Hiring girls is difficult (because very few work in the space)

Problem in that line of thought is that the "best people" are in large majority given an unknowingly unfair advantage. The goal of this effort isn't to acquire a trophy it is to strengthen a large portion of the population.

+1

If she can do the job. Its like hiring a minority just to fire them. If you cannot do the work don't hire them its that simple.

As a young woman. You're doing it wrong!

Have you heard of femgineer, or Skillcrush? cuz' you should look into having a 'femgineer' event to attract talent.

Having a woman on board will give you an upper hand. We're more resilient And offer 'details, details, details' which can help your endeavor in ways you can't see yet.

Holy lord this is beyond ridiculous and silly. I hope you are trolling.

s/you're/your/

+1

Isn't "girl" the female equivalent of "guy"? I'm not a native English speaker, but to me, "men" and "women" just sound so... cold, impersonal, even old (I'm in my mid20s). Is there another noun for "females" that doesn't sound like it's been taken from a biology or sociology study?

No, 'girl' is the opposite of 'boy'

'gal' is like 'guy' (but no one calls anyone 'gals' anymore, it's outdated)

You are correct, "female" feels like more of a scientific term and could also be used to describe monkeys, dogs or birds. Use it as an adjective rather than as a noun. Female partner. Female wrestler. Female officer.

Call me a woman. That's what I call myself and my female friends. :)

you mean your women friends?

" and stop calling them girls."

followed closely by

"and check out Girls Who Code."

The political correctness policing is almost laughable if it weren't so sad.

+1

Nothing "politically correct" can't dip it's little acid toes into. The term is lazy and dismissive. The term is most often used when one person raises a question about the weight that a word or phrase carries and the next person in the exchange throws down the "politically correct" accusation to dismiss the point.

In general, women in any professional capacity do not want to be called "girls", contrary to the the overwhelming evidence of one site called "Girls Who Code".

If you're going to complain about the word "girls" you shouldn't then point to a site called "Girls Who Code" though

Actually 'Girls who Code' is a completely accurate reference - the organization is working to inspire high school girls to enter computer science. The mentors however are women and talented programmers themselves.

I think you're actually thinking of Women Who Code, where you would go meet adult women who are programmers. Girls Who Code teaches young girls how to code.

Women also drop out of the field once they get into the workforce. I worked at a Fortune 500 where they actually brought in quite a number of female programmers. But pretty soon (within 3 years) most of them moved out of programming into program management jobs.

I think the big elephant that nobody is willing to entertain is that generally women don't like programming - they find it boring as shit. Its PC to say that its education/discrimination etc (which I'm sure plays a part), but at the crux most (not all) women don't find it their cup of tea.

no it's not that women don't like programming. Being a woman doesn't mean that you won't "like" something. That's like saying women don't like sports or women don't like beer. Making generalizations based on gender is SEXIST. Women might be dropping out of programming because the culture and the environment of the programming community is so horrifically skewed towards male comradery and this type of casual sexism is infuriating.

You want to show up for your job every day and enjoy it. You want to exist as a woman in the work force without having to fight to be taken seriously or accepted. The programming community is rifled with sexism and thus female programmers face daily hurdles that their male counterparts will never understand.

Read the comments through startups anonymous and just count how many instances of sexism there are. I would ignore this site entirely if I wanted to completely enjoy my day because these sexist comments sting. However, I know I have to participate in this discussion so that the female voice is heard. Like female programmers, I might be able to take it for a couple years but i don't want to have to keep fighting for my right to sit at the table and be heard. It's exhausting.

Replace the word women with 'black people' next time you want to make a statement like "women don't like programming". If it sounds racist to you then it's most definitely sexist.

But isn't it ridiculous to ask me not to talk about star trek, 90s computer games, technology and sports with my fellow workmates just because a woman may feel she's being left out?

I mean, I'm glad to include anyone in the conversation, but most women I've met don't enjoy these topics, which, believe me, is quite frustrating, as they are things I'd very much like to get a female point of view on (although, I should point out, most of the times what I get is a bad look, like we are stupid kids discussing things that don't matter).

I'm one of the women considering leaving tech. I'm tired of being Wendy to the Lost Boys. We can have the conversations about star trek and Legos sometimes, then what?

"Replace the word women with ‘black people’ next time you want to make a statement like “women don’t like programming”. If it sounds racist to you then it’s most definitely sexist."

You can be as PC as you like, a fact is a fact. If I see black people choosing to accept promotions into non-engineering positions than sticking with it, I'll call a spade a spade and I'll say it.

Just because something <em>sounds</em> sexist does not make it so.

There are MANY women who thrive and enjoy coding, I am NOT refuting that. I'm just saying by and large they don't like it.

You may have a chip on your shoulder due to your past experience, but here's MY past experience at a Fortune 500. There were four female programmers when I joined. NOBODY discriminated them, in fact they made up 40% of the team. Its just over three years three of them decided to take non-engineering jobs because they CHOSE to. The other one is still a programmer and enjoys it. Only one of the other guys decided to take a non-engineering promotion.

I'm a woman and I was raised in a seemingly progressive feminist household (with a mom who's a surgeon, no less). Nevertheless, both society and my family expected me to be good at history, literature, languages, art, ballet, piano and other such "feminine" pursuits - and nothing else. I excelled at math and formal logic, but it was still expected that I major in the humanities or social sciences, which I did. In high school, when I brought home Cs in physics, everyone sighed, but if I dared bring home a C in literature, there'd be a serious conversation and no TV for a month. It's very difficult for men, even those harboring the best intentions, to understand that we're only now getting to the point where girls who are into STEM at school aren't weird tomboy butch freaks. This may not be as pronounced of a problem at the best schools in the country, but generally, that's how it goes.

Now imagine your family, friends, teachers, etc pushing you, explicitly and implicitly, out of STEM and towards what is "normal" and "natural" for girls to be good at. For twenty plus years. I'm a self-taught front-end dev (who heard nothing but "why don't you go read a book or something instead of being on the computer all day" growing up), and I'm now getting into back-end. Every time I hit a snag with Ruby, which I work on in my spare time, my subconscious reverts back to "why am I doing this", because succeeding in something like this was never presented to me as a priority growing up, and it takes tremendous mental effort to get over that. None of my (highly educated and accomplished) female friends work with anything even remotely related to technology; most of them think I'm just "on the computer a lot". I have no accessible female role models or mentors in this field - I can read all the leaning in articles ever written, but I don't have anyone 35+ I can look to and say "I want to be her in 10 years". But I have a job in politics, which will be there whether I do well or poorly at Ruby, and that's a cushion that's very tempting to fall back on when it's 3 in the morning and I have non-Ruby work in five hours and I can't get something to work.

This is why "by and large they don't like it" is a ridiculous sweeping generalization - you have no idea whether they took non-engineering jobs because they "didn't like it" or because they went down the path that society has been telling them is the one of least resistance for their gender since they were born. Unless you've been a woman in this industry (and even I'm still an outside observer), you have no idea what it's like.

" I’m a self-taught front-end dev (who heard nothing but “why don’t you go read a book or something instead of being on the computer all day” growing up), and I’m now getting into back-end."

I'm a guy and my parents would tell me this all the time. Maybe you thought you were getting this treatment because you were a girl when it's actually quite a common thing for parents to say?

It is quite common at age 13-15; by 18-20, however, the boys this was said about typically become the subjects of gleaming parent-to-parent dinner party conversations ("Bobby's really great with computers and is building _______!"). The few girls who tough it out in this field in the face of rampant sexism throughout high school and college typically become the subjects of "Sally does something with technology"-style conversations. With very rare exceptions, Sally ends up being compared to someone else's daughter who became a lawyer or went to build wells in Africa.

Another thing that people seem to forget - for all of us, our initial formative period was largely guided by our parents. Our parents are the products of a society where higher education only became accessible to women 100 years ago, and <em>using</em> that education for anything beyond maybe teaching grade school until you got married only became acceptable in the past what, 40 years? Parents buy their children toys and accoutrements based on what that society has been telling them is appropriate for each gender (see: any baby shower for a girl anywhere) - four-year-olds don't drive themselves to Toys R Us. Stop by any toy section of any big store anywhere and consider how we expect girls to grow into women with an interest in STEM when 95% of the "girl" section consists of pink dollhouses and Easy-Bake Ovens. We're FINALLY getting to the point where parents (one set in a hundred) are buying their daughters Goldiblox and robots, but even then, their daughters - wanting to fit in at school - are seeing their friends playing with dollhouses and Easy-Bake Ovens purchased for them by parents who aren't reading profound studies on obstacles to gender empowerment in The Atlantic. Not because they're bad parents; they're just the products of the society in which they were raised.

My colleague wants his 3-year-old daughter to major in biochemistry at Stanford. She's already coming home from a fancy-ass progressive preschool in an upscale neighborhood of DC telling her (highly educated, progressive, feminist) parents there are "girl toys" and "boy toys". Now imagine what's happening in the rest of the country.

+10

The Harvey Mudd College in So Cal computer science graduates are over 50% female. President Maria Klawe is doing much to change these stats. One idea is to call the university to connect to some of their amazing alumni. https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/president-klawe/

<p>A diverse work environment is greater than the sake of diversity. Having a balance of race and sex can increase employee morale and improve company performance.</p>

<p>Totally just made that up, but it sounds accurate.</p>

You know what's HILARIOUS. A woman has never been elected president because she is a WOMAN. And you know since, forever, women haven't been given jobs even though they are the best possible candidate for the job because they are women.

Modern corporations have never hired the best possible candidate for the job, they've hired the best MALE candidate for the job. Now things are changing, slightly, and us ladies have a real shot at positions that have been held by men forever.

I'm sorry that being born a man no longer gives you the same privileges it did twenty years ago in the work force but guess what, you can legally drive in Saudi Arabia and if you marry a woman in Pakistan that your parents hate you won't get stoned to death. I think the cards are pretty much in your favor so chill out on the 'hire the best possible candidate' BS.

Discrimination is frustrating isn't it?

I live in a country where we have a woman president (she sucks in the job and is corrupted as hell, but we had many men presidents who were the same, so I don't blame that on the fact that she is a woman, in fact, it proves women are no different than men), and where we had another woman president in the 70s. In fact, our former Central Bank chairman was a woman, we have many women CEOs in companies, and even women Union Leaders. So I wouldn't say women inequality is a big problem.

However, I work in a tech Startup over here, and I have the same problem as the OP. 95%+ of developers are male. And the little amount of women who have either studied computer engineering or learnt to code on their own usually move to management positions quite far (my co-founder among them). Soon ago, however, we gave a woman a chance even though she was far from being the best candidate. The result: she cried about 2/3 times a day, and ended up leaving. I'm not saying this is always the case, but maybe women just don't like to code. If you like it, and we ever open up in the US, I'll be glad to hire you, but believe me, it's not the rule.

"Discrimination is frustrating isn’t it?"

It's not just frustrating, it's morally wrong - regardless of whether you're discriminating against men or women.

"You know what’s HILARIOUS. A woman has never been elected president because she is a WOMAN."

Are you serious? A woman has never been elected president because she's a woman? Maybe she's never been elected, cause she NEVER RAN? Ever thought of that?

You know, an African American has never been elected president either, UNTIL HE RAN! Then guess what happened? He got elected and then re-elected, even though he sucked!

What are you looking for? For them to hand the presidency to a woman? You want a woman president? Put your big girl panties on and run!

Besides, she says this when the most likely person to be next president is a woman.

I can only imagine the rageful reaction of the community if someone said that the other way around.

I have to say whether it's wrong or right, this happens all the time. People just don't confess it. <strong>Ever go to Hooters and be met by a male in short shorts and tiny tops?</strong> Personally, I love the idea of an all-female tech enterprise. Not saying that's what this person is trying to create but it would be nice to see. It's not even unusual to see major companies with few women or no women at all on top. So I'm all for it.

It's the same. It's like saying guys instead of men.

No it's not - the equivalent of girls is boys!

It's "guys and gals".

Or is that "guys and dolls" (yuck, women aren't dolls).

What I meant is that by saying "girls" he's not implying they are actually girls, and he's not disrespecting their intellectual capacity. It's incredible someone actually needs to state this, being so obvious.

So we should start pulling off men so that women are more comfortable, that is what you are saying?

no just be less douchey bro's and act professionally.

+10000

Right, because men don't have families?

And what percentage of men are the primary caregivers in their families? Exactly. That's why those programs focused on maternity leaves.