{"id":1534,"date":"2014-10-06T07:39:44","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T14:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/?p=1534"},"modified":"2014-10-06T12:44:35","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T19:44:35","slug":"diversity-irony-from-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/06\/diversity-irony-from-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley diversity irony from The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend, The New York Times<\/em> published an op-ed about “Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem”<\/a>. \u00a0A dressing down from the Times on diversity is painfully ironic, given that the Times has the biggest gender gap of the US’s ten most widely circulated newspapers. \u00a0In the Times, 69% of its bylines are men. \u00a0That’s not all that different from Google’s workforce<\/a>, which is 70% male.<\/p>\n

The Times has suggestions for improving Silicon Valley’s diversity problem, including this one:<\/p>\n

Not all tech industry employees are engineers and programmers. The companies employ large numbers of people who manage projects, market services and design products. Many of these jobs do not require a computer science or an engineering degree. But the proportion of women and minorities in these types of jobs is not much better than the proportion in technical positions. Companies should make efforts to hire a more diverse group of workers \u2014 including more liberal arts graduates \u2014 for nontechnical jobs, according to Vivek Wadhwa, who has written a book about women in the technology industry.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Times assumes that\u00a0engineering and programming jobs require a computer science (CS) or engineering degree. \u00a0This isn’t true, and hasn’t ever been true. \u00a0Anecdotally, I know programmers without degrees at all.2<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0I know programmers with philosophy degrees, and English degrees, and history degrees. \u00a0There have been plenty of times where I’ve been in a roomful of developers where I was the only one with a CS degree. \u00a0Software development changes fast. \u00a0We value people who are self-taught. \u00a0A CS degree is not required for a programming job.<\/p>\n

Better is that their solution is a two-tiered solution to engineering. \u00a0It’s the same as their two-tiered solution to journalism. \u00a0At the Times, as elsewhere in journalism, women are significantly more likely to write articles about lifestyle or health. \u00a0Articles about crime, justice, and politics are still more likely to be written by men, as are op-eds. \u00a0The hard news and analysis goes to men, the soft news goes to women. \u00a0And so too should the hard engineering problems go to men, while the soft stuff like project management or design go to women.<\/p>\n

According to “The most comprehensive analysis ever of the gender of New York Times writers”<\/a>,\u00a0only five sections have articles that are mostly written by women: Fashion, Dining, Home, Travel, and Health. \u00a0According to\u00a0The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2014<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(PDF), men have 3 times as many page 1 quotes in the Times than women do. \u00a0The Times would do well to improve its own record on diversity before advising others what to do about theirs.<\/p>\n

We should not divide software development into men’s work (programming) and women’s work (“manag[ing] projects, market[ing] services and design[ing] products”, as per above). \u00a0Women are just as capable as men of programming. \u00a0Men are just as capable as women at project management, marketing3<\/a><\/sup>, and design. \u00a0Tech companies need real diversity, not enclaves of women in specific roles in a misguided attempt at diversity.<\/p>\n

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  1. I’m not even going to begin to get into the problems about quoting Wadhwa as an expert about women in technology. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. I rely on anecdote because I wasn’t able to find data about how many programmers actually have CS or relevant engineering degrees. \u00a0If you’ve got a source, please share. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Come on, has no one seen Mad Men<\/em>? ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This weekend, The New York Times published an op-ed about “Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem”. \u00a0A dressing down from the Times on diversity is painfully ironic, given that the Times has the biggest gender gap of the US’s ten most widely circulated newspapers. \u00a0In the Times, 69% of its bylines are men. \u00a0That’s not all that … Continue reading Silicon Valley diversity irony from The New York Times<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1542,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}