What Is Silicon Valley’s Problem With Gender?

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Wait, boardrooms in Silicon Valley aren't football locker rooms with pin-ups everywhere? But...but...the media tells us it is. :D

From the testimony at trial, and from the coverage in the media, you would think that Silicon Valley is a hotbed of sexism and discrimination. You would get the impression that women cannot get ahead because they are deliberately and repeatedly denied opportunities. You might picture our offices and boardrooms as football locker rooms, with pin-ups everywhere.
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Hysterics. Just a bunch of hysterics drummed up by manipulators to an easily misled public.

Perpetual revolution, always a fight to fight and always and injustice to right.
 
Give it a rest already. This forced diversity is going insane. Someone needs to tell PC to shove it.

How can you expect to fill ~50% of the workforce with women when only (random guess) ~20% of engineers are women? It is most certainly a male dominated field. It's not possible to force this to happen. The only way to get change to happen is to get girls involved in math/science and get engineering/programming degrees in college. Most of my classes when I graduated 5-6 years ago, was lucky to have 1 girl in it with nearly 20 men.
 
Tiburon1186 said:
Give it a rest already. This forced diversity is going insane. Someone needs to tell PC to shove it.

How can you expect to fill ~50% of the workforce with women when only (random guess) ~20% of engineers are women? It is most certainly a male dominated field. It's not possible to force this to happen. The only way to get change to happen is to get girls involved in math/science and get engineering/programming degrees in college. Most of my classes when I graduated 5-6 years ago, was lucky to have 1 girl in it with nearly 20 men.
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Try 11% are women.

Your idea of working from the ground up seems reasonable, but no one is "forcing" diversity and you really sour the rest of your post with such garbage.
 
A relatively unbiased article. I'm developing a pet peeve about the whole unconscious bias thing. It's called experience.

If the majority of people I met who are grossly over-weight (fat) are largely inactive with a huge sweet-tooth than I am going to presume that when I met an over-weight person (and there is nothing wrong with that). What is wrong is refusing to re-evaluate my assumption when the data does not support my conclusion. There are many "classes" of people of whom I have a somewhat negative bias however I am always aware of identifying the exceptions to the rule during my interactions with people.

To ignore those biases increases the probability of negative consequences when dealing with people. Some of those consequences can be dangerous. I'm not going to pretend my observations over the years are without merit simply to satisfy a utopian ideal.
 
Well run companies understand that talent comes in all different shapes, sizes, sexes, etc. I work in the world of finance, and my boss happens to be a woman, and also happens to be the best boss I've ever worked for. Our company is truly a meritocracy, where those who provide the most quality output rise to the top. Our management team could care less if it's a man or a woman in charge of a particular group; they just want to see consistent outperformance of goals.

I suspect most companies are run this way, so I'd agree that it's probably a good chunk hysteria. I'm sure there are nasty exceptions to the rule, but I think most companies are primarily concerned about the bottom line, and not who got them to a good bottom line.
 
Dreaz said:
Try 11% are women.

Your idea of working from the ground up seems reasonable, but no one is "forcing" diversity and you really sour the rest of your post with such garbage.
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Your post was even worse.

If you don't think anyone is trying to "force" diversity with useless "diversity initiatives" (especially those that give to hate groups like Intel has), well, who do you think are preventing diversity in the first place?

I'll give you the answer: It's all the idiots writing about Silicon Valley being oppressive against women. Trying to convince women that Silicon Valley is such a terrible place is somehow supposed to get more women involved? "Don't worry, we're going to bring lawsuits about it" - OH SHIT SIGN ME UP.
 
It could be that women aren't interested in the tech field? It maybe just natural way of thinking for women? There's no need to force women into an industry that majority don't have any interest in. That's like wondering why men don't generally go into the beauty and fashion industry as much as women. Like DUH, right?

This is just Silicon Valley's new popular topic for the moment. They want as much women as men. As many gays and straights. As much ethnic diversity as possible. Because it looks good when you can claim your business is this politically correct. Meanwhile I'm just happy to not have someone from India on the phone with me who can barely speak English.
 
Tiburon1186 said:
Most of my classes when I graduated 5-6 years ago, was lucky to have 1 girl in it with nearly 20 men.
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Sounds about right on average, though I've seen far more women in math than in engineering, and fewest of all in compsi or software engineering. If there's anything holding women in general back, it's happening before they ever reach college.
 
Tiburon1186 said:
Give it a rest already. This forced diversity is going insane. Someone needs to tell PC to shove it.

How can you expect to fill ~50% of the workforce with women when only (random guess) ~20% of engineers are women? It is most certainly a male dominated field. It's not possible to force this to happen. The only way to get change to happen is to get girls involved in math/science and get engineering/programming degrees in college. Most of my classes when I graduated 5-6 years ago, was lucky to have 1 girl in it with nearly 20 men.
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Of course it's possible to force it to happen, but it creates a detriment to productivity. The first job I got was legally obligated to have a specific diversity between men and women, as well as minorities. We had this one woman who was absolutely a terrible programmer. One of my friends at work was pissed at having to waste his time to fix all the bugs in her code, which often required him rewriting her code from scratch. Trust me, it was terrible. Example: For resolutions, she had hard coded functions, one for each resolution. Well, what happens if a machine has a resolution that's not 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768? Well, the program would crash. But, she had to be kept because she fit two minority groups (she also was a minority as well as female).
 
schizrade said:
Perpetual revolution, always a fight to fight and always and injustice to right.
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Yup. California is a hot bed of liberals. They are always wanting to fight any perceived injustice by some privileged group. Straight, white men are the evil people holding others back.

I can understand that there are some places that are gender/race/whatever bias. It happens. But, it's not the whole industry. It's not as widespread as people say. If a number isn't 50/50, they are being discriminated against. Equality means equal numbers to them, not equal opportunity.

Computer science isn't dominated by women because it's not a field they really go into. I see a lot of extremely talented women (and a few duds) in the industry. They aren't getting lower wages, they aren't getting discriminated against, they aren't getting mocked or anything. They just aren't in as many numbers as the men are.
 
thejokker said:
A relatively unbiased article. I'm developing a pet peeve about the whole unconscious bias thing. It's called experience.

If the majority of people I met who are grossly over-weight (fat) are largely inactive with a huge sweet-tooth than I am going to presume that when I met an over-weight person (and there is nothing wrong with that). What is wrong is refusing to re-evaluate my assumption when the data does not support my conclusion. There are many "classes" of people of whom I have a somewhat negative bias however I am always aware of identifying the exceptions to the rule during my interactions with people.

To ignore those biases increases the probability of negative consequences when dealing with people. Some of those consequences can be dangerous. I'm not going to pretend my observations over the years are without merit simply to satisfy a utopian ideal.
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One of the wiser things posts made in this whole forum.
 
And I can't edit to fix a typo, so ignore the redundancy wreck above.
 
Tiburon1186 said:
The only way to get change to happen is to get girls involved in math/science and get engineering/programming degrees in college. Most of my classes when I graduated 5-6 years ago, was lucky to have 1 girl in it with nearly 20 men.
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Thats about the same for the college im currently in.

(which kinda sucks... :p)
 
Dreaz said:
Try 11% are women.

Your idea of working from the ground up seems reasonable, but no one is "forcing" diversity and you really sour the rest of your post with such garbage.
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You have absolutely no clue if you're saying diversity isn't being forced. We are constantly seeing people passed over for promotion by someone less qualified that has spent less time in the company SPECIFICALLY because they have come out and said they need to increase diversity. No ifs ands or buts about it, they came and flat out said it. And make two applications to the UT schools of engineering, one as a black female and one as an asian male and otherwise all identical, and see which makes the cut.
 
Ducman69 said:
And make two applications to the UT schools of engineering, one as a black female and one as an asian male and otherwise all identical, and see which makes the cut.
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But in this case though if merit is equal then merit can't be the deciding factor.
 
Ashbringer said:
It could be that women aren't interested in the tech field? It maybe just natural way of thinking for women? There's no need to force women into an industry that majority don't have any interest in.
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"In first four decades of the twentieth century, women earned about 14.3% of the mathematics Ph.D.’s granted to Americans for that period. However, as in other fields, the 1940s led to significant change. Starting in the 1940s the percentage of Ph.D.’s awarded to American women in mathematics plunged until it reached a low of 5% in the 1950s. This drop reflects both a decline in actual numbers of women in the 1940s and 1950s from 1930s levels, as well as the tremendous influx of men into the graduate schools after World War II." (source)

"It is interesting to note the sharp decline in women in CS from 1966 to 1967. I wish I had the source data from this graph, but the early data set my be so small so that the decline is not significant. There were only a few universities which had computer science departments in the mid-60s. (Purdue University had the first in 1962, followed by Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1965. However, I think Taylor’s point is that the number of women in the field declined after the war from a majority of women programmers to a small minority." (source)

Ashbringer said:
That's like wondering why men don't generally go into the beauty and fashion industry as much as women. Like DUH, right?
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You know nothing about the beauty and fashion industry if you don't know it's severely male-dominated. (source 1) (source 2)
 
Most of the management in the last company I worked for were women. They all started off as Software developers, then decided to go to management. The ones I got to know were very talented developers and make great managers. I don't think the problem is discrimination or unconscious bias. The problem is the environment isn't friendly to their social goals. Half the blame should go work environment that requires developers to effectively disappear from the planet for a month/weeks before and month/weeks after a release. The other half of blame should go women putting social pressure on each other for marriage, babies, and dating/going out.

Is the shortage of women a problem? Indirectly since we have a shortage of MSE, but guess what? Women don't code any differently then men.
 
heatlesssun said:
But in this case though if merit is equal then merit can't be the deciding factor.
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Fine, make one superior in one way other than gender and race. Asian males on average have to score 140 points higher than white males, 160 points higher than white females, and 240 points higher than black applicants (can't find a breakdown on female, but trends indicate it should be even greater). Why?

Asian males are a minority, MUCH smaller than the white or black population, but they are "over-represented" in Universities, and so we see its simply about forced diversity for its own sake.

I don't believe in race based diversity, as it is inherently racist to assume that people bring something different to the table based purely on their skin color. You can after all have a Eminem white guy who espouses "black culture" and a Carlton Banks black guy. I believe only in equal opportunity, and equal opportunity should make it ILLEGAL to in any way ask about the race of the applicant, and also get rid of race-based scholarships entirely and make them only merit based.
 
All this stuff is hypocritical and counter-intuitive towards any true discrimination free workplaces. All these questionnaires wanting to know what ethnic background... utterly pointless especially here in the US where a person can have multiple backgrounds. I look 100% white, except my father is Hispanic and had to work hard to provide a living for 6 kids. Obama looks black comes from a well to do mixed heritage family, yet Obama can pull the black card and win, and if I try to pull the brown card I would get laughed at and be told I have it easier cause my skin is white, even though ethnically im about as white as obama is black.

None of this has any bearing to actual ethnicity or background, its all about skin color and gender and how you can best use it to your advantage.
 
heatlesssun said:
But in this case though if merit is equal then merit can't be the deciding factor.
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Race shouldn't be a factor at all. Maybe one kid has aspirations to be the best and go on to a PhD and the other is going onto a different program afterwards or is undecided. Or, he shows little interest but the other guy does.

Race can be an issue in some places, I won't deny that. It can be a problem. But, if you see the problem, correct it. When I see minorities getting preference, it appears that they are less qualified and less smart so they need that extra boost. It shouldn't be like that. Everyone should earn it exactly the same. If there is a place where 95% are white folks, then look into it. If fully capable and qualified black/asian or whatever applicants are denied, start firing people or fining the establishment. Don't lower the standards to allow someone else in. It just makes them look less than standard. Devalues them when they could be extremely smart and more than capable.

Equal rights. Equal opportunity. Lowering scores and forced diversity go completely against anything equal.
 
Wiffle said:
None of this has any bearing to actual ethnicity or background, its all about skin color and gender and how you can best use it to your advantage.
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There's a long history about this subject, even laws about who was black and such in matters of mixed race. The idea that it always works to advantage is well overstating the advantage even today.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Race shouldn't be a factor at all.

Equal rights. Equal opportunity. Lowering scores and forced diversity go completely against anything equal.
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Yup, and aside from not being allowed to ask or volunteer the race or gender of the applicant, why do those deciding on entry even need a NAME?

Just have the computerized application change the given name to a random numeric application code # 15792462349218432.

Then if that application # is approved, the system goes back and notifies the person accordingly. Then it doesn't matter what the result is, as the test is 100% blind to gender and race, so if a gender/race is "under/overrepresented" then who gives a crap?
 
A while ago I was part of a meeting where we had to determine a certain amount of promotions, the guy in charge was spelling it out like this: (to paraphrase)

"Ok, we need to pick a few people under a certain age, heres the # of people we pick over 30 (some mention of race diversity)..."

an hour later:

"Oh crap, I forgot we have to pick a woman!"

This meeting was due to some forced diversity thing that got handed down to us and we were a selected team to figure out the best people to promote (early). I didn't think we were doing that bad but apparently some study said differently.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Equal rights. Equal opportunity. Lowering scores and forced diversity go completely against anything equal.
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Ok, sure. And when did this happen in the US? It certainly wasn't the case for most of this nations history.
 
heatlesssun said:
Ok, sure. And when did this happen in the US? It certainly wasn't the case for most of this nations history.
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Fairly recent. No one can argue that it wasn't the case for most of the nations history. Hell, even most of the 20th century. But, in today's 'diverse' world and cultures, it is almost a slap in the face. I'd hate to be told "There were people better than you, but you were poor so we had to let you in.". Replace poor with anything else. Or something that you have no control over (color of your skin). So, they are making the color of your skin a weakness that needs to have a handicap to increase par on those things.

There are a ton of talented people out there of all sexes and colors. They should all get equal judging when applying for schools and jobs. Not the golf handicap because you have blonde hair vs. black. Those are things that make no difference.

Now, rather than being forced to have more minorities or give them lower entry scores, there should still be the anti-discrimination stuff. I do know that there are some that still feel 'elite' and only want the 'best of their kind' where they are.

But, some people treat race, gender and other things as a weakness. It's far from that. Those kinds of things I do not agree with. Don't lower the threshold for entry.

Now - I'm a white guy in a rural community. I don't live in a black community in a poor part of the city. They may need more of those special treatments. I still don't think lowering entry scores for those groups are good. I'd rather focus on bringing their scores up. Increase spending and resources in those communities to get some of that talent into school and excel.
 
Ur_Mom said:
But, some people treat race, gender and other things as a weakness. It's far from that. Those kinds of things I do not agree with. Don't lower the threshold for entry.

Now - I'm a white guy in a rural community. I don't live in a black community in a poor part of the city. They may need more of those special treatments. I still don't think lowering entry scores for those groups are good. I'd rather focus on bringing their scores up. Increase spending and resources in those communities to get some of that talent into school and excel.
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The bottom line is that the history on this issue runs long and deep in this nation. And the history indicates little tolerance for grievances expressed by those in the minority no matter what that grievance may be.

If we couldn't even agree on who was fully human or not without major conflict then agreement on lesser issues is unlikely anytime soon.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Fairly recent. No one can argue that it wasn't the case for most of the nations history. Hell, even most of the 20th century. But, in today's 'diverse' world and cultures, it is almost a slap in the face. I'd hate to be told "There were people better than you, but you were poor so we had to let you in.".
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Also if these people find out the reason why they got hired, they will have even less motivation to do a good job. If they know (or think) their work isn't good enough to begin with but also that they will be difficult to fire (company is RACIST/SEXIST/whatever for firing a bad employee!!!!111one) they will likely put even less effort in.
 
I have a class action lawsuit against Cosmopolitan magazine. The staff is almost entirely female and I think the real reason behind it is they're a bunch of bigots. In other news, I plan on suing some make up companies, some high heel companies, and also a lingerie company. For some bizarre reason, all those companies are also mostly all female.
 
Seventyfive said:
I have a class action lawsuit against Cosmopolitan magazine. The staff is almost entirely female and I think the real reason behind it is they're a bunch of bigots. In other news, I plan on suing some make up companies, some high heel companies, and also a lingerie company. For some bizarre reason, all those companies are also mostly all female.
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That's just the numbers and how they fall. I am fine with that. But, would a man be denied entry if he were fully qualified? Maybe, maybe not. That's where I would take issue. :)
 
A lot of privileged white guys in this thread patting themselves on the back vigorously with the owner of the site of course being at the front of the line.
 
Seventyfive said:
I have a class action lawsuit against Cosmopolitan magazine. The staff is almost entirely female and I think the real reason behind it is they're a bunch of bigots. In other news, I plan on suing some make up companies, some high heel companies, and also a lingerie company. For some bizarre reason, all those companies are also mostly all female.
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Except they aren't, the vast majority of fields even those considered feminine are male dominated.
 
Oh no, you said white and privilege together. You must be right!

Quotas and affirmative action are terrible. Some people actually think you shouldn't get hired or have a bonus(or worse a malus for white and asian students) on your college admission scores just because of the color of your skin or what's in between your legs.

But that's not what's important to you. It's spitting "the man" that's important.
 
Laureolus said:
Quotas and affirmative action are terrible. Some people actually think you shouldn't get hired or have a bonus(or worse a malus for white and asian students) on your college admission scores just because of the color of your skin or what's in between your legs.
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This is what bugs me. Why give special advantages to some but not others. That is the opposite of equal. Equal opportunity - everyone, including minorities, should get the same opportunity. If the statistics show otherwise, and not just by a show of numbers for those in the field.... How many are trying to enter that field vs. how many are in it, then do some research and discipline from there.

It's punishing good people, raising up people that aren't good enough, and just not equal.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Why give special advantages to some but not others.
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One of the fundamental questions in all of human existence. Given its long, complex and controversial nature through the eons one that still alludes an answer.
 
heatlesssun said:
One of the fundamental questions in all of human existence. Given its long, complex and controversial nature through the eons one that still alludes an answer.
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I can understand smart, strength, or other advantage. The ones I don't get is why give x person a higher ranking because he is *insert special need here, but same mental and physical capacity*. I guess people want to feel special. For some, I guess having a Mexican take your job makes them feel like shit. Or Indian. Or whatever. But, if they are qualified and do a better job - you better up your game to compete. It's a competition in this world.

Even worse, though - getting beat by a girl. :D So, I'm sure some guys are pretty upset with some girls in their ranks. Especially, the macho jobs.

I just don't think it should be special treatment for some people. It shouldn't be all numbers, either. I mean some people fit and some don't. It'd be better if some people in power weren't assholes, racist, discriminatory or whatever, though. World will never be perfect. I just don't like the solution that they have right now.

If I got a job not because I was smart, but because I was short, I'd feel stupid. I was accepted because of my physical stature, not because I was the best qualified applicant. :/ Way to shoot down the self esteem.
 
Quotas are without a doubt the worst way to diversify, but will undoubtedly be introduced. They already exist in areas across Europe and the UK.

A meritocracy is the best way to approach these things.

Also, the gender gap is shrinking, across the board this really is a none issue. The dumbest part of most arguments against this fact is the average age of people in positions (for example most CEOs are 50+ which means your pool for female CEOs where borne in 1965, problem is like everything is western society, we are fucking impatient and want it now).

The age pay gap and income inequality are the single largest unaddressed issues facing today's western people. Way larger problems than the gender crisis. The next problem after those two will be perminantly unemployed population due to replacing them with technology (robotic warehouses, automatic fast food joints, self driving cars, etc) service and labour industries are going to be laying off in droves.

Yet we waste time on gender and diversity, while real societal wide problems of household income, civil unrest and unemployment are here to stay.
 
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