According
to the Harvard Business Review, 41% of women working in tech eventually
end up leaving the field (compared to just 17% of men), and I can understand
why.I first learned to code at age 16, and am now in my 30s. I have a math PhD
from Duke. I still remember my pride in a “knight’s tour” algorithm that I
wrote in C++ in high school; the awesome mind warp of an interpreter that can
interpret itself (a Scheme course my first semester of college); my fascination
with numerous types of matrix factorizations in C in grad school; and my
excitement about relational databases and web scrapers in my first real job.
Over a decade after I first learned to program, I still loved
algorithms, but felt alienated and depressed by tech culture. While
at a company that was a particularly poor culture fit, I was so unhappy that I
hired a career counselor to discuss alternative career paths. Leaving tech
would have been devastating, but staying was tough.I’m not the stereotypical male
programmer in his early 20s looking to “work hard, play hard”. I do work hard,
but I’d rather wake up early than stay up late, and I was already thinking
ahead to when my husband and I would need to coordinate our schedules
with daycare drop-offs and pick-ups. Kegerators and ping pong
tables don’t appeal to me. I’m not aggressive enough to thrive in
a combative work environment. Talking to other female friends
working in tech, I know that I’m not alone in my frustrations.
When researcher Kieran Snyder interviewed 716
women who left tech after an average tenure of 7 years, almost all of
them said they liked the work itself, but cited discriminatory environments as
their main reason for leaving. In NSF-funded research,Nadya Fouad surveyed
5,300 women who had earned engineering degrees (of all types) over the
last 50 years, and only 38% of them are still working as engineers. Fouad
summarized her findings on why they leave with “It’s the climate, stupid!”
This is a huge, unnecessary, and expensive loss of talent in a
field facing a supposed talent shortage. Given that tech is currently one of
the major drivers of the US economy, this impacts everyone. Any tech company
struggling to hire and retain as many employees as they need should
particularly care about addressing this problem.
Your company is NOT a
meritocracy and you are NOT “gender-blind”
Nobody wants to think of themselves as being sexist. However, a
number of studies have shown that identical job applications or resumes are
evaluated differently based on whether they are labeled with a male or female
name. When men and women read identical scripts containing entrepreneurial
pitches or salary negotiations, they are evaluated differently. Both men
and women have been shown to have these biases. These biases occur
unconsciously and without intention or malice.
Here is a sampling of just a few of the studies on unconscious
gender bias:
- Investors
preferred entrepreneurial ventures pitched by a man than an identical
pitch from a woman by a rate of 68% to 32% in a study conducted
jointly by HBS, Wharton, and MIT Sloan. “Male-narrated pitches were rated
as more persuasive, logical and fact-based than were the same pitches
narrated by a female voice.”
- In a randomized,
double-blind study by Yale researchers, science faculty at 6 major
institutions evaluated applications for a lab manager position. Applications
randomly assigned a male name were rated as significantly more competent
and hirable and offered a higher starting salary and more career
mentoring, compared to identical applications assigned female names.
- When men and
women negotiated a job offer by reading identical scripts for a Harvard
and CMU study, women who asked for a higher salary were rated as
being more difficult to work with and less nice, but men were not
perceived negatively for negotiating.
- Psychology
faculty were sent CVs for an applicant (randomly assigned male or female
name), and both men and women were significantly more likely to hire
a male applicant than a female applicant with an identical record.
- In
248 performance reviews of high-performers in tech, negative
personality criticism (such as abrasive, strident, or irrational) showed
up in 85% of reviews for women and just 2% of reviews for men. It is
ridiculous to assume that 85% of women have personality problems and that
only 2% of men do.
Most concerningly, a study from Yale researchers shows
that perceiving yourself as objective is actually correlated with showing
even more bias. The mere desire to not be biased is not enough to overcome
decades of cultural conditioning and can even lend
more credence to post-hoc justifications.Acknowledging that you
have biases that conflict with your values does not make you a bad
person. It’s a natural result of our culture. The important thing is
to find ways to eliminate them. Blindly believing your company is
ameritocracy not only does not make it so, but will actually make it even
harder to address implicit bias.
Bias is typically justified post-hoc. Our initial subconscious
impression of the female applicant is negative, and then we find logical
reasons to justify it. For instance, in the above study by Yale
researchers if the male applicant for police chief had more street smarts
and the female applicant had more formal education, evaluators decided that
street smarts were the most important trait, and if the names were reversed,
evaluators decided that formal education was the most important trait.
Good News and Bad News
The Bad News…
Because of the high attrition rate for women working in
tech, teaching more girls and women to code is not enough to solve this
problem. Because of the above well-documented differences in how men and women
are perceived, training women to negotiate better and be more assertive is also
not enough to solve this problem.Female voices are perceived as less
logical and less persuasive than male voices.Women are perceived negatively for
being too assertive. If tech culture is going to change, everyone needs to
change, especially men and most especially leaders.
The professional and emotional costs to women for speaking out
about discrimination can be large (in terms of retaliation, being perceived as
less employable or difficult to work with, or companies then seeking to portray
them as poor performers). I know a number of female software engineers who
will privately share stories of sexism with trusted friends that we are not
willing to share publicly because of the risk. This is why it is important
to proactively address this issue. There is more than enough published research
and personal stories from those who have chosen to
publicly share to confirm that this is a widespread issue in the tech industry.
…and the Good News
Change is possible. Although these are schools and not tech
companies, Harvey Mudd and Harvard Business School provide inspiring case
studies. Strong leaders at both schools enacted sweeping changes to address
previously male-centric cultures.Harvey Mudd has raised the percentage of
computer science majors that are women to 40%(the national average is 18%).
The top 5% of Harvard Business School graduates rose from being
approximately 20% women to closer to 40% and the GPA gap between men and
women closed, all within one year of making a number of comprehensive,
structural changes.
So What Can We Do About It?
These recommendations on what companies could do to improve their
cultures are based on a mix of research and personal experience. My goal is to
have a positive focus, and I would love it if you walked away with at least one
concrete goal for making constructive change at your company.
Train managers
It is very common at tech start-ups to promote talented engineers
to management without providing them with any management training or oversight,
particularly at rapidly growing companies where existing leadership is
stretched thin. These new managers are often not aware of any of the research
on motivation, human psychology, or bias. Untrained, unsupervised managers
cause more harm to women than men, although regardless, all employees would
benefit from new managers receiving training, mentorship, and supervision.
Formalize hiring and
promotion criteria
In the Yale study mentioned above regarding applicants
for police chief, getting participants to formalize their hiring criteria before
they looked at applications (i.e. deciding if formal education or street smarts
was more important) reduced bias. I was once on a team where the hiring
criteria were amorphous and where the manager frequently overrode majority
votes by the team because of “gut feeling”. It seemed like unconscious bias
played a large role in decisions, but because of our haphazard approach to
hiring, there was no way of truly knowing.
Leaders, speak up and act
in concrete ways
Leadership sets the values and culture for a company, so
the onus is on them to make it clear that they value
diversity. Younger engineers and managers will follow their perceptions of
what executives value. In the cases of positive change at Harvey
Mudd and Harvard Business School, leadership at the top was
spearheading these initiatives. Intel is going to begin tying executives’
compensation to whether they achieve diversity goals on their teams. As
Kelly Shuster, director for the Denver chapter of Women Who Code has pointed
out, leaders have to get rid of employees who engage in sexist or racist
behavior. Otherwise, the company is at risk of losing talented employees, and
is sending a message to all employees that discrimination is okay.
Don’t rely on
self-nominations or self-evaluations
There is a well-documented confidence gap between men
and women. Don’t rely on people nominating themselves for promotions or to
get the most interesting projects, since women are less likely to put
themselves forward. Google relies on employees nominating themselves for
promotions and data revealed that women were much less likely to do so (and
thus much less likely to receive promotions). When senior women began hosting
workshops encouraging women to nominate themselves, the number of women at
Google receiving promotions increased. Groups are more likely to pick male
leaders because of their over-confidence, compared to more qualified women who
are less confident. Don’t rely heavily on self-evaluations in performance
scoring. Women perceive their abilities as being worse than they are,
whereas men have an inflated sense of their abilities.
Formally audit employee
data
Confirm that men and women with the same qualifications are
earning the same amount and that they are receiving promotions and raises at
similar rates (and if not, explore why). Make sure that gendered criticism
(such as calling a woman strident or abrasive) is not used in performance
reviews. The trend of tech companies releasing their diversity statistics is a
good one, but given the high industry attrition rate for women, they should
also start releasing their retention rates broken down by gender. I would like
to see companies release statistics on the rates at which women are given
promotions or raises compared to men, and how performance evaluation scores
compare between men and women. By publicly sharing data, companies can hold
themselves accountable and can track changes over time.
Don’t emphasize face time
A culture that rewards facetime and encourages people to regularly
stay late or eat dinner at the office puts employees with families at a
disadvantage (particularly mothers), and research shows that working
excess hours does not actually improve productivity in the long-term since
workers begin to experience burn out after just a few weeks. Furthermore, when
employees burn out and quit, the cost of recruiting and hiring a new
employee is typically 20% of the annual salary for that position.
Create a collaborative
environment
Stanford research studies document that women are more likely
to dislike competitive environments compared to men and are more likely to
select out of them, regardless of their ability. Given that women are
perceived negatively for being too assertive, it is tougher for women to
succeed in a highly aggressive environment as well. Men who speak up more
than their peers are rewarded with 10% higher ratings, whereas women who
speak up more are punished with 14% lower ratings. Creating a competitive
culture where people must fight for their ideas makes it much tougher for women
to succeed.
Offer maternity leave
Over 10% of the 716 women who left tech in Kieran
Snyder’s research left because of inadequate maternity leave. Several were
pressured to return from leave early or to be on call while on leave. These
women did not want to be stay-at-home-parents, they just wanted to recover
after giving birth.Just as you would not pressure someone to return to work
without recovery time after a major surgery, women need time to physically heal
after delivering a baby. When Google increased paid maternity leave from
12 weeks to 18 weeks, the number of new moms who quit Google dropped by
50%.
Some final thoughts…
A note on racial bias
There is a huge amount of research on unconscious racial
bias, and tech companies need to address this issue. As Nichole Sanchez, VP of
Social Impact at GitHub, describes, calls for diversity are often solely
about adding more white women, which is deeply problematic. Racial bias adds
another intersectional dimension to the discrimination that women of color experience. In interviews
with 60 women of color who work in STEM research, 100% of them had experienced
discrimination, and the particular negative stereotypes they faced differed
depending on their race. A resume with a traditionally African-American
sounding name is less likely to be called for an interview than the same
resume with a traditionally white sounding name. I do not have the
personal experience to speak about this topic and instead encourage you to read
these blog posts and articles by and about tech workers of color on the
challenges they’ve faced: Erica Baker(Slack engineer, former Google
engineer), Justin Edmund(designer, Pinterest’s 7th employee), Aston
Motes (Engineer, Dropbox’s 1st employee), and Angelica Coleman (developer
advocate at Zendesk, formerly at Dropbox).
About the Author
Rachel Thomas is currently teaching software development
at all-women Hackbright Academy, a job that she loves. She wants all women
to have the opportunity (and I mean truly have the opportunity, without
implicit or explicit discrimination) to learn how to program — knowing
software development provides so many career and financial
possibilities; it’s intellectually rewarding and fun; and being a creator is deeply
satisfying. Although many women have frustrating experiences of sexism, she
also knows women who have found companies where they’re happily thriving.
Article by Rachel Thomas (An Instructor/Software Engineer/Data
Scientist)
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