Lots of talk about sexual equality in the dev community. Personally I work in a small team, equal mix of male and female. I can honestly say there was no bias towards hiring as I was the one who hired them all, I employed the people I work with because they were the best candidates.
Questions to you all - have you experienced bias in hiring? Have you seen 'positive discrimination' (hired because someone was female - not because they were the best person).
In the U.K. the media is saying there's a huge shortage of females in the sciences, I like to think there's a positive push to get more women into science, but what's the reality? What's you're experiences?

I think the entire discussion is bullshit. Whoever is talented in a profession will ultimately get a job there. If that happens to be more males (as in our field) well than its dominated by males. The opposite might be the case in the hairdresser buiz. One should hire people who're qualified for the position and I myself have luckily never experienced a different approach to that topic

@theZorgEffect I agree with you. It's not that just because you have less female in this fields it means that there's less equality. We should say a person regardless of gender is more interested in a topic or subject. We don't have to push equality everywhere.

Excellent point you both raise and one that I fully agree with; it's the best person for the job that should get it.
I would hate it to be any other way!

I don't believe in forcing equality at the professional level. By that time the most qualified person should get the job.

However I do support programs which expose girls to STEM fields at an early age. It's hard to be the best at something as an adult if you didn't get experience as a kid.

Hmm... I think there is more to this subject then just equality and besides equality is a very abstract subject that needs to be clear for all. I think now in 2017 in most of the countries mamen and women have the same value in most of the general field. There is no way people can convince me that women != in the field of science or other stuf that can be generalized. I think all people are like some usb sticks when they are boarn with the same capacity of memory for everyone which in theory means that anyone can learn anything and can't give any virtual excuses! So women are thus = as they too have the same size of memory so tgere is no inequality here so the probleme is elsewhere, the news people should learn to debug better...

I don't think trying to get more women into tech or science even makes sense. Everyone should do what they like to do, and it's not a bad thing that there are more men in tech than women. It's just a matter of taste. If coding is something more men prefer then why should anyone force women into it?

The real problem would be if there was discrimination towards women in this field (or any other for that matter). THEN there should be measures to be taken, for now let it be how it is.

Also, for the record, no one seems worried that kindergarten teachers or hairdressers are mostly female. Maybe because it's not a problem either

I don't think the problem is so much hiring as it is cultural attitude. Boys are encouraged to be adventurous professionals and girls are encouraged to be sexy housewives (albeit not always but I'd argue that's the cultural norm). I agree managers should hire the best fit for the job. I think we could also do more to encourage girls and young women to explore tech and engineering jobs without criticizing them for not choosing to be sexy housewives.

@sam0 from what I've heard, women are generally more emotional, kind of like hdds and ssds work differently, men and women are built differently (by society and genetics). Emotion is what science, most of the time, wants to exclude. Science wants to have facts. Maybe that is why in some fields there is more interest from men than women. But I don't have any experience and I know that, of course, there are a lot of women also interestet in science and e.g. men interested in, say, hairdressing

I don't want to be insensitive, but personally I think all those programs are huge BS. I cannot imagine how gender could possibly be related to interests.
If girl is interested in coding she can do that ans make a carrer out of it.
Ive never seen situation like "so... You are a male, well, how about coding?", so i cannot imagine need for something like that for any gender.

The other thing is building image of a field in young humans mind.
Had someone showed me someone like Lindsey Stirling while i was a kid, id have more "cool" associated with playing violin and maybe it would push me in that direction.
And i think that kind of building an image of things is a thing totally separate from gender.

@Arlekin I think these images are built differently for the genders though. At least they were. Where boys stereotypically play with rc cars and lego, girls play with barbie puppets and draw.

@writeascript
Obviously things changed a lot since last century about separating jobs and interests when raising kids.
On the other hand being a kid i never played much with cars, I preferred lego.
My younger sister, didn't play with dolls, she just didn't like that, but then didn't do much lego either, so in terms of toys neither of us played with "gender" toys but only one of us played with "dev" toys.

(I dunno if that makes sense but kinds illustrates my point)

I think such affirmative actions are necessary only for ppl raised in some awful way...

@writeascript @Arlekin I'm not saying every boy or girl plays with lego||dolls. But when I ask you "who plays with dolls and who with lego or cars", I think we both know the answer. And that's just one example. If there are other universes, there's probably also one where girls are the ones more interested in science; but that's because their society has flipped the stereotypes relative to us

@writeascript emotions... I won't said is wrong but i personally think emotion is an option which is necessary to become a human and not an obligation. Yes statically talking girls do more 'girly' stufs then bous from an early age but i think it's because the environment teach us modt of the things that we have to 'like' or not. If we put a bunch of new boarn children in some kind of desert remote dark place where they can only hear and live, and that's all they can experience and nothing more if one day you put some dolls and some cars do you think the boys will chose the cars and girls will chose the dolls, or some pink color and some red ? I think if there is an equality is because they want it and it is necessary. Ofcorse that in many countries there are many kind of inequality for women, but when we speak of the first world countries if there is less women in a field it's purely by choices of those who applied for the job. ( some time it can be a

choice of the recruiters, but it cannot simply be the case of all recruiters, because there is no reason for not hiring a women. But yeh you are right that there are some fundamental differences, but they are way more fundamental then those, in my opinion ofcorse

Forcing it based on their sex rather than skills is a leap backwards. I've already seen what happens when a company hired based on someone's sex rather than their skills, they didn't help the team and became more of a nuisance when deadlines were tight. Hiring wise, if you can do the work then I don't care what you are.

You can't force people into a field, this "movement" is purely BS. Just show people what the field offers and let them choose.

I won't speak for all women but I was very interested in coding in middle school. I was never explicitly discouraged from pursuing it but my school didn't have any related classes and my confidence in science and math dropped as I wasn't expected to be as good as the boys. I ended up studying English in college and only got back to coding as an adult. It's not as simple as girls having different interests. I often wonder where I would be now if I had been encouraged to pursue coding when I first got interested.

I'm all for hiring the right person for the job, but I have seen my male co-workers' ideas be given more weight than equally knowledgeable female co-workers just because our culture tells us they know what they are talking about.

TLDR; gender bias exists

@writeascript Men are in a lot of cases more emotional than women. The idea of the strong insensitive men is too perpetuated in society.

I know personally plenty of women in STEM jobs/courses and they are just as capable of being objective as any other human being. I believe education (especially philosophy) is key for objectivity.

@elz1 Men are usually better at engaging discussion and taking (unnecessary?) risks, women better at analyzing situations and pursuing less risk. When it comes to professional careers, employers want people who show engagement and can calculate risk, this requires a mixture of both of these. This also hits at the company's culture, they may be conservative or dynamic.

That isn't gender bias, that's more primal instinct. There's even a research article, such one by Fusion, saying men do better at interviews.

@Wallpaper "primal instinct" doesn't mean it's not gender bias haha. Also, link to some research backing up those generalities? I'm curious to see it.

@elz1 Primal instinct drives your emotions and personality, that's science. I already provided a source for you to Google yourself. "fusion gender interview".

@Wallpaper How do you know it's primal instinct and not the environment while growing up? People buy different toys, paint the nursery differently, before the kid is even born, depending on gender.

@elz1 I'm not a woman, but gender bias does exist. There's numerous articles about this. Women are often judged on qualities that are seen as positive in men. But we as men do not see it. This is why we need to judge people on their skills, while blinded to their name and gender. That is, if we are really interested in hiring the best. If we just want people who are like us than nothing will change. I'm thinking

@Gauthier That still doesn't sway women away from STEM, just like forcing me to play sports (against my every will) didn't stop me getting into tech. What about male nurses?

@Charmgoggles An article by the website Fusion (Google Fusion gender interview) shows a study where men and women had their voices masked, even swapped, and and their sex withheld. The interviewers still showed a strong preference towards the male candidates, and that males conducted more interviews on average. It isn't gender bias, it's more so women not doing as well in interviews (as per the researchers).

@Charmgoggles @wallpaper maybe interviews reflect our culture and have been designed to select for those qualities that are more common in men. Just a thought. That Fusion article also mentions that women have biases against themselves, which probably sounds strange but I would agree with. It's hard not to believe things you've been told and have been implied about you your entire life.

And one more thing - it's been demonstrated again and again that when we have diversity in our workplaces everyone wins. It's not a zero sum game. We solve problems more creatively when we're surrounded with people who have different worldviews.

There are plenty of women in STEM now. I'm in my senior year in an engineering school and I've witnessed the gender balance shift immensely. When I first arrived, I noticed the balance being somewhere around 30-70 female-male ratio. Now I see so many women and it's much more like 45-55. That's a huge improvement and seems like equality for me, accounting for variables and outliers.

I don't think this issue is so relevant anymore and we shouldn't be making such a big deal over it. At this point, it seems like the concept has been corrupted by political correctness, like feminism has changed these past few years.

@elz1 The only diversity that should be a factor is that of intellectual diversity. Anything else is unnecessary and does not contribute to any problem solving. For instance, should 2 MIT grads be hired, or one and someone else solely based on something provided from birth? Tech interviews are pretty straight forward, you can either solve a problem, or you cannot -- that's not tailored to any gender. I don't know what self bias refers to, but perhaps it's similar when people assume I'm a meathead and don't know much outside the gym, then are shocked to discover I'm a Trekkie and do network security.

It's because women are smarter and early on they won the social position of staying at home.

I have seen "positive” discrimination where, because so few women do compsci in the UK, those who do it and do well get more opportunities than men of the same ability. With so much outside pressure to hire women in male-dominated fields, it's easy to see why.

When I taught compsci at university, although there were very few women, the average ability was higher. I have no idea why but my guess is that with the gender bias, women are more likely to get into compsci in the UK if they're confident in their ability, whereas for men, it's sometimes a default choice ("I hate x, y and z but I can do computers")

Finally, I have also seen that the male developers seem to be more inclined to take riskier dev jobs, at small startups etc.

All anecdotal evidence and I'm told the gender balance is very different outside the UK.

@Wallpaper What about male nurses? The fact that "male nurses" is a thing, while "nurses" are assumed to be female, if no gender is specified.

@Gauthier Women are biologically (due to estrogen) more emotional and make up the majority of fields that revolve around nurturing. Men on the other hand, are more biologically geared for physical stress (due to testerosterone), which is why they're the majority in blue collar fields.

@Wallpaper absolute nonsense. This is a gross simplification of biology. Fact is, we don't know what effect hormones have on skills. It's myths like what you say, no doubt well intended, that propagate gender differences.

@Charmgoggles They actually do have a large effect on skills. For instance, men comprehend algorithms better and women comprehend verbal comprehension better. Studies have been done to show the effects of hormones and the impact they have on a person's brain.

@Wallpaper Let's for the argument's sake assume you're right. There's the biological difference, alright.

Then there's the environmental differences, how we treat boys and girls differently before they're even born. Choice of toys, colors, clothes, the distance at which we tell them not to go too far away, who we tell to go play a quiet game instead of soccer with the boys. These are real differences. Don't you think they affect the person that a child becomes? Is it fair?

Now we can't reasonably do anything about the biological differences. But the cultural ones we might. So why not do it, why not try and do something about the unfairness in the children's development environment?

@Gauthier because it is necessary, because we want our cild to cary an image f us in them, and to become us they have to go threw what we went threw. and beside dispite those thing you mentioned people who are don't wanna play with those they don't even we give them dolls or cars, you can easily see little girls really boy like who like to do boys stuf and don't lie to play with dolls, i don't think the genetic changes count in the field of work, we humans may have to different kind but as animal we don't have much difference , we can adapt to any kind of naturel changes, as changes are not necessery we are not changing, but things are changing little by little, for example in 2017 we are more open minded then 1985, what i mean by this is now the fact that there is less men or women in a field is more of a choice to be honest and. The next gen won't give a fuck about who does what as long as the work is done, we humans are becoming less emotional and more logical this days...

@Gauthier Not really, I was always pushed into sports and mathematics while growing up and I never liked either of them. I grew into power tools and IT from watching others do it, none of which were forcefully influenced. I also grew up liking purple, and wearing regular street clothes. You wise, I played with Legos and Barbies...kids really don't care what they play with when they're bored.

@Wallpaper you're right about men being stronger in math and women being stronger in language...In adolescence. Those differences level out in adulthood. As I understand it the biggest differences in brain structure in men and women are that men are better at navigating 3d space and women are better at language and empathy...BUT those are distribution curves and the overlap is huge. As @charmgoggles said, you are really overgeneralizing. You can't apply those norms to individuals with any scientific confidence. It's also really difficult to parse out what is nature vs nurture at this point in neuroscience.

@elz1 There's nothing I said that's generalized, it's all backed up by neuroscience studies as well as psychological surveys and statistics. Adolescent or not, the fact that only even out in adulthood doesn't mean too much as that's when numerological functions are matured and less efficient due to age.

@Wallpaper I'm fully behind you bro. What you say actually makes sense. I kind of feel like the others are now just trying to be more politically correct than is actually necessary.

@Wallpaper & @Koolstr I hate to do this, but I'll throw in my credentials: I'm academic psychologist. I know about neuroscience (oh god I sound like Trump!) and people in the neurosciences would never ever make the simplistic arguments you are making. It's not about political correctness (strange term, what political claim am I making ?) . The differences inbetween women and in between men are larger then the group differences between men and women. So general arguments about a gender make no sense. Hormone stories are almost all bullshit, I don't blame you for not realizing this, It's very popular psychology material. Hormones have very specific and very general workings in the body and can have different effects in different animals. Research cannot find a general 'this hormone changes that behavior' result. Believe me, we've tried to find it. Are men and women biologically the same, no. Does it make them more or less suited for programming? WE have no reason to believe so.

I feel there are multiple discussions. and points. let me try to summarize while first stating my own feelings: More diverse teams are better, and hiring procedures are often (implicitly) biased.

@feynman started discussion, saying there is lots of talk about gender equality. personally he doesn't see the need, his team (he hired) equal mix. Question was : 1 do you experience bias in hiring? positive discrimination? 2 Then there was a mention of positive discrimination (hired because of gender, not merit) and 3 talk about shortage of females in sciences.
1: some do (in both directions thus also 2) @Wallpaper & @Elz1
3: Some people claim that not enough women are going to STEM fields (pipeline argument). others say that this is already fixed. @jlave215 @Koolstr
Other claim there is not a problem. We hire on merit, apparently women are not good enough, or lack specific skills or they don't want to go. we shouldn't force people in this field. @theZorgEffect @tahnik

@Charmgoggles Since you are in psychology I don't need to mention to you confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance: reasoning and rationality do a bad job at convincing people (case in point: Trump's success). I don't know about you, but the argument above shows clear traces of these, doesn't it?

I'm aware I probably am a victim of these as well.

@Gauthier Cognitive dissonance is my favorite psychological concept! 😀

So which argument are you implying is victim to it, and what is your stance then?

@Charmgoggles You make an interesting point, but unless you can provide for me direct evidence towards your viewpoint, I can't take it as any more valid than my current stance. This is kind of like the case of proving the existence of God. You can't prove there is or isn't one, so it comes down to whatever you choose to believe in the end. Obviously this lack of proof argument extends only as far as there is no definitive evidential proof.

@Charmgoggles For someone allegedly in the field you claim to be in, I thought you'd appreciate I've done my research using government studies, medical articles, and reputable psychological studies, and nothing on a WordPress site. Unless you can present contrary data to what I've read, you may agree to disagree.

@Charmgoggles Regarding "hiring bias", I already provided one source that disproves this. Personally, listing anything other than your skills on a resume is a nuisance to me as I don't remember names. Sex and ethnicity shouldn't be an item on an application, or CV, as tech should only hire based on skill(s) and intellectual ability.

@Wallpaper care ti share those articles? Your link to the Google interview actually said the study was weak and should not be taken as evidence

@Wallpaper I think we all agree hiring should be on skill and intelligence. I just think not everyone is judged fairly.

@Charmgoggles URL follows. Fusions statement was that of the author, the study itself is accurate being that over 200 people were tested, and their statement of assumption doesn't make much sense being that both sexes had their voice modulated. https://blog.interviewing.io/we-bui...

@Wallpaper My interest is mainly in, if the result about gender differences in interviewing is correct, why it is so. My hypothesis is that the main cause is how we treat boys and girls differently from before they were even born.

Studies I've read that claim they tested genetic differences all tested on subjects who were 6 months old or older. At 6 months old I'd say you've had plenty of time to be influenced by your environment. Did you know that parents talk to their baby girls at a higher pitch than to their baby boys? (average, not sure about the standard variation).

@Gauthier Got a study on that? I don't know where the voice pitch would come from, that sounds more like how the parent was raised (region, their Alph/Beta personality). I've never seen it, but I have seen it when people are talking to animals. Though, women use different voice pitches if they're attracted towards someone, which would indicate much of that is based on primal influence.

@Wallpaper Mind telling me what that pitch is? I need to know when a girl actually likes me for once 😟

@Koolstr Lol you and me both. IIRC, they try to meet your pitch level or increase theirs. There was a social mingling experiment where it was observed, along with body language, that explained how people show interest at the nonverbal level.

@Wallpaper Cool, thanks for letting me know 😀

I don't think pushing towards equal amounts is good. I've heard women saying that there should be more women in construction but come on, yes, there are a few women who are pretty fit and could do the job good but in general, men are build to handle more heavily/hard physical work. Same goes the other way around. Generally speaking there will be more women than men in beauty saloons. That has nothing to do with equality but work the fact that most men aren't into that kinda work. Just hire the best candidate, regardless of gender.

Impressive , the argument is still going on lol, i thought people will just stop after reading all those comments. Never anyone who discover this post will go threw all those comments...

I work at a place where there's "positive" discrimination. They purposefully try to hire more women on the tech team. But they also turn a blind eye to the fact that HR, PR, business development and so on have more women. And a very specific kind of women, if you don't mind me saying.

So yeah, there is gender bias. On both sides.

For instance, most toy kitchen sets are pink, targeted at girls. But what if there's a boy who likes to play chef in a restaurant? Isn't that gender bias as well? What if a girl wants to play chef too? Does she have to play housewife?

The problem is that we have biases. Not gender biases, most certainly not biases only towards women, but biases all around.

Ps. It makes absolutely no difference if there are biological differences between men and women. Unbiased choice should be available for everyone regardless.

@BellAppLab thoughtful, yes I guess I agree. What kind of women are in hr?

@Charmgoggles In PR and biz, tall, blonde, short skirts. The ones who are not blonde dye their hair. You see, they interface a lot with rich, white males, so it fits. In HR, there's less of a demand for that. In dev, even less.

So there's a gradient in "diversity" between areas.

@BellAppLab oh dear... I see

@BellAppLab I need to get myself a job in PR then 😉