate the men in STEM by calling them sexist pigs and blaming it all on them, chasing the women away.
The solution is to make STEM a career a more desirable one, and the women who have a real interest will likely follow.
Nice office, clean working conditions, decent pay, respect Hey, now that sounds good. That isn't STEM though. That's accounting and management.
An office in the bas
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While you are certainly right about the problem with the working conditions (and there is career-options in addition as factor), I doubt fixing that would raise women in STEM by more than 10% or so. Most women who have a real interest in STEM are already in that field. I know a few.
On the other side, the STEM fields are what keeps modern society going and 10% more STEM experts would be hugely desirable.
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God forbid biology has anything to do with it.
There is no evidence that biology has anything to do with the proclivities of the genders for computer science. There is lots of evidence that many gender differences which are popularly ascribed to biology are in fact cultural, for example competitiveness [ucsd.edu].
Your anecdotes and personal preferences for what might be true just aren't as convincing as systematically gathered evidence.
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and there is no evidence that women are somehow culturally discouraged from participating in math or science these days.
My 5 y/o neice claimed "girls can't do physics". I erally can't help wondering where that came from.
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In any event, there is plenty of evidence of biological differences in the brains of men and women...
Vaague handwaving over common-sense notions isn't systematic evidence.
It took me about 3 minutes to find the following studies showing that brain structure/chemistry is indeed different for men and women:
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news... [upenn.edu]
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... [sciencedirect.com]
http://nro.sagepub.com/content... [sagepub.com]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... [sciencedirect.com]
http://www.brain-mind-institut... [brain-mind-institute.org]
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org... [oxfordjournals.org]
The last two of the studies listed above don't just show gender specific biological differences in the brain, they link the differe
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You didn't get it. When you take studies about differences in brain structure and claim it supports a the notion that a specific apparent behavioral different is inherently biological, that is vague handwaving.
Further, behavioral studies which crucially fail to control for culture don't actually say anything other than how people behave, as opposed to why.
The interesting thing here, demonstrated in the OP's responses, is that the underlying motivation is the belief that women don't face obstacles in STEM. I
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You didn't get it. When you take studies about differences in brain structure and claim it supports a the notion that a specific apparent behavioral different is inherently biological, that is vague handwaving.
Uh huh. I'm pretty sure it's you that doesn't get it. I made no such claims. What I did do is provide you with a list of links that conclusively show biological differences in the brains of men and women, which were trivially easy to find, and which disprove your position that there's no reliable evidence to the contrary.
Further, behavioral studies which crucially fail to control for culture don't actually say anything other than how people behave, as opposed to why.
Did you actually read any of the papers in my list of citations? If you did, you would have noticed that the studies are grounded in observed brain structure/biology, not behavior. Co
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Why don't you take a look at this
Do you understand the difference between a press release and a peer reviewed article?
tell me about vague handwaving.
OK, sure. When you take a study about "differences in connectivity" in the brain, and claim it has established implications for behavior, that is vague handwaving. What fMRI studies show about brain structure is irrelevant to the outcome of behavioral studies on whole people.
How does "God forbid" - a common idiom
Indeed, and in this case you used it to sarcastically express your unhappiness that your preferred alternative wasn't being argued. You should own it i
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Do you understand the difference between a press release and a peer reviewed article?
Yep, I do. Since you're obviously unable to navigate the internet, here's a link to the peer reviewed study. [pnas.org]
OK, sure. When you take a study about "differences in connectivity" in the brain, and claim it has established implications for behavior, that is vague handwaving.
Reading comprehension isn't you strong suit, is it?
The only claim I made was that there are differences in the biology of human brains based on gender, and these differences are correlated with observed behavior. You do know what correlated means, don't you? Have you ever heard the phrase "correlation does not imply causation"? Jumping to the conclusion that I claimed gender differences in brain
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Their explanation of why so few women study CS was that "the little ladies do not want to work hard and get their hands dirty doing actual work" (translated literal quote from one of them).
Which is odd, considering many of them become mothers. When that happens, I can't imagine any part of their person or environment stays clean [theoatmeal.com] very long.
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Which comes as a surprise to many of them and hence may not influence choice of career much or at all. But the main deterrent seems to be the hard mental work required.
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I think that it was a British study case in the Chemistry field, and these were made with public money. I wasn't able to find the source for it.
I can't think why private funds would choose to involve themselves in that sort of
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How would they know how they would be treated? There is no discrimination in CS on the contrary, but there are a constant stream of bullshit articles claiming there is by pointing at gender imbalances in professors and IT hires.
At least they are trying to solve the problem (Score:5, Informative)
The important part of the article that was left out of the summary is that Microsoft is trying to address the problem by funding programs that encourage girls to get into the talent pipeline at a young age and stick with it.
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The express version of Visual Studio is too crippled to use, forcing the purchase of the full version.
I'm still looking for the full version of Visual Studio on my Commodore 64...
Maybe women are smarter? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a tech marketing lady I met observed, the men make the stuff and the women sell it in our industry. She added "maybe that's because we're smarter about getting paid!"
Might help if Microsoft, among others, stopped supporting increased tech H1-B quotas. They tend to depress wages and working conditions, making the "pipeline" we're trying to promote less attractive than, say, marketing. Or doctoring or lawyering. There are only so many really smart people to go around, so one profession's gain is another profession's loss. Design engineers seem to have plateaued around very roughly $100K. That's an OK living, but not exactly what I'd call professional earnings.
Stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Very few women actually enroll in Computer Science / Engineering Programs, as a result this means that the talent pool from which to hire from contains less females vs males. This doesn't mean that big commons don't want to hire women, it just means that there aren't a lot of qualified women pick from.
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Unlike athletically gifted American males, who often choose to make a career in baseball, hockey, basketball, and the other football, there isn't as much competition for the athletically-gifted females.
It's precisely why the US women are a force to be reckoned with, and the men are not. Soccer, the World's football game, gets a great dea
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Here's a bold idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't you try offering them MORE MONEY, and watch the problem resolve itself! It might not be cool, but classic labor Economics still works in the 21st century.
Of course, Microsoft (or any other big tech company) doesn't really have a reason to do that as long as they can get a bunch of cheap H1-B workers to fill the positions instead.
Re:Here's a bold idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't you try offering them MORE MONEY
Because gender discrimination in pay is illegal.
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I think that domestic software engineers should be paid more in general regardless of gender. That's my somewhat biased opinion, since I fall under that category. I don't want my kid to follow in my footsteps, since I'm not sure if there will be any well paying entry level jobs in this field by the time she graduates.
That said, offering bonuses or other incentives to get more diversity in the CS field wouldn't be a bad thing.
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IThat said, offering bonuses or other incentives to get more diversity in the CS field wouldn't be a bad thing.
Yes it is a "bad thing". It is also an "illegal thing". Institutionalized racism and sexism are outlawed for good reasons.
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I don't see how that is a problem here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap [wikipedia.org]
It is illegal to pay men and women differently for doing the same job. The "gender gap" is mostly the result of men and women doing different jobs. A male engineer and a female engineer, equally capable, and equally experienced, should be paid the same, and any systematic discrimination is illegal. There is no requirement to pay a male engineer the same as a female childcare worker.
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should be payed. That's the crux. I don't think anyone disagrees that the majority of the gender gap is due men and women doing different jobs, on average. Its just that not everyone thinks the causality is one-way.
No two persons can be evaluated to be of equal value, and have equal pay, especially in expert positions (which CS mostly is). And if gender correlates with pay differences, that means that gender discrimination is happening.
Or that the one sex is better than the other at that particular job. But
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Two otherwise-identical people of different genders doing the same job are paid almost exactly the same, at least on a population level and with moderate-size or larger companies. To do otherwise is super-dangerous because it is an open-and-shut lawsuit and the information is all discoverable. (Of course individuals may have minor differences due to experience or negotiation at hiring, which generally goes away with tenure - if the company is smart.) You can look at any of the company stats of salaries for
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Alternatively, because procreation is a societal good, we can incentivize specifically mothers in this fashion. I trust that women wouldn't just have kids to get this benefit, and who pays for it is an open question, but it still seems like a perverse incentive - and in any case it may not be legal to do this.
I see this thread is completely pointless from now on & uptill now.
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As a stay at home father I'm getting sick of the 77% number. It's bull shit and here's why....
A year ago I quit my job. I had been in industry for all of ~9 years. That means by this year I would have been in industry for 10 years. If I had been paid the exact same amount of money the entire time I would immediately be at making 90% of income as my peers. But start to weight my starting salary vs bonuses and raises and that number slips.
Additionally I'm 1 year removed from what has happened in industry. I'v
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Why don't you try offering them MORE MONEY, and watch the problem resolve itself! It might not be cool, but classic labor Economics still works in the 21st century.
Of course, Microsoft (or any other big tech company) doesn't really have a reason to do that as long as they can get a bunch of cheap H1-B workers to fill the positions instead.
An MSc in CS takes 5 years... So that's a very very long term plan... Also not feasible...
To make people choose CS for money to a larger extent than they already do you would have to double or triple wages... Wages that are already high enough to incentivise studying CS for the money.
Anyways, people don't choose everything in their lives with their wallet. What a sad world that would be.
Statistics need verifying (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this statistic really true? Are those 140,000 net new jobs, or just job openings that exist for some period of time during the year?
The article cites but does not link to a source for this statistic.
Also, a CS degree is a long, tough slog through dull material that has dubious relevance to most jobs that require a CS degree.
Re:Statistics need verifying (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this statistic really true? Are those 140,000 net new jobs, or just job openings that exist for some period of time during the year?
The article cites but does not link to a source for this statistic.
Also, a CS degree is a long, tough slog through dull material that has dubious relevance to most jobs that require a CS degree.
Those are 140,000 openings, so you don't necessarily need new graduates to fill them. You can fill them from other companies (which in theory leaves the same number of openings, but most companies don't fill voids, they just make the other people work harder), or you can fill them from unemployed CS people, of which there are tens of thousands, if not more. There are at least 6,000 more as of a week ago, when Microsoft, the company complaining about the worker shortage, fired 6,000 people.
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What Microsoft really wants is more choice without paying for choice. They have a picky hiring process and want what they want. They don't care about society issues or trade-imbalances, that's somebody's else' problem. They just want cheap young choice, and lobby heavily for it.
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To be perfectly fair, they were mostly Finnish...
What Microsoft really wants is more choice without paying for choice. They have a picky hiring process and want what they want. They don't care about society issues or trade-imbalances, that's somebody's else' problem. They just want cheap young choice, and lobby heavily for it.
The correct code word for "younger workers" this week is "digital native". Last week it was "recent graduate". We have "whippersnapper" penciled in for next Tuesday.
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This is the number of graduates the industry wants, so they can hire the best and pay them nothing.
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Is this statistic really true? Are those 140,000 net new jobs, or just job openings that exist for some period of time during the year?
This is the same company that two weeks ago just laid off 8000 American workers in their annual summer layoff program.
And almost exactly one year ago laid off 18,000 American workers in their annual layoffs.
And almost exactly two years ago laid off multiple divisions, with an unspecified number (estimated in the thousands) of American workers.
And 2010, they laid off about 35% of it's American work force.
And in the summer of 2009, another 6000.
...
Every year they reduce their staff by 5000-20,000 in Ame
H1B Excuse (Score:3)
This is a common tactic used to keep the H1B-type labor programs going in Congress. You get a bonus with H1B labor programs keeping domestic labor costs down and therefore depressing the number of entrants in the field.
Re: (Score:2)
every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent
Is this statistic really true? Are those 140,000 net new jobs, or just job openings that exist for some period of time during the year?
If it were true, wages would be sky high. Ipso facto, it is not true.
bribe women for CS. (Score:3)
again, /. mutilates the story with a bad title (Score:4, Insightful)
The story submitter and/or editors clearly had some agenda here in using a misleadingly suggestive title.
Fortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
There are countless accounts of women facing gender related problems studying CS. What is your argument against those accounts? Are they lying? Perhaps you dismiss their problems, or claim that men face equal problems. I'm interested to know your position.
I've never seen any of those accounts. I've only seen countless articles claiming that there must be those accounts because we don't have very many women in CS.
Re: (Score:2)
Even 15 years ago my high school tech/engineering teacher (taught a variety of classes) was giving extra credit to anyone who could get another girl into any of his classes. The classes went from small 15ish people classes with a only couple girls to 25-30 people with half them female. Tech started out rather gender neutral in the 70's and the education side has been trying desperately to fill the gap ever since it appeared.
The real problem is that tech companies have been abusing their employees for so lon
Re: (Score:3)
There are countless accounts of women facing gender related problems studying CS. What is your argument against those accounts? Are they lying? Perhaps you dismiss their problems, or claim that men face equal problems. I'm interested to know your position.
Anecdotes do not a study make. Those countless anecdotes wouldn't be about non-tech people like Zoe Quinn, Brianno Wu, etc, would they?
No one cares (Score:3, Insightful)
Enough of the gender/race baiting nonsense.
Re: (Score:2)
Only because the issue is a political talking point. It has no utility or meaning outside of that. The people pushing this mostly just see advantage in it.
And everyone else... for whom I presume to speak is just tired of being subjected to endless progressive horseshit.
If the progressives want to destroy the tech industry on the west coast US... that's fine.
They can do that. And then it will just relocate somewhere else. Go ahead. Make more Detroits. Make a new rust belt. I double dog dare them.
When they're
Interesting editing, Slashdot... (Score:4, Informative)
This is an incredibly dishonest way to frame this guy's remarks. Slashdot and Dice should be ashamed.
FIFA (Score:2)
Women succeed at soccer because there are no men (Score:2)
The reason women succeed at soccer is that there are no men in that field in the US.
That's Blue Ocean strategic thinking: if you want to succeed, go to uncontested markets.
I'd dare say that the real reason.... (Score:2)
And for any women that might express discomfort with the fact that the workplace is primarily male as a disincentive apply to such a place, I would suggest that is ultimately just a manifestation of their own insecurities (cue the feminists who will call me a misogynist upon reading that)... but my point is that it is *THEY* who are focusing on the gender differences, and not necessarily Mic
Is anyone else tired of this nonsense? (Score:2)
It irritates me every time I hear this ruddy nonsense that keeps spewing out of Seattle and San Fransisco that we're not cranking out enough computer science graduates.
Hey Microsoft! Newsflash! Computer science majors rise and fall [nsf.gov] as starting salaries rise and fall [cra.org].
If you want to see more majors, raise your starting salaries. Stop firing [zdnet.com] everyone [qz.com] and outsourcing to India [indiatimes.com].
Bad analogy (Score:2)
Because FIFA paid the LOSERS in men's soccer more than they paid the winners in women's soccer.
The question needs to be asked... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would anybody, in their right mind, get a CS or IT degree if they knew how shitty the environment was?
Microsoft and every other tech company: We want talent, but we don't want to pay for it. Give us more H1-B workers to cut the average salary, please.
Game corps: We slave-drive our workers, because it's better to take young talent and burn them out so they leave before they get too expensive. Which is why we're always re-inventing wheels.
IT: Dealing with really ungrateful idiots every day, all week, all year. The higher-up the chain, the stupider (with tech) they are.
Why would anyone, male or female, bother to get into this?
Fuck it. Play soccer.
--
BMO
That was a bad analogy (Score:2)
Let's see how the women's soccer team does against the men's soccer team. So the unspoken argument is that you should hire inferior people to fill the role.
Somehow, I do not think that is the message they want to get across.
Re: (Score:3)
There's something to be said for the simplicity of old school procedural languages. In some places, such languages are even still relevant. It's not always all about the new shiny shiny.
Re: (Score:3)
That we can. What we can't do (without things like quotas) is ensure equality of outcome, which is what this article is really about. No matter how neutral and objective Microsoft's hiring practices are, they can't hire women who don't apply there and won't hire women who aren't qualified. There's also, of course, the problem that HR is again confusing credentials for ability, but that's an ongoing issue that's as much of a problem for m
Re: (Score:2)
Our own women spend their time watching TV.
Oh come now, that's not true. In my 20 years coding professionally, I've met literally several American female coders. Several!
Re: (Score:2)
Same one.
Last week it was 7800 persons.
http://yle.fi/uutiset/microsoft_to_lay_off_more_than_half_its_finnish_staff/8139690 [yle.fi]
Re: (Score:3)
Whew, I thought his analogy would be a more foot-in-the-mouth comment along the lines of: despite the pipeline for girl soccer development, they still couldn't compete within men's leagues.
That's because Slashdot and Dice framed his remarks dishonestly to make them sound bad. Slashdot ought to be ashamed. (I correctly expected the thesis of his article to be "Here's what Microsoft is doing to improve the training pipeline," but that's because I assume Slashdot screwed this up.)
With regard to whether women's soccer can compete with men's soccer in terms of competing for American entertainment dollars is an interesting question. I don't watch either sport, but a fairly common opinion on Twitt