Gender gap in tech jobs narrows across advanced economies

https://www.ft.com/content/f37f3af3-2c3a-4082-84c3-e6fe7fe53252

by sylvainkalache • 2 years ago

34 90 2 years ago

ft.com

smcg• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/fFRZN

swagasaurus-rex• 2 years ago

Some of these statistical shifts can be explained by fewer men graduating colleges entirely.

Juicyy• 2 years ago

My classes were like 30:1 or worse male to female. Gender gap being close will always look like hiring bias to me...

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

Most of the inroads are attributed to flexible schedules which reduces the attrition from women after the entry level

alongside the role not being ruled out entirely by the candidate

this is something I hear from other women for other career choices too, from nursing to dancing to undiagnosed mental disorders (BPD, autism), the flexible scheduling draws them over 9-5 in person office work

for tech there are more pipelines than university and an entire decade has been spent addressing that already

whats happening is likely not just what you’re sensitive to

IncreasePosts3• 2 years ago

Well then, some enterprising corporation can pick up those forgotten young men for a song, and have a huge competitive advantage if that is really the case

wolverine8769• 2 years ago

My classes were like 30:1 or worse male to female. Gender gap being close will always look like hiring bias to me...

How do your personal classes represent the labor supply? The fact is that most college students now are female.

darth_avocado2• 2 years ago

fewer men graduating colleges entirely.

That may be true in general, but in STEM, twice as many men graduate as women at all levels of degrees. [1]

[1]https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=899

idontpost2• 2 years ago

It used to be 10x.

twosdai• 2 years ago

Side comment on that link. What's going on with female pacific islanders getting a graduate degree. Like it's 20k over the males in the same category. My guess is that it's an error since the total only adds up to ~600

crackercrews5• 2 years ago

Only certain majors would affect tech job hiring. Are men now lagging women in those majors? It's not especially relevant that there are tons more women than men getting degrees in social sciences etc.

dauertewigkeit• 2 years ago

It would be interesting to know if this is explained by the status gain of tech jobs (w.r.t more traditionally prestigious jobs). This is one of the theories that tries to explain some of the gap in preferences between man and women of equally high aptitudes.

cedws4• 2 years ago

DEI initiatives are inherently sexist and racist and to date I have seen zero solid scientific evidence proving that diversity is a strategic advantage.

When adjusted for factors such as lifestyle choices, women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's[0] - a negligible difference. Intervening to enforce exact equality between men and women without taking into account lifestyle choices is in fact giving preference to women.

Women are already outperforming men in education[1]. Is it really valid to claim women are not on a level playing field anymore? We're not in the 20th century. In the UK, women outnumber men in universities[2]. White, working class British boys are one of the poorest performing demographics in education but I have rarely seen it discussed. As a British lad who left school less than a decade ago, I don't think the education system is suited to engage boys whatsoever.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/13/girls-outperform...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/h...

Addendum: I'm located in London and work in the tech scene. I have worked with people from all over the world and many different cultures. At no point have I observed a distinct advantage from this diversity.

giantg29• 2 years ago

"I have seen zero solid scientific evidence proving that diversity is a strategic advantage."

It depends on what you define as solid. There are some compelling case studies on diversity effects, at least when going from almost zero diversity to a little diversity. I don't think there's any solid research on what levels of diversity are beneficial or detrimental.

In additon to your points, one thing about DEI initiatives that I don't like is how they ignore other types of diversity, including people with disabilities. It seems to be all about gender and ethnicity.

kenjackson2• 2 years ago

In additon to your points, one thing about DEI initiatives that I don't like is how they ignore other types of diversity, including people with disabilities

This varies. I've led DEI initiatives and one of the points I make is "there's diversity in diversity". Meaning it isn't just gender and ethnicity. I do believe that actually caring about people is the most important thing, and I've found that people who do care about others generally share the trait that they want diversity in their environment -- at least certain types of diversity that aren't inherently detrimental to the work they do (e.g., you probably don't want small/light offensive linemen). The reason for this is because I think most rational people who care realize they have major gaps in their understanding and want to bring in more people, in whatever capacity makes sense.

While I don't have anything near conclusive data, the people most against DEI tend to be the most insular in general. That said, often those the most extreme for "DEI initiatives" aren't really pro-DEI -- rather they are just pro their specific group, which just reduces to being the same as those that are against DEI.

crackercrews5• 2 years ago

The studies that claim benefits from diversity are almost always correlation, not causation. It's easy to see how reverse causation could be at play. Companies that are more profitable can afford to have diversity programs. This fact can be reframed to make it look like the diversity came first and caused the higher profitability.

When DEI studies were first being touted I used to ask to read them. I thought that perhaps I would eventually find one that actually had any rigor behind it. After reading dozens, I stopped asking. It seems that rigor is not required. Just a headline that resonates with key constituencies.

mitthrowaway2• 2 years ago

Yes, there are a lot of kinds of diversity that can have value in an organization. For example: People whose native language is not English. A mix of people from different continents, where different kinds of items are common in hardware stores. People from rural and urban areas. Introverts, extroverts. People from countries with different social norms. People with different understandings of the term "football field". People from countries that don't use US dollars and US-formatted zip codes. People who write their family name first, followed by their given name. People who have lived in areas without reliable internet access or electricity. People who have worked in blue collar jobs. People who don't drive a car. People who did not attend university. People who have spent time homeless. People who have taken care of aging parents. People who have raised infants.

There are all kinds of diversity, and it's really valuable to have someone in the room who realizes that your product will be offensive in India or unusable in Brazil, or dangerous to young children. It's way more than skin deep.

no_wizard3• 2 years ago

DEI initiatives are inherently sexist and racist and to date I have seen zero solid scientific evidence proving that diversity is a strategic advantage

I can't speak for the broader, more recent term of DEI, therefore I am not speaking to how diversity is achieved.

However, I can speak to diversity being a huge win. I've seen features go through the lifecycle process that if there weren't other perspectives in the room (namely, people of color, non male genders and folks with disabilities), we would have ended up releasing things that would have either not been good for our entire addressable market, or accidentally offensive.

Saved us embarrassment more than once. Having a pool of people from different backgrounds, ability, ethnicity and genders can be real value add, in above their competency as engineers (of which, they most certainly were some of the best I ever worked with in many cases)

northzen2• 2 years ago

However, I can speak to diversity being a huge win

For the sake of example, let's substitute diversity for wealth.

Wealth distributed equally and justly is good. People who feel they must control the distribution of wealth because of the injustice of the world are evil. And their practices are evil. And the actual implementation of those practices only leads to more injustice and evil.

mobilejdral• 2 years ago

Only hiring cis white men from your local network or only recruiting from the college that only allows men is by definition sexist and racist.

The point of DEI is to first try to teach and then to punish managers that are stupid and say that they have a meritocracy when they absolutely don't.

women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's[0] - a negligible difference.

So I am guessing you would be okay if I only paid the men in my org 95-99% of what I pay women? Enforcing that they are paid the same is just giving preference to men. Didn't think so.

I have a special place in my heart for the men that whine about the one woman in their org that didn't work out, ignoring the countless men that don't work out. The idiot men that get through the interview screening are somehow okay, but heaven forbid we hire a single woman that couldn't cut it. When I ask for more details these guys eventually admit that they just hate the idea that finding a job could be slightly harder or it is plain old misogyny with the belief that all men are better than all women. This doubly applies to men who seem to not be doing amazing at their job. Not only are the other men better than them, but they get really mad when a woman does better too.

I just want to do a good job, but I have had to deal with this stuff my entire career.

cedws4• 2 years ago

Women's salaries are 95-99% of men's, when adjusted for lifestyle choices, on a macro scale. It is almost impossible to achieve complete salary parity. Let's not forget, men have higher physical performance, take more risks, and are willing to do dirtier work. These factors increase the salary ceiling. It's actually quite impressive if the difference is only about 5%.

I don't know why we have to pretend men and women are exactly the same. They're not. They each have different characteristics, different preferences, and different capabilities.

8f2ab37a-ed6c2• 2 years ago

At least in tech, many companies have massive over-representation over Asian-American employees. Over-hiring cishet white males is not exactly a problem, in fact in many roles they are under-represented compared to the national slice. See the BLS data.

E.g. 50% of NVIDIA's staff is AA. Third most valuable company in the world. That's about 10x the national average. Similarly with CISCO. You can keep digging these up.

What should we do? Systematically disadvantage and discriminate against Asians (part of the honorable and noble BIPOC coalition) to make sure to return to the national averages?

Of course this also touches upon the insanity of wanting company x to match a certain demographic split. Should they mirror the world's demographics? The US's demographics? California's demographics? South Bay's demographics? Santa Clara's demographics? Each one of those is different, and nobody seems to be able to agree on which we should use as the authoritative reference. If people are going to be shaming firms for not meeting a certain bar, can we at least agree what that bar should be?

And the wage gap is most likely not going away, men are women are not identical, they do not have the same impulses, incentives, timelines, or desires. They're not perfectly homogeneous interchangeable robots that behave the same way. It's entirely not surprising that we're seeing a gap. See the Uber study which was trying to find sexism to explain their drivers' 7% wage gap, only to find out that it ultimately boiled down to risk taking, hours worked, and more aggressive driving: https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf - this is going to be true across all jobs.

Side note: the real "wage gap" is everybody vs mothers, not men vs women. If you want to advocate for making child rearing easier on mothers in the workplace, I'm fully in support.

Links:

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...

https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/about/csr/esg-hub/people/wor...

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

ctvo2• 2 years ago

When adjusted for factors such as lifestyle choices, women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's

Ignoring what lifestyle choices means and taking this claim at face value:

Can I have 5% of your lifetime earnings? Can I increase your taxes by 5% for no benefits?

It's not a negligible difference even with your handwaving. It's someone else's money and not your problem is the tl;dr here.

giantg29• 2 years ago

"It's not a negligible difference even with your handwaving."

So what are the root causes and fixes?

riskable• 2 years ago

Can I increase your taxes by 5% for no benefits?

You know that's not how taxes work, right? If someone's taxes are increased by 5% that means there's more money available to do things (or pay off debt). Many or even most of those things might have no direct benefit to the person paying the taxes but "we live in a society" (haha) and hence, we all pay into a pool that helps everyone in our community, state, country, etc.

Sometimes the benefits are obvious such as infrastructure but for most government spending it's indirect such as restoring wetlands or hiring more code inspectors so fewer buildings burn down or collapse.

mrsilencedogood• 2 years ago

If you're asking if sexism in the industry still exists, yes, it does.

I worked for a company that had 0 female programmers. "How curious", I thought as a fresh grad, "that while there were some women in my CS classes, there were none at the company". "Well, there are only 30-40 of us, so it must simply be a quirk of statistics."

Yeah no, the owner didn't think women could handle production systems so he only hired men. He told us this directly at lunch one day. He looks exactly how you're probably imagining he looks based on that statement. His wife made him give me a bigger bonus one year because at a company dinner, I made the mistake of sitting next to her because I didn't recognize who she was, and mentioned (over the course of dinner) that my wife and I wanted 3 kids and she was going to be a stay-at-home mother. I worked there for far too long because I was a new grad who hadn't ever left a job before.

It being so obvious at my first job was honestly a good wake-up call, because now that my generic white male illusion that it's all in the past was soundly shattered, I see it's more insidious forms. Like at my next job, how the one woman on our team was suspiciously the only one who took longer than 2 years to get promoted from [mid-level eng] to [career level / sr eng]. I don't think that one was nearly as explicit, but I no longer sit here and go "hmm how curious that the only woman is the only one who didn't fit the pattern". It's because of unconscious biases in the promotion review panels.

thefaux• 2 years ago

DEI initiatives are inherently sexist and racist

We live in a sexist and racist society (and always have). One either takes no action which is passive acceptance of the status quo or we attempt to take action which will inevitably have some racist and sexist consequences (intentional or not). There is no neutral option.

Railing against DEI almost always comes across as a convenient scapegoat to justify the status quo which overwhelmingly favors men in the tech industry. I will admit I don't have the statistics, but I would expect that one would find proportionally fewer and fewer women at every rung in the organizational ladder in tech firms, which to me speaks to the challenges that women face even in this supposedly level tech space. It is one thing to get an entry level job, possibly even through a DEI initiative, but another to actually be treated as an equal after hiring. My experience at a big company made clear to me that even men who like to think of themselves as egalitarian or even feminist, often have very obvious unconscious bias. I can particularly recall a manager talking up the potential of a young man relative to his female peer even though she was more productive than him on basically every imaginable metric.

raxxorraxor4• 2 years ago

Wrong. You refrain from people from achieving incremental improvements. The opportunity for change towards a positive direction is inhibited. That there is a status quo is a wrong assumption as there certainly was a positive development strongly associated with free societies that specifically prohibit discrimination among racial lines. A development that hopefully doesn't get stunted by DEI any further.

People that do DEI as their main job certainly try to ensure that discrimination will stay. They have a vested interest in it for themselves. What can I say, they are just human. Probably sexist and racist, just like you said.

wolverine8769• 2 years ago

When adjusted for factors such as lifestyle choices, women's salaries are on average 95-99% of men's

Assuming that is true (I'm not buying Wikipedia as a source), the career and job norms were created by men for men. If it was women who had created them for centuries and men were just joining in, the norms would be structured so that raising children was assumed - like taking weekends off - and not a career killer, and maybe everyone would get a day off every ~28 days (I don't mean that snidely at all; it would be realistic and reasonable).

White, working class British boys are one of the poorest performing demographics in education but I have rarely seen it discussed. As a British lad who left school less than a decade ago, I don't think the education system is suited to engage boys whatsoever.

This kind of undermines your comment, IMHO; it's a cliche of white racial solidarity and a race competition. If race doesn't matter to you, then it's not an issue of race.

Among successful people in Britain, clearly white males have great advantages. The educational system engages them fine. Maybe it's poor kids of all sorts who don't have access and engagement?

cedws4• 2 years ago

Assuming that is true (I'm not buying Wikipedia as a source)

The sources are on the Wikipedia page itself.

This kind of undermines your comment, IMHO; it's a cliche of white racial solidarity and a race competition

Why is it a race competition to point out when white people are at a disadvantage, but justice to point out when black people are at a disadvantage? It seems you have biases of your own.

Among successful people in Britain, clearly white males have great advantages

That isn't so obvious to me. A vast portion of successful people in London, especially in the finance sector, are not white British. In fact, as a London-based tech worker, I have become completely accustomed to not seeing white British people in high places.

vehemenz• 2 years ago

There are smaller gaps between the sexes for high-paying jobs in general. See law and medicine.

I started at top ten CS program almost 25 years ago, and there were only a handful of women there at all. Today's grads weren't born much later, so when tech jobs began to pay better and became high-status, it's not a big surprise that everyone else flocked to them. I'm not discounting the advantages women get in the hiring process, which plays its own part, but I think it's a lesser factor in all of this.

giantg29• 2 years ago

About 15 years ago at a state school, it was still like 10-15 males to 1 female in my CS classes. My masters classes at a bigger school about 7 years ago were more evenly split. I'm not sure if there was a massive increase during that time. In my experience it seems like there was a slight increase in undergrad but that a much higher percentage of females went on to a masters program than did males.

nradov• 2 years ago

Harvey Mudd College has a top undergrad CS program with gender parity. It's a small school so unclear whether they have expanded the pool, or are just better at recruiting women than other schools.

https://www.hmc.edu/about/2018/05/15/harvey-mudd-graduates-h...

The gender ratio was actually more even in the early days of computing. One hypothesis is that it became skewed largely because in the 1980s the consumer electronics industry marketed video games and home computers almost exclusively to boys. I don't know whether that entirely accounts for the change but it could have been a factor.

https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-resu...

vundercind• 2 years ago

1980s is when "programmer" and "analyst" became a combined role instead of two distinct ones, as well, IIRC.

swader9993• 2 years ago

I just think it's ridiculous to even be discussing gender or color when hiring. I'll interview and hire anyone capable, that's all that matters. And diversity to me is have they done anything interesting with their life, education, career, overcome adversity, something hard, creative, helpful.

syndicatedjelly• 2 years ago

Are you actually responsible for living with the decision to make a good or bad hire? Or are you speaking in hypotheticals?

swader9993• 2 years ago

I've hired about a hundred people over a couple of decades. Recruited for Boards too but don't really count that. I guess I should say that a lot of these hires have been 'diverse' but that wasn't a factor in the decision. I've only had two white males out of eight of my last hires and I had to really think about this.

0_____03• 2 years ago

Historically (and I suspect your stance is to mostly ignore history and try to make good decisions going forward) people have done a great job of hiring people that resemble themselves.

Social in-group is a powerful thing to fight against. If you can cut off the header of a resume and make hiring decisions based on that, that's awesome, but otherwise it's reasonable to be aware of and resist implicit bias in hiring.

swader9993• 2 years ago

I don't really have that luxury in almost every situation. More often than not a candidate far surpasses anyone else in areas that are very objective to the role at hand.

mc322• 2 years ago

When in college, in a downtown uni, I recall walking around the small businesses around town looking for a part-time job. It was hard, and most workers seemed to come from the same background. Maybe they were cheaper, maybe they spoke the same language --who knows, but rarely did they have mixed ethnicities in those smaller businesses.

threatofrain• 2 years ago

Sometimes doing blind interviews can lead to more lopsided gender outcomes.

mc322• 2 years ago

Marc Cuban thinks otherwise and says those factors can be part of his hiring equation: https://i.imgur.com/SpuqB5c.png though that seems to run afoul of title VII.

wolverine8769• 2 years ago

I just think it's ridiculous to even be discussing gender or color when hiring.

I and many people would agree, and that is why we need DEI: Gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, etc. etc. have long been determinative in hiring, education, etc. The system we inherited is a DEI program for (mostly) heteronormative white guys - it advantages them over others. The data - the outcomes, if you look around - are overwhelming.

They are determinative intentionally (especially now, when open prejudice is brazenly thrown around, hate crimes are multiplying, etc.), unintentionally (we're biased to hire people like us - we're just more comfortable, more trusting), and systematically (we hire from our social networks, which are segregated racially, etc., in large part because we inherited them from prior generations).

For the last eight years I've heard much open prejudice - you can see it everywhere on social media, as an obvious example, and from some prominent political leaders. I remember when a college funding program was voted down in Congress, a white guy I was speaking to laughed and said 'no way was I paying for Blacks to go to college'. The same person told me there is no bias in hiring, education, etc.

evantbyrne• 2 years ago

It is important to note that they appear to be grouping workers together based on industry, not job title. For example, the US data (https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceseeb5a.htm) lists >35% of workers in "Custom computer programming services" to be women. So while that is a perfectly valid statistic for analyzing industries as a whole, data organized in this way tells us nothing about what percentage of professional developers in the US are women. I haven't looked at the EU data.

countrymile• 2 years ago

I think this is a positive, but the article needs more data on what women are actually doing, beyond a few annecdotes. It says: "Employees in computer programming and related services” what are these related services? For example data on faang and gender looks bad but not that bad. But when you actually look at the roles women are doing within the organisations, there is a massive imbalance when you look at programming, compared to Comms.

alienicecream• 2 years ago

Why is this desirable again?

bradlys• 2 years ago

In the US, the proportion of female workers in tech rose from 31 per cent in 2019 to 35 per cent by the end of 2023, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It rose by an absolute 4 percent during the incredible rise of the fake email job. To me, it means that we're completely tapped on the amount of women that are willing to join tech.

If you look at college admissions, you'd think, "Hey, we're actually seeing an increased interest in women joining CS. Look at the percent of women graduating from top CS colleges over the last 15 years." What you're not seeing is the admissions statistics broken down by gender. Almost all admissions statistics that are publicly available are aggregated. I've seen how the meat is made on the admissions side and have had access to the statistics broken down by gender. There is a drastic difference in the admissions process based on gender. Often the only admitted male candidates have a GPA of 3.9+/4.0 to these top programs whereas the average on the female candidates have much lower at 3.4/4.0. That's the difference between perfect academic performance and above average. It takes a lot of effort to achieve a perfect score in some of these intense majors. It doesn't even account for the grading bias that these men will be experiencing in addition.

What's interesting to me is that you see very few women as ICs in later stages of their career. Most transition to management or out of the workforce. Straight women in tech typically marry someone else who makes same or much more. It's often plausible for the woman to become a SAHP and opt out of working as long as they're fine with either husband grinding insane hours to make 7 figures or moving to Dublin/Boulder Creek.

In addition, I think the outsourcing of tech jobs will be another way that companies will "improve" the statistics here in the USA. Engineering is overwhelmingly male. Companies love to outsource expensive software engineers to other countries (where they are also still overwhelmingly male but won't be accounted for in company stats!). I think this is the next move for DEI/anti-labor consultants. Expect your job to be outsourced not because it's saving the company money but because it improves the company's demographic numbers.

I remember a company I worked at bragged about their wildly high POC/black workforce. Everyone they were hiring in those roles wasn't making much money. They were just customer service roles that didn't pay a ton but this was peak fake email job time. The HR side of the company would then trash the engineering org because it was 75%+ asian (one would think it was 95%+ depending on org you joined) and most of the remaining <25% was a mix of white/middle eastern with a few token Nigerians spread in. (Not a single black american in over 1000+ employees in USA employer) Almost always the female IC engineers were under 35 - and none had kids yet. As soon as kids happened - transition to management or quitting. I never thought I'd see it so blatantly.

I don't know why we have to fixate on such a stupid non-problem. Women and a lot of minorities just have no interest in tech because it has the lowest social status of all white collar professions and it's an incredibly taxing job on top of that. The competitive jobs require an insane amount of effort to get into that requires nothing short of methamphetamine or autism. The only reason most women I know get into these jobs is because the hiring bar is lower for them. A lot of women get completely shellshocked whenever they encounter an interview that is at the level of a typical male candidate.

Gender gap in tech jobs narrows across advanced economies

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