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Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

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551 points adrianhon | 1 comments | 08 Apr 24 15:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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toolz ◴[08 Apr 24 19:57 UTC] No.39973124[source]▶
I do believe there are unique challenges to being a woman in tech, but the odds seem in favor of women doing well both back in the 70's and today with todays stats having roughly 20% of CS grads being female while some 23% of SWEs are female. That suggests there are more women in software jobs than women who have been pursing that career academically. What stats do you see that suggest the odds are against women in tech? I frequently recommend tech as a good field for young girls, but I'll probably not do that anymore if the odds are truly against them.
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leononame ◴[08 Apr 24 20:01 UTC] No.39973152[source]▶
How ist 20%/23% good? Am I reading the numbers wrong? 40%, that I could agree on. But 23% is very low.

Another thing is culture. The in the company's where I've worked at, how the men talked about women was pretty off-putting to be honest. They didn't do it in front of women (obviously), but even your nerdy developers would drop comments that had me wondering whether I was really in the ckrrect field. I'm sure the women in those places notice that even if it's behind their backs.

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ekms ◴[08 Apr 24 20:21 UTC] No.39973307[source]▶
23% > 20% which means if someone goes into the field of computer programming they're more likely to remain in the field if they are a woman than if they are a man. "remain in the field" is used as a proxy for success.

You could argue about whether or not it's a good proxy for success, but your response sounds like you think women would be more likely to drop out of the field alltogether than men, which doesnt appear to be true

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1. leononame ◴[08 Apr 24 21:11 UTC] No.39973764[source]▶
Does it really say that or are women just slightly more probable to enter the field without a degree?

And I'd argue it's a pretty bad proxy. Because the field might be growing (or shrinking) and percentages don't mean anything. 23% of 10k is less than 20% of 5k, for example. The percentage numbers don't really indicate whether someone will stay in the field, it's just a number that's highly dependent on a lot of variables and a very bad indicator for "people are staying in the field". I'm happy to be corrected, it's just how I read this.

Additionally, if your assumption is that 23%>20%, that would kind of mean that it's capped at 23%, right? Once more the CS degree quota is higher than 23%, following your logic, that would be an indicator that women are more likely to leave the field because it naturally gravitates towards 23%. But that's not based on anything, you could argue just as well that it's an indicator that more women are starting to take interest in CS as a career.