Let me repeat: women were a minority in medicine and law at one point. Why did getting asked out not prevent them from achieving parity in those fields?
Because entry into medicine is neither entrepreneurial nor social. You apply and you get in.
The medical professions evaluate gender trends by the number of women who go to medical school. Once you graduate medical school, you're on a track that leads straightforwardly to gainful employment. That allowed schools to be a focal point for policy changes to improve representation of women in the field. The same thing goes for law. My sister graduated UChicago law and got a lucrative, high-status biglaw job immediately based, as I understand it, pretty much on her track record in school.
No similar track exists for software, and, obviously, even less of a path exists in entrepreneurial technology, which is largely controlled by wealthy male gatekeepers.
Tangentially: a law or medical professor could be fired for aggressively propositioning a student. A successful investor can't be "fired".
But also: you dodged my question instead of addressing it. Do you actually believe that the experience of being targeted by sexual advances is the same if you're one women surrounded by men as it is if you're one of many women surrounded by an almost equal number of men?
Neither is entry into tech. Only entry into the extremely narrow "Sand Hill Road" style VC funded tech is entrepreneurial and social. There is a rigid heirarchical track for software much like law: stanford -> google, or MIT -> apple, or rutgers -> morgan stanley. Most of technology fits a track like this, in fact.
I didn't dodge your question, I pointed out why the answer was irrelevant. There are two ways to debunk a theory: directly (by showing a premise is false) and by contradiction (showing it implies a false conclusion). I'm doing the latter.
As for how women feel about being asked out, in my experience the primary determinant is how attractive she finds the asker. To relate a real life experience, if a woman is surrounded by firefighters and one of them asks her out, she probably won't mind. Not that the anecdotes really matter (see the point above about argument by contradiction).
This is demonstrably incorrect. All you have to do is read a few years of Patrick McKenzie's advice to underemployed tech workers to see how different the character of tech jobs is from medical jobs. Scoring by "status" or by compensation, the variance among tech jobs in the first 5 years of a tech career dwarfs those of a medical doctor. Some people with CS degrees end up working helpdesk or patch management. Some of them wind up writing J2EE LOB applications wiring up form fields to SQL columns over and over again. And some of them work in challenging roles that offer opportunities to build a career.
The difference between the high-status roles and the low-status ones isn't school, excepting possibly that an absurdly small subset of the industry (Stanford and MIT grads) have easier time avoiding helpdesk jobs.
The "rigid hierarchical track" you suggest exists for tech also doesn't exist. I have a single semester of university. If you want to make the pot rich enough, we can bet on whether I can get a full time job at Google or Apple. I'd warn you that I've got an information advantage on this bet.
Hiring in technology is warped and driven by bogus apocrypha. A tiny component of the overall demand is fed by truly credentialing universities. But the majority of the demand is fed by a pool of candidates not distinguished by the particulars of their degree. Instead, they're distinguished by ability to navigate hazing rituals.
Your last paragraph isn't an argument. It's what you'd like to believe is true. It doesn't even fit the anecdotal evidence we have here. Have you met a lot of VCs? I have. As a group, they tend to be attractive: fit, the product of school, career, and social tracks that build social (and athletic) skills. They're well dressed, which comes of having large amounts of disposable income. And yet, strangely: women founders appear not to be comfortable being propositioned by them. The only way your last graf works is if we assume that those women are simply lying.
Scoring by "status" or by compensation, the variance among tech jobs in the first 5 years of a tech career dwarfs those of a medical doctor.
The variance among law jobs in the first 5 years dwarfs those of a medical doctor. You cite your sister who got a biglaw job, which is more or less the legal equivalent of stanford -> google. Most lawyers don't get to biglaw just as most engineers don't work at google.
You've done a great job explaining why medicine has women, while law and computing don't.
But the majority of the demand is fed by a pool of candidates not distinguished by the particulars of their degree. Instead, they're distinguished by ability to navigate hazing rituals.
How does this differ from most other fields? Do you think HR, lawyers, accountants or management consultants don't have hazing rituals?
As for my last paragraph, it's simply an anecdotal observation. I'm not pushing it . I'm not accusing anyone of lying or disagreeing with their experience. I'm just pointing out that your theory predicts incorrect facts.
No: the overwhelming majority of law school graduates end up in established legal practices that employ many attorneys. It's possible that not even a plurality of CS graduates end up as software developers at software firms; a huge number of CS graduates end up writing line of business software for insurance companies, or on their QA teams.
Law schools can exert pressure on law firms in ways that CS programs can't exert pressure on technology firms.
Do law firm hires endure hazing rituals like those in technology? I don't know. I doubt it. First-year associate hires aren't high-stakes the way tech hires are; the legal profession is structured around an "up or out" process that admits entrants to the profession mechanically. The technology profession as a rule does not, and relies intensely on status indicators.
You've agreed with me on that last point in the past, so I'd be surprised to hear you contest it now.
Here it's worth noting: the law profession does have gender equality issues; they just take place at a tier of the profession higher than where they happen in technology. But consider the implication of law forestalling the gender reckoning and tech front-loading it: entrants to the law field start amongst a relatively balanced cohort of coworkers. They get a foothold. They get experience working on real projects for partners. They get a track record. They have a different experience than minority entrants to technology.
Once again: the feeling of being singled out by your gender when you represent a tiny minority is different than being approached when you have a solid peer group of the same gender.
Hey: while I'm at it: I consult for F500 companies that build LOB apps. You can imagine that banks and hedge funds are more concerned about security than cat-sharing startups. Women are in my experience over the last ~9 years better represented in software jobs at non-software companies than they are in startups. Tech employees at banks and insurance companies are hired more mechanically and with less rubber-chicken voodoo than they are at startups. I don't think this is a coincidence.
No: the overwhelming majority of law school graduates end up in established legal practices that employ many attorneys. It's possible that not even a plurality of CS graduates end up as software developers at software firms; a huge number of CS graduates end up writing line of business software for insurance companies, or on their QA teams.
I don't think I fully understand the preconditions for your theory, so let me try to carefully state it. Being asked out + diversity of work situations + mostly internal department rather than external firm + non-rigorous interview process => women won't go from 0 to 50%.
Did I miss any preconditions? If I did, could you carefully list them?
Fun fact: HR (lots of women) satisfies these properties, near as I can tell. HR drones certainly ask me stupid non-rigorous interview questions, I'm sure they ask the same of each other. So there should be a dearth of women in HR?
Incidentally, the process I'm doing here was described by Scott Alexander yesterday. Basically I'm "feynmaning" you - finding examples which satisfy your preconditions but not your conclusion. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-cu...
You've agreed with me on that last point in the past, so I'd be surprised to hear you contest it now.
Let me repeat myself one more time. I don't disagree with you on this. I also don't disagree with your claims about people's subjective feelings. I don't think it's unique to tech, which makes it a poor explanation of a tech-specific phenomenon. Finance certainly uses similar interview techniques, and mid-office finance (besides IT) has no shortage of women.
Incidentally, if your observations about banks/f500 vs startups are correct and generalizeable, then your theory explains part of the discrepancy. Specifically, it explains the delta between startups and f500, but not the delta between f500 tech and f500 HR. It's not the only explanation that part of the discrepancy - risk aversion also works, and to me seems simpler. But I can't immediately reject your theory for that portion of the discrepancy.
