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I don't feel the same. The last decade or so has seen an explosion of women show interest in joining the tech community. Ratio's on teams I've been on has great

I don't feel the same. The last decade or so has seen an explosion of women show interest in joining the tech community. Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career. I've been on several teams now where women have outnumbered men. In my experience, the ratio is now flipped when you look at the team as a whole (XFN, etc). I may be biased though as I've only worked at "premier" large tech companies and they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale. That being said, true senior roles in engineering (VP+) is still very male dominated. Part of that is the pipeline catching up and part of is that I see women leave engineering for other roles more often. For example I would say, in my experience, I've seen more women have an interest and engage in transitions to PM, designer, etc.

gizmo686 2y ago
> they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale. Slight tangent, but most large tech companies DEI programs were never really great at doing DEI at scale. They were mostly funnelling the existing pool of diverse candidates into them. The result is that companies without an active DEI program end up less diverse through no fault of their own.
- leetcrew 2y ago
  what is the mechanism for that "funneling" though? intentional programs to make diverse candidates feel more welcome? more money? if big tech is actively working to attract diverse candidates and other companies aren't keeping up, it doesn't sound like it's through no fault of their own that they can't retain those people.
  - gizmo686 2y ago
    Corporate DEI can be split into 3 broad buckets: 1) Recruitment 2) Retention 3) Sponsorship Retention improvements are generally a net positive for industry wide diversity. If someone leaves your company for harrasment reasons, they are more likely to leave the industry all together. Sponsorship is generally net positive as well. The funnelling I am talking about is entirely in the "recruitment" bucket. If you hire a woman software developer, they were already looking for a job. They already made a significant personal investment in getting the job. The industry is still enough if an employees market that they were probably going to get a job. You did nothing to bring that women into the industry. All you did is increase the chances that they end up working for you in particular. On the margins, this is still probably a net positive for industry wide diversity, but that is a much smaller effect then the chair shuffling effect. Of these three buckets, the most effective way of increasing your diversity numbers is in recruitment (unless you have horrid retention). In the current environment, there is no way for a large company to get anywhere near 50/50 without a significant investment in the recruitment bucket.
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    More money. Smaller companies can't compete with FAANG salaries. So when FAANG prioritizes hiring women, and there are still many fewer women than men in tech overall, smaller and poorer companies can't compete with the offers women are getting from FAANG.
    - pas 2y ago
      ... sure, on the other hand way less competition, and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training.
      - jimbokun 2y ago
        "way less competition"?
        pas 2y ago
        excuse my phrasing, I meant fewer applicants for the position, so less competition for job-seekers
      - Jensson 2y ago
        > and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training. Not before FAANG hired the promising juniors first, FAANG are very willing to give on the job training. Or at least were a couple of years ago.
        pas 2y ago
        That seems to imply that they singlehandedly (or fivehandedly) exhausted the promising pool and kept it dry since! But that's not the case, right? So whatever they did - while definitely important at the margin does not completely change the bulk of the market. We can look at their employment numbers, they did not hire millions of people, yet there are millions of capable juniors globally eager to jump head-first into software development. Bootcamps closed because hiring slowed down. (Because ZIRP ended, everyone doubted that the Fed can do a soft landing, and on top of that the certified bubble of AI-mania meant that companies increased spending on buzzword driven development, and ... on top of all this increasing cloud costs and slowing growth meant that no one felt the need to hire juniors.) Oh, and of course due to the amazing tech demos where this or that LLM created a site/game in React in a few minutes, or even issued a PR, the meme of end of coding led to a pretty significant belief about the end of juniors.
- ilickpoolalgae 2y ago
  This may be true. As I noted, I've only worked at very "desirable" companies so my views are potentially skewed. That being said, I can't imagine that DEI has gotten significantly worse across the industry while vastly improving at the top end but I have no data to back that up.
Volundr 2y ago
> Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career. I don't have data on this other than my own anecdata, so big grain of salt, but I think it's varies pretty widely by company and/or industry. In my last few jobs I've had several in which the engineering teams were overwhelmingly male, while in my current role it's more balanced. Further anecdata but in my most recent job search the engineers interviewing me were overwhelmingly male with only a few women.
Jensson 2y ago
Sounds like you went into more and more female spaces, as the field as a whole has barely changed, and if you compare to 20-30 years go it is worse. https://swe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Percent_WomenSTEM_1980-2023-1024x661.png https://swe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Percent_WomenSTEM...
- jimbokun 2y ago
  DATA! Thank you!
johnnyanmac 2y ago
It's hard to say, to be honest. In that same decade we had some of the most vicious backlash to POC/women yet. Maybe that's always been there and the awareness at least help clear 5% of the swamp. But in many ways the situation feels (in my perception) even worse. If anything, this is the time such orgs are needed the most. But yes, it's definitely a large company thing. I could count the number of female programmers at my first job (~150 staff, maybe 80 programmers) on one hand. 2nd was a huge conglomerate and a better mix, even if older personell skewed male. 3rd was a ~150 startup (more like 100 programmers) and back to the "on one hand" situation. I completely agree with more of a shift to management and design for women compared to being "in the field" as programmers.
burutthrow1234 2y ago
It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead to lower lifetime comp and less "impressive" titles.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc Women tend to seek out such roles all on their own, there is no encouragement needed. Just adding "design" to a job title massively increases how many women applies, even if the job itself is unchanged. Just rebrand software engineers to software designers and suddenly you get many women, even though they do the same thing.
  - ygjb 2y ago
    That's a pretty bold claim to make without data to back it up.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      The comment I responded to didn't have any data either, not sure why I'd need data for a similar kind of comment while they don't? The university I went to did that and they said it was to get more women, and easily got over 50% women into engineering fields just by adding design to the name of the degree. It is a well known trick, names matters.
  - petsfed 2y ago
    I wonder if the perception of engineering as a "men's field" factors into that. Like "every engineering role I've ever had, I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man, maybe the culture is different around 'designer'". Likewise for "technologist". More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of engineers' perception of inequity within their field basically devolves to "well, there's nothing about the material that's sexist, I don't understand why more women don't want to do it". It reveals a staggering lack of imagination and empathy, especially within a group that stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as young people.

gizmo686 2y ago

> they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale. Slight tangent, but most large tech companies DEI programs were never really great at doing DEI at scale. They were mostly funnelling the existing pool of diverse candidates into them. The result is that companies without an active DEI program end up less diverse through no fault of their own.

leetcrew 2y ago
what is the mechanism for that "funneling" though? intentional programs to make diverse candidates feel more welcome? more money? if big tech is actively working to attract diverse candidates and other companies aren't keeping up, it doesn't sound like it's through no fault of their own that they can't retain those people.
- gizmo686 2y ago
  Corporate DEI can be split into 3 broad buckets: 1) Recruitment 2) Retention 3) Sponsorship Retention improvements are generally a net positive for industry wide diversity. If someone leaves your company for harrasment reasons, they are more likely to leave the industry all together. Sponsorship is generally net positive as well. The funnelling I am talking about is entirely in the "recruitment" bucket. If you hire a woman software developer, they were already looking for a job. They already made a significant personal investment in getting the job. The industry is still enough if an employees market that they were probably going to get a job. You did nothing to bring that women into the industry. All you did is increase the chances that they end up working for you in particular. On the margins, this is still probably a net positive for industry wide diversity, but that is a much smaller effect then the chair shuffling effect. Of these three buckets, the most effective way of increasing your diversity numbers is in recruitment (unless you have horrid retention). In the current environment, there is no way for a large company to get anywhere near 50/50 without a significant investment in the recruitment bucket.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  More money. Smaller companies can't compete with FAANG salaries. So when FAANG prioritizes hiring women, and there are still many fewer women than men in tech overall, smaller and poorer companies can't compete with the offers women are getting from FAANG.
  - pas 2y ago
    ... sure, on the other hand way less competition, and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training.
    - jimbokun 2y ago
      "way less competition"?
      - pas 2y ago
        excuse my phrasing, I meant fewer applicants for the position, so less competition for job-seekers
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training. Not before FAANG hired the promising juniors first, FAANG are very willing to give on the job training. Or at least were a couple of years ago.
      - pas 2y ago
        That seems to imply that they singlehandedly (or fivehandedly) exhausted the promising pool and kept it dry since! But that's not the case, right? So whatever they did - while definitely important at the margin does not completely change the bulk of the market. We can look at their employment numbers, they did not hire millions of people, yet there are millions of capable juniors globally eager to jump head-first into software development. Bootcamps closed because hiring slowed down. (Because ZIRP ended, everyone doubted that the Fed can do a soft landing, and on top of that the certified bubble of AI-mania meant that companies increased spending on buzzword driven development, and ... on top of all this increasing cloud costs and slowing growth meant that no one felt the need to hire juniors.) Oh, and of course due to the amazing tech demos where this or that LLM created a site/game in React in a few minutes, or even issued a PR, the meme of end of coding led to a pretty significant belief about the end of juniors.
ilickpoolalgae 2y ago
This may be true. As I noted, I've only worked at very "desirable" companies so my views are potentially skewed. That being said, I can't imagine that DEI has gotten significantly worse across the industry while vastly improving at the top end but I have no data to back that up.

Volundr 2y ago

> Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career. I don't have data on this other than my own anecdata, so big grain of salt, but I think it's varies pretty widely by company and/or industry. In my last few jobs I've had several in which the engineering teams were overwhelmingly male, while in my current role it's more balanced. Further anecdata but in my most recent job search the engineers interviewing me were overwhelmingly male with only a few women.

Jensson 2y ago

Sounds like you went into more and more female spaces, as the field as a whole has barely changed, and if you compare to 20-30 years go it is worse. https://swe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Percent_WomenSTEM_1980-2023-1024x661.png https://swe.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Percent_WomenSTEM...

jimbokun 2y ago
DATA! Thank you!

johnnyanmac 2y ago

It's hard to say, to be honest. In that same decade we had some of the most vicious backlash to POC/women yet. Maybe that's always been there and the awareness at least help clear 5% of the swamp. But in many ways the situation feels (in my perception) even worse. If anything, this is the time such orgs are needed the most. But yes, it's definitely a large company thing. I could count the number of female programmers at my first job (~150 staff, maybe 80 programmers) on one hand. 2nd was a huge conglomerate and a better mix, even if older personell skewed male. 3rd was a ~150 startup (more like 100 programmers) and back to the "on one hand" situation. I completely agree with more of a shift to management and design for women compared to being "in the field" as programmers.

burutthrow1234 2y ago

It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead to lower lifetime comp and less "impressive" titles.

Jensson 2y ago
> and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc Women tend to seek out such roles all on their own, there is no encouragement needed. Just adding "design" to a job title massively increases how many women applies, even if the job itself is unchanged. Just rebrand software engineers to software designers and suddenly you get many women, even though they do the same thing.
- ygjb 2y ago
  That's a pretty bold claim to make without data to back it up.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    The comment I responded to didn't have any data either, not sure why I'd need data for a similar kind of comment while they don't? The university I went to did that and they said it was to get more women, and easily got over 50% women into engineering fields just by adding design to the name of the degree. It is a well known trick, names matters.
- petsfed 2y ago
  I wonder if the perception of engineering as a "men's field" factors into that. Like "every engineering role I've ever had, I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man, maybe the culture is different around 'designer'". Likewise for "technologist". More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of engineers' perception of inequity within their field basically devolves to "well, there's nothing about the material that's sexist, I don't understand why more women don't want to do it". It reveals a staggering lack of imagination and empathy, especially within a group that stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as young people.