Gender in software engineering

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by Latherty, Aug 14, 2017.

  1. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    We know that autism is predominately male, at a ratio of between 2:1 to 16:1

    Why is it such a leap that males dominate a field where you spend 12-16 hours a day silently working on logic puzzles?

    http://www.autism.org.uk/about/what-is/gender.aspx
     
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  2. waltky

    waltky Well-Known Member

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    Is dat what happened when...

    ... the Enterprise computer...

    ... kept callin' Capt. Kirk, "Dear"?
     
  3. HonestJoe

    HonestJoe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    If that was in any way an accurate description of software engineering you’d have something of a point. Maybe if we had a more diverse workforce, we’d be producing more under-friendly and requirement-orientated software?
     
  4. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Racist/sexist admission policies must not be tolerated.

    Women are under represented in software engineering employment in large part because they don't go into computer science degrees. There are no institutional barriers to their participation, they simply on average choose humanities more often.

    My computer science faculty has been extremely eager to get more women involved. In fact, social justice advocates control the admissions process. They are doing everything possible to eliminate structural barriers. They long ago finished doing this.

    What's left is equality of choice with different outcomes. The authoritarians and gender supremacists then try to persecute males to artificially force an equality of outcome and a loss of equality of choice.

    Scum the whole lot of them.

    There is a war coming in It. Egalitarians on one side, and racial/gender supremacists of all sorts on the other.
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2017
  5. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    omg this is so full of ****.. Hippo's are big and eat grass therefore they are slow, vegetarian and harmless :rolleyes:

    Estrogen receptor expression may help explain why more males have autism

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140909093703.htm


    Now if I wanted to be as much of a jerk as the "men are more software engineerish" group I could say estrogen makes women smarter...
    but it's just not that simple... even men and women have different levels of testosterone and estrogen and we are all unique in our own way... not to mention someone can have far more knowledge/studied harder/worked harder/more work experience than another in a field and for this simple reason perform the task better... regardless of their gender/race/nationality/sexual orientation.
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2017
  6. HonestJoe

    HonestJoe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I don’t believe active discrimination is really a major problem. If it was, it’d be much easy to resolve. Also, addressing this at the employment stage or even university stage is really too late.

    Somewhat ironically, the now infamous memo that pushed this topic briefly in to the mainstream again is, while containing some technical truths also contains part of the problem. A running theme was that the entire industry is fundamentally structured against female employees. Any girl with an interest and ability with computing (of which there will be many) reading about this are going to be discouraged from perusing that from the outset regardless of which side of the debate they hear. Similarly, employers, admission officers, career advisors and the like are going to be subconsciously influenced by that kind of imagery, meaning they could find themselves discriminating even if they have no intention to do so.

    Like so many similar statements, while the memo opened talking about trends and tendencies, the overall theme still achieve the impression that all females are one way and all males are another. This obviously isn’t the case and the reality is that a lot more women would be perfectly capable of excelling in traditionally male dominated roles if only they wasn’t so much social discouragement, both to them perusing such a career and to others to accept them doing so.
     
  7. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    I don't equate software engineering with intelligence. It might even be the absence of intelligence that makes a good software engineer.

    I am saying the tasks inherent to the role are more desirable to a particular kind of person. That kind of person is more often, but not exclusively, male.

    You're talking about people on the wings of the distribution curve. Small differences at the mean translate to large variances at the margins.
     
  8. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The memo explicitly said that this is not the case with his bell curve example. While global population may exhibit differences, there's nothing stopping individual men or women from being better than the opposite sex despite global population differences.

    Structural discrimination has turned to white men.
     
  9. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    oh I get it the same way secretarial skills are more in line with females due to the servitude aspect :roflol:
     
  10. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    That would only be the case if there were in fact differences between men and women, otherwise diversity would not produce any different result.

    If you have ever been in a software engineering office, there is very little verbal communication. Its mostly just a quiet rattle of thousands of keys being tapped. Google spends a lot of money trying to make an environment where these guys interact, because otherwise they wouldn't. Not because they dislike each-other, but because it just wouldn't occur to them. That's why Google has such great office spaces, and insurance brokers don't.

    If you're a software engineer yourself, you might not have noticed. But that's because you are a software engineer and it probably hasn't occurred to you to look!

    totally agree.

    I think the misrepresentation of the memo by the media and Google Execs would definitely have that effect on girls.

    They are basically saying that Google engineers think that women can't do software, which was absolutely not the claim of the memo.

    But now whenever someone points out : "hey, what that memo says is actually true!", the message to the public is that "women can't do software is actually true".

    Hence Science must die.

    Google Exec and media have totally blown this. Fools
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2017
  11. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Remove institutional barriers then women and men should choose for themselves.

    Are ****-shoveling skills more in line with men? The vast, vast majority of sewage workers are male. What accounts for this? Is there some massive discrimination in the sewage industry?

    What of healthcare and education roles? Are men below women in terms of these skills, or is it institutional sexism making 91% of nurses female? Moreover, why are only the differences which disadvantage women institutional sexism? Why not also those differences which BENEFIT women?

    I thought his memo really nailed this with a graph:

    [​IMG]

    Differences in global population do not mean individuals cannot succeed. Distributions may even have one group outperforming the other, but have the highest performing individual a member of the lower performing group.

    ___________________________________________________

    I am an egalitarian. I am opposed to gender supremacists on both sides.

    What we need to do is create a voluntary system, then leave people to their preferences. Gender quotas ARE discrimination and gender supremacy.

    Unfortunately Australia is way ahead of the curve on this stuff. The army is doing it. Universities are doing it. Corporations are doing it.
     
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  12. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    It may well be that more females than males prefer structured office work. I don't know, but so what?

    Your prejudice is that some jobs are more important or worthy than others. What drives the prices of labor is scarcity and demand for skills, not some inherent worth of the job itself.

    That's why mechanics in fly-in/fly-out mining work in Australia get paid so much (regardless of gender!). And why British royal household gets paid so little.

    Secretarial work is important, but there's just more people both wiling and able to do it, so it doesn't pay as much. But there are PAs who pull down six figure salaries, because they offer their employer something unique, such as trust for discretion.
     
  13. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    [​IMG]
    I can't put arrows in, but in the top graph,at about the middle,
    green = blue.​

    move to the right a bit,
    green = blue + 20%​

    move further to the right and
    green = blue x 5 ​

    Thats what I mean by the amplification of small differences when you are at the wings of the distribution curve.
     
  14. scarlet witch

    scarlet witch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    :D my prejudice... I think you are projecting.
    Let's not forget men hold the majority of high paying jobs and women only managed to get the vote less than a 100 years ago, we still have a long way to go.
    You are trying to box gender into a specific skill set and when it comes to strength related jobs I have no problem with that. Men are stronger than women, however if you're going to make the same argument for intellect you're going to need to provide much more than "autism" as evidence.

    And this is really the problem, I have given you genetic research as evidence that your argument is baseless, in fact based on the research I provided I could potentially argue the opposite, that women are more likely better software engineers. There are no specific testing that have been done for software engineers ito gender. It appears you are simply trying to find an excuse for what are more likely the result of stereotyping and discrimination.

     
  15. HonestJoe

    HonestJoe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes, he explicitly raised the point at the start but the general impression I got from the whole felt like it went on to ignore that. It still talks about favouring women or men rather than favouring individuals with particular characteristics.

    The fact is that because this is only about a general trend, it can’t account for all of the vast gender differences in this field (or others like it). He makes some valid points and offers some reasonable ideas, it’s just that the whole thing only covers part of the problem and as I said, because of that it actually risks feeding another part.

    I didn’t specify gender diversity, just diversity in general regarding how software problems and requirements are thought about and addressed, like having more user-orientated rather than technical focus.

    I’m sat in such an office right now and there is no less verbal communication (professional and social) than any other working office. Some parts of some organisations may well match your description but there is much more variety than you give the industry credit for and scope for even more than that. This kind of stereotypical image of what software engineering is (and must always be) is again part of the problem.

    The reporting and Google’s response was definitely a massive problem but even the memo itself gave the impression that women can’t work in the field unless the kind of changes he proposes are put in place. Again, some of his proposals were good but they were still based on the distinction that they’re for women (and not for men) rather than being for people who have particular characteristics not suited to some existing working practices at Google.
     
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  16. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    You'd have to completely ignore the profit motive of business to suggest that stereotyping and discrimination are behind the discrepency. I'm willing to consider there might be some element of that, but its such a cut-throat industry I just can't see a company performing if it tolerated that level if inefficiency. Yet all the best companies in the industry show this mix of sexes.
    Women dominated the industry when it was less competitive.

    Men are distributed more widely than women along the curve. Men are more likely to be ultra-smart and ultra-stupid (whereas there are more women with EXACTLY 100 IQ than men).
    So men are more likely to be homeless and unemployed. They are more likely to be killed doing their job. You are cherry picking the data, choosing only the most lucrative jobs and saying its unfair women don't get their fair share of them. Its also unfair that women are not taking up their fair share of the downside.

    The reason men are more widely distributed is that they are expendable from an evolutionary viewpoint. A single successful male can father 100 offspring, whereas a single succcessful woman is limited to maybe 10 or 12 at the very most.
     
  17. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    agreed. On point, Damore's memo asked for more ideological diversity.

    We can only judge by our personal experiences. Not being a SE but having spent time in a variety of offices, I would say the SE office was one of the less verbal. Most verbal was a commodities trading desk, but that was verbal abuse rather than communication...

    I really didn't get that impression. He was after all addressing the corporate aim of improving gender diversity, so potential solutions that might promote gender diversity were relevant. I felt he was trying to balance that corporate aim with promoting gender-nuetral (and to a lesser extent, race-nuetral) diversity. Such is the life of a peon...
     
  18. Latherty

    Latherty Well-Known Member

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    Have a look at my post # 13.
    It certainly can explain the entire variance, because we are looking at the wings of the distribution curve. Not the middle.
     

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