<story><title>Autism and gender imbalance in tech</title><url>http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-gender-inequality-in-technology-good.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sudosteph</author><text>Weird blog post. He never really attempts to answer his own question of if gender imbalance is a good thing. He just seems to be making the point that autism is imbalanced in sex distribution, and engineering is appealing to autistic people, so the imbalance in engineering is expected due to autism.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, as a woman on the autism spectrum myself, I actually kind of agree that some level of imbalance is due to this. But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, I&amp;#x27;ve convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio&amp;#x2F;chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn&amp;#x27;t considered before was b&amp;#x2F;c nobody ever talked to them about it. Neither grew up  playing video games (though one said she asked for a console and the parents put it in her brother&amp;#x27;s room for them to &amp;quot;share&amp;quot;) and there weren&amp;#x27;t any mandatory programming classes, so they just were never exposed to it as an option, even though they are both highly logical people (thus the chem or bio degree paths before switching).&lt;p&gt;So I guess I&amp;#x27;m still firmly in the &amp;quot;Its a pipeline problem&amp;quot; camp. Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, and some of those women will miss out on tech. I think mandatory high school programming and networking classes are what will really help.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnthonyMouse</author><text>&amp;gt; But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.&lt;p&gt;Imagine a scale that goes from autism to whatever the opposite of autism is, with neurotypical as the middle. The hypothesis is that men are more likely to be on the autism side of dead center, even for people who are still in the neurotypical region. A higher percentage of men being diagnosed with autism is evidence of the hypothesis being true.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; So I guess I&amp;#x27;m still firmly in the &amp;quot;Its a pipeline problem&amp;quot; camp.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re kind of orthogonal. It clearly &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; the pipeline problem -- you can&amp;#x27;t hire people who don&amp;#x27;t get the relevant qualifications. But it&amp;#x27;s possible that biological differences contribute to the pipeline problem.&lt;p&gt;In reality anything is affected by everything. So it makes sense to work against the pipeline problem regardless, because some of it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; caused by non-biological factors that could be addressed. But some of it may also be caused by biology, which means that even if some progress is attainable, expecting the end result to be a 50&amp;#x2F;50 split may be unreasonable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Autism and gender imbalance in tech</title><url>http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-gender-inequality-in-technology-good.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sudosteph</author><text>Weird blog post. He never really attempts to answer his own question of if gender imbalance is a good thing. He just seems to be making the point that autism is imbalanced in sex distribution, and engineering is appealing to autistic people, so the imbalance in engineering is expected due to autism.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, as a woman on the autism spectrum myself, I actually kind of agree that some level of imbalance is due to this. But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, I&amp;#x27;ve convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio&amp;#x2F;chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn&amp;#x27;t considered before was b&amp;#x2F;c nobody ever talked to them about it. Neither grew up  playing video games (though one said she asked for a console and the parents put it in her brother&amp;#x27;s room for them to &amp;quot;share&amp;quot;) and there weren&amp;#x27;t any mandatory programming classes, so they just were never exposed to it as an option, even though they are both highly logical people (thus the chem or bio degree paths before switching).&lt;p&gt;So I guess I&amp;#x27;m still firmly in the &amp;quot;Its a pipeline problem&amp;quot; camp. Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, and some of those women will miss out on tech. I think mandatory high school programming and networking classes are what will really help.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heretoo</author><text>Potentially, the author is using this example as a vehicle to ask us to consider that a 50&amp;#x2F;50 gender split is unrealistic when you ever try to correct for a different inequality.&lt;p&gt;I think the author also intends to try and suggest that the 50&amp;#x2F;50 split doesn&amp;#x27;t need to be blamed on men.</text></comment>