The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

What sexist twaddle

Why is The Register posting this sexist idiocy? Why the attack on 'boys clubs' and not the multiple corporate funded Women in Technology groups that promote only one gender?

Women show far greater in-group bias than men, multiple attempts to remove gender from technology job interview processes have resulted in worse outcomes for women (demonstrating that existing processes favour them), politicians are continually pushing for gendered laws that favour women (e.g. the current Domestic Violence bill going through Parliament that expressly demands that the law recognises women's issues despite 40% of victims being male) and the education system is so horrifically gender biased that in a decade "must have a degree" jobs are going to be dropping that requirement because they won't be able to find qualified applicants.

Already single women under 40 earn more than single men, women working part time earn more than men working part time and women that don't have children achieve career progress on a par with their male counterparts.

I'm perfectly comfortable working with and for competent people, and I truly don't give a fuck what gender they are. So focus on finding and promoting those people instead of pushing divisive identity politics. I find this article not just sexist and offensive but also insulting to the many capable women that I've worked with, who succeed on their merits and don't need condescending policies from ignorant men.

Not Just Women

I think these campaigns fail when they make it about 'women'. Considering "Brockman hosted "Billionaire Dinners" through the 1990s and 2000s, events where the wealthy and powerful rubbed shoulders with the best and brightest. Yet, with very few exceptions, invitations to these events went to men of influence and power. " (my emphasis). The rich and powerful are invited to these things. If you are part of the wrong social class (especially in the UK) then you have virtually no chance regardless of your gender. By focussing on just women's lack of opportunity it breeds resentment amongst the many men who also have no opportunity to progress which in turn makes them less likely to be willing to support women in their fight against inequality in those areas of their life where gender bias really does make a difference. Inequality should be fought on behalf of the disadvantaged where ever it occurs regardless of people's gender (race, sexual orientation etc).

FTAO ...... The Perfumed Garden Cat House for Exciting Almightily Excited Shenanigans*

Only when we start to fear the power of the "girls' nights out", when the fates of male colleagues get decided on a whim, will we begin to understand the scope of our error, how much has been lost — and how much will need to be repaid.

Oh please, you cannot be serious whenever All Below is Available .....

Only when we start to exercise and master the power of the "girls' nights out", when the fates of male colleagues get decided on a heavenly whim, will all begin to understand the scope of our powers which are so very much more than just what desire offers to fulfil with an inclusive conclusive mutually rewarding satisfaction, for then is everything else also Readily Available for Market Offerings.

I Kid U Not ‽ .

* SMARTR Red Light Territory for Other Not Real World Experiences ..... Private Intellectual Property Pads for Pandoran Pilots and Pirates ..... ESPecial CyberIntelAIgents

Okay, I admit we've jumped ahead a tad here, but because of what follows all of this, is it worthwhile to ponder and file away to secure memory for Future Recall and Present Reflection.

Beginning to see.

"We're beginning to see how an entire generation of women found their way forward in computer science effectively barred by misogyny at the highest levels."

Perhaps. But the second half of the sentence links to an article about Richard Stallman. First, I'm not sure whether "creep" and "misogynist" are wholly overlapping categories, and most of the chatter around Stallman has been about creepiness. Second, the article does not establish that he barred anyone from anything. Finally, what highest levels did he control? Not hiring in the Microsoft or FAANG world.

vive la difference

As I have said before, there were a wide diverse bunch of people working in IT companies in the seventies and early eighties. Not just in terms of sexes but also in terms of attitudes, outlooks and in ways of going about doing their jobs and solving problems. Things have changed between now and then and the IT industry is a much more mono cultured, insular and a much less fun place to work. So what has changed?

In part it must have something to do with computer industry and the rise of the PHB, but I think it also has something to do with larger cultural changes and the increasing focus on fiscal targets in a globalised market. As others have said, it's complicated. But I do think that concentrating on one aspect of a person, their sex, is not very edifying.

People working as mounted policeman and orchestral conductors apparently have a preponderance of left handers. Is this a reason to castigate their recruitment policies and demand a pro-right handed policy? Professional athletes are disproportionately taller than the general

population (as in fact are company executives) . Should we demand equal height representation.

I know those are trivial and silly examples, but I also think that viewing the world through a lens where peoples sex is their most important, indeed their only characteristic of any note, is also silly.

Seeing the whole person and be more tolerant of their differences (not just their sex) would be a good place to start and reinvigorate the IT workplace.

If it's just a matter of the board level

If the idea is to get more women onto the board level, and we can't find women who appear suitable: why not just appoint some who don't seem suitable?

In how many companies does the board do anything useful anyway?

Motherhood

There is one major reason why there are fewer women than men going into STEM and that is is the evolutionary pressure to have children. Having a child has a major interference with education and working. For a woman to be sufficiently established in a STEM career to be able to take time off for children usually requires delaying having children till after 25. In non-technical fields, the education is often shorter and a break in the career to care for children does not have as much impact.

For larger companies (>200 employees) having a creche/day care center can help women back into their career with minimum disruption but few companies provide such a facility.

"Could it be, as Harvard President Lawrence Summers publicly mused 15 years ago, that women just don't have the brains for such analytic tasks?"

That's not what he said, and you know it ...

Twenty-six Men and a Girl

A mostly male environment is hostile and uninviting to females. In my 1986 class there was one female electronics student, and she was always one of the two students pulled out of class to do college publicity, which she hated but went along with to encourage future female students.

The workplace was incredibly sexist then, like nude calendars on walls, but the few women engineers in the workplace were treated fairly decently. Things seemed to get better into the '90s, almost too PC - I recall my boss being told to remove an innocuous photo of a girl band from his cubicle. And then things got worse again, not just in the workplace but in society. I blamed 'lads mags' but internet porn probably had a bad effect too. Then in the 2000s things got much worse, the whole Gamergate / entitled InCel 8Chann misogynist mob mentality.

The best ten software engineers I've worked with are female. The fewer hardware female engineers I've known were okay, average, but less successful. I guessed that is a bias to soft and hard but that's superficial. In my youth women got taught at school how to touch-type, so they could be secretaries. Typing is a key skill in coding efficiently. Of course a brain that can process logic and maths is essential, but those skills aren't dependent on gender.

One female boss laughed at me looking at the keyboard when I typed - she could churn out a perfect screen of text in the time it took me to complete a paragraph. I explained to her though that was the speed my brain worked at, I was thinking it through as I was typing it and there was no use in typing faster than my brain worked. Hell, this has taken me half an hour to write.

Existance Proof.

The thesis of this article seems to be that men are jerks that should be viewed with suspicion. A dim recognition of being maligned results in a rash of odd counter arguments which pretty much confirm the thesis. Well Done!

I have spent 30+ years in software, in companies ranging from very small to quite large. Consistently, these work environments have been toxic, not just for women, but especially for women. Studying the phenomena could keep loads of evolutionary biologists occupied for decades., How do they manage to reproduce?

During the 1990s, when "don't ask don't tell" was the closest the US could come to a decent strategy for managing sexual diversity in its armed forces, I couldn't come to grips with the issue at all. I thought that an advantage of having a sexual orientation unaligned with the expectations of the military was that you could avoid military service. Why would anyone, regardless of orientation, do that?

I feel the same about women in tech. The tech industry is awful; why would you want to work with these people? Cave-dwelling INCEL idiot savants that think they are masters of the universe. Lock em in a room, slide pizza under the door, and turn on the sprinklers every couple of weeks.

Great Idea

I think that’s a very good idea. I am fed up of working in all male teams. We have twenty-five team members and only one, in India, is female. That’s ridiculous. When I did IT at Leicester Poly in the early 80s, we had two women out of sixty students and they both dropped out. Pah! It seems to me to be the parents and teachers that are mostly to blame. My 7-year old daughter is going to be an engineer or similar, I hope. She has a doll, some pink stuff but several construction sets which she loves, two railway sets, model dinosaurs, cars, aeroplanes, guns and is learning to code. Come on you parents, get your daughters sorted out.

Enough is enough

I've carved out my own niche because I was never on the most recommended victims list.

How many Decades have we given Women and Minorities advantages over straight white males?

I've done ok and will be out of the maze soon but what I see around me is sad...Identity Politics, who would have think it?

When you seek to remedy by imposing the same bias you are fighting you lose.

Most women in big tech are business people anyways, the same people that cheered for Steve Jobs....get me?

"we will need a long period – at least a generation – where women are favoured over men" has been standard practice at many large companies for many years. It is called "hiring to quota".

Like many articles of this type, there is confusion between actual discrimination and politically motivated synthesis of discrimination. The “equality of outcome” proposed by the author indicates that the latter is the case here. Jumping on the Epstein bandwagon is all the proof needed!

The facts are that less females enter university to do subjects such as computer science, and this has always been the case. The question is why ... in my experience with 18 year old kids, it is amazing how few female students show any interest at all? - despite all manner of interventions to try to get them interested.

Until we see 50% of the tech population being female, we shouldn’t be expecting 50% of leadership to be female either. Attempts to force this outcome will cause resentment amongst people who are driven by logic and mathematics - they are not interested in or impressed by virtue signaling or political correctness, just logic.

Just think how much progress would be made if computers were programmed with virtuous statements and politically correct syntax and not with logic!

It’s time to be logical not emotional about the motives of the extreme feminist agenda being pushed by the hard left socialist “equal outcome” brigades.

Equality of outcome is very bad

The proponents of equality if outcome never seem to be able to answer the dimensions question. If you want to somehow mandate equal numbers of (in this case) IT workers/managers/executives then why stop the equalization at just gender. What about ethnicity and gender. What about age , ethnicity and gender. What about height, social background, marital or child caring status weight, hair colour ,etc etc.. the list is almost endless.

Basically you end up at the individual.which, let's face it, is what you want. In any company , organisation , you should try to recruit, retain and promote the best ( most suitably skilled, adapted and competent) person... regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation..whatever.

But of course that means you cant write virtue signalling articles to increase your standing in your own small peer group.

Equality of opportunity should be the goal and not equality of outcome. However, if you have that that you need to accept that in many cases males and females will make very different choices and that those choices may not always mean a 50-50 distribution

One other point...why would anyone think.having females as managers and executives be any way different. Take a look at what Ginny is doing at IBM. No different to all her male predecessors...Maybe worse.

Social engineering does not work.

Youll just destroy the West's ability to compete with sane societies that don't shackle their productivity like that.

Want more women at the top?? That is a goal worthy for you? great! teach your children to be ambitious and not want participation trophies.

How many times must we repeat those mistakes? why won't the writer learn from the Scandinavian experiment? the more they forced Women to be like Men, the stronger the lash back got.

Its never was a "boy's club"...

The only reason you get carping like this is because these jobs are perceived as good and high paying so they're desirable. If they were something more unpleasant -- like old fashioned coal mining -- then you'd see a lot less pressure for gender equality.

The awful truth about 'good paying STEM jobs' is that they require rather a lot of work to prepare for. You can't just do a few courses at school and then step into them, you have to do a lot of external preparation. Traditionally -- a couple of generations ago -- boys would have had the inside track because the impressing of gender roles at home and school would have put all but the most dedicated and talented girls at a disadvantage (the boys would be fixing stuff and doing hobbies like making radios, the girls would be playing house in one form or another). This sort of stereotyping is long behind us but it doesn't mean that all girls are about to be programmers -- its more likely that (as in the town where I live) they'll be far more interested in biotechnology. They wouldn't be doing this a generation or so ago because the technology and the jobs just didn't exist (well, they did, but we called it 'brewing' and it wasn't quite as scientific).

I'm glad to be retired these days so I don't have to put up with this kind of workplace politics. Its actually been going on for ever -- pushy people who are at best second rate but manipulative enough to find angles to advance their personal agenda (its gender neutral as well). Its part of office life but with the new twist of finding some kind of discrimination that allows you to claim a place that you're not really entitled to. Real talent shines through this crap and its appreciated regardless of the gender, orientation and general shape and size of the person.

seriously?

"we will need a long period – at least a generation – where women are favoured over men for funding and promotion."

Wtf?! Promote based on gender? Is this (checks article) guy even capable of understanding what he proposes?

Reversed discrimination is still discrimination

As a white male, I have had trouble getting job interviews. I've actually had a manager tell me that he wasn't ALLOWED to consider me for an interview until they had looked at "diversity candidates". The fact that I am male doesn't mean this isn't sexual discrimination. The fact that I am white doesn't mean this isn't racial discrimination.

How about actual, proper equality, where everyone is evaluated based on technical skill, communication ability, and the ability to work civilly with others? We should fix these discrepancies, not by adding a different discrimination, but by changing the culture to make such discriminations - in any directon - unacceptable to the general populace. Note that "ability to work civilly with others" would include treating everyone with respect and dignity, regardless of gender, race, etc - an applicant CAN be judged on their decisions on how they treat others.

I scrolled back

to my astonishment, the author of this is male. Thank you, sir, for getting it. I am at retirement age, but ran into this sort of thing, overt and covert, for the time I was in corporate life, and in financing and networking my own business later. I don't think that reverse discrimination is the correct answer, but calling out the common or garden variety discrimination and the mindset that underpins it will be an ongoing task for the next generation. #Me too does exist, and it spills over and colors every interaction in the business world.

If Affirmative Action is any indication then this discrimination will be permanent, not for a generation.

Others worried

Do nurses and school teachers worry that there are not enough men in their professions?

Are lawyers and plumbers also trying to get more women into their ranks?

I would rather focus on getting quality, than just checking off liberal talking points.

Where the wealthy and poweful rub shoulders.

I think Richard Nixon blew the lid off the 'good old boys' clubs with his (recorded) comments about the Bohemian Grove. A number of 'business leadership' retreats were quietly closed down when these remarks went public.

If they invited women, they'd be pretty lonely at some of those events.

Terrible idea

"we will need a long period – at least a generation – where women are favoured over men for funding and promotion"

Straightforward positive discrimination a terrible idea. The best way to deal with people of one gender thinking people in another only got the job because they were in another gender person isn't to make the prejudiced people correct. And of course by rejecting talented members of the one gender for less talented members of another you are ensuring your company doesn't get the best talent and performs worse.

(I'm using "gender" in the middle english sense of "kind", "type", or "sort" here, because the same applies whatever group you are discriminating in favour of.)

There are ways to deal with inequality that don't have this drawback, or the problem of illegal discrimination

- employ the best people - if you do this the talent pool available to your company is bigger than the talent pool available to a hidebound competitor that still thinks that "those people aren't right for this type of work". Outcompete them, prove them wrong, and rejoice.

- remove identifying information from CVs/whatever before passing them to the potentially prejudiced person in charge of hiring. This has been shown to work in blind auditions for orchestras

- if you must mandate something, mandate interviews not outcomes - since the NFL mandated that at least one non-white candidate must be considered for a head coach job the diversity of head coaches has increased, but nobody got the job because of their race.

Socialism at it's finest

It's funny how socialists insist we live in a free country with equal rights and then at their earliest convenience write laws that remove our freedom where our choices differs from their opinion of what the correct choice should be.

Fairness

My problem with articles like this is the assumption that only one sub group of people are affected by preferential treatment. There's no doubt that certain groups have been discriminated against, but that discrimination isn't against a single target. The greatest con game played against the poor is to pit each group against each other, leaving the wealthy to laugh at us all.

No we should not start reverse discrimination based on gender, orientation, ethnicity, financial status, nationality, age or whatever other arbitrary factor pits one set of people against another.

Why should person be at a disadvantage for the rest of their working lives, just because people who look like them have committed injustices? That kind of reasoning promotes discrimination and anger, while those with the power and money just sit back and laugh as the people below them fight amongst each other.

Why can't we just have fairness? Make it a civil crime to not be fair. Fine companies that have been found to deliberately exclude individuals from promotion or other rewards when it can be clearly shown they favor one set of people over others.

All I hear when I see articles like this is another attempt to let the good old boys club continue as before. Because this article isn't a call to bring them to account for their actions. It's a call to let them continue as before, but instead of targeting women they get to choose another group to ignore.