Code.org: Blame Tech Diversity On Education Pipeline, Not Hiring Discrimination 227
theodp writes: "The biggest reason for a lack of diversity in tech," says Code.org's Hadi Partovi in a featured Re/code story, "isn't discrimination in hiring or retention. It's the education pipeline." (Code.org just disclosed "we have no African Americans or Hispanics on our team of 30.") Supporting his argument, Partovi added: "In 2013, not one female student took the AP computer science exam in Mississippi." (Left unsaid is that only one male student took the exam in Mississippi). Microsoft earlier vilified the CS education pipeline in its U.S. Talent Strategy as it sought "targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms" from lawmakers. And Facebook COO and "Lean In" author Sheryl Sandberg recently suggested the pipeline is to blame for Facebook's lack of diversity. "Girls are at 18% of computer science college majors," Sandberg told USA Today in August. "We can't go much above 18% in our coders [Facebook has 7,185 total employees] if there's only 18% coming into the workplace."
I'm glad SOMEBODY finally said this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm glad SOMEBODY finally said this (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is there no media outrage at the low male attendance at fashion colleges? There's a pretty big one around here called FIDM, and all I saw walking around campus were females.
Shouldn't the diversity crusaders be making waves calling for more male enrollment in fashion?
Or should they STFU and accept the fact that males and females tend to like different things, and short of forcing students into majors they don't like, you're never gonna get perfect diversity?
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The difference being that tech is VERY in demand and introducing anyone with a pulse (including those that aren't fond if it as a career) is a good at filling back-end need. Forgetting the argument that these people are less likely to be what we would call your typical programmers (people have said that for decades, so nothing new there), having targetted enticements for people to enter a given field that is under-served isn't a bad thing.
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Surely the soaring wages should be enticement enough. Or did you mean there's a lack of people willing to work unpaid overtime on minimum wage out of desperation?
Re:I'm glad SOMEBODY finally said this (Score:4, Insightful)
Shouldn't the diversity crusaders be making waves calling for more male enrollment in fashion?
No, because no one feels the lack of diversity in fashion affects the efficiency of our economy.
and short of forcing students into majors they don't like, you're never gonna get perfect diversity?
That may be your contention, but there is a great deal of disagreement around this. Many people believe that culture has a significant impact on the careers people pursue. Many people feel someone working as an engineer improves society more than someone working as a retail worker, and that it is worth the effort to help women meet their full potential. I will sure try to do this for my daughter.
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This is not about coercing people. The mystery to me is why women used to be represented in computing and now they're not. What was it that once made women want to go into computer science and now they don't want to?
And it is a very important question: because this affects income. Computing jobs are higher paying than many. Therefore if those jobs are dominated by just a subset of the demographics then it should indicate that something is wrong. Even for the purposes of have multiple points of view in
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No, because no one feels the lack of diversity in fashion affects the efficiency of our economy.
Many people feel someone working as an engineer improves society more than someone working as a retail worker
The fashion industry consists of more than just the lowly retail worker (of which I argue that the ratio of men to women are fairly close to how much men and women respectively pay attention to their fashion and are willing to spend money on fashion). The fashion industry goes from designers to models to critics. And if you get fancy, there are also interior designers and architects. While you don't think there's any value to such work, I would completely disagree. I would argue that aesthetics does have a
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Shouldn't the diversity crusaders be making waves calling for more male enrollment in fashion?
I think you are missing a subtle point. Men do enroll in fashion, it's women who don't enroll in auto repair. Men are in widely dispersed fields, women tend to clump in a few. Even within a field, such as law, women tend to clump within a discipline. Oddly enough, they tend to clump in professions that offer good life / work balance. Culturally they are still expected to take care of the kids and grandparents - so no - I don't think they should shut up. However, this means there are too many women pursuing
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Some people like to hear themselves speak. Other people like to get things done. (Of course, I'm on Slashdot, so I'm probably one of the former rather than the latter.)
The fault lies in those who give people in the former group a soapbox. It's just being fair and balanced, obviously.
And I'm not talking specifically about women in STEM or any other particular fire that's about to break out sometime somewhere for somebody. This applies to any large show of indignation. Usually, it's no more than just that: a
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Also, females make up an unacceptably low proportion of prison inmates. That needs to increase.
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Also, females make up an unacceptably low proportion of prison inmates. That needs to increase.
Well, that makes sense if prison inmate is a career. Given the way the prison industrial complex is going, it pretty much is now.
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"Why is there no media outrage at the low male attendance at fashion colleges? "
You of course surveyed the commentary on fashion school enrollment before making such a claim, so I need not ask you to prove it.
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Apparently, it's only "real" discrimination if the victim isn't a white man.
FTFY
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Not true; they are trying to get more men into nursing, so they have someone around to do the heavy lifting. (I'm half tongue-in-cheek about that, but only half)
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You'll also never see a push to get men into teaching, nursing,
u wot m8?
Let me introduce you to a very hand website it's called:
www.yahoo.com
no, oops, I mean:
www.google.com
There's plenty of call for both of those.
or being a hair stylists even though those jobs are absolutely dominated by women. Apparently, it's only "real" discrimination if the victim isn't a man.
My hair stylist is a man. So was my previous one.
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I'm not aware of any evidence that males are put off entering the fashion industry when they want to. If you have evidence of that then it is a problem, sure.
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if you ask most feminists, they probably see the lack of men at FIDM as an issue, too
I have never met a single feminist that would even notice, TBH.
Re:I'm glad SOMEBODY finally said this (Score:4, Insightful)
"Gender parity is important." Why? And parity at what? All things? Be specific and provide an argument that is more than opinion.
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Everything is opinion. If we're restricted to facts then the argument is over. Because it is impossible to prove or disprove via facts that women should even have jobs, or that men should or should not have jobs. Of course it is opinion. My opinion is that women are great at computing, and I wish I saw more of them in computing today like I used to see in the past. My opinion is that I'm tired of the frat house attitudes at work. But there's no way to give a 'fact' that more women should be in computi
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For which highly educated jobs are women still non self selectively disenfranchised?
Maybe at the top level where the old boys network outweighs positive discrimination, but they're all lizards any way ... gender is irrelevant.
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Bullshit. CompSci accounts for less than 10% of degrees conferred, meanwhile women utterly dominate virtually every other aspect of higher education. Women are nearly 2/3rds of college graduates. If this were about picking battles and gender equality people would be *freaking out* about the fact men are barely over a third of college graduates.
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Exactly! When will people learn that it's what the *computer* cares about that's important? People are useless slobs, I can't wait for them all to be wiped out in the robot uprising. :)
Also, have you *seen* tech recently? If hiring pasty white guys is suddenly unacceptable, about 90% of the current workforce has their pink slip in the mail already.
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My sister was the only women in the engineering program she went through in college and has mentioned many times how she was the only woman engineer where she worked. Although that has changed a little in the last 20 years I think there are two other lady engineers in her department out of the little over a dozen engineers.
She has a funny story about another student cutting her bra off in a welding class when a wardrobe malfunction allowed a piece of hot metal to bypass her apron and shirt to become lodge t
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I know a woman who went through and received an engineering degree from Ohio State University then promptly opened a bakery after college. She has created some things to automate the business some for consistency but as far as I know, that is the extend of her professional usage of her degree and licenses.
I asked her why she changed and all she said was the opportunity was there and everything fell into place. She ended up marrying someone who was partners in the business with her several years later, but i
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When I was an undergraduate we had plenty of women in the science, math, and computing courses. You could walk into any one of those classes and be unable to see a large demographic difference from any other sort of class on campus. But over time that changed. So why was a female freshman in 1980 more likely to declare as a CS type major than a female freshman in 2010?
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Since the plural of anectdote is data....
I've noticed at most one or two females in the 4 sections of Linux Admin I teach in a year. I have noticed that I'm now getting close to an even mix between black, white, and hispanic males. Only 2 or 3 orientals in the 10 years I've been teaching the course. This is at a community college in the same town as a major state university.
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Well if you ask actual women in tech [techraptor.net] they'll tell you an answer you might not want to hear: "I think the fear mongering will push women out of the industry more than anything."
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So why was a female freshman in 1980 more likely to declare as a CS type major than a female freshman in 2010?
Um evolution or something. You see for some glib reason evolution makes women less likely to want to do computer science. Also evoultion happens really fast and takes less time than it takes to have a new generation so this happened some time in the 80s. I blame punk.
So because of evoultion, we should celebrate the differences, not force everyone to be the same and keep pretending despite the eviden
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Why do you choose the peak of female enrollment percentage as the benchmark? Why not ask what was going on in the 1980s that sent more women into computer science?
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I graduated first in 1986, there were a LOT of female students, it was closer to 30-40% instead of an even split but still quite respectable compared to other programs on campus. I was later a grad student from '89 to '94, and we still had a good number of female students, but not as many, as well as African American students, in a CS program. Given that females are very rare in CS today, yet the curriculum is essentially the same, then the mystery is what actually changed. I also saw many women in mathe
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I graduated in '92, and female CS students were a rarity. That peak around 1984 was an anomaly, which is why those who point to it and wonder what changed are looking at it backwards.
dumb-down diversity (Score:2)
Built-in differences (Score:2, Informative)
Even at 1 day old, girls look longer at objects with faces and boys longer at mechanical objects. Differences like this are measured at all ages.
As long as the few women that want to get into coding can do so then there's no problem. And it's really easy for any woman to get into it that wants to, for instance at my college CS was controlled entrance for men but any women that applied was let in regardless of qualifications.
tl;dr the only problem is people whining about other people choosing not to get in
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The problem is that we have fewer women who want to get into computing today than there were 20 or 30 years ago. This is not some innate sex difference going on here.
There is indeed a problem because these degrees lead to higher paying jobs. Do you think that the best jobs should be dominated by men, and that 'women don't want higher paying jobs'? Is parity in income important or irrelevant to you? So the question here is not whether or not women want to go into CS, but *why* they don't want to go into
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There is indeed a problem because these degrees lead to higher paying jobs.
For the people for whom they lead to a job at all, sure. They can do that, and they often do. But there's a lot of those people out of work, too, and there's thousands of applicants for every job. Why would anyone want to add themselves to numbers like those? The smart plan is to choose an upcoming industry without a lot of people going into the education programs, not to join a sea of unemployed. Even if you're fantastic, you'll have a hard time being noticed.
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Microsoft Bob was killed too early.
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I'm not sure you can support a claim's veracity by simply making the same claim using the word, "monkeys".
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The cult of diversity is really out of hand (Score:3)
On the one hand, we are told that the race/gender/etc. of individuals results in very different experiences and desires, and sometimes these are so different that members of one group can't really understand members of another group. (E.g. "It's a black thing.") On the other hand, if individuals in these different groups then turn out to (on average) want different careers than pure statistics would predict (e.g. all professions aren't 51% women), then we are told it's a Terrible Social Problem and Something Must Be Done.
You can't have it both ways, folks.
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Except that this is not true. Biology has not radically changed in the last few decades, yet the number of women wanting to enter engineering, math, or computing programs at school as dropped by a very large amount.
Now I could be persuaded that there might not be a problem, as you seem to imply, if you could show that all of these women are getting jobs that pay as much as the CS oriented jobs do.
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Except that this is not true. Biology has not radically changed in the last few decades, yet the number of women wanting to enter engineering, math, or computing programs at school as dropped by a very large amount.
I'm not sure what you are saying is "not true," because what you say supports my point: nobody thinks discrimination against women in tech has increased in recent decades, so this is more likely to be the result of a bunch of individual decisions.
Now I could be persuaded that there might not be a problem, as you seem to imply, if you could show that all of these women are getting jobs that pay as much as the CS oriented jobs do.
Why must they get jobs that pay as much as the CS oriented jobs do? Maybe they'd rather have different jobs that pay less. Maybe they'd rather have kids and stay home. As long as they are making free choices, let them do what they want, and don't obsess over "inequ
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You can't have it both ways, folks.
That's not what this is. Part of something being a "black thing" is how black people are treated. Substitute freely for "black".
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When people say "it's a black thing" what they really mean is "it's a cultural thing". Culture that stops people doing the things they want to do is a problem.
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Or just pick up random underrepresented people and put them in prison so the numbers work out.
Pot calling kettle black? (Score:4, Insightful)
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How does that make any sense when all the tech giants have numbers of "minorities" greater than the industry mean. How can you both discriminate against under-represented people
No, they don't. Indians and Chinese are not considered "under-represented", only blacks and hispanics. Yes, they actually consider all these ethnic groups differently. For instance, if you're a black student wanting to go to college for CS, there's likely some scholarships for you. If you're Indian, forget it, there's no such sch
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I'm pretty sure research bears out that both education and hiring processes are deeply flawed
So here's a question then: Would it be a better use of time, money, and effort fixing education, or fixing hiring?
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Sure, but for the sake of the exercise, let's assume that you can only pick one. Which would you think would yield better results?
In fact, even if we don't make this assumption, there really is one answer to which fix would yield better results. You may have a better shot at fixing one over the other as an individual acting individually. But then I have to question, is acting individually the ideal means by which you can employ to fix the issue? And as we're social creatures living in society, the answer to
the biggest underrepresented group (Score:2)
programmers over age 40.
Now the companies have no easy excuse about the 'education pipeline' or any such nonsense, when there are plenty of applicants with both experience, knowledge, and a strong intent and interest.
And yet.....
Somehow this discrimination, which is overt and very deep, doesn't ever matter.
I have a crazy idea (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we hire and promote based on merit and competency?
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Yeah, poor software developer and computer scientist in the US...Out of college if they're decent they're ONLY in the top 6%* of income in the country (all experience put together). And after a few years they're "only" in the top 3%* without having to sell their soul to a major bank (and they can go much higher if they decide to sell their soul anyway, but they can keep that as an option instead of it being mandatory).
Poor poor things.
*references not posted because the precise numbers vary depending on wher
Normalise Normalise Normalise! (Score:2)
...Out of college if they're decent they're ONLY in the top 6%* of income in the country...
Even though your statistic is not supposed to be real, it's conceptually incorrect and should be lower when you normalise it with initial investment.
Then you should also give it some context by considering initial investment in terms of time and effort - i don't think many would disagree that if you put in the effort then you are at least deserved of an equivalently better income and not just lucky or greedy.
Now take your normalised statistic with context and apply it to "that software developer in the US"
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That's the damn point. Since merit and competency show no gender bias but hiring and promotion does show gender bias, that means hiring and promotion is in part not done on the basis of merit and competency. Why do these people hate capitalism?
This again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we have to hear about this every second week, year in and year out? On average, girls are - for whatever reason - less interested in math, physics, chemistry. Meanwhile, boys, on average, are less interested in things that revolve around social interaction. Likely, these preferences are based in biology. Make sure the playing field is as level as reasonably possible, and then leave off. Let individuals decide what they want to be.
The other aspect addressed by the article is race. Here, there may also be biological factors in play, but within the US cultural factors play a huge role - specifically: support for education within the family. Cultural issues are very, very difficult to address - because, cultural change needs to come from within the culture itself. There is very little to be done about it by the tech companies, or even by the educational system.
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"On average, girls are - for whatever reason - less interested in math, physics, chemistry."
Fact not in evidence.
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No evidence required. If you are making the reverse claim, that women are just as interested in math and physics as men, then evidence is required.
IOW:
Men and Women are different biologically. Doesn't mean we can't socialize men into wearing skirts, but it DOES mean we cannnot *socialize* men into having the same ability to empathize that women have. This has been accepted as fact since before the first beer was brewed. The extraordinary claim is nurture, not nature and so far all I've seen is giant lea
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This is the same mentality as people who would rather get liposuction and spend a few weeks in the hospital than regulate their diet and exercise over the course of a lifetime. Attack the symptoms, not the cause. Live looking only a few inches ahead and blame the guy who put that lamppost in front of them when they hit it.
I don't subscribe to biological (genetic) factors. Yes, with respect to an individual's performance, biology plays a major role. But in a group, the distribution, with all things except an
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"On average, girls are - for whatever reason - less interested in math, physics, chemistry. ... Likely, these preferences are based in biology ..."
The Code.org article said none of this. In fact, it freely acknowledged social pressures that discourage women from entering or staying in tech. It's not unreasonable to suppose stories from women in tech discourage the next generation from even attempting to enter computer-related fields. It helps to read the freaking article.
As others have said, people -- mo
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150 years ago pink was a boys colour. They dressed in pink, had pink bedding, pink toys etc. Blue was for girls.
At some point it flipped. I doubt humans evolved that fast, so there must be some other reason.
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because in America, we are free to obey our biology. Other countries are less free.
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India and China also practice female infanticide. The Chinese male-female newborn ratio is 120 male to 100 female.
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Maybe you're too old and forgot, but back in the 50s and 60s blacks were actively prevented from doing these things, whereas today programs fall over backwards to recruit women into STEM fields but they still don't go into those fields.
Blacks were discriminated against, women are discriminated for.
In fact blacks are still discriminated against. The number of blacks in STEM is as low as women, maybe lower, and there's no reason to think they have less desire to be in those fields than men of other races. I
They choose wisely (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, a few folks have fun jobs, but the majority of the work in this field is miserable and women are wise enough to avoid it.
Circa-2005 Facebook Office (Score:2)
Brogrammers at Work [staticflickr.com]
I've seen the same thing (Score:3)
In my first year of computer science in CEGEP, we were 60 students. 2 of them were women. They accepted pretty much anybody who applied based purely on your highschool grades. Right off the bat you've got a 97% male program, and there was no bias in that selection either (for what it's worth, the person deciding on applications was female). Women simply did not apply for the program in the first place.
It's always been obvious to me that the reason that there are so few female developers has little to do with hiring practices and a lot to do with the lack of interest in computer science among women. You just have to look threw a stack of CVs when people apply for jobs at your company for it to be obvious: when there are so few CVs from women in the pile, statistically you're not going to hire as many of them.
kids may be too smart to fall for engineering/code (Score:3)
I see these silly ads on TV, but I think that anyone smart enough to be a really good engineer/programmer, can also see that it's a dead-end job. The corprate execs are going to hire CHEAP, period, whether in the USA, imports, or offshore.
Take your math skills and get into finance.
If nothing goes into the of the pipeline ... (Score:2)
... then nothing comes out the back.
When I went back to school in 2003, the CS department had a grand total of zero (0) US women in the graduate program. There may have been one woman in the undergrad program. This despite the following: the department head was a woman; almost 1/2 of the instructors were women; about 1/4 of the foreign students were women; and the _founder_ of the department in the 1970s was a woman. There weren't that many US men either - probably 3/4 of the grad program were foreign s
Indian women are doing better... (Score:2)
All are from India except for one from China.
What? (Score:2)
Salary differentials (Score:2)
AP Computer Science (Score:2)
About 25% of AP computer science test takers are women, which is about representative of tech companies.
Kids are great (Score:2)
News flash, citizens!!!! (Score:2)
'Nuff said (or else it should be, if not eveyone qualifies as an Ameritard today!)......
Re:The feminists want you to find a way! (Score:5, Insightful)
People in this career path are generally treated poorly and don't make that much money compared to career paths with similar educational requirements and difficulty, and the prestige is pathetic.
I don't think that's even remotely true. In San Francisco, people are freaking out because the techies are making (what many consider) too much money and all sorts of financial types are abandoning Wall St. for Silicon Valley because tech is considered way cooler than finance.
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Is that adjusted for cost of living.
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The cart doesn't push the horse - the reason housing prices are so high in SF and SV is because tech workers earn exceptionally high salaries compared to virtually every other industry. Only medicine, finance and law pay better but law (and to a lesser degree finance) is a total crapshoot with a lot of lawyers earning almost nothing from their JD.
$150K + equity is pretty standard for a moderately experienced developer living anywhere between San Francisco and San Jose and you can live pretty damn well on t
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the reason housing prices are so high in SF and SV is because tech workers earn exceptionally high salaries compared to virtually every other industry.
Uh no. That's pushed things up significantly, but even before the tech boom San Francisco had massive cost of living. It comes from being some of the most apparently desirable real estate in the world (I can think of a half-dozen places offhand with better weather and just as good connection to the world via sea, air, and internet, but whatever) and there being an extremely limited quantity of it available. Before it was a tech center it was NoCal's financial center and before that it was a shipping hub. An
Re:The feminists want you to find a way! (Score:5, Informative)
Do you live in SF Bay Area? I'm assuming not because the previous poster totally has it nailed. Of course the city has always been expensive, but the booming tech industry (both for commuters to companies like Google and SF companies like Twitter) is the primary reason for the recent gentrification/housing boom/whatever you want to call it. I mean, jesus, this isn't even really a debatable argument, it's all anyone in the city or the local media ever talks about these days...
Yes, gold was the reason 150 years ago. But now THE reason is highly compensated tech employees - and especially the younger employees who want to live in the city, and given the shortage of talent right now are making a shit-ton of money right out of college compared to past years.
And as the parent said, it's not just SF, it's SV as a whole. Hey, my SV "suburban" house has appreciated over 30% in the last 3 years because of all of the tech employees with their high salaries (and higher stock options/bonuses) are looking for something to buy...
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Do you live in SF Bay Area?
More or less. I was born in Santa Cruz. I have lived in SF, however, when I worked for gay.com.
Yes, gold was the reason 150 years ago.
Very good. You're paying attention. I was giving you a history lesson which demonstrated that SF has always been expensive real estate, not claiming that gold is still the driving force behind the San Franciscan economy. Don't prevaricate.
But now THE reason is highly compensated tech employees
You are on crack. In order for that to be true, San Francisco would have to be peopled mostly by tech employees, which is very far from the case.
And as the parent said, it's not just SF, it's SV as a whole.
SF is not in the SV. HTH.
Hey, my SV "suburban" house has appreciated over 30% in the last 3 years because of all of the tech employees with their high salaries (and higher stock options/bonuses) are looking for something to buy...
Yes, you
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Tech salaries have contributed, but they are as high as they are in part because the cost of living in San Francisco is so high. The cart and horse push each other at different times.
Oh, and that is easily disproven, as if it were explainable simply by cost of living, *ALL* salaries would be going up proportionally and that's clearly not been the case.
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as if it were explainable simply by cost of living, *ALL* salaries would be going up proportionally and that's clearly not been the case.
Of course it's explainable simply by cost of living. Tech workers expect to get paid more than the baseline, because their job is harder and requires more exclusive knowledge. Fair enough. But the baseline is higher. They wouldn't have asked for that much money if the cost of living weren't so high. They in fact do not ask for so much money when moving someplace else. The cost of living is high, so the salaries are higher in SF than they would be someplace with a lower cost of living, like say Austin. And i
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People in SF are freaking out because they see techies make lots of money with a profession they also hold in low regard. That's the norm, not the exception: people also generally despise people working in finance and law.
Many intellec
Re:The feminists want you to find a way! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem isn't the education pipeline. As TFS notes, only one male student in Mississippi bothered to take the AP CS exam.
Actually, yes, though it's a bit winding in the reasoning, the education pipeline (and the cause, lack of funding and emphasis) is definitely to blame for much of it. The real problem with the statistics quoted in the article isn't related to the number of female or male students taking the AP CS exam, per se, it's that they used *Mississippi* as an example!
According to that chart there were 28 students in the ENTIRE state of Mississippi who took the Calculus BC entrance exam. That's about the same number who took that exam at my high school in Illinois - and it wasn't that big a HS, senior class was about 400.
And while, of course, Mississippi is probably one of the poorest and worst educated states, I'm not going to attribute it all to "cultural differences" or "interests". I really had no interest in Calculus BC, but it was a near-requirement to get into the best colleges. The reason I was able to take it is my high school district was wealthy enough to offer it, and the students wealthy enough to have the previous education to be ready for it.
In American culture, being a developer or software engineer or whatever term you want to use is simply not seen as a prestigious career path. People in this career path are generally treated poorly and don't make that much money compared to career paths with similar educational requirements and difficulty, and the prestige is pathetic.
What, are you fucking kidding me?! It's one of the highest paid jobs right now, maybe the highest paid with a BS degree right out of college. And with the popularity of Facebook, Silicon Valley etc, startups, etc it's considered fairly prestigious. Claiming plumbing is more "prestigious" than software engineering, while I'm pretty sure isn't true almost anywhere, it's laughable in the areas of the country that actually *hire* engineers.
I will give you that going to somewhere like Stanford or Berkeley is different from the University of Mississippi - the former are actually at the point they have almost *TOO MANY* CS majors, and it's making the system somewhat unbalanced. But I'm also pretty sure the number of doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers from the former schools also massively outweighs the latter. But at the top schools heavily involved in the tech boom CS is almost the social norm, not the exception. And the grads are getting $100k++ straight out of college and being recruited from the best tech companies like rock stars.
I don't know, sounds like you are either not in the field, or you are and you have been socially burned too many times so you are bitter...
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I think there's an issue in assuming that it's a problem. IT gets done, people get paid. There's nothing that says that there should be an equal balance of the sexes in any profession or field other than certain (sometimes questionable) cultural biases.
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In the workplace I prefer female co-workers because they actually get the job done and contrary to popular mythology these women are not engaged in backstabbing and political machinations unlike many of my male co-workers. It only takes one political operative to destroy a team and jeopardise projects.
My wife disagrees with you. She hates women with a passion, because of her time in the legal field where women (esp. the lawyers) were mostly horrible, backstabbing, jezebel cunts.
I suspect this phenomenon va
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Wow, that post was all over the place. And a bit too borderline mysogynist without any actual point.
Pretty sure you could have just summarized it as: humans are humans, and there are "backstabbers" and political machinists regardless of gender. I can't stand people who try to generalize this sort of office behavior by gender - it mostly means they don't understand it at all, not that they have "figured it out".
The main difference is likely in the approach - women may be a bit more subtle about it, and men
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It wasn't just the lawyers, however, it was a good deal of their staff. Many of the secretaries were also horrible, backstabbing jezebels jockeying for power within the firm, even though the attorneys treated all the non-attorneys like shit.
My wife could write a book about how horrible the legal field is to work in. She worked at a bunch of different places (a lot of temp-work), and I think her estimate was that about 2 out of 100 lawyers were actually decent people, the rest were all scum. The staff wer
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While I have a natural affinity and aptitude for computers science, mathematics, analysis and associated critical thinking skills, if I could turn back the clock I would have chosen another career rather than information technology.
Another problem I've seen in the engineering/IT/CS fields is people like you. (Please note I'm not criticizing you in any way; your opinion is valid and you have every right to express it, it just proves my point about the career not having prestige and workers not being treate
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Very far from the truth. The education pipeline is low because the long term compensation vs work is low. Anyone that is smart enough to get a CS degree can get double the money with half the effort with an MBA.
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...and Poe's law. /thread.
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It's genetics and hormones.
Well, it wasn't like this in the 50s-70s. You know, evolution only happend that fast in X-men comics.