| --- Log opened Sun Dec 25 00:00:49 2016 |
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| 05:12 | <@Alek> | Wiki used to be better. hrmph. |
| 05:18 | <&[R]> | Wikipedia you mean? |
| 05:21 | <@Alek> | yes |
| 05:37 | <&jeroud> | abudhabi: Historically, the software industry was dominated by women. That changed when it became a more "prestigious" career and the men started taking over. |
| 05:38 | <&jeroud> | (I'm dramatically oversimplifying.) |
| 05:40 | <&jeroud> | Also, the women I know in the industry are all damned good at it. If there were a natural ability difference rather than cultural pressure, I'd expect to see more women who are mediocre. |
| 05:44 | <@Alek> | that's a complex thing though - the ones who are damned good are more likely to actually get work in the industry, as opposed to the mediocre ones, where the mediocre guys tend to get the work. |
| 05:45 | <@Alek> | not an ability difference, just a sexism difference. |
| 05:45 | <@Alek> | but manifesting slightly differently than what you implied, I think. |
| 05:48 | <&jeroud> | Alek: No, that's what I mean. |
| 05:49 | <&jeroud> | This doesn't prove that there is no ability difference, but it does show that there's a very definite cultural problem. |
| 05:51 | <&jeroud> | As an organisation that really cares about diversity, we have worked hard to find three female devs. We currently have two. |
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| 07:29 | < catadroid> | There's a huge cultural problem. |
| 07:30 | < catadroid> | And women are just as capable at being software developers as men |
| 07:30 | <~Vornicus> | Year or two back the word "brogrammer" got thrown around a lit |
| 07:34 | < catadroid> | The cultural problem attacks from multiple angles too |
| 07:35 | < catadroid> | To an extent, you *have* to accept some male socialisation to be considered a good programmer if you're a woman |
| 07:36 | < catadroid> | And women are discouraged and shuffled away from the kind of school subjects that naturally lead to entering coding professions |
| 07:36 | <~Vornicus> | "Math is hard!" |
| 07:37 | < catadroid> | Yeah, so is everything else |
| 08:08 | <&jerith> | Math is easy. *People* are hard. |
| 08:09 | <&jerith> | Also: https://github.com/jerith/adventofcode-2016 is a bag of individually giftwrapped OCaml solution to Advent of Code 2016. |
| 08:14 | <~Vornicus> | Actually I was referring to an old barbie toy |
| 08:14 | < catadroid> | :( |
| 08:14 | | * catadroid hisses |
| 08:51 | <@abudhabi> | jeroud: So it basically overcompensated, went past the ideal of a 50/50 split and is now male dominated today? |
| 08:54 | <&jeroud> | abudhabi: Basically, it went from "this is secretarial work" to "this is serious business" and suddenly men took over. |
| 08:55 | <@abudhabi> | Yes, I have a bit of familiarity with ancient computing, but that's not what I'm talking about. |
| 08:55 | <&jeroud> | Then, for a variety of reasons, it became sufficiently male-dominated that a bunch of sexist cultural things became normal. |
| 08:56 | <&jeroud> | Which made it uncomfortable for women to join teams and also uncomfortable for men to have women join their teams. |
| 08:56 | <&jeroud> | Which created a positive feedback loop. |
| 08:57 | <@abudhabi> | So goes the theory, yes. |
| 08:58 | <&jeroud> | There's a very similar effect with economic opportunities across racial boundaries in the US. |
| 08:59 | <&jeroud> | (The details are all different, of course.) |
| 09:02 | <@abudhabi> | Out of curiosity, what is the optimal split in the industry, then? |
| 09:02 | <~Vornicus> | as with most industries, probably 50/50 |
| 09:03 | <~Vornicus> | there's no reason to believe that women or men are better scientists or programmers or forklift operators or or or or or. |
| 09:03 | <&jeroud> | This is one of those cases where historical inequality has become systematised even though the original reasons are no longer relevant. |
| 09:04 | <&jeroud> | There are a very few places where gender differences matter, and almost all of those are pretty minor changes in the distribution of ability. |
| 09:05 | <&jeroud> | Things that rely heavily on muscle mass is an example. |
| 09:07 | <&jeroud> | I have yet to see even mildly compelling evidence of a gender difference in any brain-heavy activity that isn't trivially attributable to culture. |
| 09:08 | <&jeroud> | Look at TheWatcher's image above. The shift very clearly happens midway through schooling. |
| 09:10 | <@abudhabi> | jeroud: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm |
| 09:10 | <@abudhabi> | jeroud: It looks to me like it's puberty. |
| 09:17 | <&jeroud> | I haven't read those in detail, but they seem to be mostly statistical analyses. |
| 09:18 | <@abudhabi> | TL;DR: A relatively tiny difference in ability spread causes tail-end ratio to be skewed like it is. |
| 09:19 | <&jeroud> | That's just the tail end variance, though. |
| 09:19 | <@abudhabi> | Yup. Combine that with a culture of meritocracy, and this is what you get. |
| 09:20 | <&jeroud> | What about the mediocre majority of the industry? |
| 09:21 | <&jeroud> | And the software industry is very much *not* a culture of meritocracy. |
| 09:21 | <@abudhabi> | Really? People get hired based not on their qualifications/skills, but rather on the base of their sex/race/whatever? |
| 09:21 | <@abudhabi> | (Pretty sure that's sorta illegal.) |
| 09:22 | <&jeroud> | People get hired because the people hiring them like them. |
| 09:23 | <&jeroud> | In particular, really top notch people probably wouldn't be hired for the majority of software jobs. |
| 09:23 | <@abudhabi> | Seems like HR hates women, then, those self-hating bints. :V |
| 09:24 | <&jeroud> | And if they are hired, they probably wouldn't last very long. |
| 09:25 | <&jeroud> | Anyway, most of the discrimination isn't malicious or deliberate. |
| 09:26 | <@abudhabi> | Then there's the hard-to-quantify issue of interest in a given vocation. |
| 09:26 | <&jeroud> | And quite a lot of it isn't even gender-based. |
| 09:26 | <@abudhabi> | After all, there's no reason to assume that it's purely random. |
| 09:27 | <&jeroud> | I know I have a bias against quiet and less articulate people when I'm interviewing. |
| 09:27 | <&jeroud> | I try to compensate for that. |
| 09:28 | <@abudhabi> | OTOH, hiring people you like has the advantage of better relations in the team. |
| 09:28 | <@abudhabi> | Hiring people one doesn't like tends not to build morale. |
| 09:28 | <&jeroud> | There's nothing wrong with hiring people you like. |
| 09:28 | <@abudhabi> | I know. |
| 09:29 | <&jeroud> | You just need to make sure that's balanced against everything else. |
| 09:29 | <@abudhabi> | Sure. |
| 09:30 | <&jeroud> | "I can't stand this person's arrogance" is a legitimate disqualifier, "he supports a different badminton team" is not. |
| 09:32 | <&jeroud> | The worst bit of the software industry is actually the bit I'm in. |
| 09:33 | <&jeroud> | SRE/operations/systems/whatever. |
| 09:34 | <&jeroud> | We decided not to attend a recent conference in the field because every single speaker was a white male. |
| 09:35 | <@abudhabi> | That's weird. |
| 09:35 | <&jeroud> | (And also because it turns out we're quite far ahead of the curve, and pretty much all the talks were about things irrelevant to us or things we've evaluated and rejected.) |
| 09:35 | <@abudhabi> | The decision, not the conference sex ratio. |
| 09:36 | <&jeroud> | If all the speakers are white men, most of the attendees will be as well. |
| 09:37 | <@abudhabi> | And that's wrong somehow? |
| 09:37 | <&jeroud> | And the main benefit of going to conferences is talking to people in hallways. |
| 09:39 | <&jeroud> | The people we really want to talk to are generally those from atypical backgrounds, and a very strong demographic homogeneity makes that less likely. |
| 09:43 | <&jeroud> | I believe there was also at least one speaker they invited to the conference who turned them down because of the lack of diversity. |
| 09:46 | <@abudhabi> | Refusing to speak at a conference because it's not diverse enough sounds like a way to make sure it stays undiverse. |
| 09:52 | <~Vornicus> | only if you're not of the majority group |
| 09:54 | <&jeroud> | Yeah. I know of several white men who won't speak at conferences where everyone else is a white man. |
| 09:56 | <@abudhabi> | Even so. Presumably, it would alter the composition a bit to have some white men who think diversity is good for something, even if they're still white men. |
| 10:03 | <&jeroud> | abudhabi: It's more effective to say "if you want me at your conference, go find some diversity". |
| 10:04 | <&jeroud> | This only works for people the conferences really want, of course. |
| 10:06 | <&jeroud> | I also know some people who just won't submit talks to conferences without diversity because they know the chance of harassment is higher. |
| 10:09 | <&jeroud> | (Which is really sad.) |
| 10:11 | <@abudhabi> | Well, sounds like the industry is in a stable equilibrium. |
| 10:12 | <@abudhabi> | Conference goers won't go to undiverse conferences, conference organizers won't invite based on racist/sexist grounds. |
| 10:23 | <&jeroud> | It's in the kind of stable equilibrium that's incredibly harmful. |
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| 11:24 | <@abudhabi> | Debatable. |
| 11:59 | <&jerith> | Debatable that it's harmful? |
| 11:59 | <&jerith> | Because I can assure you that it very much is. |
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| 12:04 | <&jerith> | Aside from the specific individual cases I can cite where we've lost valuable members of the community to bullshit harassment, any kind of monoculture tends to become less and less diverse over time. |
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| 12:08 | <@abudhabi> | I don't think there's anything wrong with a monoculture. |
| 12:08 | <@abudhabi> | Or that there's anything wrong with undiversity. |
| 12:15 | <&jerith> | abudhabi: Diversity breeds good idea. |
| 12:15 | <&jerith> | *ideas |
| 12:16 | <&jerith> | But more to the point, a monoculture breeds solutions that ignore the needs of people not in that monoculture. |
| 12:17 | < catadroid> | It's very easy to think a monoculture is fine when it benefits you |
| 12:17 | <&jerith> | Look at the horrendous mess that is character encodings for an example. |
| 12:21 | <&jerith> | It's only in that past decade that we've finally been able to assume that *some* systems we interact with will be able to understand Å and ø and ζ and Ð and × and ठreasonably consistently. |
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| 12:26 | <@abudhabi> | catadroid: Indeed! |
| 12:26 | <@abudhabi> | I struggle to think why one would do otherwise. |
| 12:27 | <&jerith> | abudhabi: Are you playing devil's advocate here, or do you actually not see the problem? |
| 12:30 | <@abudhabi> | I'm pretty sure I'm the Devil here. |
| 12:35 | < catadroid> | This stuff directly affects my ability to function as a programmer and a person |
| 12:35 | < catadroid> | It's very difficult to talk about because it means so much |
| 12:37 | <&jerith> | This stuff indirectly affects my ability to function as a programmer and a person. |
| 12:59 | < catadroid> | Clojure is even more appealing to me as a language, because a lot of the speakers at conferences are women |
| 12:59 | < catadroid> | And prominent members of the community are not just a parade of white men |
| 13:04 | <&jerith> | The Python community seems to have more women in it than most. |
| 13:26 | < catadroid> | Interesting |
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| --- Log closed Mon Dec 26 00:00:51 2016 |