Women In Tech? Or Let The Bros Be Bros?

This is the thing we still haven’t really solved, despite talking about it for a decade-plus.

We tend to think of “women in tech” issues as a pipeline problem — namely, there are not enough girls in STEM programs and summer camps, so there must be a “skills gap” and we can’t find the bad-ass women we need.

Turns out that’s probably largely bullshit.

New research on the women in tech issue

Stanford researchers studied a series of tech job information sessions, and…

In the sessions, the researchers found, presenters often peppered their remarks with references to geek culture favorites like Star Trek and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, focused conversation on only the highly technical aspects of the job, or referred to high school coding experience. These topics often excluded women, who on average join the field after high school and can feel excluded from the images depicted in geek culture. Also…