So I want to talk (real quick) about gender representation in tech. Specifically, the fact that it's abysmal. Women[1] usually account for, at most, 30% of the employees in a company and that number is often much lower. Even at the companies where it's 30%, that number is misleading because it doesn't adress management positions which are often much lower. (For reference, women accounted for about 59% of the overall workforce as of 2015, when the article I pulled those numbers from was published.) Here's an article that says that on average, women leave the industry within 7 years of being in it. Let me repeat that, because I didn't say they leave their jobs, or take a break. They completely leave the entire technology industry. And unfortunately it makes sense, since incidents of sexism in tech are rampant.

Unlike (most of) the rest of the tech world, the Recurse Center is mostly (completely?) gender-balanced. I want to point out that while for years I've believed in diversity, it didn't become clear to me how much implicit bias I held until I joined RC. I find that, having previously spent significant amounts of time in environments that were predominantly white, cis and male, I find myself needing to self-correct discriminatory and gender-based unconscious assumptions significantly less frequently at RC. In other words, my subconscious is making less incorrect, gender-based suggestions about what people are like that I then have to consciously reject. I would attribute this almost 100% to the fact that at RC I'm surrounded by lots of people who are a) super talented and know their shit and b) aren't male.

If I have a point to this blog post (and I'm not sure that I do), it'd be to underscore what many have said before me: representation and role models are important. Advocating for gender equality is good and important, but in the end what really matters is what's actually in people's heads. That's mostly influenced by what they see in their immediate lives, and that's why representation is so important - believing in equality is great, but presenting actual evidence to your subconscious that its biases are incorrect is a much more powerful way to improve the way you perceive the world.

If folks have any comments or different perspectives, I'd love to hear them privately or via WebMention.

[1]: I'm focusing on women here because I'm not aware of any statistics about non-binary people in tech. But it's worth noting that it's a huge problem for them, too.

Update February 22nd: the lovely Rachel Vincent from RC faculty says this about RC's gender-balancing:

Of the folks who are currently in-batch (Winter 2's and Spring 1's), ~36% identify as women. It's roughly the same for the community as a whole (~33%), though we don't have super accurate numbers because we don't update information on folks' gender. The most gender balanced batches were a little over 40% women. We're always pushing for 50/50, though. 😊 Our overall strategy is to try to get an applicant pool that is as gender balanced as possible, and we don't do any kind of balancing during the admissions process itself.