WHY ARE THERE FEW WOMEN IN TECH? WATCH A RECRUITING SESSION

Let's kick it off by joining one sort of a session.

If the company sends a female engineer, often she has no speaking role at all. If she does speak, her segment centers on ‘company culture’ or the company’s vision. Other women recruiters are in charge of handing out swag and other materials, or managing logistics. The ‘hard-core’ technical material belongs to the male presenters. 

In the company culture segment, the presenter mentions the ‘fun’ work environment, with a plethora of ‘perks’, such as free meals and haircuts, which mean employees never need to leave the office. Entertainment might include foosball tables, beer fridges, and other elements of fraternity culture. Sleep is a low priority, mentioned as a point of pride. 

Then the main male presenter opens the floor for a Q&A segment. Only male students ask questions. The conversation becomes a chest-beating competition – who can ask the most technical question that stumps the presenter? Meanwhile, the few female students remaining in the room stay silent.

The stage is set and here it might be noteworthy that the study was done by two female scientists in gender research and sociology. If you fancy to call those subjects science. 'Wired' sums their research up nicely.

The paper also describes recruiters using gender stereotypes. One online gaming company showed a slide of a woman wearing a red, skin-tight dress and holding a burning poker card to represent its product. Another company, which makes software to help construct computer graphics, only showed pictures of men—astronauts, computer technicians, soldiers. Presentations were often replete with pop-culture images intended to help them relate to students but instead furthered gender stereotypes. One internet startup, for example, showed an image of Gangnam-style music videos that featured a male artist surrounded by scantily clad women.

In an attempt to appear approachable, presenters often made comments that disparaged women or depicted them as sexualized objects rather than talented technical colleagues. For example, in one session, a man mentioned the “better gender ratio” at the company’s Los Angeles office compared with its Silicon Valley office. “I had no girlfriends at [University Name], but now I’m married,” he said, suggesting that the better odds had helped get him hitched.

This type of informal banter occasionally devolved into overtly sexualized comments. One presenter from a small startup mentioned porn a couple of times. Another, when talking about a project that would allow banking on ships, suggested that sailors needed access to cash for prostitutes.

The few sessions that featured women speaking on technical subjects had fewer such problems. When these women spoke on technical issues—and connected those issues to real-world impact—female students were much more engaged. In these sessions, female students asked questions 65 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent of the sessions without these features.

Abstract (of the study)

A ‘chilly’ environment limits women’s advancement through the educational pipeline leading to jobs in science and technology. However, we know relatively little about the environment women encounter after making it through the educational pipeline. Do technology companies create environments that may dampen women’s interest at the juncture when they are launching their careers? Using original observational data from 84 recruiting sessions hosted by technology companies at a prominent university on the US West Coast, we find that company representatives often engage in behaviors that are known to create a chilly environment for women. Through gender-imbalanced presenter roles, geek culture references, overt use of gender stereotypes, and other gendered speech and actions, representatives may puncture the pipeline, lessening the interest of women at the point of recruitment into technology careers.

Pdf here (worth reading)