The Real Reason Women Quit Tech (and How to Address It) (2016)

https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/the-real-reason-women-quit-tech-and-how-to-address-it-6dfb606929fd

by j_s • 9 years ago

39 48 9 years ago

PaulHoule• 9 years ago

"Lack of opportunities for advancement" is a problem for tech workers, Male or Female.

Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises.

If you are a programmer/IT person at many organizations, you might find that your organization has advancement paths for (say) salespeople, geospatial analysts, librarians, etc. but no paths for technical people.

pyvpx• 9 years ago

Interesting. Now that I think about it, every single one of my networking and/or sysadmin friends have realized significant upward mobility in the past decade. any of my programming friends have either gone freelance or simply changed employers for pay increases.

Are there any public statistics on this?

mason240• 9 years ago

Being a programmer is a lot more like skilled blue collar job such being a plumber or an electrician than we like to admit.

What kind of career advancement do those fields have? Pretty close to what we have. Maybe you supervise/manage a group less experienced tradesmen. Maybe you open your own small business or go freelance. The result is the same ceiling where real, continual advancement is on the business management side.

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

Some relevant numbers: one of the article's statistics is that of American women in science, engineering, and tech, 27% feel stalled and 32% are likely to quit within a year.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are higher than the male numbers, but I'm disappointed the source doesn't have any male numbers. It's pretty well established that software companies are bad offering raises that match job-change gains, and consequently have lots of turnover. I'd love to know what that that produces across genders in terms of feeling stalled or odds or quitting.

emddudley• 9 years ago

Don't get raises? What do you mean? Are you referring to non-technology companies?

I'm curious if there are any numbers out there on the senior-to-junior salary ratio for various professions, corrected for time. I wonder which professions have the lowest and highest salary increase rates, and the mean time to hitting the salary ceiling for a profession.

logfromblammo• 9 years ago

In years when I stay with my current company, I barely get a COLA raise of around 2%. When I switch companies, even involuntarily, I can often get an immediate 10% to 20% gain over my previous pay.

This tells me that my employers do not look at current market rates when adjusting employee pay rates.

There are detailed survey data regarding actuary pay scales at https://www.dwsimpson.com/salary . It looks like they start lower than software pros, but grow faster and top out higher (everywhere outside of Silicon Valley).

hamstercat• 9 years ago

It may be location-dependent. Here in Canada, I know that dev salary increase a little less than two-fold between the time you get hired after school and whenever you get to 7-10 years of experience. Of course, one needs to change job a few times as raises within a company rarely increases that much.

Starting salary is also a lot lower when freshly out of school here than what you could get in SV.

enraged_camel• 9 years ago

>Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises.

That's not as big of a problem as it sounds. Starting your career making lots of money is better than starting with lower pay and getting raises along the way, even if your end salary in the latter scenario ends up being higher (to a point).

The reason is simple: compound interest. If you start off with $100k you can start saving (and investing) much earlier. In contrast, making a lot of money later in your career isn't as helpful.

Of course, this only tackles the financial aspect. I think career advancement is important for psychological reasons as well, such as feeling fulfilled.

devnull423• 9 years ago

Wow this has been the opposite of my experience. I have seen many cases where women are fast tracked or given more opportunities as engineers because of diversity programs. There was one case where a female engineer got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman and they didn’t want the appearance of underpaying a female engineer, meanwhile I am 16% below company median for my position.

buro9• 9 years ago

Two things:

got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman

Really?

Do you ever consider that when non-women who are given more opportunities it is because they are men? White? Tall? Are not bald? Have good teeth?

If that doesn't run through your mind, please don't suggest that anyone not a cis-male only gets there to meet the criteria of a diversity program.

meanwhile I am below company median

The thing with medians is that half of the company will be below that point.

If everyone were on the median, then everyone is receiving precisely the same salary.

edoceo2• 9 years ago

What is "cis-male"?

devnull423• 9 years ago

got her salary adjusted to median position salary because she was a woman
>Really?

Yes really. She said that there was a meeting where a manager actually made a comment about underpaying her because she was a women then they immediately freaked out.

>anyone not a cis-male only gets there to meet the criteria of a diversity program.

As far as this goes there was a specific initiative that was in place to cater linux to women and we were told to interview and hire them. After hiring many of these candidates and having pretty bad results we had to stop giving that program preferential treatment.

Also for the record my friend who I referred to with the pay discrepancy was a fantastic engineer who was not hired through that program and she hated the program because it tried to make linux all girlie which she found offensive and demeaning.

ameister142• 9 years ago

Do you ever consider that when non-women who are given more opportunities it is because they are men? White? Tall? Are not bald? Have good teeth? If that doesn't run through your mind, please don't suggest that anyone not a cis-male only gets there to meet the criteria of a diversity program.

In the absence of programs specifically and openly designed to promote and hire people with good teeth, I'm not going to have that as my default reason an under-qualified person was hired.

If I put together a program to emphasize building more blue cars quickly and then I see a bunch of new blue cars failing, I'm going to assume that the program resulted in lower quality cars being built. That might not be the correct reason, but it's going to be the assumption most people make naturally.

startupdiscuss• 9 years ago

It would be interesting to know if these issues (lack of advancement opportunity, voice not heard, poor assignment, personality perceptions) are exclusive to technology or if they also occur in, for instance, finance and medicine.

This would be informative because it would tell us if tech is doing something uniquely discouraging, or if there is a wider problem.

moomin• 9 years ago

Broadly, the answer is: they're not exclusive, but tech is particularly bad. Probably because tech has mythologised itself in a very male-normative manner.

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

This seems pretty oversimplified?

Especially when the point was comparison to finance and medicine, which have similarly male-normative histories.

A few decades ago medicine was at least as male-normative as tech; culture said nurses were female and doctors were male and that was that. But med school matriculants are ~48% female at this point. Some specialties are way more than half female, while others remain large-majority male.

Meanwhile, finance has hardly budged at all.

There's clearly something to learn here, and I think we're losing insight by just saying "tech is particularly bad" without actually trying to investigate.

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

The tech/medicine question is a really interesting one.

A lot of the issues cited in software engineering, from initial male-dominance to long hours to rudeness from superiors, are overwhelmingly present for doctors. (As are a lot of the upsides, like high initial salary.) And yet new doctors are almost 50% female - though the question becomes much messier if you break down by speciality. Clearly the unpleasance of med school isn't driving women out, but there are massive gender gaps in specialties like surgery.

I don't have any conclusions here; I just wish people would make these comparisons more often before diagnosing issues as either universal or tech-specific.

edit: "More than" to "almost" - I had seen non-American statistics.

tyingq• 9 years ago

There are some highly skilled professions where career progression is almost solely driven by tenure.

Airline pilots are a good example. Their unions negotiate the pay scale based on years of seniority.

That's a huge tradeoff, of course. If you switch jobs to another company, you lose all of your accrued seniority.

arca_vorago• 9 years ago

You know, the interesting thing to me as a sysadmin was coming to understand that tech is inside every industry, but not every industry is inside tech, if that makes any sense. In that way, I have seen the insides of hundreds of companies, from 2 man law firms to fortune 500 oil companies, and the almost universal thing I have found is that the tech side of the business is usually being underserved and under-represented in the boardroom.

Think about how many senior sysadmins you know that answer to a CEO, or to a CFO, instead of a CTO or CIO... What is going on in my opinion is that without someone playing the business-political games for them, tech workers almost always are forced to move companies in order to find upward mobility.

I got burnt out in my last position dealing with this very situation, and so I have been spending more time trying to understand how the best CTOs and CIOs do their job, so that I can eventually help other sysadmins/future employers understand how to fill that gap since management largely doesn't understand the technical debt they create by cutting short-term costs in that way.

edoceo2• 9 years ago

Please also read the Part 1 of her article about "bullshit diversity programs". Startup CEOs should read both, twice

JamesBarney• 9 years ago

I think that diversity is an important goal that we should strive for in tech. I also loved that the author included actionable advice we can all take to improve the impact of our female colleagues.

But I didn't like how the article bounces around a lot citing different studies without explaining why each study is relevant. For instance the first citation about how the #1 reason women leave their jobs is lack of career advancement opportunities. Well from that study(a linked in survey) the #1 reason men left their jobs was the same reason. The big difference between the 2 was men were much less likely to cite culture as a reason for switching jobs.

Then later cites a study showing how Latina women are paid less than white men. Which seems like a weird comparison, maybe the author had a good reason, but she doesn't explain why Latina women vs white men is the appropriate comparison and not all men vs women, or Latina women vs Latino men.(I suspect was this was the way to find the greatest discrepancy because Latino men were the most underpaid of anyone except Latina women.)

These strange comparisons and citations are pretty common in the article and set off my alarm bells that the author is using studies more for support than illumination.

And while most of us agree we need to get more women into tech (not just for women's sake but because I think it would benefit tech greatly). And precisely because it's important we need to be careful that we spend time, money and effort in the right places on the right things, and don't jump to conclusions blowing it on interventions that aren't impactful.

braveo• 9 years ago

This was basically my read of it as well, I actually stopped reading right after the latina woman vs white male comparison for the very reasons you laid out.

watwut3• 9 years ago

"The big difference between the 2 was men were much less likely to cite culture as a reason for switching jobs."

That makes sense to me. Bad culture is more damaging to people who have bias against them - or just those who "think" there might be bias against them so they leave proactively (even when there is no bias).

As in, most workplaces are not sexist, but the workplaces who are sexist will have more women then men leaving because of culture. Bias in tech is against women, not against men (I would assume it to be opposite in traditionally female fields.)

eizaiGh0• 9 years ago

Yes. Women leaving the teaching profession is also less likely to cite culture as a reason for switching jobs, which is commonly the case for work places which is dominated >60% of a single gender. Work culture in such places incorporate parts of gender identity and those of a different gender either has to assimilate to that culture or be forced to leave, a fact noted in a report by Swedish institute for higher education, published a few years ago.

danielvinson• 9 years ago

It is very hard to find the right place to straddle the line of interpreting and explaining the sources for your reader, but not sounding condescending. The author, in this case, likely chose a tone she thought would resonate with male engineering managers best, and it's really hard to fault her for that. The author is an engineer after all, not a professional writer, and the article is not less trustworthy because of that.

While I would normally be fast to offer advice to the author on how to improve the tone and resonate with the reader more, in this case, this article is not something which needs to be written in an engaging, interesting way - it is just a collection of data, presented in an accessible manner. It encourages the reader to change their opinion in a Bayesian manner and use the sources, not just blindly follow the author.

jlos• 9 years ago

Whats frustrating about these analysis is they ignore the reality of children and family life. The bias' mentioned, which are appear real and well evidenced, are secondary and complicating factors to the general problem of adapting family life to an urban, specialized economies.

Prior to the 1900's the largest companies in the world were only a few hundred employees and over 50% of the population farmed. That meant a significant amount of the economic activity occurred in family run farms and business where all family members worked together. The trend towards men working outside the home and women staying at home was a somewhat unique phenomena in the 20th century and in some ways-not all-a natural progression since manual labor jobs favor men.

While bias are real and need to be dealt with, I think attributing everything to them does little to solve the real challenge of how to harmonize specialized technical work, which at the current scale is unique to our time period, for large corporations, which did not exist prior to the 20th century, with the demands and realities of family life.

Having kids below the age of schooling is a unique time and one that many very competent women are not willing to sacrifice for career advancement. And since there is almost no part-time work for STEM careers, this has the effect of limiting career advancement for those women who choose to prioritize family life and may also account for the perceptions that create the types of bias' listed in the article.

I don't think theres an easy solution, and maybe not one at all, but without considering the very real component of family these types of accounts fall short.

sharemywin2• 9 years ago

except a lot of women are delaying families.

xyzzyz• 9 years ago

Sure, and there's also a lot of data suggesting that young women are paid as much if not more than young men, see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...

magic_beans• 9 years ago

What exactly does "a lot" mean?

watwut3• 9 years ago

Below the age of schooling is not so much unique time when you spend a lot of time with the kid. It seems unique only when you are spending very little time with them. Most of that are routine daily duties, sometimes frustrating, with unique magic moments sprinkled here and there.

Quite frankly, if it would be so unique, men would be way less willing to work 60 hours a week just to prove passion for work. The trouble is, one of you two have to do those things else the kid will be neglected and suffer. Which means it is going to be the one there is less stigma against doing so, has lower salary or feel more responsibility towards the children.

Quite frankly, I don't know why career vs family is framed only in terms of good feels, unique times, etc in these debates and so rarely in terms of responsibility and children needs. Even more frankly, it seems to be framed that way by people who don't actually do that trade off.

sharemywin2• 9 years ago

I've seen many women(programmers) go into project management and fly up the ranks. To get an architect or other higher level senior technical title male or female requires a devotion to pedantic study that few people desire to pursue(usually with marginal monetary value).

ameister142• 9 years ago

I know this is a huge problem, but I really dislike how this article is built on a house of cards, reference-wise. Almost none of the statements are backed up by viewable primary sources.

waynecolvin• 9 years ago

If they misrepresent their arguements there must be a motive.

jpeg_hero• 9 years ago

Listen closely at meetings, and repeat unacknowledged good ideas, giving the person who first had the idea credit.

yeah? is this really a good thing? getting idea credit in meetings?

buckbova2• 9 years ago

I honestly try to do this all the time, but mostly for those who are less vocal, the quiet ones. I tend to be on the other end of the spectrum, so if I never shut up at least I'm throwing someone else a bone in the process.

bobwaycott• 9 years ago

Yes, it really is a generally good thing for all humans. Everyone responds generally positively for being recognized for whatever their contributions are. Even if the ideas aren't particularly amazing, there's something pretty powerful in general human interactions that happens when you make a point of noting people's ideas, and making correct attribution. This may be somewhat of a learned skill. In practical terms, it's as easy as a summation of ideas thrown out--e.g., "Bob has suggested we take a better look at X. Sue's thinking we ought to consider Y."

Some time later, when another person offers up an idea, there's a different relational outcome between saying, "Oh, nice idea, John"--while Sue is thinking, That's an awfully lot like my idea from a couple weeks ago--and saying, "Oh, hey, that sounds a lot like Sue's idea from a couple weeks ago, but with a little twist." Sue's going to respond positively because you're acknowledging her idea. John's going to respond positively because you're doing the same for her. Now both of them may be encouraged to work together on it.

There's also a funny thing about us humans in that the same ideas and thoughts can hit us differently at different times. Making a point of tracking (mentally or otherwise) people's contributions to an organization isn't something that is likely to ever be a bad idea.

rogerdickey• 9 years ago

Why does HN love click bait so much?

msimpson• 9 years ago

A study of 4,000 women who had recently changed jobs found that the #1 reason women leave companies is because of “a concern for the lack of advancement opportunity.”

The same study which found that men leave companies for the exact same reason? Meaning there is no inequality in the lack of advancement opportunities ...

Mz2• 9 years ago

I think trust and effective communication are the root cause of a lot of these problems. Articles like this one rarely address that piece at all. I talk about it on my blog, * but my writing isn't exactly getting millions of page views. I find it frustrating.

* Such as: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zon...

j_s• 9 years ago

Shortcut to HN discussion of Mz's "The Gray Zone": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7407280 (3 years ago)

Yowzers! Not really sure what else to say, I can see why HN avoids these types of discussions.

Mz2• 9 years ago

That was three years ago. I was actually pretty pleased at the time.

I believe discussions on such topics generally go better these days than they used to.

tzs• 9 years ago

Some people dismiss the gender pay gap by arguing that women choose lower-paying fields; however, the causality is opposite: pay drops as women move into a previously male-dominated field. A study by Stanford and UPenn researchers analyzed 164 occupations using 50 years of US Census data (1950–2000) and found consistent evidence that pay drops as women move into a previously male-dominated field in areas as varied as recreation, ticket agent, designers, housekeepers, and biologists. When a job attracts more men, such as computer programming, which used to be predominately female, wages rise.

Those examples where women moved in on male-dominated fields all seem to have been fields that were not undergoing rapid growth. Opening them up to women would have expanded the size of the labor pool, and if the number of jobs was not expanding at the same rate, would't we expect pay to drop?

Computer programming switched to male-dominated at a time of rapid rise in demand for computer programmers. Rapid rise in demand tends to raise pay.

The Real Reason Women Quit Tech (and How to Address It) (2016)

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