An interesting read I came across today:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/toxic-masculinity-in-silicon-valley/article35759481/
I saw another article in this vein a few weeks ago. Not sure what to think about this . . . the tech culture is male dominated in certain ways. Is it because more men gravitate toward engineering and CS? Is there a certain type of ‘brain’ that thrives in those areas, but along with the good comes some negatives?
??
Hard to speak in generalities, of course.
I haven’t read the OP article (skimmed), but in regards to the topic, this article may detail more exactly where the problems are and why/how they can be avoided regardless of if the field is male dominated.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/
The point being, the negatives need to be corrected, male dominated field or not and regardless of what you think of the male/female balance in tech generally. I think that’s an important starting point given that as soon as this thread hits the “Is there a certain type of ‘brain’ that thrives in those areas” debate, there isn’t going to be much of anything but bickering with insufficient claims left and right.
I will say that the article above also gives some data that would strongly go against the “certain type of brain” theory, but I don’t think opening up that can of worms will end up being productive.
@PengsPhils ^^that Atlantic article might be the one I saw . . . I know I read one on the same topic fairly recently.
Certain type of brain - by this I mean, perhaps in 80’s era simplicity - are some of these guys the ones who were rejected by girls/women at some point in life? And their belief that they have a superior brain to females is a defense mechanism of some sort?
Of course this is absolutely no justification whatsoever. Just throwing it out there in a very generic, non-comprehensive manner in a (probably) clumsy attempt to understand where some of this comes from.
That’s not necessarily the case universally or historically. For instance, decades ago, most computer programmers in the US/UK were women. That is, until the status of programmers improved to the point women ended up being pushed out.
Also, in Eastern Europe and some areas of East Asia, female engineers made up a much larger proportion of the profession in their respective societies than here.
Consequently, the phenomenon of tech being male dominated has much more to do with our society’s cultural socialization processes and the perceived status of the professions than it does with innate inclinations of each gender.
^^interesting @cobrat.
I never worked in tech or Silicon Valley but I’ve encountered plenty of toxic masculinity in my worklife. I think the common thread is men, not any specific industry.
I think a lot of it has to do with the culture of where they are working. While women have been under-represented in tech across the board , what they are talking about I think more is the culture of silicon valley firms rather than across the board. With Silicon valley you are talking for one thing very young people, and these are startups generally with all kinds of expectations of making a lot of money very fast when the company either goes public or gets sold for a lot of money, and it is very testosterone fueled, there is a lot of swagger and so forth. The most direct parallel I can give to it is another industry that has had a lot of trouble with these kinds of things, in the financial industry, especially among traders, there were similar problems. A lot of it may be the people who tend to work for a startup or who (at least in the day) were traders, tends to be people who think rules don’t necessarily apply to them, see themselves as some sort of super dude (or bro in today’s wording lol), and they have in many ways haven’t grown out of being teenagers IME. While women are misrepresented in tech, at more mainstream tech firms or tech parts of companies, that kind of behavior would never be tolerated, between HR and also having older, more experienced, settled people, that kind of wildness wouldn’t be tolerated. The company I work for was a startup, but the people running it were not 20 somethings hiring a bunch of bros, we had 15 people trying to make a company work and that was what it was about and there was a different level of maturity there, there were some younger people who sometimes did stupid things, and the older, more experienced people acted as a check and balance. One of the problems with many silicon valley firms, especially the startups, is that they are very, very phobic to anyone above a certain age, and I suspect that is one of the issues here as well.