birdwontquit

Having worked in Silicon Valley the last few years, at ground zero of the supposedly hostile environment to women, alongside many women in tech leadership positions, I consider the meme that the industry is "not welcoming to [women]" to be significantly overblown. Women are not well represented in technology long before they don't enter "the industry", but rather are not present in college engineering and computer science classes, and fail to show a significant interest in "tech" well before the professional level. This may well be due to social factors, culture, nurture etc. but I don't think it's reasonable to place the blame on "the industry", which exists within the larger framework of a culture with well defined gender roles, as has been done. Your expose seems to be a rather shallow exploration of the issues at hand, and that may be by design, I understand it is Glamour and not the NYT, but do you really think the answer to the "issue" of the lack of women in tech (I should note no one seems to mind the lack of women in garbage collection) is simply to shove more women into tech positions, rather than address, if possible, the cultural issues that cause this disparity in the first place, assuming it is one of nurture and not nature?

the list was saved and publicized by bloggers, and backers have been harassed as sexual assault supporters.

I think there is a fundamental flaws in the reasoning behind your position; it starts from the premise that "equality" means equal representation by numbers in fields. This is an overly simplistic measure, and one only used because it is understood by everyone, and easy to point to as evidence of disparity. However, as I pointed out, there are not equal numbers of both genders in a large variety of industries, including nursing, garbage collection, construction, the army, sex work, oil rigging etc., and men and women aren't equally inclined to enter certain fields. Women tend not to desire to become petroleum engineers. Is this because the industry is hostile to women?

A better measure of equality would be, if a woman with the necessary talents and abilities desires to enter an industry, does she have the same opportunities and experiences as a man, and vice versa. That's admittedly harder to measure, but it's more sound than simply saying we can't stop until one of every two programmers is a woman.

That's reasonable. I'm certainly not opposed to encouraging women to explore an interest in STEM, and welcome women into the industry with open arms. I just find the characterization of an industry of sexist, boorish, brogrammers who are hostile to women to be sensationalist, inaccurate, and offensive to those of us in the industry, and the tenet that women must be represented in equal numbers in the industry before we have achieved equality to be rather stupid.

Maybe it really isn't for them. I understand that will sound, on first reading, incredibly sexist, but if women don't want to go into tech, why do we have a responsibility to collectively encourage them to do so? If girls don't want to do math, why do we know better than them that they should? Also, let me tell you firsthand, math isn't that cool lol.