So, this is unflaggable and should be discussed, but is buried on the fifth page? Is there something in the ranking algorithm that is dinging it, over other older posts with fewer up-votes?
I didn't get a reply last time I asked this in the same circumstances, but...
Will you also be flag-protecting articles which take different viewpoints? I ask because I've never seen a thread on any other topic or expressing any substantially different view on this topic have flags turned off, but perhaps that's just observation bias on my part.
I see this as an echo of the makers and takers debate.
"Give me a job." "MAKE me feel comfortable." "I am at your mercy." ... This the subtext I read. Other people want to create their own world; when someone tells them no or gets in their way, the attitude is "fuck you" not "change to accommodate me."
This reaction may be biologically ingrained as a difference in the sexes; I am not sure- But I rarely, if ever, come across articles about women who have been fed up with some job and formed their own companies with other fed up women and strove to put their former coworkers/employers out of business, whereas for hackers "I'll show you!" seems a very common motivator.
We should be trying to give women (and men) more confidence, integrity and fortitude, and quit with the shaming and guilt tactics.
That's the right attitude. Of course, once their companies grows to a certain size they will be forced by law to diversify their workforce and then they are back in the same situation.
Not the case? Then this problem isn't as endemic as it's being portrayed.
> But I rarely, if ever, come across articles about women who have been fed up with some job and formed their own companies with other fed up women and strove to put their former coworkers/employers out of business
It wasn't in IT, but it happened for many of the same reasons as stated here.
The outcome is just one of several possibilities, and the media field may be more prone to have divas (although IT has too many divas of all sexes, IMHO), so I'm curious how the tableflip subculture will fare (hopefully much better).
This is the thing, though. We are being told that it's just crappy for women in tech; we should be seeing female web devs, mobile devs, devops, product people, etc. banding together and doing things Their Way, and reading a bunch of glowing articles about how much better things are now, and how that creepy old boss who stared at their boobs a lot wishes he was nicer, and that kind of thing. I am unaware of an example of this actually happening, so it makes me very skeptical this is as big of a problem as we are being told.
We've known this for a while, it boils down to: barbies.
Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what the herd is doing and results in girls avoiding engineering and boys avoiding, say, nursing.
It's a systemic disease and is highly contagious. One possible solution is an elementary school where the entrance requirement is determined by the parents: girls get barbies AND chemistry kits. Boys get toy cars AND sewing kits. Their social group shouldn't be determined by gender, rather interest.
Did he actually say something terrible, or did he just commit a thoughtcrime in public? In this sort of discussion, one never knows. I didn't see the original comment, so I have no idea.
But, given the context of this discussion, I am concerned that there is a decent possibility that he wrote something not outrageous, but simply contrary to the current received wisdom of young Bay Area Californians.
Ah, I didn't know that it was possible to show deleted posts (its been awhile since I looked at my preferences, I guess). Judging by the grammar, word choice and username I'd suspect that the author is not a native English-speaker.
I agree that in this case it doesn't really add much to the conversation, although I am a bit more forgiving if the author is indeed not a native English speaker.
I'm going to keep showdead on. There have been a number of cases in which I've seen comments moderated to oblivion where, from the quotes in child comments, I think that they were probably worth reading.
(Amusingly, HN has not let me post this for several hours, since I'm 'posting too fast')
Model/view/misandry et al's continued hatred of HN suggests to me that the moderation approach doesn't punish thoughtcrime qua thoughtcrime, only actually horrible stuff.
If you don't believe me, you're welcome to go look, but it's not an experience I'd recommend.
(edit: It occurs to me that the last sentence is unclear as to whether I'm referring to showdead or MVM; the answer is 'yes')
I didn't expect the google results to be quite so utterly worthless; I am apparently the only person to've called them that anywhere indexed, only on twitter, and I only found the tweet by googling 'avoiceformanchildren' (I was in a lovely mood that day, apparently; being a relatively moderate libfem turns out to result in ending up angry at basically everybody).
Dear Google: Please up your game to compensate for my stupidity -- love, mst
I vouched for wtbob's comment. It's important to air these concerns in public; some participants in debates on this topic quickly resort to censorship. I read the deleted comment, and in this instance, and in this instance, the deleted comment added nothing to the discussion.
That's not all that is required. By the time you get to where "real" academic excellence matters (college) you have already made a choice based on what you have been exposed to. I'm talking about exposing children to as many professions as possible with no pressure from their childhood peers to fit into the more archaic gender role.
However, that is a brilliant way to curb the really damaging bullying.
>The key is to make it a priority to move to an area where...
Plans that begin with that phrase are never sustainable. All sane people will want to move to the same places, rising prices substantially until people are forced to borrow huge amounts of money to buy houses in nice places, causing a housing bubble, causing a crash.
> Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised.
Exactly: both boys and girls get strong negative feedback for being nerdy. Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback.
Exactly the opposite of what I am saying. I wasn't considering the gender of the victim in that comment - rather the relative effectiveness of the victimization tools typically used by genders at that age. I was calling myself out as a non-typical case which received both (as a boy) only to point out exactly how one can just walk away from a punch in the face.
Furthermore, if someone puts up a movie poster because they've finally found a "safe space" then who is the author of the article to take that away from them?
> Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback.
In these scenarios, boys find groups that are supportive. In their case the video game playing, computer oriented, math/physics/etc. "nerds" are one such social group.
The entire point of the article is that those same groups are not supportive for women and girls.
It has nothing to do with them being so strong and manly that they can stand up to the bullies and pursue computer science anyway! It's that they find a safe haven in those social groups where they are not bullied and are inclusive.
>It has nothing to do with them being so strong and manly
Where did you read that? I wrote sufficiently interested. And no, not because there's a "safe group", but because they lose themselves in the technology and f*ck the groups.
"It's that they find a safe haven in those social groups where they are not bullied and are inclusive." Is this last live referring to the "nerds" or women/girls? Because "nerds" deal with they same issues.
Being a software engineer I've been involved in this discussion for several years now. And I don't think it ever clicked with me so much as with this comment. Guys do find groups that are supportive, be it something like an MMO community, card game community, robotics clubs etc. While girls also exist in these domains they are pretty consistently outsiders. At older ages they will receive a ton of attention, much of which I would describe as predatory, and it is constantly brought up that they are attention-seeking if they actually embrace the space (stream on Twitch or what have you). I believe at younger ages they are just simply viewed as odd-balls who are tolerated rather then truly accepted.
Previously when viewing a thread like this I would take a perspective of "It's not discrimination, they just don't want to do it". Now I want to think about it some more in the context of what I just said.
As a corollary however, is it really a good thing to push a gender towards a particular field? Anecdotally in the case of SE there seems to be a huge amount of anxiety, depression, and various social issues, that comes with the work load. I often wonder if my life would be better had I never taken to computers. Interesting food for thought, do any of us really know what's "best for us" on a societal level?
> As a corollary however, is it really a good thing to push a gender towards a particular field?
I don't think the suggestion is being made to push genders toward a particular field. I believe the case being made is that the status quo is that genders are pushed towards certain careers due to cultural biases and antagonistic or hostile group behavior that goes unchecked by the larger communities in certain groups.
The question being asked is how we, as a society, can stop pushing genders into certain roles. In particular, regarding the field of computer science and engineering.
> Previously when viewing a thread like this I would take
> a perspective of "It's not discrimination, they just
> don't want to do it".
Well, maybe that wasn't exactly wrong. Or rather, there are different motivations for entering the profession. For males "love of technology" is a much stronger motivating factor, whereas for females it is "job security", "ease of entry" and "flexible working hours" [1]. All other factors surveyed were not different.
When it comes to experience in the job, the only difference found was that women received greater support and mentoring from their superiors.[2].
This is from a study published in the Communications of the ACM as "Women and men in the IT profession"[3]. Although not as interesting an anecdote as the NY Times article, and not fitting the current narrative, the study does have actual data. It concludes that women and men in tech are more alike than different, that the primary difference coming in is "love of tech" vs "good benefits" and that the biggest difference when in the field is that women get slightly better support from their bosses.
> It has nothing to do with them being so strong and manly that they can stand up to the bullies and pursue computer science anyway!
The way bullying works with boys and girls is very different. A boys greatest wish when bullied is to be left alone by the bullies. A girls greatest wish is to avoid being excluded. In general anyway.
As long as I have enough good friends, I don't really care what anyone else thinks of me. My wife on the other hand would be incredibly distressed to find out 80% of her colleagues etc disliked her.
> As long as I have enough good friends, I don't really care what anyone else thinks of me.
That's the definition of desiring inclusion.
If all of those friends that accepted you were marketing majors and not computer scientists the odds you'd pursue computer science goes way down. Particularly if the computer scientists were the bullies.
The point of the article is the computer (and in her case physics/science) culture was hostile to women, not inclusive.
This is a very good point--the friends I had that were guys an nerdy tended to work together to form our own merry band of misfits.
Girls in secondary education, though, seem to be all-too-ready to screw over each other and throw "friends" under the bus if there is any perceived benefit socially (saw this happen with family and female friends).
So then it seems like we should focus on introducing feminine-nerdy interests into programming culture. I don't know what these are and why Star Trek wouldn't be among them though.
I think a lot of it is a network effect problem. As (hopefully) more nerdy girls start finding each other and providing alternatives to ostracization at a young age, they'll be able to increase their numbers.
That said, as controversial as there is, I think there is a bit of a genetic component here. Not that girls are genetically less capable of being good engineers or even of being nerds, but rather, that men may be genetically more likely to have obsessive and solitary interests, including things that seem to be borderline on the autistic spectrum.
Men are 8x more likely to be diagnosed with high-functioning autism than women are.
If there is a genetic component to this [1], then the numbers of female nerds are probably always going to be lower than female nerds. But awareness and support of female nerds is certainly important.
this point is explored in the article and seems a good point is made: nerd male still have a stereotype to conform in the culture and set of social rule/standing to navigate relationship, especially promoting late career 'wins'; girls don't.
of course as this is the experience as reported from the author, it is at most anecdotal, but it's interesting and actually could be a good starting point for further inquiry.
Target tries to make one step in the right direction (like making sure a chemistry set is not labeled as a BOYS chemistry set) and people respond with:
"You liberal POS idiots are ruining this Country. Just because you morons don't want to think there are boys and girls, doesn't mean the rest of us with a brain have to think in your warped ways."
"Complete stupidity. I want my girls and boys to identify with their gender."
"This is stupid! So you think my grandson's wants to sleep on a frozen bed set made for girls and my granddaughters wants to sleep on spiderman bed sets. I don't think so. You better leave well enough along before you lose your business."
"This is just stupid. Kids are being taught not be them selves such as a true boy or a true girl. Men now a days are not men, they are girly men. A lot of women are not women they are trying so hard to fit into a mans world. Leave kids to b kids please. Pinks and blues do not hurt any one!"
A horrifying reminder of the capability for critical thought of the general population!
This is to be expected though. Removing gender associations is going to be seen as an attack on existing peoples' upbringings. Anything that falls into that category is going to be a painful fight.
There's an effect I forget the name of. Basically, if you give someone something and then some time later take it away they experience anger.
When you give rights to one group, you have to remove them from another (important: even if the second group had rights that were not rightfully theirs).
Men previously and incorrectly had exclusive access to jobs (and votes, and so forth). By giving women fair chance to those rights, you have to subtract the unjust portion of men's rights. I don't know why some (most? unlikely) of us can accept the truth, that those rights were never only ours, but as for the rest they experience anger. Just another way that equality is a hard fight: we're fighting a documented psychological effect.
This article isn't talking about taking away "exclusive access to jobs" from men. It's hinting at separating geek culture from software development. Let's be honest: the two interests correlate well. You're talking about stripping many practitioners of software development from their culture. Why is that just?
> You're talking about stripping many practitioners of software development from their culture. Why is that just?
Why is it unjust? Why do you have to bring your personal interests and preferences into the workplace? Why not make a neutral workplace where different kinds of people can integrate and feel comfortable?
You're advocating for sterile, culture-less workplaces. You're free to do that, and companies are free to implement your proposed policies. Personally, I wouldn't work for a company that prohibited my expressing nerd culture.
Yes, I am. I think work places should be neutral places where the focus is on work. I'm a professional--I don't need to bond with my teammates over unrelated bullshit in order to work effectively with them.
Why can't the shared culture be a mutual commitment to high-quality work?
Let me put it another way: do you want to spend all day hearing about my toddler? If not--well that's how I feel about everything you're interested in. So let's just all do our work and leave our personal lives at home.
> Why can't the shared culture be a mutual commitment to high-quality work?
Because that's not how human beings bond. We don't bond over a single facet of our lives; we bond as a community. The modern world, in which we live different places, believe different things and pursue different jobs, is poison for any sense of community.
A group of middle-class white guys will bond more quickly and easily than a group that mixes white guys and low-income black women.
So where do you draw the line? It's clearly not OK, even in the name of "cohesion", to encourage a culture that excludes people of different income levels or ethnicities.
That's an argument that gets you a team of people who all like the same video games and all pick which beer to drink by maximizing IBUs.
There's a point at which can safely say that this kind of studiously groomed, exclusionary "cohesion" is doing more harm than good. I mean, there's obviously that point: if you refused to hire someone because they were a woman, you'd get sued; if you refused to hire someone because they didn't drink, you'd (rightfully) be ostracized in the community.
Look at the other extreme: the idea that I might be discouraged (or disallowed) from bonding with my coworkers over shared interests sounds dystopian.
You might argue that workplaces shouldn't endorse one particular subculture over another: that's fine. But unless you take stern measures to ban fraternization, you're going to get coworkers forming friendships based on shared interests, and we're lying to ourselves if we think that interests of software people tend not to cluster around what we think of as "geek" culture.
It's important to realize that this pushback you are seeing is not because people think girls should not play with chemistry sets. It's because, in point of fact, there _is_ a cultural force out there that exists, that insists that boys and girls are blank slates and if not for antiquated belief systems, all jobs or interests would be split 50/50 across genders.
They are pushing back against the pressure to conform to this new dogma, not that they would deny any particular girl access to a "boy's things".
I believe that girls and boys naturally (either through differences in neural architecture, hormone exposure, or early acculturation) simply have different average preferences, and that these preferences manifest over their lifetimes as differences in life stories and career choices.
I don't think this difference is a problem we need to solve. Diversity is supposed to make our culture richer, right? If so, why are some people trying so hard to make us all the same?
Of course we shouldn't artificial barriers to non-gender-normative career choices --- but gender disparity in a particular field is not itself evidence that these barriers exist. We've already done quite a bit to draw women into technical professions. Whatever disparity remains is on them.
This comment says everything better than I could say it.
Programming is a solitary activity where you solve logic puzzles. Anyone can do it. Another activity that is very similar is playing chess - yet no one is up in arms that chess schools aren't including 50% girls in elite chess training.
If you took a group of girls and a group of boys and put them in a room where they played chess for a few hours, then asked them how much they enjoyed it... more boys would rate the activity higher. Is it because some stupid poster on the wall??? No it's not. On average, men and women are different and have different average preferences.
Programming is not an activity where you need social support groups to succeed. It's the one activity where being a hermit who takes initiative and learns everything themselves can be an advantage over being more social. A large portion of programmers are self-taught online, and just start tinkering with things because they enjoy the activity. You can't force that.
Programming can be done very easily by yourself, but when you actually want to get something finished or do more than 30 person-hours a week it's best to go find some other people to make a company with.
If you want to see it as a job, compare it to other businesses where you have to write things on a schedule, like writing a newspaper. There's more conversations with strangers involved in that one and it sounds a little friendlier.
I'll confirm this anecdotally. My sister was extremely good at math and science... until the end of middle school, when she started hanging out in earnest with her friends. Her friends thought that any intellectual interest was nerdy and stupid, and my sister acted accordingly. Now, the girl who was easily learning algebra in elementary school "just can't do math."
I think that the big difference in STEM is that nerdy boys exist in such a number that they can still get acceptance and support. It's not as normal as, say, being a football player, but male nerds aren't exactly rare.
In contrast, because there are much fewer female nerds, their awkwardness is even more exaggerated, and this feeds back on itself to heighten the pressure to conform. Boys find some support in numbers, and their interest in the subjects smooths over any discomfort. Girls don't have any of that support, so if they aren't absolute fanatics about the subjects, they're going to conform.
It's very sad how many people (both male and female) I knew growing up were "extremely good at math and science" until they ran headlong into anti-intellectual American high school culture. I saw people who loved science fiction spiral into useless party culture and end up with unfulfilling low-value service jobs. That's a tremendous waste of talent, and I don't think it's very much a gender issue.
I favor an approach where we separate kids who've shown some aptitude for the sciences and concentrate them in schools full of their peers. We can't do anything for the anti-intellectual types, but we can at least stop their ruining perfectly good raw talent.
> I favor an approach where we separate kids who've shown some aptitude for the sciences and concentrate them in schools full of their peers.
They tried that on us ("gifted schools"). The two things it got us were hours less sleep each day because of the longer commute, and worse college admissions because of GPA deflation. I would've rather stayed in the normal pipeline and gotten scholarships instead.
There are hundreds of thousands of boys who excel at math and science until their bodies mature to the point where they become competitive at track or football.
Unlike "hanging out with friends", a universal activity, extracurricular sports actually do conflict with early computer science exploration (they're a huge time sink, as any parent of a kid in a sport will attest).
Meanwhile, sports draws in more boys than girls.
Why are we so quick to accept the notion that after-school activities that girls participate in isolate them from STEM, but after-school activities dominated by boys don't?
As a nerdy teenager, I never had a problem with any girl in any clique or social group at my school. But I sure as shit had problems with the boys in sports.
I'm not sure sports are more of a time sink than a lot of kids would otherwise spend doing something mindless like watching TV or gaming. It's a couple of hours a day after school for practice and half a day on the weekend for a game (yes I have three kids in sports).
There are kids (and parents) who get totally invested in a sport with often unrealistic expectations of college scholarships or professional careers, but there are a lot who are also remain very academically focused and balanced. I know that many of the kids on my oldest son's high school teams went on to college in STEM fields so it's not an either/or.
Huh? I lettered in three sports, plus played in multiple musical groups and was on the quiz bowl team, and still found plenty of time to learn to program in assembly language and Forth.
According to the anecdote, "Her friends thought that any intellectual interest was nerdy and stupid, and my sister acted accordingly" had an impact, not that it took time to hang out with them.
Sewing kits, to me, sound kinda boring. Why not Lego for everyone? Lego is great! It stimulates creativity and you can do whatever you want with it. If you want to play with cars you can make em out of Lego. If you want to roleplay, you can make buildings and use the Lego minifigures! Doesn't that give you the best of both worlds? Heck, even if you're not interested in building your own stuff from scratch, a lot of sets are tons of fun, and all they require you to do is follow instructions.
They do to me too! However the tech industry isn't the only industry with these problems, we just talk about them more. I bought up the nurse example because it's one I'm familiar with: I dated a nurse. By the time she graduated (around 2007 I think) her academic hospital had zero, as I recall - less than 2 to be safe, male nurses. I knew some civil engineers at college, out of their whole class: 2 women.
Every industry is experiencing it in both directions. It's more unfair to women as the higher-salary industries tend to be the male-dominated. However, if my son wanted to be a nurse I'd want him to be able to figure that out and then feel that it was completely normal.
This childhood self-discrimination is pervasive and needs to be fixed.
> This childhood self-discrimination...needs to be fixed
I'm baffled by how you can believe that individual choice can be a problem that needs to be fixed. Do you believe that people should be directed into non-traditional fields against their will? Or do you believe that they're not competent to make their own decisions?
While a agree with the problems people mention in this subthread there are also, at least in some parts of the world, plenty of women in "life sciences" (biology/chemistry/medicine) and other fields like economics.
Yes. I sometimes feel like most of the people in these threads don't enter the discussion with the understanding that computer science, and software development in particular, are a topic of discussion because they have a uniquely bad gender gap.
In the UK, there's possibly much more of a problem with low/status pay for engineers in general than for women engineers specifically.
Clever women with the right social background head for medicine, law, media, marketing, or even teaching - especially at department head level, and above. That's where the real money and status are. There's also not much of a gender gap to speak of, except perhaps at the very top.
If anything, the gap goes the other way now, because boys in state schools are being aggressively socialised by peer pressure and teacher disinterest away from academic achievement in ways that girls aren't.
Engineers often have poor social status anyway. The UK is run by public school types, and they tend think of engineers as a slightly better class of carpenter or plumber. Social polish and family/school connections are far more valuable than the ability to build stuff that works.
What about Barbie doll ownership makes it harder to understand pointer math?
Exactly how are Barbie dolls in conflict with chemistry sets?
Even boys who own chemistry sets play with them far less often than they do with action figures. Is there some connection between chemistry sets and action figures that advantage them over Barbie dolls?
Is it just Barbie dolls? I hope my 14 year old daughter's American Girl dolls haven't ruined her for STEM; that's her current planned field. The boy, 16, played with legos and video games. I'm guessing he's going to be history major, or a writer. Did we do something else right? Or are we doomed and just don't know it yet?
Honestly, as a girl who was actually given access to both, I chose both. I still have my barbies, I still have my lego sets, I still have my electronics kits. I don't think I was ostracized (or at least I found my own tinkerer community), and I played with everything I was given with. I think what made this cooler was that my dad was supportive of what I wanted to do (e.g. make houses, make lights for barbies, make websites to describe what I was working on), even though he didn't understand some of how it worked.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, today I'm a software engineer.
I know this is purely anecdotal, but I think we forget that if you give kids access to everything, they will figure out their own playtime and communities.
I believe that it likely begins at middle school or high school instead because this is the age an individual can more easily comprehend what computer engineering is actually all about. What I suspect is that generally speaking both men and women start out on equal footing in terms of having access to a computer to learn on and the capability to learn the craft. I suspect they are also on equal footing in terms of both feeling the same intellectual stimulation, challenge, rush, and sense of self-empowerment that comes after they've built their first program.
Unfortunately from that point on more male than female students go on to more fully grok programming. I believe this is because the hidden costs associated with pursuing the craft are unequal between the two genders. For either gender it can represent a 'ding' on their popularity scorecard so to speak, but the ding is felt far more profoundly for women. One can certainly debate why this is and of course it's possible to trace this phenomena historically back into the days of ancient greek culture and before.
My feeling on the matter personally though is that the cultural norms of highschoolers have simply not had time to adapt to the idea that "geek is sheik" because the sentiment has only existed (outside of hacker culture) for the last decade (and perhaps it's still only a thing in California). In addition to that there has never been a "female astronaut moment" for computer science, so to speak in terms of it breaking into the consciousness of the average teen. This may be a chicken/egg type problem.
I think this is shifting now, but my opinion is that the biases which effected how highschoolers were feeling 15 or 20 years ago about computer science are still skewing the hiring statistics today because there are far fewer women job applicants who have been doing this kind of programming work for 15 or 20+ years...
How many were programming BBS systems in ANSI C back before AOL was a thing, or how many were following along with the early web as the standards (things like CSS) were being flushed out and it's possibilities were being explored (intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_B31nF3sU0&t=2m10s)
According to the statistics there are a lot more men who have been engaged in "Internet engineering" in one form or another for most of their life and this kind of multidisciplinary computer-science background can skew a hiring decision in their favor assuming both candidates are equally well versed with the most current technologies. Young programmers find ways to make up for the often times narrower scope of their experience (lack of a lisp beard) by being really good at the things that they specialize in, and by tracking more closely the cutting edge. I feel there are more women who are joining this cohort every day, but there are still not as many and it's a shame.
If that were the case then the first step might be to somehow get grown up women to accept the root cause of the problem (young girls antagonizing other girls) because if older women are blaming the entire issue on men then they're never going to recognize that they may need to have difficult conversations with young women about their biases and behaviors in order to reverse this unfortunate situation..
Instead of accepting the responsibility of doing their part to foster an understanding in young women about subtle forms of bullying they instead prefer to embrace the victim role which is the view that little can be done to resolve the issue without somehow breaking free from their (imaginary) male oppressors.
Girls are put off by how computer culture styles itself in nerdy ways.
Ok, i can kind of get that. On the other hand, i don't like it much because she seems to be saying "hiding positive expressions about things you like could be helpful".
I'm all for increasing diversity, but that should happen by bringing in more things and widening horizons. If that means "Sex and the City", then yes, please.
The article does also kind of lose its red thread when she compares offputting styling with outright attacks against her. Maybe she's trying to be less contentious by not outright calling them out as bullshit that should get people shitcanned by HR. But really, that's what should be said about that, not comparisons with star wars posters.
All that said, i like the bit she mentions at the end, about introducing computing earlier. If done emphatically it can have a real chance of leveling the playing field.
i don't like it much because she seems to be saying "hiding positive expressions about things you like could be helpful"
Quite. The person who happens to like sci-fi isn't motivated by excluding anyone; they like it because they like it and will share their enthusiasm with anyone. Has that person intentionally done something wrong? And if not why should they be censured for it? That is the elephant in the corner of the room here. There is no conspiracy to keep women out of tech, never has been, and demonizing decent people for innocent things, doesn't ultimately help anyone.
It's not so much the fault of any individuals, as it is just a difficult situation overall. Ideally there would be both sci-fi enthusiasts as well as enthusiasts of other topics, so that more people can find common interests.
"The person who happens to like sci-fi isn't motivated by excluding anyone; they like it because they like it and will share their enthusiasm with anyone."
You sure about that? I know quite a few people who are seemingly only interested in science fiction and gaming it its various forms and aggressively disinterested in anything else. Maybe you know some, too: people who use terms like "sports ball" and whatever the current incarnation of "mundane" (as a noun) or "muggle" is. Believe me, it's no more appealing than hanging with a group of, say, serious football fans (for the appropriate value of "football").
I don't feel the need to demonize anyone, but decent people doing what they feel are innocent things can successfully masquerade as a conspiracy for as long as you care to watch.
I think you'll only find that in personality types that most of society probably isn't too fond of. That's not a gender thing, that's just a pretentious, insular, obnoxious personality.
And frankly, I don't think that's very common in professional settings. A basic rule of polite conduct is respecting other people's interests and beliefs.
That said, I myself do sometimes say "sports ball" because I think it's a humorous way to address a topic I know absolutely nothing about.
if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines
This would seem to be a bit of a bait-and-switch... If you aren't interested in "computer parts and tech magazines" then what exactly is it about computing that makes you want to do it?
"For the money" is a valid answer of course, a job's a job for most people, but let's call a spade a spade.
Its a prop for being low social status. If they wanted masculinity instead of low social status, they would have used football posters and GQ magazine for props in their thought experiment.
I'm not quite sure what a prop would be for low social status women.
Its a prop for having a functioning brain. Other than the star wars and science fiction stuff (which I haven't seen at any tech companies I've worked at here in the bay), the rest of the props indicate that you have a genuine intellectual interest in the field.
We don't make fun of NASA for decorating their offices with space paraphernalia or claim it means a low social status. Frankly I'm not interested in people coming into this field who are stupid enough to think that people genuinely excited about what they do have a "low social status".
Do you mean "prop" as in holds something up or "prop" as in, a thing from a scene in a movie? Because I am having some difficulty in parsing your comment.
This is probably it, there's even movies about it (Legally Blonde, etc). What's different there is customer-facing vs non-customer-facing roles, a lawyer who shows up in court in non-professional attire is going to get flak, and I don't know what the immediate female-heavy analogue for a back-of-office, not-customer-facing male-dominated engineer department. The usual examples of female-dominated professions like nursing and teaching don't fit that comparison.
But it's very disingenuous to call engineering low social status these days. Wearing Star Wars t-shirts or talking about computer parts and technology 24/7, yes, that will still receive at least some ribbing, if not more, but that's not the same as being an engineer by day. In my recent social experience, reaction after someone asks "what do you do?" is pretty uniformly somewhere on the positively-neutral-to-impressed spectrum.
I don't see how this is bait and switch. I am a programmer and I cant't stand star wars or the vast majority of science fiction. Neither do I enjoy running around with geeky tshirts. You do not have to be nerdy to enjoy working with computers.
How did you draw that conclusion? First of all I do not work in an environment where I do not connect with my peers, secondly I said that I do not like this culture, not that I have a problem if people do.
"I felt out of place among my mostly male colleagues because I hated drinking beer and didn’t like being mocked for reading novels. Not to mention that the men who controlled access to the computer made me listen to a barrage of sexist teasing if I wanted to be given that day’s code to run my program."
I'm male. I don't drink beer. I read novels. I don't get mocked for either of them. I don't get sexist teasing. I have seen coworkers do that, though (in more subtle ways)—and that just sucks.
It would be a mistake to interpret or portray this article as "afraid of Star Wars posters" as if Star Wars posters are a thing that actively attacks people who are different.
The premise of the article is that if potential students are exposed to "nerd culture" they are less likely to pick compsci than if the person they talk to avoids this environment. Not sure how you draw a conclusion about work.
I think the parent was complaining that things which definitely have nothing to do with STEM fields (sci-fi and star wars) were interspersed with things that are germanely related (computer parts and tech magazines).
You wouldn't fault an anatomy course for having skeletons in the room or a Physics classroom for having copies of Science laying around, so the parent argues that it's also weird to tell technology educators not to display computer hardware (for instance).
FWIW I ultimately agree with you. Computer hardware and pop sci/tech trade rags have nothing at all to do with most of the Computer Science field.
I don't think any of the things mentioned need to be in a compscie class. At least on my university neither architecture nor math departments were littered with popculture references, yet compsci was. And math and architects dressed better ;)
> things which definitely have nothing to do with STEM fields (sci-fi and star wars)
I respectfully disagree wholeheartedly. Many enter these industries because of their love for sci-fi. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Space X or NASA employee who wouldn't attribute at least some of their aspiration to the creations of Carl Sagan or Gene Rodenberry.
True but incomplete. Some of us got interested in scientific fields because we were interested in science (not science fiction). For me, it was a good teacher at a critical time in HS. Not a role model, as I did not and really do not wish to be a teacher. But somebody who opened a door into something that excited me.
Could you square that circle for me where you are interested in science, but not science fiction? I'm not talking about science fantasy, but fiction rooted in science and the ramifications of scientific development.
This isn't strange at all. I interact with scientists fairly regularly and very few are fans of science fiction in any sense of the phrase.
Most scientists are normal people with an aptitude for a certain discipline, enjoy working on interesting problems, and had the luck of having encountered a mentor or two who steered them toward research. None of the ideas that drive the creation of sci fi are necessary to be a scientist. It really is just another career.
In fact, I can't think of a single scientist I (personally) know who became a scientist because of sci fi. (Which isn't to say that they don't exist.)
I'm a scientist who doesn't like sci fi much. I don't hate it, I enjoy some of it, but not the genre as a whole. I like Star Wars for the big pew pew spaceships as much as anybody but I don't like Star Trek at all.
To me, a lot of it just comes across as unimaginative. Oh sure, we've travelled half way across the galaxy to meet an alien race and it turns out they're Space Russians, or Space Jews. Maybe Space Ancient Romans for a change.
While I have read science fiction, it's not high on my list. I prefer various forms of history to SF and I have read one fantasy series (Katherine Kurtz). Perhaps I just prefer to look backwards to understand today (and the near future) rather than far off to anticipate the future? I think I'm more of a problem solver than a visionary.
I also have a problem with anything where the science (or engineering, I guess) isn't right or consistent in my eyes. I find such things TERRIBLY distracting, slaughtering what might otherwise be a good story. Anal, yeah, but then you probably suspected this as this is HN, after all.
No one's being called out. I'm curious about how it works, so I asked. Thankfully not everyone here is as reactionary as you, and I actually learned something.
I think it's better to call it a specific American subculture than "nerdy". All kinds of people have that level of obsession with other things like fashion, but they have their own communities that respect them for it.
How well correlated are those things with CS or Engineering studies? Star Wars and science fiction won't help you write software. Building a computer from scratch won't really either, these days. (And magazines are a weird one because they're very much a relic of the past, and not as much of a realistic way to pick this stuff up for the past 15 years.)
Tech posters also seem entirely like a high-school/college-age cultural thing rather than a sign of real interest. Most of my (almost entirely male) software engineer coworkers have as their desktop pictures nature scenes, cityscapes, or picture of people, very few have sci-fi/fantasy/anime/whatever screenshots or art.
If you go to more directly-related things like "reading and commenting on HN on a Sunday" where someone is likely to very well be learning things that apply to their job, it would be interesting to see how much of a turnoff that seemed to be compared to the above-listed tangential culture markers. Though even then, while I'm sure business owners love having employees who will willingly do uncompensated work-related study on the weekend, I'm doubtful that it's a thing we should be striving towards.
Science fiction gives the ideas that we can eventually implement ourselves.
How many people working on the first customer mobile phone didn't think it was the Communicator from Star Trek?
In 2001 A Space Odyssey, the book describes the tablet computer.
Scifi has a great cultural and technological precedent in computing: it gives the ideas of what to do next. And that doesn't matter what sex you are (or aren't).
If you aren't interested in "computer parts and tech magazines" then what exactly is it about computing that makes you want to do it?
I am a woman with a Certificate in GIS. I know some HTML and CSS. I run some blogs.
I joined an email list -- a parenting/homeschooling list -- when my now 28 year old son was 11. It led to me becoming a moderator of an email list for a time. My advice was seemingly popular on that list. Someone liked my writing and wanted to put some of it on their website. Later, she helped me move that to a site of my own and take over the coding.
There are things I would like to do in this world to help other people -- to educate them, to empower them to solve hard personal problems. I joined Hacker News in hopes of eventually learning to write code to do that. So far, life has gotten in the way.
My two adult sons are masters of framing traditionally male interests in a way that appeals to me. My oldest son got me playing Master of Magic -- now one of my favorite games -- by telling me "It's like SimCity" and then helping me to play it in a way that appealed to my interest in civilization building. My sons want to make video games for a living. If things work out, I may join them in that endeavor at some point.
Having girly motivations does not mean writing code is of no interest to you. You can be interested in people or whatever and see code as a way to accomplish your goals. Mulan is the single best movie I know of that portrays a woman having success in a man's world doing a man's job for girly reasons: She loved her father. She felt guilty that she was a daughter and not a son. If she had been born a boy, she would have been conscripted, not him. So she went in his place -- and saved a nation, to keep her beloved family member alive.
You can be a girly girl and love someone enough that you would murder others over it. We aren't all helpless whiny crybabies. Sometimes, doing things like a girl makes you a total badass.
But there are serious "marketing" problems with how we approach the problem space currently.
> Having girly motivations does not mean writing code is of no interest to you. You can be interested in people or whatever and see code as a way to accomplish your goals.
I've noticed that in some tech circles, social and emotional motivations (and especially ones with negative valence like anger and disappointment) are seen as sort of unreal and invalid. I understand that people often want to focus on choosing the product/technology/protocol/whatever that's objectively the best, but I think there are cases where it's warped the culture such that people get into cliques and develop (sometimes intense) social motivations based on perfectly valid factors like trust and respect, but pretend that those motivations are entirely based on dispassionate technical analysis.
I guess I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe it's that social "drama" is inevitable, but tech communities make it toxic because of a misguided belief that it's irrelevant, and this dynamic causes splash damage for women who are more heavily socialized to value personal relationships. Maybe it's just a brain fart, but I think it would explain a lot.
I think part of the devaluation of emotion is the nature of the work. The computer doesn't care that you've had a bad day. The computer doesn't care that your kid is sick. The computer doesn't care that you're behind on your mortgage, or that your partner left you, or that you could really use a hug. The computer is a cruel adversary, and to beat it, you need to discard emotion (at least temporarily) and embrace its cold, logical way of reasoning about the world. You need to beat it at its own game.
Is it any wonder that we programmers tend to view logical reasoning as more useful than emotional reasoning?
I did once post an article here about how emotional labor is deemed to be women's work and the social expectation is that women must do it. It was fairly man-bashy, so it unsurprisingly got no attention here. It got a great deal of very positive attention in a different forum I belong to. It was a huge positive, eye opening discussion for a great many women who have boatloads of legitimate frustration and anger about this issue and how it negatively impacts their lives.
The degree to which women are expected to deal with the emotions of other people means that women in male dominated environments get dumped on in a way that becomes very problematic for them. Women are not allowed to say "Not my problem." If they try that, there is hell to pay. So I do not believe this is more problematic for women because they value social relationships more. I think it is more problematic because everyone around them will blame them if they do not smooth things over (I mean for other parties -- like mom interceding between fighting children), will cry on their shoulder and expect them to care, etc.
This is one reason tech needs to value diversity: Most men simply don't have substantial skill in dealing with certain things. When you lack social and emotional savvy, it is not uncommon for the fallout to involve things like being sued by people who are mad as hell at you. The way to minimize outcomes like that is to have people on board who will recognize the problem early and act to resolve it before it involves lawyers and bad publicity. But they cannot take effective action if they do not have real power and are not sincerely respected.
> If you aren't interested in "computer parts and tech magazines" then what exactly is it about computing that makes you want to do it?
If that's not rhetorical, I'm uninterested in "computer parts and tech magazines". They're just corporate blahblahblah selling technojunk. But I have zillions of books on computing. More interesting to read about the computing roads society didn't take.
Even with books, I probaby don't empathize with most readers... tech isn't a smorgasbord I wish to shovel down indiscriminately. Most of it tastes like crap; some is entrancing.
And of course, ends matter if tech isn't just masturbation. Why ultimately care about computing? What about a universe full of other intellectual pursuits?
A telling remark. So far as I can see, lawyers dress pretty much identically to every other professional --- except computer professionals, who actually do have an idiosyncratic dress code.
I don't see that at all. Lawyers in general dress better than most other professions except finance. I've worked in hospitals and never saw the doctors dressing as well as lawyers[1] - some consultants do, but far from the majority doctors. Friends of mine are in architecture, and I don't see that there either. Same with engineering in general - neat casual seems much more par for the course. Academics also don't often fit the bill.
In contrast, the 'neckbeard and star wars t-shirt' is something I've never personally seen working in tech. Neckbeard, yes. I've worked in one waterfall shop and four agile shops, and liaised with techies in enterprise from time to time (zero t-shirts there) - the 'sci-fi geek visible at 100 yards' is a trope, a stereotype. The techies I've worked with have been overwhelmingly male (only one female developer in all that time) and about half of them were family men. That's something the 'computer professional' stereotype actively opposes, instead painting people that are into computers as social losers who can't get a girl.
IT is more accepting of shabbiness in dress than other professions, but I simply don't see the sloganed t-shirt as being the actual standard attire of computer professionals. Instead it seems more to be a shorthand stereotype, just like a white coat and stethoscope signals 'doctor' in the collective mind.
[1] I do have bias here - when I say 'lawyers', I mean ones in business. I haven't had interaction with lawyers dealing in personal matters. I imagine they dress to suit.
I think you're making observations from a biased selection of lawyers. BigLaw corporate lawyers wear suits and ties. But most lawyers aren't that, and most of them wear business casual just like everybody else.
Meanwhile: if you select down to consulting software developers, particularly those working at major (500+ headcount) firms selling to Fortune 500 companies, you're going to find that they don't dress like the stereotypical software developer either. Those consultants are the CS equivalent of BigLaw lawyers.
I don't think "I've ... liaised with techies in enterprise from time to time" marries up well with "if you select down to consulting software developers". :)
The biggest headcount of a company I've worked in tech with is 60, most of whom were not in IT. The other tech companies are all 10-20 people, including part-timers. Only one company I worked for sold to Fortune 500 - ironically this one had the shabbiest dress of all.
Three of those companies had lawyers - they all dressed in suit-with-optional-tie. As did their visitors (visitors rarely optioned out of the tie) and the lawyers I'd talk to from other companies (admittedly a rare occurrence). Apart from the medical sales at the waterfall place and finance staff, I rarely see a suit jacket in the neat casual dress of other staff (IT or otherwise).
I realise this is all anecdata, but at the same time, the 'neckbeard and t-shirt' idiom is a grossly incorrect stereotype.
This particular argument is just not interesting to me. I disagree with you: I think lawyers dress like pretty much all the rest of the accountants, salespeople, marketing managers, and project managers that make up the modern workforce. I think that if there's any profession that does have an informally enforced and idiosyncratic dress code, it's the programmers, with their surreptitious warnings to preferred job candidates not to wear a suit to the interview.
I respect that you've had a different set of experiences and drawn different conclusions, but respectfully: I think I'm just going to be hard to convince otherwise on these points, and having a message board slapfight over which jobs wear more ties --- I can visualize myself trying to Google my way to a survey answer to this question now --- shudder --- just seems like a terrible use of our time.
I'm happy to agree to disagree, though we both agree that IT is more tolerant of shabbiness. I do think that your definition of 'professional' is too narrow - 'professionals' are more than finance, sales, and middle-managers. I guess my point was primarily that the stereotype of developers doesn't seem to match up with the actuality of developers. I just get verbose and waffley at times.
And yes, this isn't a debate that should send either of us a-searching :)
More appropriate analogy: law students being put off by Sex In The City.
That's in some hypothetical world where the law industry is for some bizarre reason as obsessed with Sex In The City as the tech industry is obsessed with science fiction. Conversations among coworkers return to Sex and the City references with tedious regularity. The meeting rooms at your firm are called Carrie and Miranda and Samantha and... the other one. Your firm's senior partner shows you, with pride, the signed portrait of Sarah Jessica Parker that occupies pride of place in his office. I can imagine that would be pretty alienating for anyone who isn't a SatC fan.
Luckily law isn't so ridiculously obsessed with some tiny facet of pop culture.
Law pretty much requires you at least be comfortable with some douchey stuff. It's very classist. Some of them look like you just murdered a baby if you got mcdonalds for lunch. Their version of nerd is pretentious yuppie.
It's not far off from working in tech and not being a nerd. Maybe even worse since nerds don't actively look down on regular people the way lawyers do.
I suspect the reason why women find the nerd culture more off putting is because being nerd is sort of bad. So thinking tech is nerdy means tech is embarrassing and undesirable. Not that they won't fit in. They don't want to fit in.
Either way, the solution is to encourage some women to do tech and they can trail blaze. Then future women can see that you don't have to be a nerd to do tech.
I got into computers because they were amazing devices that I could make do things. I have no interest in hardware, other than using it to write software. Tech magazines are reference materials, and as such, aren't all that interesting. Professionally, I managed to combine my academic and hacker interests into spending decades making software that others can use to do THEIR work: solve problems, understand Nature, ...
I have to admit, I'm kind of sick and tires of this fanatic mania of an obsession with fantasy stories. It's like some retarded fixation. It's so obsessive and annoying when someone makes a trite star wars reference and everyone laughs or feels compelled to laugh
Upon hearing de Blasio's announcement, my initial reaction was mandatory programming classes for high school is as unnecessary as mandatory calculus.
After reading the article, I'd update that opinion. I still don't feel it should be mandatory for a basic High School degree, but perhaps forming a track for college bound students that includes programming (and calculus, AP english, etc.) and requiring that track to graduate with honors would be a good positive incentive.
Programming & algorithms is a pretty advanced academic topic. Requiring it for graduation would set up a lot of students to fail or become disillusioned with what education has to offer them. Much like if Calculus were required.
My high school had an abhorrently bad AP CS program. The teacher was a hobbyist who had no business teaching the subject and in fact turned off the majority of the students to CS, especially the girls. I fear anytime we make something mandatory in American education it will only exasperate the terrible education system that we have and ultimately do more harm then good.
It is because they don't want to be there. The opportunity is there for everyone to take thus men and women. I actually think women have an advantage in this space and it is up to them to see it and advantage of it.
As a woman, I am tired this. If you want it, go and get it. There shouldn't be any special treatment. Prove you deserve to be at the table, prove you deserve to be there based merits etc.. Not because of gender, race etc.
People are going to wonder why this conclusion? Because when people see you as a women trying to achieve something, a lot are willing to help and push you. Don't moan about it, go ahead and just get into Tech if you want it that bad.
My point is Women are every bit as talented, smart, and tenacious as men. The focus on women is good in that there are women that just need to go for it - reference to the article however broad my initial response was.
I tend to agree with this. For whatever reason, girls just don't like the work. When I stated studying, the ratio was 50:50 split. By graduation time, it was down to 80:20 as he girls transferred into different courses or dropped out. I was friends with many - as they changed or dropped out they all said they don't like the subject matter or the type of work.
By the time we all started working, it was further down to 90:10. My office recruited a lot of female grads, we had a female department head who positively discriminated. One of my first mentors was female. In that respect I think my early experience was atypical.
But they kept dropping out as time went on, transferring into different streams/jobs.
There are some things that need to be done - particularly at helping parents understand their school age girls like of STEM - but ultimately I don't think it's worth trying to socially engineer and entire field to be 50:50 when you'll struggle to find that many women who want to study it, learn it and work in it for decades.
@Brc, I agree with you a 100%. Obviously this has to be discussed and does stir emotions. It is fine but people have to understand although you can raise a kid a certain way, they won't always do what you want. We also have to consider external factors that influence such decisions and why a person decides to choose a specific field. It will be nice for the ratio to be 50:50 when it comes to these things but it does not work that way.
Not going to hijack the thread but I am going to use myself as a guinea pig. I am a young black woman who likes hanging out here. I personally don't believe things should be handed to me. I expect to be judge based on my merits and as such. Did someone force me to come and be on hacker news? No. It a place I really like and learn alot and has been welcoming. So if women want to be in tech, they just need to make the effort and show the desire for it. They can start by choosing courses in universities and seeking out help and asking questions. They can also do research and see where like- minded individuals hangout if they are really serious about learning.
While 1) my own experience somewhat matches yours, and 2) it does seem, subjectively to me, like a lot of this can be attributed to women freely choosing not to go into the profession early on, you did absolutely nothing to refute any of the points in the article.
Regarding the dropping out, I think it is (at least partially) due to a lack of positive reinforcement. Imagine two students, one male and one female, who were both good science students in high school and decide to take CS 101. They both get a 70% on the first test. The male student will (implicitly or explicitly) be told "shake it off, you'll do better on the next one" while the female student will be told "well you tried, maybe CS isn't your thing". I used to see this a lot in engineering classes, the male students took the failures as a fluke and the female students thought it meant they should do something else.
Schema for gender discussion in tech, version 3.c.ii:
1. An article is posted wherein a woman describes wanting to be in tech and not doing so due to active and passive opposition.
2. Many comments discussing how women aren't in tech because they don't want to be there.
I swear, these threads are all straight out of How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ (a book I strongly recommend; it's absolutely hi-damn-larious.)
>> Prove you deserve to be at the table, prove you deserve to be there based merits etc.. Not because of gender, race etc.
I would add white privilege or majority privilege to that... quite a few blokes get a seat at the table cause they identify with the majority group or vice versa.
This was a very well written and balanced article. I want to contribute a reason why I think that many men in tech hold back from fully endorsing this viewpoint.
The reason is that there is a very fine line between saying that you don't have to be nerdy to be in tech, and failing to acknowledge that in general being nerdy is a disadvantage in society, and many people found a refuge in tech where they were mocked and often bullied outside[0]. To fail to acknowledge this is to risk promoting the same negative attitudes towards nerds within tech, as exist outside it.
So I would say that we should all encourage tech to be as open an welcoming as possible, and to avoid any implication that you have to have a certain personality, appearance or interests to succeed in tech. But we shouldn't dismiss the traits of people who currently are overrepresented in tech as a "stereotype", much less a "negative stereotype". I also don't think this is what the author was suggesting. As the article says, "stereotypes are only partly true, and women who actually take classes in computer science don’t hold the same prejudices as women who get their ideas from pop culture."
Speaking as a nerd who grew up in the early 1990s: persecuted nerds do not have the right to (in any way) cordon off computer science as a refuge for their culture. But a lot of male nerds think they do!
Do persecuted non-nerds have the right to (in any way) cordon off computer science as a refuge free from nerdiness? Because that's what articles like these seem to be suggesting we'd need to do, by saying that nerd social cues like Star Wars and geeky T-shirts are excluding women.
I think that's an overwrought reading of the article, for two reasons: first, the article isn't prescriptive about Star Wars, and second, it's reporting simple facts; whether you feel comfortable about it or not, nerd culture's coupling with software development does alienate potential entrants to the field.
But let's not bother deploying dueling readings from the article, and instead see how much you and I actually disagree:
I do not in fact think it's reasonable to suggest that individual software developers should avoid nerd signifiers to avoid alienating people. I feel safe presuming we agree about that.
Do you feel like it's reasonable for companies to avoid aggressive identification with nerd culture? To not ask candidates what their favorite Star Wars movie is, or to try to balance out outings and fringe benefits so they only appeal to sci-fi fandom?
I wasn't trying to be gender-specific with my example, just showing how something you can do as a manager to build culture can exclude and alienate people.
(Though: I do think beer drinking trends masculine.)
Right: nobody bonds over building shareholder value. They bond over shared interests. But there are no _universal_ interests, so team-building is a quandary. I think the best you can do is rotate events and make sure most people are interested most of the time.
Maybe after the beer offsite, you can visit a winery, or a famous local coffee house, and then a museum.
I think the closest universal interest for me has been music. I don't really drink and I don't really talking to drinkers when I'm sober but I always love going out to gigs with pretty much anyone.
It's not exactly the most interactive activity when you can't talk for 80% of the time, but it's still enjoyable and sociable.
It's really hard to win at this. Whatever you do as a culture or team building exercise is going to either offend or just be uncomfortable to some subset of employees, unless it's so bland as to be boring for everyone.
It seems like a borderline example. I feel that the "brogrammer" stereotype was invented up mainly because the nerd stereotype was too sympathetic. I'm genuinely curious if there are examples of the kind of stereotypes in the article being promoted right now by tech companies.
As an aside, these sorts of critiques of mainstream/White culture are somewhat contradictory in that they criticize any specific cultural identity as being exclusive and insular, and yet whenever this is lacking, they point to how boring mainstream/White culture is. Even lack of crime can be turned into evidence of boringness. For example, for every article on the negative effect of nerd culture on diversity, there is an article complaining about the decline of nerd culture and the rise of corporatism. The latter tend to be highly revisionist and pretend that the tech industry was founded by LSD taking hippies who coded inside isolation tanks. But the contradiction is still stark.
Beer seems more in-line with bro culture than nerd culture. This particular article seems more against corporate nerd culture than against corporate bro culture, but I've definitely seem articles speaking out against brogramming culture. Bros and nerds are quite different things (even though it seems like there are a lot of hybrids in Silicon Valley), but it seems to me that the only way to not alienate anyone is to have zero corporate culture.
I'm a hardware engineer. Most hardware companies are too tight fisted to have offsites (making physical things is expensive). The few that I've been on have been very tame because the last thing management wants is an offended employee.
Having an offsite at a brewery is kinda shitty because not everyone likes to drink. Did anyone try to suggest another venue?
Palantir is named after an item in Lord of the Rings. From what I've heard from friends working there, they have an internal conference called HobbitCon, meetings rooms named after LotR, and refer to their office as "the shire".
Did I say that persecuted nerds have the right to cordon off CS as a refuge for their culture? I thought that I said the opposite. Your later comments suggest that you break things down exactly as I do: it's ok for nerds to be nerds, and it's ok for nerds to cluster in tech, but it's not ok to promote the idea that only nerds can do tech, or to promote an stereotype that goes beyond reality.
Did you read my comment carefully? Was I unclear at some point? Do you disagree that a lot of male nerds are resisting the diversity movement because they feel that it attacks them, and that this article notwithstanding, often the diversity movement does attack them?
The very fact that your previous comment was misinterpreted by tptacek to the point of castigating the imaginary nerds to give up their imaginary rights to "cordon off computer science as a refuge free from nerdiness" indicates to me that those people who are wont to blame the men in tech have little empathy to begin with.
The nerd culture has been one of the most inclusive cultures I've been with. As esr wrote, "No compiler or network stack or 3-D printer gives a crap about the shape of your genitals or the color of your skin, and hackers as a culture don’t either." http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6642
Of course not. The provided quote from Eric S. Raymond -- who, in my mind, is more of someone who intelligently analyzes these matters better than most people than is someone popular/ famous/ worshipped -- is to illustrate the 14 years of personal experience dealing with nerds (7 years in India; 7 years in the West; plus various interactions over the internet with people from other cultures) wherein it became clear, again and again, that the nerd culture has been one of the most inclusive cultures I've been with. Indeed, just in the last month I have seen two incidents where the non-nerds (the so called "women in tech") have clearly demonstrated their lack of empathy (and there have been more such incidents, outside of tech).
> female students are more interested...if they are shown a classroom...decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor
> If the actor wore a T-shirt that said “I CODE THEREFORE I AM” and claimed to enjoy video games, the students expressed less interest in studying computer science than if the actor wore a solid shirt and claimed to enjoy hanging out with friends
So all we need to do is overhaul computer science's anti-women culture is remove computer magazines, computer parts, computer games, futurism, and coding.
> So all we need to do is overhaul computer science's anti-women culture is remove computer magazines, computer parts, computer games, futurism, and coding.
Best comment on this submission IMHO.
Making a subject more welcoming to folks who aren't actually interested in it just seems ridiculous. I wouldn't want a physician who doesn't actually care about bodies and biology; I wouldn't want my care designed by someone who isn't really into reliability, moments and materials; why would I want software written by someone who doesn't hunger and thirst to manipulate symbols and code?
This article is discursive. It talks about modern issues we need to deal with (current image of computer scientists), but then goes into an outdated story of direct harassment she received at Oak Ridge. The latter is irrelevant to discussion at hand.
"female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines."
The "neutral decor" sounds awfully boring for a computer classroom. I love art, nature posters, coffee, and plants; but when I imagine a computer classroom in both of these styles the former is infinitely more appealing.
I don't really understand why they think all females hate star wars. I love it, I even had a Darth Vader 3d puzzle.
I also know a lot of women who like star wars, anime, and "geeky" stuff. It really sounds like they want to remove nerd culture from the tech industry.
I had a hard time with this when I was in software, because I didn't enjoy video games or sci-fi or a lot of the things my coworkers did. I have nothing against those things, but I feel like in the industry it's pretty common to adopt these things into the work culture instead of trying to keep the workplace more neutral.
I would liken it to working at an office where everyone is really into sports. I'll watch the occasional college football game, but I'd be pretty alienated working at an office with sports stuff hanging on the walls where people expected you to watch the game every weekend in order to fit in.
I 100% want more women in tech so this is only a comment on the star wars posters side of the thing
making video games is/requires programming so there's bound to a be a large overlap in programmers who are interested in video games.
Sci-fi inspires lots of people to get into programming. From wanting to create R2-D2 and C3PO to wanting to create projected holograms, wanting to create tricorders, computers that can take voice commands, touch surfaces, fancy new interfaces, virtual reality, AI, and many other topics touched on in sci-fi that are all directly related to programming.
Sports are not directly related and do not directly inspire most jobs but sci-fi does directly inspire many programmers to program and probably many other STEM careers. video games also inspire many programmers to program since video games are programming.
> In fact, Dr. Cheryan’s research shows that young men tend not to major in English for the same reasons women don’t pick computer science: They compare their notions of who they are to their stereotypes of English majors and decide they won’t fit in.
I wonder how long it will take for humanities departments to adopt a more inclusive culture? Why must our obsessive hand-wringing be be reserved exclusively for computer science and engineering, which are mostly hidden and do not set the wider cultural narrative (for the most part).
Why must our obsessive hand-wringing be be reserved exclusively for computer science and engineering, which are mostly hidden and do not set the wider cultural narrative
Because now there's money in it. No-one cared about this when the IT department was at the bottom of the corporate pecking order. No-one cares that refuse collection is almost exclusively male, but that's a job of real social importance...
As a white male who was at one time considering a double-major in Computer Science and English (it was a dumb idea for me for several reasons) and who therefore attended both English and Computer Science classes, I think the other issue that was mentioned in the article is more immediate.
Which is that just the sheer numbers of male students or female students in particular subjects is overwhelming. For example, in my American Lit class, there were literally three male students including me. The funny thing in that class was that at least half of the subject matter was basically about how the white male was evil.
But I definitely didn't fit in there, even without the subject matter. And its not that the girls treated me differently, they didn't -- but I knew I was different. Because I was surrounded by girls.
So I think that just the fact of the momentum of having lopsided student counts of males versus females has a huge effect. People do need to fit in and being with people who are really just like them is a big part of that. I think the stereotypes do have a big impact too, but its a double-whammy -- even when girls might not really be influenced by the stereotype, the reality of being the only female or one of a small group of females surrounded by young men in their classes will make them question their place.
So I think the social dynamics have more to do with it than people realize and I think this is a good article.
Yet, it appears that you will assume that we will assume that you are male. Why? Because you are on HN? Is this not buying into gender stereotypes?
(I am a woman. I am sometimes referred to as "he" on HN. I am quite open about my gender and it is specified in my profile. But the default assumption here is that anyone talking must be male -- because tech. This is accepting a stereotype.)
Let's suppose that most HN readers are men. There's no obvious gender signaling in your username. (It's two letters long, after all.) What's wrong with someone using the male pronoun as a default until being corrected? Do you expect commentators to read a user's profile before choosing a pronoun for that user? That would be a big efficiency loss for no real benefit. It's unfortunate that this default bothers you, but it's not the responsibility of anyone to prevent offense-taking on the part of another.
It doesn't hurt my feelings. It does, however, make it harder for most women to participate here. The correct way to handle it is to either find out my gender or speak as if you do not know what it is instead of assuming I am male. If you do not know my gender, it takes very little effort to speak in a way that admits you do not know it:
> It does, however, make it harder for most women to participate here
I've seen many people make this claim, but I haven't seen anyone back it up with evidence. What do you mean by "harder"? Do you mean "more difficult"? In what way?
Right now, I believe claims that tiny linguistic differences create meaningful barriers to female participation in technology are all specious. I could be convinced otherwise, but have seen no evidence that might move me.
> If you do not know my gender, it takes very little effort to speak in a way that admits you do not know it
English is not structured to be gender-neutral. I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.
Right now, I believe claims that tiny linguistic differences create meaningful barriers to female participation in technology are all specious. I could be convinced otherwise, but have seen no evidence that might move me.
Years ago, I joined an urban planning forum. It had been around for 10 years. It was the most prominent forum of its kind in the world. The majority of members were in Canada or the Continental US. The owner was frustrated that he did not have more of a global membership. He was not very socially savvy. He had explicitly stated his desire to have more international participation. I felt okay with kind of fucking with the group culture to hand him his wish. I was there about 6 months and was not a moderator when membership generally began to rise, but in particular international membership went up.
Part of how that happened:
I was a nightowl living in California, so I was often on late at night, like midnight my time, when it was the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast. Most members were not only living in the East Coast to West Coast time zones of the continental US, they were on the East Coast. It was a professional forum of nerds. So they were there mostly during working hours, 8am to 8pm east coast time (8-5 for east coast and west coast inclusive, since it is 8pm on the east coast when it is 5pm here).
So one of the cultural things going on was that if anyone was there during the evening or weekend, they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours. It was clear to my mind that this was a barrier to participation for anyone living outside of those time zones -- that potential international members would already be self conscious about being "different" and they would be online during their normal work hours, which were outside that 8-8 east coast timeframe. So the ugly comments about how terrible it was to post outside of those times was something I actively hunted down and fucked with. I threw it in everyone's face that I was there after midnight, that I was a woman and a student and so on (ie I emphasized that I was demographically different from the predominantly male employed professionals to help make foreigners more comfortable with being different). I was the only person having real time conversation with our one active Australian member when it all began.
That changed. I successfully killed the "I am here outside those hours, so I must be a lozer" meme and International membership went up.
I cannot "prove" that me going after that small linguistic detail directly caused it. I can tell you the forum existed for 10 years before I arrived. The forum owner had bitched for years about his desire to have more international members. Six months after I joined, international membership went up. I set it as a goal to make it happen as a gift to the forum owner since I felt he was doing good work and had explicitly expressed a desire for it.
So I believe strongly that I am right. I am also, as far as I can tell, the highest ranked woman here in terms of karma score, apparently by quite a stretch. So perhaps I know something about how to make that work here, if you want to believe my performance is in some way indicative that I know what I am talking about. Or you can do what a great many people do to me and wave it off as "luck" or "coincidence" or whatever and not indicative that my mental models have any kind of sound basis. That gets done to me quite a lot.
You have an anecdote. I don't know the timeframe for the events you described, but it's a widespread international connectivity to the internet developed much later outside the US than it did inside it, so all things being equal, I suspect there were simply more international participants available during your tenure than during the previous years.
This experience may have convinced you that language policing is effective, but it doesn't convince me. Bragging about your karma likewise has no effect on my evaluation of the merits of your argument.
> That gets done to me quite a lot.
It happens to everyone a lot. In context, I get the feeling that you're suggesting it happens to you because you're a woman. Am I wrong? These sly implications of sexism where none really exist are extremely offensive and offputting and make me less likely to sympathize with your cause.
Well, you are, in fact, dismissing it as merely coincidence, as I predicted.
Nor did I say it gets done to me because I am a woman. It does get done to me a lot. I don't know that it has anything to do with my gender. It may have more to do with the fact that I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology and I have well developed mental models for how these things work that most people are not very familiar with. Since social psychology is a "soft science," it is much harder to convince people that X is true than, say, for physics or math. That doesn't mean there are not studies or established principles, etc, to call upon for drawing conclusions.
Anyway, I have work to do and this seems fruitless, alas.
Yes, I am dismissing your anecdote as mere coincidence. I can't justify on an intellectual basis doing anything else. Am I supposed to just listen and believe?
> I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology
Your continuing reliance on credentials isn't helping your credibility.
You generally are being dismissive, not just "dismissing my anecdote". Women are frequently treated in a dismissive fashion by men. You dismiss my presumed hurt feelings over being misgendered as unimportant and something you cannot be bothered to put any effort into avoiding. You dismiss my accomplishments in gaining status on a predominantly male forum. You dismiss my "anecdote". And then you think that women should apparently be perfectly comfortable here in the face of you and thousands of other men like you being generally dismissive, disrespectful and insensitive towards them.
I don't imagine there is any hope of educating you as to why your behavior would drive off women and make them reluctant to participate here. But perhaps pointing it out will cast some light on the issue for other people.
Edit: And then you edit your comment to further dismiss my credentials as not helping my credibility. Just icing on the cake of a mountain of dismissiveness.
> Women are frequently treated in a dismissive fashion by men.
Everyone is treated in a dismissive fashioned by everyone. Only evidence and careful reasoning can rebut this default policy. You have presented none.
It galls me you interpret treatment that everyone receives as hostility directed toward the group to which you happen to belong. I am under no obligation to give additional weight to your argument merely because you are a woman. That you consider my dismissal of your unsupported claims is intellectually dishonest. You're smart enough to know better.
You're essentially claiming that everyone who doesn't accept your unsupported claims is sexist. You're free to do make this claim, but in doing so, you're crying wolf and weakening your cause.
You're right that I'm being dismissive. I'm also veering toward being disrespectful. That's not because you're a woman, but because you're demanding unearned special treatment. You're a technologist. Gaining status on a technologist's forum is no great accomplishment.
I wouldn't call myself a technologist. I do have a Certicate in GIS. But I intended to be an urban planner before life got in the way and I have failed, so far, to get a job in tech. However, I also know of a man high on the leader board who is a school teacher. Being a technologist seems to not be required to have status here. Being male does seem to be a requirement. There do not appear to be any women currently on the leaderboard. So I believe you to be wrong that it is no great accomplishment for a woman to gain status here.
You're smart enough to know better.
Thank you for saying that. But it does not change the fact that men here are routinely asked to show their work and women are routinely told they are simply full of shit. I have tried to show you what I know. You dismiss it and seem unopen to considering additional evidence.
There is a big difference between skepticism or desiring firmer evidence and disrespect. I don't expect you to give me special treatment. The standard on HN is supposed to be civil, respectful discourse. But my history suggests that standard applies to men and not women. It has improved, quite a lot, but there are still differences.
When I joined Hacker News, there was much more collegial respect here -- for the men, not the women. That has deteriorated some over the years. It is perhaps being repaired. My hope is that if it is fully restored, it will apply equally to all members.
If the vast majority of HN participants are male, the leaderboard composition is a function of demographics, not some kind of "man filter" you've had to overcome. If your username is so generic that people frequently misgender you, how can it also be the case that you're simultaneously held to a higher standard on account of being a woman?
(Well, you might imagine that commentators here are _deliberately_ misgendering you, which is a suggestion so preposterous that I can't entertain it. It might also conceivably be the case that you've gained so much karma _because_ you have an androgynous username, but see below.)
As a man, I find it extremely frustrating when advocates for women in technology look at a phenomenon where men and women are imbalanced and immediately jump to sexism as the explanation. I've had a long career in technology. Not once have I seen a woman discriminated against or her ideas held to a higher standard than the ideas of men. I've seen plenty of mentoring, encouragement, and outreach however. I've personally worked to mentor women in computer science. The idea that there is some systemic bias against women on Hacker News or in the workplace is inconsistent with my experience and with the professed views of my colleagues.
I think we need additional empathy here. Maybe it's the case that _everyone's_ ideas are dismissed too quickly. Numerous times in my career, I've proposed $FOO, been told $FOO is impossible, and only been believed after actually _implementing_ $FOO, often on my own time after tending to my official responsibilities. When some women get this treatment, they call it sexism. When I get it, I call it the reality of working in a world that combines empiricism and huge egos. I think a lot of women in technology are genuinely unaware that men get this treatment too. Maybe it's shitty for everyone and not just women.
I agree with some of your points. It took me a very long time to conclude my gender was a factor on HN. Compared to other male dominated environments I have spent time in, my treatment here has been spectacularly good. It is one of the reasons I worked my ass off to resolve some of the problems I had here.
I went through a period where I was getting a helluva lot of flack, where it was clear to me that men on the leaderboard were closing ranks to shut me out. But my karma was so far below what qualifies one for the leaderboard, I was baffled by social evidence that I was "prominent -- for a woman." After managing to gather objective data that fit with that fact, I handled things differently here.
I don't think anyone is consciously, intentionally trying to exclude women. I do think the apparent lack of women on the leaderboard is not a mere happenstance of numbers.
It is possible for your experiences and views to have validity and for mine to also. I have written about this issue previously. I think you and I might agree more than it seems had we not gotten off on the wrong foot. I also think you are bringing personal baggage and frustrations to the discussion that biases your interpretation of my position. You "heard" me accusing you of dismissing it as coincidence because of my gender when that wasn't my intent. That kind of thing does wind up being a problem for women. It ends up being a kind of de facto sexism.
I also did not say I was held to a higher standard. That isn't how I would frame the problem space. But, given that you are not sympathetic to my views or testimony concerning my firsthand experience, I see little point at this time in trying to figure out how to communicate more on that piece of what you said.
Edit:
FYI: You can take my continued engagement as evidence that, while I think you are wrong about a lot of things, I don't think you are simply and intentionally being an asshole. I don't debate people that I think are not engaging in good faith to at least some degree. I stop replying when I think it is straight up assholery.
Does it occur to you that you might be getting a lot of flack because you can be so combative and come across, frankly, as a little paranoid?
This is not the first subthread I've seen get detached and marked off-topic because it degenerated into a back-and-forth scrum that doesn't make anyone look good. It's too bad; I was getting a pretty good return of InternetPoints™ for my quip about bronies...
Does it occur to you that when a man stands up for himself, it is not interpreted as combative, but when a woman does, she is clearly somehow to blame for everyone else's bad behavior? I have tried walking away. I have tried reaching out and attempting to build bridges. I have tried networkng. When I do the exact same thing men do, it gets interpreted differerntly and does not get me the results I am looking for that it clearly gets for men. Blaming me for the fact that women are fundamentally not as included here is just another form of sexism.
Upon further review, it was not detached at the point of one of my comments. So you are blaming me for something that may have nothing to do with my replies at all.
How are these kinds of rebuttals helpful? How are we learning anything more about your perspective on this issue by watching you police another commenter for providing their own narrative?
Do you have something more to say than "I would need many thousands more narratives like this to care what you have to say"? Do you have a substantial criticism of what this particular narrative suggests?
> they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours.
How is this a "small linguistic detail"? It has nothing whatsoever to do with using 'he' as a gender-neutral pronoun; it's on a completely different level.
They did not think it was a big deal. It was self deprecating humor, aimed at themselves. It certainly wasn't intended to imply anything about anyone else. If I had tried to convince people that it was something that was going to make foreigners hesitant to post, I would have been dismissed. I didn't bother to try to convince anyone I was right. I felt that the forum owner's clearly stated desire to have more international members was sufficient "permission" for me to feel a clear conscience about rooting out this "humorous" meme. If you think that meme is clearly a big deal but misgendering women is not, I will suggest you are underestimating the problem regarding use of pronouns.
> I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.
I thought I had a large vocabulary. These days, it is rare that I have to stop reading an internet post and reach for a dictionary (I mean, figuratively, you know... Google). Anyway, thanks for the new word. I can't wait to work it into casual conversation sometime this week.
>English is not structured to be gender-neutral. I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.
Using singular they is hardly a "circumlocution", I do it without thinking about it. It's not hard to learn once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.
And it's not a "possibility of offending", it's a "certainty of papercuts". If you habitually use male pronouns you will inevitably refer to women with them, and they will most likely be put off by your apparent assumption.
> Once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.
I accept responsibility for the content of my speech. I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech. It's not my job to manage their emotional state.
>I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech.
If you know some people will be offended by a particular usage and you choose to use it anyway, then you are responsible for the resulting offence, whether you accept it or not.
Sometimes there are benefits which make the offence worthwhile, particularly when the offence is exceptionally uncommon. But using gender specific speech in generic/unknown contexts has no such benefits, and will cause offence fairly often. Singular they is easy and idiomatic, and I don't see any real excuse not to use it, other than laziness.
I am the wrong person to say this to you, and I apologize in advance.
My oldest son is not neurotypical. Raising him was a real challenge. When he was 8, he spent 6 weeks psychologically torturing me. He didn't care about my feelings and he found my reactions amusing. Part of what I told him that finally got him to stop was "The point at which you will care about my feelings is the point at which you want something from me and my reply is No. What have you done for me instead of to me here lately?"
You aren't responsible for anyone else's feelings. But if you routinely disrespect and offend people and then defend your right to crap on others instead of apologizing, that will have consequences for you and they won't be ones you will like. Most people are not as forthright as I am. Most people will never tell you "I am turning down your request because of all the times you were inconsiderate, insensitive, etc." They will just tell you No and not explain why.
I will suggest there may be a connection between how frustrated you seem to feel with other people and your general attitude that their feelings are not your problem. If everyone dislikes you, that can very much be a problem for you.
That still means you are using gender stereotypes to not have to bother to state that you are male. You assume we will assume a man is not interested. It is still using gender stereotypes as a basis of your communication. This is something privileged people are prone to. It something women and minorities are less able to do. You can fail to state that you are male and just expect us to infer it because men very often have a dominant cultural position that actively fosters such behavior.
> The average programmer spends only about 30 percent of his/her time working alone.
That's nowhere close to my figure. In fact, I can pretty much _only_ program alone. Individual investigation and discovery is most of the fun in the field.
Not trying to create a positive feedback loop here, but I concur. My personal experience could point to as much as 95% of "programming" time being entirely independent once taken into account: reading articles/guides/tutorials, debugging, "playing around with" new tools/languages/frameworks.
I suspect that it varies by environment. I have worked in environments where it is 95% alone and other environments where it is 95% collaboration. Some places actually do "pair programming".
Software developers are not unique in spending lots of working time alone. Plenty of other careers, virtually all of them with something closer to gender parity, demand extensive, solitary contemplation.
Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines.
"Tech" isn't a single thing. If you want to make non-geeky spaces for tech, go ahead and do it. But lots of geeks do like tech, and they understandably make geeky environments. Why can't everyone, as the bumper sticker helpfully puts it, coexist?
I think they can. But I also think that the association of geekiness with tech isn't a random quirk of history, but rather indicates a common origin. The kind of personality and psychological profile that predisposes one to an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics also predisposes one to geekiness. Moreover, geekiness isn't gender-blind: men are simply more likely than women to be geeks. Indeed, people on the autistic spectrum are especially likely to be geeks, and the overrepresentation of males among autistics is incontrovertible. [1]
There's nothing wrong with creating non-geeky tech spaces that cater to non-geeks (male and female alike)—indeed, I think it's an excellent idea, and not only because it's generally more welcoming to women—but let's also let geeks be geeks.
if i wanted to become a hair stylist (an occupation primarily done by women), i would need to accept a culture that was different than my own...so why cant the same happen with geek culture?
The article also goes into many stereotypes and many women arent going into computer science based on these perceived sterotypes. If we were talking about any other group, the words "racist", "sexist",
Or "bigot" would be thrown around and used to describe the group not accepting the culture.
This is a tell-tale sign that it is a power-play move to gain control over another group of people.
I also thought that we were supposed to be accepting of everyones culture. Does this only apply to the privileged few???
Ok so I'm a girl who codes/programs and I'm my take on the issues she raised:
Stereotypes about STEM fields putting girls off
I can only talk about my own experience but I saw very few negative stereotypes about STEM fields growing up. Definitely not enough to put off girls.
However, while I did start coding at a young age, I didn't apply my skill to a work/business purpose until my twenties.
Why? I think this issue affects both genders actually. I was simply never exposed to people or situations that showed me you could built really cool projects/businesses with code. I never encountered anyone/anything until ~20 that inspired me to take it seriously.
Maybe it has something to do with my gender but I think a lot of people these days are being forced way too early to commit to an education/work track without being given to chance to explore what their options are.
It's hard to discover you like a topic by learning it a classroom. I think co-ed / internship programs at a much younger age will help a lot. It definitely would have helped me discovered my true passions younger.
About being feminine
I don't feel un-feminine in any environment where there are more guys than girls. Rather, I think the problem is, the professional/business world as a whole rewards and values masculine traits (competitiveness, talking highly of yourself and accomplishments, etc.) much more than feminine ones.
Even in dress, women are encouraged to dress like a man (power suits, solid colors, etc.) in professional settings to be taken seriously.
Thus as a girl, you're forced to act more masculine to achieve business goals. But it's hard to suppress your natural state of being. Additionally girls are still expected to (and want to) act feminine in their personal relationships so women "who want to have it all" have to toggle back and forth between being masculine and feminine. It can be exhausting.
Good post. As a male, I have the same issues that you have in your last three paragraphs. I am masculine but do not feel the need or desire to spray alpha maleness constantly. When the pendulum swings back to sales reps having to perform to eat, I think much of that will settle down a bit.
Great post though I'd like to add some thoughts to this bit: the professional/business world as a whole rewards and values masculine traits (competitiveness, talking highly of yourself and accomplishments, etc.)
I'd argue those are better classified as extroverted traits rather than masculine traits. Believe me, there are more than a few males that suffer from this being the dominant culture in business (or anywhere). Of course it makes sense though - introverted culture is more introspective thus not as dominating by nature. If there was ever going to be a winner, especially if the business has a focus on sales, it was going to be the one that rewards competitiveness and confidence.
I'd say the next big battle in workplace equality is going to focus on treating introversion fairly. I've seen MBTI's, a kind of personality test, used to define who a business hires and fires despite them claiming otherwise (forgetting that MBTI tests are pseudoscience). You can guess which personality types they prefer, regardless of gender. They want "rockstars".
> I'd say the next big battle in workplace equality is going to focus on treating introversion fairly.
What do you think such an effort would look like? One problem is that in big companies, it's frequently not enough to do good work. To get recognition, you have to _advertise_ that you're doing good work.
> What do you think such an effort would look like?
Good question. I see two simple avenues - organizations having a better understanding of human psychology, certainly at the human resources level but ideally org-wide. And better metrics, such as mapping human networks from email exchanges so you can find who is really driving the strong relationships with clients or stakeholders.
I guess the condensed version would be: understand humans better.
This is a sort of culture (in geographic terms) thing to be honest. There was a very nice article somewhere that compared the values of the East and the West. Talking highly of yourself actually comes off as negative in the East. In the East, humility is considered far more respectable, where as the same comes off as weak in the west.
Thats exactly what I was thinkng. I have read on here that Sweden is a very humble country in term of bragging about achivements in job intervews. It would be interesting to see some data on numbers of women in tech there.
I've been working in and managing software development teams for a while. The most striking thing about the female developers that I've worked with is how quiet they are (I wouldn't say 'introverted').
Ever see those studies that show that the most vocal person in a meeting is considered the most knowledgeable by the group (even if they're the least knowledgeable)? Yeah - software development has this to the extreme.
> Ever see those studies that show that the most vocal person in a meeting is considered the most knowledgeable by the group (even if they're the least knowledgeable)? Yeah - software development has this to the extreme.
I think this happens a lot online too. It's super easy now to become an 'expert' on a particular technology just by writing a few blog posts about it, tweeting a bunch, or self-publishing a quick ebook. I suspect a lot of people feel like they aren't 'expert' enough to do these things despite them being done by relatively inexperienced people all the time.
Some professions shouldn't treat introversion equally. Software engineering is probably one where it doesn't matter so much but sales and marketing are probably the opposite. (Though interestingly when looking for an appartment a couple of years back, I found the less pushy people far easier to deal with).
Icanhackit suggested that these present traits are "extrovert" in nature, however there are traits that are feminine that are extrovert as well - communication, team-building, etc.
My wife who is an extrovert and holds a position of corporate importance half-jests about putting a poster in her office that says "I am your manager, not your mom".
Here is an article (well shared by now) that suggests that boards with women members may be good for the business, exactly because they provide a good counter-point to "masculine" traits of aggression and risk-seeking behaviour.
I'm not really qualified to be talking about psychology, but I'm a reductionist and a bit of a loud-mouth so let's get started...
Icanhackit suggested that these present traits are "extrovert" in nature, however there are traits that are feminine that are extrovert as well - communication, team-building, etc.
I'd argue that if a male or female can have good communication or team building skills, we should really do away with any gender connotations and just focus on the fact that it's an extroverted skill. I've worked for a female who possessed what you might call masculine behavioral traits, but from what I know about her she'd been that way her whole life.
I suspect that because she and I both lived and grew up in a secular environment there wasn't as much of an emphasis placed on gender roles. Now with that massive sample size of 1 person we can, perhaps haphazardly, deduce that some gender roles aren't innate to a persons gender. Of course men and women are different and do react differently to various forms of stress and stimuli, but a good portion of behavior stems from culture.
So what do we gain by not forcing gender-specificity upon certain behaviors? We can see people as independent from their appearance and treat them in a way that doesn't pigeonhole them with certain expectations.
Thanks for your post, sounds familiar. We have (http://keepwomen.com/) talked to lots of women, who left or were thinking about leaving tech, and many of them mentioned how hard it is to "fit in". Many of whom ended up changing jobs eventually found a better cultural fit in another tech company and enjoyed their job more.
> Thus as a girl, you're forced to act more masculine to achieve business goals. But it's hard to suppress your natural state of being. Additionally girls are still expected to (and want to) act feminine in their personal relationships so women "who want to have it all" have to toggle back and forth between being masculine and feminine. It can be exhausting.
It's exhausting for men too to switch from exact equals professionally, and then being dominant romantically. Sheryl Sandberg says more women should ask out men, given that equality in romance carries over into the workplace, but that seems pretty low on feminist concerns.
basically a comedian asked question on why women were still choosing non-hard sciences in scandinavian countries inspite of the overt and covert equality measures. it ends up pitting one side against other. My reading is only one side had evidence and the other side used lots of emotion. Google threw up these references
At the risk of going off on a tangent, I think it's interesting to note that a large segment of moderate feminists would take issue with the essentialist notion that there are masculine and feminine traits.
I think this matters because it's very difficult to make any sort of meaningful progress when people seek to invalidate the experience and opinion of those they claim to represent. This is by no means unique to feminist discourse, but it's particularly evident in this case.
A problem with feminism as it currently stands is that too often it's less about improving the life of women than advancing a sociological ideology.
> Rather, I think the problem is, the professional/business world as a whole rewards and values masculine traits (competitiveness, talking highly of yourself and accomplishments, etc.) much more than feminine ones.
Exactly. Masculinity is all about taking risks. Capitalism is about risk. So of course men lead the way.
> Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines.
Sans the "general interest magazines" (so vanilla, it makes me want to barf), this sounds like a rather pleasant work environment. I'm so used to working in a dark cave with Boba Fett stand-ups everywhere, it'd be nice to work in a place with more greenery, natural tones and airiness. Nest's offices were a lot like this, and were one of the factors I liked about working there.
Let's suppose I worked at a desk next to yours, and one day, I brought in an elaborate lego Millennium Falcon to put next to my monitor. Would you support a policy that required me to remove this icon of geekdom in the name of making the workspace more welcoming for women?
Here's a thought: If we, as an industry, started to move away from this "everyone in one big shared bullpen" / open-plan model, and started giving people individual offices again, would that make things better? Because now, you, as, say, a female programmer, are free to decorate your office in pink and with "Sex In The City" posters, and issues of Cosmo or whatever (if that's what floats your boat) while your co-worker can have Doctor Who and Star Wars posters, and electronics magazines, blah, blah (or vice versa).
Personally I think that one of the best way to accomodate the uniqueness that makes us all individuals, is to embrace that individual nature and give people solo offices. Of course, that's not the only reason I advocate for private offices, but it's hard not to think that it would help in this regard as well.
In a more traditional workplace, such as a law firm, your boss would tell you to take your Milennium
Falcon home because it's unprofessional. Professionalism is a virtue which is deeply underrated by the computational professions.
Part of "professionalism" is the recognition that you can be whoever you want to be on your own time, but while you're at work your personal identity is partially subsumed into your identity as a member of a profession. That means you dress, decorate, talk and behave in a way that's a bit more neutral and respectable than you might in your college dorm room.
This is a bit dull, sure, but it also enables all sorts of people to work together effectively by papering over their individual differences with a shared professional identity. The fact that your coworkers are of a different sex or generation to you and like different things is pretty immaterial when you're all wearing suits, sitting at undecorated desks and talking about work. Nobody will be alienated by your dick jokes, because nobody makes dick jokes.
Greater professionalism is the solution to many of the tech industry's problems.
That's implying that law firms are more professional just because of a veneer of 'professionalism' (whatever that means.) Law firms are notorious for sexism and classism. If anything that fake 'professionalism' simply masks the true deviousness of the male-dominated law firm. 'Professionalism' has nothing to do with clothes or Star Wars; it has everything to do with attitude. A graphic design firm has a far different version of professionalism than does a law firm, but that doesn't make design any less professional. Professionalism doesn't mean 'generic.' Also, what's sexist about Star Wars? That implication that girls don't like Star Wars is itself sexist. By removing Star Wars from your desk, you're actually being more sexist by suggesting that girls might find it offensive. A suit and tie have nothing to do with professionalism in general; it's contextual. Software engineers aren't going to the courtroom, just like lawyers aren't playing in the NFL. That doesn't make any of those professionals less professional. The IBM white shirt black tie uniform back in the day didn't encourage more women to enter tech and it could be argued that those guys oozed professionalism. Is Mark Zuckerberg less professional because of his attire? Professionalism is an attitude, not a uniform or style of decoration. Professionalism is about maturity, fair mindedness and respect, not whether or not Chewbacca is in your desk.
What is a "general-interest" magazine? Outside of something so vanilla as National Geographic, Time, or Newsweek, I can't think of magazines that aren't market-segment sliced-and-diced.
Computer parts and tech magazines might be inevitable detritus of any office/area focused on working with technology. Do I have to lockup my programming books and hide away the spare components I'm working with?
> Yet I wonder how many young men would choose to major in computer science if they suspected they might need to carry out their coding while sitting in a pink cubicle decorated with posters of “Sex and the City,” with copies of Vogue and Cosmo scattered around the lunchroom.
Vogue and Cosmo!? As a 'feminine' counterpoint to the supposedly masculine 'computer parts' and 'tech magazines'!?
This is "Science. It's a Girl Thing"[1] all over again: "To get women into STEM, you have to show makeup and fashion". Fuck this view of fashion being a fundamental part of the female psyche. The article has some good points in it, but I think it overplays "women like fashion" and underplays "my computer time was gatekept by sexist arseholes".
Is it true that there is a "rise of pop-culture portrayals of scientists as white or Asian male geeks"?
I've seen a little bit of TV this year - every hacker I saw was female, and most were goths. Doing a google search of "top TV 2014" and looking up the ones that are likely to have a hacker as a character, I discover "Arrow" (female hacker), NCIS (female hacker), 24 (female hacker), Criminal Minds (female hacker), Person of Interest (male and female hacker), Agents of Shield (female hacker) and The Strain (female hacker).
Why do we believe that pop culture portrays scientists or computer people this way at all?
The most egregious recent example I have seen is Dark Matter.
The women are all hyper-capable, responsible and determined. The men are all petty, flawed, impulsive and frequently fighting with each other. It's absurd if you realize what is happening.
Hollywood has a history of being a canary in the coal mine when it comes to stereotypes...both good and bad. For example, when homosexuality started becoming more accepted in American culture one of the first signs were prominent gay sitcom characters.
These days, I guess it's partly because the media keeps telling us that pop culture portrays scientists and hackers this way. Which makes me wonder - is there any study on the effect of articles like this one on women in STEM fields and computing?
436 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadWill you also be flag-protecting articles which take different viewpoints? I ask because I've never seen a thread on any other topic or expressing any substantially different view on this topic have flags turned off, but perhaps that's just observation bias on my part.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10366681
"Give me a job." "MAKE me feel comfortable." "I am at your mercy." ... This the subtext I read. Other people want to create their own world; when someone tells them no or gets in their way, the attitude is "fuck you" not "change to accommodate me."
This reaction may be biologically ingrained as a difference in the sexes; I am not sure- But I rarely, if ever, come across articles about women who have been fed up with some job and formed their own companies with other fed up women and strove to put their former coworkers/employers out of business, whereas for hackers "I'll show you!" seems a very common motivator.
We should be trying to give women (and men) more confidence, integrity and fortitude, and quit with the shaming and guilt tactics.
Not the case? Then this problem isn't as endemic as it's being portrayed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-...
It wasn't in IT, but it happened for many of the same reasons as stated here.
The outcome is just one of several possibilities, and the media field may be more prone to have divas (although IT has too many divas of all sexes, IMHO), so I'm curious how the tableflip subculture will fare (hopefully much better).
Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what the herd is doing and results in girls avoiding engineering and boys avoiding, say, nursing.
It's a systemic disease and is highly contagious. One possible solution is an elementary school where the entrance requirement is determined by the parents: girls get barbies AND chemistry kits. Boys get toy cars AND sewing kits. Their social group shouldn't be determined by gender, rather interest.
So to fix problems you would screw Boys aka male gender ?
How much retard are you ?
But, given the context of this discussion, I am concerned that there is a decent possibility that he wrote something not outrageous, but simply contrary to the current received wisdom of young Bay Area Californians.
I agree that in this case it doesn't really add much to the conversation, although I am a bit more forgiving if the author is indeed not a native English speaker.
I'm going to keep showdead on. There have been a number of cases in which I've seen comments moderated to oblivion where, from the quotes in child comments, I think that they were probably worth reading.
(Amusingly, HN has not let me post this for several hours, since I'm 'posting too fast')
If you don't believe me, you're welcome to go look, but it's not an experience I'd recommend.
(edit: It occurs to me that the last sentence is unclear as to whether I'm referring to showdead or MVM; the answer is 'yes')
I think.
Dear Google: Please up your game to compensate for my stupidity -- love, mst
Dear wtbob: Doh, sorry. What rewqfdsa++ said.
The key is to make it a priority to move to an area where all the families promote a culture that views academic excellence as a good thing.
I know this isn't available to everyone due to financial limitations. But it's probably available to more than realize it.
That's not all that is required. By the time you get to where "real" academic excellence matters (college) you have already made a choice based on what you have been exposed to. I'm talking about exposing children to as many professions as possible with no pressure from their childhood peers to fit into the more archaic gender role.
However, that is a brilliant way to curb the really damaging bullying.
Plans that begin with that phrase are never sustainable. All sane people will want to move to the same places, rising prices substantially until people are forced to borrow huge amounts of money to buy houses in nice places, causing a housing bubble, causing a crash.
Exactly: both boys and girls get strong negative feedback for being nerdy. Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback.
In these scenarios, boys find groups that are supportive. In their case the video game playing, computer oriented, math/physics/etc. "nerds" are one such social group.
The entire point of the article is that those same groups are not supportive for women and girls.
It has nothing to do with them being so strong and manly that they can stand up to the bullies and pursue computer science anyway! It's that they find a safe haven in those social groups where they are not bullied and are inclusive.
Where did you read that? I wrote sufficiently interested. And no, not because there's a "safe group", but because they lose themselves in the technology and f*ck the groups.
Previously when viewing a thread like this I would take a perspective of "It's not discrimination, they just don't want to do it". Now I want to think about it some more in the context of what I just said.
As a corollary however, is it really a good thing to push a gender towards a particular field? Anecdotally in the case of SE there seems to be a huge amount of anxiety, depression, and various social issues, that comes with the work load. I often wonder if my life would be better had I never taken to computers. Interesting food for thought, do any of us really know what's "best for us" on a societal level?
I don't think the suggestion is being made to push genders toward a particular field. I believe the case being made is that the status quo is that genders are pushed towards certain careers due to cultural biases and antagonistic or hostile group behavior that goes unchecked by the larger communities in certain groups.
The question being asked is how we, as a society, can stop pushing genders into certain roles. In particular, regarding the field of computer science and engineering.
> a perspective of "It's not discrimination, they just
> don't want to do it".
Well, maybe that wasn't exactly wrong. Or rather, there are different motivations for entering the profession. For males "love of technology" is a much stronger motivating factor, whereas for females it is "job security", "ease of entry" and "flexible working hours" [1]. All other factors surveyed were not different.
When it comes to experience in the job, the only difference found was that women received greater support and mentoring from their superiors.[2].
This is from a study published in the Communications of the ACM as "Women and men in the IT profession"[3]. Although not as interesting an anecdote as the NY Times article, and not fitting the current narrative, the study does have actual data. It concludes that women and men in tech are more alike than different, that the primary difference coming in is "love of tech" vs "good benefits" and that the biggest difference when in the field is that women get slightly better support from their bosses.
Come on in, the water is fine!
[1] http://deliveryimages.acm.org/10.1145/1320000/1314229/figs/t...
[2] http://deliveryimages.acm.org/10.1145/1320000/1314229/figs/t...
[3] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-t...
The way bullying works with boys and girls is very different. A boys greatest wish when bullied is to be left alone by the bullies. A girls greatest wish is to avoid being excluded. In general anyway.
As long as I have enough good friends, I don't really care what anyone else thinks of me. My wife on the other hand would be incredibly distressed to find out 80% of her colleagues etc disliked her.
That's the definition of desiring inclusion.
If all of those friends that accepted you were marketing majors and not computer scientists the odds you'd pursue computer science goes way down. Particularly if the computer scientists were the bullies.
The point of the article is the computer (and in her case physics/science) culture was hostile to women, not inclusive.
Girls in secondary education, though, seem to be all-too-ready to screw over each other and throw "friends" under the bus if there is any perceived benefit socially (saw this happen with family and female friends).
It's downright ugly.
That said, as controversial as there is, I think there is a bit of a genetic component here. Not that girls are genetically less capable of being good engineers or even of being nerds, but rather, that men may be genetically more likely to have obsessive and solitary interests, including things that seem to be borderline on the autistic spectrum.
Men are 8x more likely to be diagnosed with high-functioning autism than women are.
If there is a genetic component to this [1], then the numbers of female nerds are probably always going to be lower than female nerds. But awareness and support of female nerds is certainly important.
[1] http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/introduction/gender-an... (See section about chromosomal differences)
of course as this is the experience as reported from the author, it is at most anecdotal, but it's interesting and actually could be a good starting point for further inquiry.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/08/09/tar...
Target tries to make one step in the right direction (like making sure a chemistry set is not labeled as a BOYS chemistry set) and people respond with:
"You liberal POS idiots are ruining this Country. Just because you morons don't want to think there are boys and girls, doesn't mean the rest of us with a brain have to think in your warped ways."
"Complete stupidity. I want my girls and boys to identify with their gender."
"This is stupid! So you think my grandson's wants to sleep on a frozen bed set made for girls and my granddaughters wants to sleep on spiderman bed sets. I don't think so. You better leave well enough along before you lose your business."
"This is just stupid. Kids are being taught not be them selves such as a true boy or a true girl. Men now a days are not men, they are girly men. A lot of women are not women they are trying so hard to fit into a mans world. Leave kids to b kids please. Pinks and blues do not hurt any one!"
This is to be expected though. Removing gender associations is going to be seen as an attack on existing peoples' upbringings. Anything that falls into that category is going to be a painful fight.
When you give rights to one group, you have to remove them from another (important: even if the second group had rights that were not rightfully theirs).
Men previously and incorrectly had exclusive access to jobs (and votes, and so forth). By giving women fair chance to those rights, you have to subtract the unjust portion of men's rights. I don't know why some (most? unlikely) of us can accept the truth, that those rights were never only ours, but as for the rest they experience anger. Just another way that equality is a hard fight: we're fighting a documented psychological effect.
Where did you get that from? I was merely attempting a theory (not excusing) on why these people act they do toward equality.
Why is it unjust? Why do you have to bring your personal interests and preferences into the workplace? Why not make a neutral workplace where different kinds of people can integrate and feel comfortable?
Let me put it another way: do you want to spend all day hearing about my toddler? If not--well that's how I feel about everything you're interested in. So let's just all do our work and leave our personal lives at home.
Because that's not how human beings bond. We don't bond over a single facet of our lives; we bond as a community. The modern world, in which we live different places, believe different things and pursue different jobs, is poison for any sense of community.
So where do you draw the line? It's clearly not OK, even in the name of "cohesion", to encourage a culture that excludes people of different income levels or ethnicities.
There's a point at which can safely say that this kind of studiously groomed, exclusionary "cohesion" is doing more harm than good. I mean, there's obviously that point: if you refused to hire someone because they were a woman, you'd get sued; if you refused to hire someone because they didn't drink, you'd (rightfully) be ostracized in the community.
You might argue that workplaces shouldn't endorse one particular subculture over another: that's fine. But unless you take stern measures to ban fraternization, you're going to get coworkers forming friendships based on shared interests, and we're lying to ourselves if we think that interests of software people tend not to cluster around what we think of as "geek" culture.
In reality, the injustice is that a small group of very powerful men oppress all women and nearly all men.
They are pushing back against the pressure to conform to this new dogma, not that they would deny any particular girl access to a "boy's things".
I don't think this difference is a problem we need to solve. Diversity is supposed to make our culture richer, right? If so, why are some people trying so hard to make us all the same?
Of course we shouldn't artificial barriers to non-gender-normative career choices --- but gender disparity in a particular field is not itself evidence that these barriers exist. We've already done quite a bit to draw women into technical professions. Whatever disparity remains is on them.
Programming is a solitary activity where you solve logic puzzles. Anyone can do it. Another activity that is very similar is playing chess - yet no one is up in arms that chess schools aren't including 50% girls in elite chess training.
If you took a group of girls and a group of boys and put them in a room where they played chess for a few hours, then asked them how much they enjoyed it... more boys would rate the activity higher. Is it because some stupid poster on the wall??? No it's not. On average, men and women are different and have different average preferences.
Programming is not an activity where you need social support groups to succeed. It's the one activity where being a hermit who takes initiative and learns everything themselves can be an advantage over being more social. A large portion of programmers are self-taught online, and just start tinkering with things because they enjoy the activity. You can't force that.
If you want to see it as a job, compare it to other businesses where you have to write things on a schedule, like writing a newspaper. There's more conversations with strangers involved in that one and it sounds a little friendlier.
I think that the big difference in STEM is that nerdy boys exist in such a number that they can still get acceptance and support. It's not as normal as, say, being a football player, but male nerds aren't exactly rare.
In contrast, because there are much fewer female nerds, their awkwardness is even more exaggerated, and this feeds back on itself to heighten the pressure to conform. Boys find some support in numbers, and their interest in the subjects smooths over any discomfort. Girls don't have any of that support, so if they aren't absolute fanatics about the subjects, they're going to conform.
I favor an approach where we separate kids who've shown some aptitude for the sciences and concentrate them in schools full of their peers. We can't do anything for the anti-intellectual types, but we can at least stop their ruining perfectly good raw talent.
They tried that on us ("gifted schools"). The two things it got us were hours less sleep each day because of the longer commute, and worse college admissions because of GPA deflation. I would've rather stayed in the normal pipeline and gotten scholarships instead.
Unlike "hanging out with friends", a universal activity, extracurricular sports actually do conflict with early computer science exploration (they're a huge time sink, as any parent of a kid in a sport will attest).
Meanwhile, sports draws in more boys than girls.
Why are we so quick to accept the notion that after-school activities that girls participate in isolate them from STEM, but after-school activities dominated by boys don't?
As a nerdy teenager, I never had a problem with any girl in any clique or social group at my school. But I sure as shit had problems with the boys in sports.
There are kids (and parents) who get totally invested in a sport with often unrealistic expectations of college scholarships or professional careers, but there are a lot who are also remain very academically focused and balanced. I know that many of the kids on my oldest son's high school teams went on to college in STEM fields so it's not an either/or.
(Though it is true I did very little partying.)
They do to me too! However the tech industry isn't the only industry with these problems, we just talk about them more. I bought up the nurse example because it's one I'm familiar with: I dated a nurse. By the time she graduated (around 2007 I think) her academic hospital had zero, as I recall - less than 2 to be safe, male nurses. I knew some civil engineers at college, out of their whole class: 2 women.
Every industry is experiencing it in both directions. It's more unfair to women as the higher-salary industries tend to be the male-dominated. However, if my son wanted to be a nurse I'd want him to be able to figure that out and then feel that it was completely normal.
This childhood self-discrimination is pervasive and needs to be fixed.
I'm baffled by how you can believe that individual choice can be a problem that needs to be fixed. Do you believe that people should be directed into non-traditional fields against their will? Or do you believe that they're not competent to make their own decisions?
Every comment I have written (including the root and the parent of your reply) explain how this is not what I am saying at all.
Although at some point, i discovered that superglue was much easier than sewing.
In the UK, there's possibly much more of a problem with low/status pay for engineers in general than for women engineers specifically.
Clever women with the right social background head for medicine, law, media, marketing, or even teaching - especially at department head level, and above. That's where the real money and status are. There's also not much of a gender gap to speak of, except perhaps at the very top.
If anything, the gap goes the other way now, because boys in state schools are being aggressively socialised by peer pressure and teacher disinterest away from academic achievement in ways that girls aren't.
Engineers often have poor social status anyway. The UK is run by public school types, and they tend think of engineers as a slightly better class of carpenter or plumber. Social polish and family/school connections are far more valuable than the ability to build stuff that works.
Exactly how are Barbie dolls in conflict with chemistry sets?
Even boys who own chemistry sets play with them far less often than they do with action figures. Is there some connection between chemistry sets and action figures that advantage them over Barbie dolls?
Is it just Barbie dolls? I hope my 14 year old daughter's American Girl dolls haven't ruined her for STEM; that's her current planned field. The boy, 16, played with legos and video games. I'm guessing he's going to be history major, or a writer. Did we do something else right? Or are we doomed and just don't know it yet?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, today I'm a software engineer.
I know this is purely anecdotal, but I think we forget that if you give kids access to everything, they will figure out their own playtime and communities.
Unfortunately from that point on more male than female students go on to more fully grok programming. I believe this is because the hidden costs associated with pursuing the craft are unequal between the two genders. For either gender it can represent a 'ding' on their popularity scorecard so to speak, but the ding is felt far more profoundly for women. One can certainly debate why this is and of course it's possible to trace this phenomena historically back into the days of ancient greek culture and before.
My feeling on the matter personally though is that the cultural norms of highschoolers have simply not had time to adapt to the idea that "geek is sheik" because the sentiment has only existed (outside of hacker culture) for the last decade (and perhaps it's still only a thing in California). In addition to that there has never been a "female astronaut moment" for computer science, so to speak in terms of it breaking into the consciousness of the average teen. This may be a chicken/egg type problem.
I think this is shifting now, but my opinion is that the biases which effected how highschoolers were feeling 15 or 20 years ago about computer science are still skewing the hiring statistics today because there are far fewer women job applicants who have been doing this kind of programming work for 15 or 20+ years...
How many were programming BBS systems in ANSI C back before AOL was a thing, or how many were following along with the early web as the standards (things like CSS) were being flushed out and it's possibilities were being explored (intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_B31nF3sU0&t=2m10s)
According to the statistics there are a lot more men who have been engaged in "Internet engineering" in one form or another for most of their life and this kind of multidisciplinary computer-science background can skew a hiring decision in their favor assuming both candidates are equally well versed with the most current technologies. Young programmers find ways to make up for the often times narrower scope of their experience (lack of a lisp beard) by being really good at the things that they specialize in, and by tracking more closely the cutting edge. I feel there are more women who are joining this cohort every day, but there are still not as many and it's a shame.
Instead of accepting the responsibility of doing their part to foster an understanding in young women about subtle forms of bullying they instead prefer to embrace the victim role which is the view that little can be done to resolve the issue without somehow breaking free from their (imaginary) male oppressors.
Girls are put off by how computer culture styles itself in nerdy ways.
Ok, i can kind of get that. On the other hand, i don't like it much because she seems to be saying "hiding positive expressions about things you like could be helpful".
I'm all for increasing diversity, but that should happen by bringing in more things and widening horizons. If that means "Sex and the City", then yes, please.
The article does also kind of lose its red thread when she compares offputting styling with outright attacks against her. Maybe she's trying to be less contentious by not outright calling them out as bullshit that should get people shitcanned by HR. But really, that's what should be said about that, not comparisons with star wars posters.
All that said, i like the bit she mentions at the end, about introducing computing earlier. If done emphatically it can have a real chance of leveling the playing field.
Quite. The person who happens to like sci-fi isn't motivated by excluding anyone; they like it because they like it and will share their enthusiasm with anyone. Has that person intentionally done something wrong? And if not why should they be censured for it? That is the elephant in the corner of the room here. There is no conspiracy to keep women out of tech, never has been, and demonizing decent people for innocent things, doesn't ultimately help anyone.
You sure about that? I know quite a few people who are seemingly only interested in science fiction and gaming it its various forms and aggressively disinterested in anything else. Maybe you know some, too: people who use terms like "sports ball" and whatever the current incarnation of "mundane" (as a noun) or "muggle" is. Believe me, it's no more appealing than hanging with a group of, say, serious football fans (for the appropriate value of "football").
I don't feel the need to demonize anyone, but decent people doing what they feel are innocent things can successfully masquerade as a conspiracy for as long as you care to watch.
And frankly, I don't think that's very common in professional settings. A basic rule of polite conduct is respecting other people's interests and beliefs.
That said, I myself do sometimes say "sports ball" because I think it's a humorous way to address a topic I know absolutely nothing about.
This would seem to be a bit of a bait-and-switch... If you aren't interested in "computer parts and tech magazines" then what exactly is it about computing that makes you want to do it?
"For the money" is a valid answer of course, a job's a job for most people, but let's call a spade a spade.
I'm not quite sure what a prop would be for low social status women.
Its a prop for having a functioning brain. Other than the star wars and science fiction stuff (which I haven't seen at any tech companies I've worked at here in the bay), the rest of the props indicate that you have a genuine intellectual interest in the field.
We don't make fun of NASA for decorating their offices with space paraphernalia or claim it means a low social status. Frankly I'm not interested in people coming into this field who are stupid enough to think that people genuinely excited about what they do have a "low social status".
But it's very disingenuous to call engineering low social status these days. Wearing Star Wars t-shirts or talking about computer parts and technology 24/7, yes, that will still receive at least some ribbing, if not more, but that's not the same as being an engineer by day. In my recent social experience, reaction after someone asks "what do you do?" is pretty uniformly somewhere on the positively-neutral-to-impressed spectrum.
Do you expect your colleagues not to mention or discuss these things in your presence?
I just understand if poeple do not like it.
"I felt out of place among my mostly male colleagues because I hated drinking beer and didn’t like being mocked for reading novels. Not to mention that the men who controlled access to the computer made me listen to a barrage of sexist teasing if I wanted to be given that day’s code to run my program."
I'm male. I don't drink beer. I read novels. I don't get mocked for either of them. I don't get sexist teasing. I have seen coworkers do that, though (in more subtle ways)—and that just sucks.
It would be a mistake to interpret or portray this article as "afraid of Star Wars posters" as if Star Wars posters are a thing that actively attacks people who are different.
You wouldn't fault an anatomy course for having skeletons in the room or a Physics classroom for having copies of Science laying around, so the parent argues that it's also weird to tell technology educators not to display computer hardware (for instance).
FWIW I ultimately agree with you. Computer hardware and pop sci/tech trade rags have nothing at all to do with most of the Computer Science field.
I respectfully disagree wholeheartedly. Many enter these industries because of their love for sci-fi. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Space X or NASA employee who wouldn't attribute at least some of their aspiration to the creations of Carl Sagan or Gene Rodenberry.
Most scientists are normal people with an aptitude for a certain discipline, enjoy working on interesting problems, and had the luck of having encountered a mentor or two who steered them toward research. None of the ideas that drive the creation of sci fi are necessary to be a scientist. It really is just another career.
In fact, I can't think of a single scientist I (personally) know who became a scientist because of sci fi. (Which isn't to say that they don't exist.)
To me, a lot of it just comes across as unimaginative. Oh sure, we've travelled half way across the galaxy to meet an alien race and it turns out they're Space Russians, or Space Jews. Maybe Space Ancient Romans for a change.
I also have a problem with anything where the science (or engineering, I guess) isn't right or consistent in my eyes. I find such things TERRIBLY distracting, slaughtering what might otherwise be a good story. Anal, yeah, but then you probably suspected this as this is HN, after all.
Tech posters also seem entirely like a high-school/college-age cultural thing rather than a sign of real interest. Most of my (almost entirely male) software engineer coworkers have as their desktop pictures nature scenes, cityscapes, or picture of people, very few have sci-fi/fantasy/anime/whatever screenshots or art.
If you go to more directly-related things like "reading and commenting on HN on a Sunday" where someone is likely to very well be learning things that apply to their job, it would be interesting to see how much of a turnoff that seemed to be compared to the above-listed tangential culture markers. Though even then, while I'm sure business owners love having employees who will willingly do uncompensated work-related study on the weekend, I'm doubtful that it's a thing we should be striving towards.
How many people working on the first customer mobile phone didn't think it was the Communicator from Star Trek?
In 2001 A Space Odyssey, the book describes the tablet computer.
Scifi has a great cultural and technological precedent in computing: it gives the ideas of what to do next. And that doesn't matter what sex you are (or aren't).
I am a woman with a Certificate in GIS. I know some HTML and CSS. I run some blogs.
I joined an email list -- a parenting/homeschooling list -- when my now 28 year old son was 11. It led to me becoming a moderator of an email list for a time. My advice was seemingly popular on that list. Someone liked my writing and wanted to put some of it on their website. Later, she helped me move that to a site of my own and take over the coding.
There are things I would like to do in this world to help other people -- to educate them, to empower them to solve hard personal problems. I joined Hacker News in hopes of eventually learning to write code to do that. So far, life has gotten in the way.
My two adult sons are masters of framing traditionally male interests in a way that appeals to me. My oldest son got me playing Master of Magic -- now one of my favorite games -- by telling me "It's like SimCity" and then helping me to play it in a way that appealed to my interest in civilization building. My sons want to make video games for a living. If things work out, I may join them in that endeavor at some point.
Having girly motivations does not mean writing code is of no interest to you. You can be interested in people or whatever and see code as a way to accomplish your goals. Mulan is the single best movie I know of that portrays a woman having success in a man's world doing a man's job for girly reasons: She loved her father. She felt guilty that she was a daughter and not a son. If she had been born a boy, she would have been conscripted, not him. So she went in his place -- and saved a nation, to keep her beloved family member alive.
You can be a girly girl and love someone enough that you would murder others over it. We aren't all helpless whiny crybabies. Sometimes, doing things like a girl makes you a total badass.
But there are serious "marketing" problems with how we approach the problem space currently.
I've noticed that in some tech circles, social and emotional motivations (and especially ones with negative valence like anger and disappointment) are seen as sort of unreal and invalid. I understand that people often want to focus on choosing the product/technology/protocol/whatever that's objectively the best, but I think there are cases where it's warped the culture such that people get into cliques and develop (sometimes intense) social motivations based on perfectly valid factors like trust and respect, but pretend that those motivations are entirely based on dispassionate technical analysis.
I guess I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe it's that social "drama" is inevitable, but tech communities make it toxic because of a misguided belief that it's irrelevant, and this dynamic causes splash damage for women who are more heavily socialized to value personal relationships. Maybe it's just a brain fart, but I think it would explain a lot.
Is it any wonder that we programmers tend to view logical reasoning as more useful than emotional reasoning?
The degree to which women are expected to deal with the emotions of other people means that women in male dominated environments get dumped on in a way that becomes very problematic for them. Women are not allowed to say "Not my problem." If they try that, there is hell to pay. So I do not believe this is more problematic for women because they value social relationships more. I think it is more problematic because everyone around them will blame them if they do not smooth things over (I mean for other parties -- like mom interceding between fighting children), will cry on their shoulder and expect them to care, etc.
This is one reason tech needs to value diversity: Most men simply don't have substantial skill in dealing with certain things. When you lack social and emotional savvy, it is not uncommon for the fallout to involve things like being sued by people who are mad as hell at you. The way to minimize outcomes like that is to have people on board who will recognize the problem early and act to resolve it before it involves lawyers and bad publicity. But they cannot take effective action if they do not have real power and are not sincerely respected.
Thank you for replying.
If that's not rhetorical, I'm uninterested in "computer parts and tech magazines". They're just corporate blahblahblah selling technojunk. But I have zillions of books on computing. More interesting to read about the computing roads society didn't take.
Even with books, I probaby don't empathize with most readers... tech isn't a smorgasbord I wish to shovel down indiscriminately. Most of it tastes like crap; some is entrancing.
Anyway, most computing is bureaucratic rather than poetic, as anthropologist Graeber puts it. On social media, people constantly fill out forms. (http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declinin...)
And of course, ends matter if tech isn't just masturbation. Why ultimately care about computing? What about a universe full of other intellectual pursuits?
In contrast, the 'neckbeard and star wars t-shirt' is something I've never personally seen working in tech. Neckbeard, yes. I've worked in one waterfall shop and four agile shops, and liaised with techies in enterprise from time to time (zero t-shirts there) - the 'sci-fi geek visible at 100 yards' is a trope, a stereotype. The techies I've worked with have been overwhelmingly male (only one female developer in all that time) and about half of them were family men. That's something the 'computer professional' stereotype actively opposes, instead painting people that are into computers as social losers who can't get a girl.
IT is more accepting of shabbiness in dress than other professions, but I simply don't see the sloganed t-shirt as being the actual standard attire of computer professionals. Instead it seems more to be a shorthand stereotype, just like a white coat and stethoscope signals 'doctor' in the collective mind.
[1] I do have bias here - when I say 'lawyers', I mean ones in business. I haven't had interaction with lawyers dealing in personal matters. I imagine they dress to suit.
Meanwhile: if you select down to consulting software developers, particularly those working at major (500+ headcount) firms selling to Fortune 500 companies, you're going to find that they don't dress like the stereotypical software developer either. Those consultants are the CS equivalent of BigLaw lawyers.
The biggest headcount of a company I've worked in tech with is 60, most of whom were not in IT. The other tech companies are all 10-20 people, including part-timers. Only one company I worked for sold to Fortune 500 - ironically this one had the shabbiest dress of all.
Three of those companies had lawyers - they all dressed in suit-with-optional-tie. As did their visitors (visitors rarely optioned out of the tie) and the lawyers I'd talk to from other companies (admittedly a rare occurrence). Apart from the medical sales at the waterfall place and finance staff, I rarely see a suit jacket in the neat casual dress of other staff (IT or otherwise).
I realise this is all anecdata, but at the same time, the 'neckbeard and t-shirt' idiom is a grossly incorrect stereotype.
I respect that you've had a different set of experiences and drawn different conclusions, but respectfully: I think I'm just going to be hard to convince otherwise on these points, and having a message board slapfight over which jobs wear more ties --- I can visualize myself trying to Google my way to a survey answer to this question now --- shudder --- just seems like a terrible use of our time.
And yes, this isn't a debate that should send either of us a-searching :)
{law books, mahogany desks} : practice of law ~= {computer parts, tech magazines} : software development.
That's in some hypothetical world where the law industry is for some bizarre reason as obsessed with Sex In The City as the tech industry is obsessed with science fiction. Conversations among coworkers return to Sex and the City references with tedious regularity. The meeting rooms at your firm are called Carrie and Miranda and Samantha and... the other one. Your firm's senior partner shows you, with pride, the signed portrait of Sarah Jessica Parker that occupies pride of place in his office. I can imagine that would be pretty alienating for anyone who isn't a SatC fan.
Luckily law isn't so ridiculously obsessed with some tiny facet of pop culture.
It's not far off from working in tech and not being a nerd. Maybe even worse since nerds don't actively look down on regular people the way lawyers do.
I suspect the reason why women find the nerd culture more off putting is because being nerd is sort of bad. So thinking tech is nerdy means tech is embarrassing and undesirable. Not that they won't fit in. They don't want to fit in.
Either way, the solution is to encourage some women to do tech and they can trail blaze. Then future women can see that you don't have to be a nerd to do tech.
After reading the article, I'd update that opinion. I still don't feel it should be mandatory for a basic High School degree, but perhaps forming a track for college bound students that includes programming (and calculus, AP english, etc.) and requiring that track to graduate with honors would be a good positive incentive.
Programming & algorithms is a pretty advanced academic topic. Requiring it for graduation would set up a lot of students to fail or become disillusioned with what education has to offer them. Much like if Calculus were required.
It is because they don't want to be there. The opportunity is there for everyone to take thus men and women. I actually think women have an advantage in this space and it is up to them to see it and advantage of it.
As a woman, I am tired this. If you want it, go and get it. There shouldn't be any special treatment. Prove you deserve to be at the table, prove you deserve to be there based merits etc.. Not because of gender, race etc.
People are going to wonder why this conclusion? Because when people see you as a women trying to achieve something, a lot are willing to help and push you. Don't moan about it, go ahead and just get into Tech if you want it that bad.
Edit: When I posted this, the comment consisted entirely of its first paragraph.
My point is Women are every bit as talented, smart, and tenacious as men. The focus on women is good in that there are women that just need to go for it - reference to the article however broad my initial response was.
By the time we all started working, it was further down to 90:10. My office recruited a lot of female grads, we had a female department head who positively discriminated. One of my first mentors was female. In that respect I think my early experience was atypical.
But they kept dropping out as time went on, transferring into different streams/jobs.
There are some things that need to be done - particularly at helping parents understand their school age girls like of STEM - but ultimately I don't think it's worth trying to socially engineer and entire field to be 50:50 when you'll struggle to find that many women who want to study it, learn it and work in it for decades.
Not going to hijack the thread but I am going to use myself as a guinea pig. I am a young black woman who likes hanging out here. I personally don't believe things should be handed to me. I expect to be judge based on my merits and as such. Did someone force me to come and be on hacker news? No. It a place I really like and learn alot and has been welcoming. So if women want to be in tech, they just need to make the effort and show the desire for it. They can start by choosing courses in universities and seeking out help and asking questions. They can also do research and see where like- minded individuals hangout if they are really serious about learning.
1. An article is posted wherein a woman describes wanting to be in tech and not doing so due to active and passive opposition.
2. Many comments discussing how women aren't in tech because they don't want to be there.
I swear, these threads are all straight out of How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ (a book I strongly recommend; it's absolutely hi-damn-larious.)
I would add white privilege or majority privilege to that... quite a few blokes get a seat at the table cause they identify with the majority group or vice versa.
The reason is that there is a very fine line between saying that you don't have to be nerdy to be in tech, and failing to acknowledge that in general being nerdy is a disadvantage in society, and many people found a refuge in tech where they were mocked and often bullied outside[0]. To fail to acknowledge this is to risk promoting the same negative attitudes towards nerds within tech, as exist outside it.
So I would say that we should all encourage tech to be as open an welcoming as possible, and to avoid any implication that you have to have a certain personality, appearance or interests to succeed in tech. But we shouldn't dismiss the traits of people who currently are overrepresented in tech as a "stereotype", much less a "negative stereotype". I also don't think this is what the author was suggesting. As the article says, "stereotypes are only partly true, and women who actually take classes in computer science don’t hold the same prejudices as women who get their ideas from pop culture."
[0] E.g. see http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/08/programmin...
But let's not bother deploying dueling readings from the article, and instead see how much you and I actually disagree:
I do not in fact think it's reasonable to suggest that individual software developers should avoid nerd signifiers to avoid alienating people. I feel safe presuming we agree about that.
Do you feel like it's reasonable for companies to avoid aggressive identification with nerd culture? To not ask candidates what their favorite Star Wars movie is, or to try to balance out outings and fringe benefits so they only appeal to sci-fi fandom?
(Though: I do think beer drinking trends masculine.)
Maybe after the beer offsite, you can visit a winery, or a famous local coffee house, and then a museum.
It's not exactly the most interactive activity when you can't talk for 80% of the time, but it's still enjoyable and sociable.
As an aside, these sorts of critiques of mainstream/White culture are somewhat contradictory in that they criticize any specific cultural identity as being exclusive and insular, and yet whenever this is lacking, they point to how boring mainstream/White culture is. Even lack of crime can be turned into evidence of boringness. For example, for every article on the negative effect of nerd culture on diversity, there is an article complaining about the decline of nerd culture and the rise of corporatism. The latter tend to be highly revisionist and pretend that the tech industry was founded by LSD taking hippies who coded inside isolation tanks. But the contradiction is still stark.
Having an offsite at a brewery is kinda shitty because not everyone likes to drink. Did anyone try to suggest another venue?
It's not, like, a management decision I'm super duper proud of.
Did you read my comment carefully? Was I unclear at some point? Do you disagree that a lot of male nerds are resisting the diversity movement because they feel that it attacks them, and that this article notwithstanding, often the diversity movement does attack them?
The nerd culture has been one of the most inclusive cultures I've been with. As esr wrote, "No compiler or network stack or 3-D printer gives a crap about the shape of your genitals or the color of your skin, and hackers as a culture don’t either." http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6642
just because someone famous described a culture certainly doesn't mean it's true universally.
> If the actor wore a T-shirt that said “I CODE THEREFORE I AM” and claimed to enjoy video games, the students expressed less interest in studying computer science than if the actor wore a solid shirt and claimed to enjoy hanging out with friends
So all we need to do is overhaul computer science's anti-women culture is remove computer magazines, computer parts, computer games, futurism, and coding.
Best comment on this submission IMHO.
Making a subject more welcoming to folks who aren't actually interested in it just seems ridiculous. I wouldn't want a physician who doesn't actually care about bodies and biology; I wouldn't want my care designed by someone who isn't really into reliability, moments and materials; why would I want software written by someone who doesn't hunger and thirst to manipulate symbols and code?
The "neutral decor" sounds awfully boring for a computer classroom. I love art, nature posters, coffee, and plants; but when I imagine a computer classroom in both of these styles the former is infinitely more appealing.
I would liken it to working at an office where everyone is really into sports. I'll watch the occasional college football game, but I'd be pretty alienated working at an office with sports stuff hanging on the walls where people expected you to watch the game every weekend in order to fit in.
making video games is/requires programming so there's bound to a be a large overlap in programmers who are interested in video games.
Sci-fi inspires lots of people to get into programming. From wanting to create R2-D2 and C3PO to wanting to create projected holograms, wanting to create tricorders, computers that can take voice commands, touch surfaces, fancy new interfaces, virtual reality, AI, and many other topics touched on in sci-fi that are all directly related to programming.
Sports are not directly related and do not directly inspire most jobs but sci-fi does directly inspire many programmers to program and probably many other STEM careers. video games also inspire many programmers to program since video games are programming.
I wonder how long it will take for humanities departments to adopt a more inclusive culture? Why must our obsessive hand-wringing be be reserved exclusively for computer science and engineering, which are mostly hidden and do not set the wider cultural narrative (for the most part).
Because now there's money in it. No-one cared about this when the IT department was at the bottom of the corporate pecking order. No-one cares that refuse collection is almost exclusively male, but that's a job of real social importance...
Which is that just the sheer numbers of male students or female students in particular subjects is overwhelming. For example, in my American Lit class, there were literally three male students including me. The funny thing in that class was that at least half of the subject matter was basically about how the white male was evil.
But I definitely didn't fit in there, even without the subject matter. And its not that the girls treated me differently, they didn't -- but I knew I was different. Because I was surrounded by girls.
So I think that just the fact of the momentum of having lopsided student counts of males versus females has a huge effect. People do need to fit in and being with people who are really just like them is a big part of that. I think the stereotypes do have a big impact too, but its a double-whammy -- even when girls might not really be influenced by the stereotype, the reality of being the only female or one of a small group of females surrounded by young men in their classes will make them question their place.
So I think the social dynamics have more to do with it than people realize and I think this is a good article.
(I am a woman. I am sometimes referred to as "he" on HN. I am quite open about my gender and it is specified in my profile. But the default assumption here is that anyone talking must be male -- because tech. This is accepting a stereotype.)
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-be...
I've seen many people make this claim, but I haven't seen anyone back it up with evidence. What do you mean by "harder"? Do you mean "more difficult"? In what way?
Right now, I believe claims that tiny linguistic differences create meaningful barriers to female participation in technology are all specious. I could be convinced otherwise, but have seen no evidence that might move me.
> If you do not know my gender, it takes very little effort to speak in a way that admits you do not know it
English is not structured to be gender-neutral. I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.
Years ago, I joined an urban planning forum. It had been around for 10 years. It was the most prominent forum of its kind in the world. The majority of members were in Canada or the Continental US. The owner was frustrated that he did not have more of a global membership. He was not very socially savvy. He had explicitly stated his desire to have more international participation. I felt okay with kind of fucking with the group culture to hand him his wish. I was there about 6 months and was not a moderator when membership generally began to rise, but in particular international membership went up.
Part of how that happened:
I was a nightowl living in California, so I was often on late at night, like midnight my time, when it was the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast. Most members were not only living in the East Coast to West Coast time zones of the continental US, they were on the East Coast. It was a professional forum of nerds. So they were there mostly during working hours, 8am to 8pm east coast time (8-5 for east coast and west coast inclusive, since it is 8pm on the east coast when it is 5pm here).
So one of the cultural things going on was that if anyone was there during the evening or weekend, they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours. It was clear to my mind that this was a barrier to participation for anyone living outside of those time zones -- that potential international members would already be self conscious about being "different" and they would be online during their normal work hours, which were outside that 8-8 east coast timeframe. So the ugly comments about how terrible it was to post outside of those times was something I actively hunted down and fucked with. I threw it in everyone's face that I was there after midnight, that I was a woman and a student and so on (ie I emphasized that I was demographically different from the predominantly male employed professionals to help make foreigners more comfortable with being different). I was the only person having real time conversation with our one active Australian member when it all began.
That changed. I successfully killed the "I am here outside those hours, so I must be a lozer" meme and International membership went up.
I cannot "prove" that me going after that small linguistic detail directly caused it. I can tell you the forum existed for 10 years before I arrived. The forum owner had bitched for years about his desire to have more international members. Six months after I joined, international membership went up. I set it as a goal to make it happen as a gift to the forum owner since I felt he was doing good work and had explicitly expressed a desire for it.
So I believe strongly that I am right. I am also, as far as I can tell, the highest ranked woman here in terms of karma score, apparently by quite a stretch. So perhaps I know something about how to make that work here, if you want to believe my performance is in some way indicative that I know what I am talking about. Or you can do what a great many people do to me and wave it off as "luck" or "coincidence" or whatever and not indicative that my mental models have any kind of sound basis. That gets done to me quite a lot.
This experience may have convinced you that language policing is effective, but it doesn't convince me. Bragging about your karma likewise has no effect on my evaluation of the merits of your argument.
> That gets done to me quite a lot.
It happens to everyone a lot. In context, I get the feeling that you're suggesting it happens to you because you're a woman. Am I wrong? These sly implications of sexism where none really exist are extremely offensive and offputting and make me less likely to sympathize with your cause.
Nor did I say it gets done to me because I am a woman. It does get done to me a lot. I don't know that it has anything to do with my gender. It may have more to do with the fact that I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology and I have well developed mental models for how these things work that most people are not very familiar with. Since social psychology is a "soft science," it is much harder to convince people that X is true than, say, for physics or math. That doesn't mean there are not studies or established principles, etc, to call upon for drawing conclusions.
Anyway, I have work to do and this seems fruitless, alas.
Have a good day.
> I have formally and informally studied certain things about social psychology
Your continuing reliance on credentials isn't helping your credibility.
I don't imagine there is any hope of educating you as to why your behavior would drive off women and make them reluctant to participate here. But perhaps pointing it out will cast some light on the issue for other people.
Edit: And then you edit your comment to further dismiss my credentials as not helping my credibility. Just icing on the cake of a mountain of dismissiveness.
Everyone is treated in a dismissive fashioned by everyone. Only evidence and careful reasoning can rebut this default policy. You have presented none.
It galls me you interpret treatment that everyone receives as hostility directed toward the group to which you happen to belong. I am under no obligation to give additional weight to your argument merely because you are a woman. That you consider my dismissal of your unsupported claims is intellectually dishonest. You're smart enough to know better.
You're essentially claiming that everyone who doesn't accept your unsupported claims is sexist. You're free to do make this claim, but in doing so, you're crying wolf and weakening your cause.
You're right that I'm being dismissive. I'm also veering toward being disrespectful. That's not because you're a woman, but because you're demanding unearned special treatment. You're a technologist. Gaining status on a technologist's forum is no great accomplishment.
You're smart enough to know better.
Thank you for saying that. But it does not change the fact that men here are routinely asked to show their work and women are routinely told they are simply full of shit. I have tried to show you what I know. You dismiss it and seem unopen to considering additional evidence.
There is a big difference between skepticism or desiring firmer evidence and disrespect. I don't expect you to give me special treatment. The standard on HN is supposed to be civil, respectful discourse. But my history suggests that standard applies to men and not women. It has improved, quite a lot, but there are still differences.
When I joined Hacker News, there was much more collegial respect here -- for the men, not the women. That has deteriorated some over the years. It is perhaps being repaired. My hope is that if it is fully restored, it will apply equally to all members.
(Well, you might imagine that commentators here are _deliberately_ misgendering you, which is a suggestion so preposterous that I can't entertain it. It might also conceivably be the case that you've gained so much karma _because_ you have an androgynous username, but see below.)
As a man, I find it extremely frustrating when advocates for women in technology look at a phenomenon where men and women are imbalanced and immediately jump to sexism as the explanation. I've had a long career in technology. Not once have I seen a woman discriminated against or her ideas held to a higher standard than the ideas of men. I've seen plenty of mentoring, encouragement, and outreach however. I've personally worked to mentor women in computer science. The idea that there is some systemic bias against women on Hacker News or in the workplace is inconsistent with my experience and with the professed views of my colleagues.
I think we need additional empathy here. Maybe it's the case that _everyone's_ ideas are dismissed too quickly. Numerous times in my career, I've proposed $FOO, been told $FOO is impossible, and only been believed after actually _implementing_ $FOO, often on my own time after tending to my official responsibilities. When some women get this treatment, they call it sexism. When I get it, I call it the reality of working in a world that combines empiricism and huge egos. I think a lot of women in technology are genuinely unaware that men get this treatment too. Maybe it's shitty for everyone and not just women.
There are a bunch of people who chose to misgender others, even when they know the preferred terms.
Whether they get flagged or not seems random.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896908
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896788 etc.
I agree with some of your points. It took me a very long time to conclude my gender was a factor on HN. Compared to other male dominated environments I have spent time in, my treatment here has been spectacularly good. It is one of the reasons I worked my ass off to resolve some of the problems I had here.
I went through a period where I was getting a helluva lot of flack, where it was clear to me that men on the leaderboard were closing ranks to shut me out. But my karma was so far below what qualifies one for the leaderboard, I was baffled by social evidence that I was "prominent -- for a woman." After managing to gather objective data that fit with that fact, I handled things differently here.
Here is a summary, with supporting links, to the data I gathered: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat...
I don't think anyone is consciously, intentionally trying to exclude women. I do think the apparent lack of women on the leaderboard is not a mere happenstance of numbers.
It is possible for your experiences and views to have validity and for mine to also. I have written about this issue previously. I think you and I might agree more than it seems had we not gotten off on the wrong foot. I also think you are bringing personal baggage and frustrations to the discussion that biases your interpretation of my position. You "heard" me accusing you of dismissing it as coincidence because of my gender when that wasn't my intent. That kind of thing does wind up being a problem for women. It ends up being a kind of de facto sexism.
I also did not say I was held to a higher standard. That isn't how I would frame the problem space. But, given that you are not sympathetic to my views or testimony concerning my firsthand experience, I see little point at this time in trying to figure out how to communicate more on that piece of what you said.
Edit:
FYI: You can take my continued engagement as evidence that, while I think you are wrong about a lot of things, I don't think you are simply and intentionally being an asshole. I don't debate people that I think are not engaging in good faith to at least some degree. I stop replying when I think it is straight up assholery.
This is not the first subthread I've seen get detached and marked off-topic because it degenerated into a back-and-forth scrum that doesn't make anyone look good. It's too bad; I was getting a pretty good return of InternetPoints™ for my quip about bronies...
Upon further review, it was not detached at the point of one of my comments. So you are blaming me for something that may have nothing to do with my replies at all.
Citation? I strongly believe this to be false in general; certainly it has been in my experience.
Do you have something more to say than "I would need many thousands more narratives like this to care what you have to say"? Do you have a substantial criticism of what this particular narrative suggests?
I learnt a lot. It was a pretty big flag.
How is this a "small linguistic detail"? It has nothing whatsoever to do with using 'he' as a gender-neutral pronoun; it's on a completely different level.
You're being dishonest by assuming the answer to the question. I don't believe that using 'he' "misgenders" women at all, because it doesn't.
I thought I had a large vocabulary. These days, it is rare that I have to stop reading an internet post and reach for a dictionary (I mean, figuratively, you know... Google). Anyway, thanks for the new word. I can't wait to work it into casual conversation sometime this week.
Using singular they is hardly a "circumlocution", I do it without thinking about it. It's not hard to learn once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.
And it's not a "possibility of offending", it's a "certainty of papercuts". If you habitually use male pronouns you will inevitably refer to women with them, and they will most likely be put off by your apparent assumption.
I accept responsibility for the content of my speech. I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech. It's not my job to manage their emotional state.
If you know some people will be offended by a particular usage and you choose to use it anyway, then you are responsible for the resulting offence, whether you accept it or not.
Sometimes there are benefits which make the offence worthwhile, particularly when the offence is exceptionally uncommon. But using gender specific speech in generic/unknown contexts has no such benefits, and will cause offence fairly often. Singular they is easy and idiomatic, and I don't see any real excuse not to use it, other than laziness.
>It's not my job to manage their emotional state.
No, it's just a nice thing to do.
My oldest son is not neurotypical. Raising him was a real challenge. When he was 8, he spent 6 weeks psychologically torturing me. He didn't care about my feelings and he found my reactions amusing. Part of what I told him that finally got him to stop was "The point at which you will care about my feelings is the point at which you want something from me and my reply is No. What have you done for me instead of to me here lately?"
You aren't responsible for anyone else's feelings. But if you routinely disrespect and offend people and then defend your right to crap on others instead of apologizing, that will have consequences for you and they won't be ones you will like. Most people are not as forthright as I am. Most people will never tell you "I am turning down your request because of all the times you were inconsiderate, insensitive, etc." They will just tell you No and not explain why.
I will suggest there may be a connection between how frustrated you seem to feel with other people and your general attitude that their feelings are not your problem. If everyone dislikes you, that can very much be a problem for you.
And the correct way to do the latter, in English, is to use male pronouns. It's different in other languages, no doubt.
There are plenty of ways to speak in a gender neutral way in English that don't involve trying to rationalise using a gender specific pronoun.
My preference is for singular "they". (It's not as clunky as "he or she", and not as confusing for the unfamiliar as "xe" or similar).
But thank you for replying.
> The average programmer spends only about 30 percent of his/her time working alone.
That's nowhere close to my figure. In fact, I can pretty much _only_ program alone. Individual investigation and discovery is most of the fun in the field.
"Tech" isn't a single thing. If you want to make non-geeky spaces for tech, go ahead and do it. But lots of geeks do like tech, and they understandably make geeky environments. Why can't everyone, as the bumper sticker helpfully puts it, coexist?
I think they can. But I also think that the association of geekiness with tech isn't a random quirk of history, but rather indicates a common origin. The kind of personality and psychological profile that predisposes one to an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics also predisposes one to geekiness. Moreover, geekiness isn't gender-blind: men are simply more likely than women to be geeks. Indeed, people on the autistic spectrum are especially likely to be geeks, and the overrepresentation of males among autistics is incontrovertible. [1]
There's nothing wrong with creating non-geeky tech spaces that cater to non-geeks (male and female alike)—indeed, I think it's an excellent idea, and not only because it's generally more welcoming to women—but let's also let geeks be geeks.
[1]: http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/introduction/gender-an...
The article also goes into many stereotypes and many women arent going into computer science based on these perceived sterotypes. If we were talking about any other group, the words "racist", "sexist", Or "bigot" would be thrown around and used to describe the group not accepting the culture.
This is a tell-tale sign that it is a power-play move to gain control over another group of people.
I also thought that we were supposed to be accepting of everyones culture. Does this only apply to the privileged few???
Stereotypes about STEM fields putting girls off
I can only talk about my own experience but I saw very few negative stereotypes about STEM fields growing up. Definitely not enough to put off girls.
However, while I did start coding at a young age, I didn't apply my skill to a work/business purpose until my twenties.
Why? I think this issue affects both genders actually. I was simply never exposed to people or situations that showed me you could built really cool projects/businesses with code. I never encountered anyone/anything until ~20 that inspired me to take it seriously.
Maybe it has something to do with my gender but I think a lot of people these days are being forced way too early to commit to an education/work track without being given to chance to explore what their options are.
It's hard to discover you like a topic by learning it a classroom. I think co-ed / internship programs at a much younger age will help a lot. It definitely would have helped me discovered my true passions younger.
About being feminine
I don't feel un-feminine in any environment where there are more guys than girls. Rather, I think the problem is, the professional/business world as a whole rewards and values masculine traits (competitiveness, talking highly of yourself and accomplishments, etc.) much more than feminine ones.
Even in dress, women are encouraged to dress like a man (power suits, solid colors, etc.) in professional settings to be taken seriously.
Thus as a girl, you're forced to act more masculine to achieve business goals. But it's hard to suppress your natural state of being. Additionally girls are still expected to (and want to) act feminine in their personal relationships so women "who want to have it all" have to toggle back and forth between being masculine and feminine. It can be exhausting.
I'd argue those are better classified as extroverted traits rather than masculine traits. Believe me, there are more than a few males that suffer from this being the dominant culture in business (or anywhere). Of course it makes sense though - introverted culture is more introspective thus not as dominating by nature. If there was ever going to be a winner, especially if the business has a focus on sales, it was going to be the one that rewards competitiveness and confidence.
I'd say the next big battle in workplace equality is going to focus on treating introversion fairly. I've seen MBTI's, a kind of personality test, used to define who a business hires and fires despite them claiming otherwise (forgetting that MBTI tests are pseudoscience). You can guess which personality types they prefer, regardless of gender. They want "rockstars".
What do you think such an effort would look like? One problem is that in big companies, it's frequently not enough to do good work. To get recognition, you have to _advertise_ that you're doing good work.
Good question. I see two simple avenues - organizations having a better understanding of human psychology, certainly at the human resources level but ideally org-wide. And better metrics, such as mapping human networks from email exchanges so you can find who is really driving the strong relationships with clients or stakeholders.
I guess the condensed version would be: understand humans better.
I don't think this metric survives Goodhart's Law. It's too easy to game.
> I guess the condensed version would be: understand humans better.
It's not that simple.
I've been working in and managing software development teams for a while. The most striking thing about the female developers that I've worked with is how quiet they are (I wouldn't say 'introverted').
Ever see those studies that show that the most vocal person in a meeting is considered the most knowledgeable by the group (even if they're the least knowledgeable)? Yeah - software development has this to the extreme.
I think this happens a lot online too. It's super easy now to become an 'expert' on a particular technology just by writing a few blog posts about it, tweeting a bunch, or self-publishing a quick ebook. I suspect a lot of people feel like they aren't 'expert' enough to do these things despite them being done by relatively inexperienced people all the time.
Icanhackit suggested that these present traits are "extrovert" in nature, however there are traits that are feminine that are extrovert as well - communication, team-building, etc.
My wife who is an extrovert and holds a position of corporate importance half-jests about putting a poster in her office that says "I am your manager, not your mom".
Here is an article (well shared by now) that suggests that boards with women members may be good for the business, exactly because they provide a good counter-point to "masculine" traits of aggression and risk-seeking behaviour.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/01/the-effect-o...
Icanhackit suggested that these present traits are "extrovert" in nature, however there are traits that are feminine that are extrovert as well - communication, team-building, etc.
I'd argue that if a male or female can have good communication or team building skills, we should really do away with any gender connotations and just focus on the fact that it's an extroverted skill. I've worked for a female who possessed what you might call masculine behavioral traits, but from what I know about her she'd been that way her whole life.
I suspect that because she and I both lived and grew up in a secular environment there wasn't as much of an emphasis placed on gender roles. Now with that massive sample size of 1 person we can, perhaps haphazardly, deduce that some gender roles aren't innate to a persons gender. Of course men and women are different and do react differently to various forms of stress and stimuli, but a good portion of behavior stems from culture.
So what do we gain by not forcing gender-specificity upon certain behaviors? We can see people as independent from their appearance and treat them in a way that doesn't pigeonhole them with certain expectations.
It's exhausting for men too to switch from exact equals professionally, and then being dominant romantically. Sheryl Sandberg says more women should ask out men, given that equality in romance carries over into the workplace, but that seems pretty low on feminist concerns.
I'd love to see the industry become less masculine, rather than the onus being on women to act more masculine.
as evidenced by this doco on the "Gender Equality" paradox https://vimeo.com/19707588
1. http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happe...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/1vuho8/the_docu...
I think this matters because it's very difficult to make any sort of meaningful progress when people seek to invalidate the experience and opinion of those they claim to represent. This is by no means unique to feminist discourse, but it's particularly evident in this case.
A problem with feminism as it currently stands is that too often it's less about improving the life of women than advancing a sociological ideology.
Exactly. Masculinity is all about taking risks. Capitalism is about risk. So of course men lead the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
Sans the "general interest magazines" (so vanilla, it makes me want to barf), this sounds like a rather pleasant work environment. I'm so used to working in a dark cave with Boba Fett stand-ups everywhere, it'd be nice to work in a place with more greenery, natural tones and airiness. Nest's offices were a lot like this, and were one of the factors I liked about working there.
Personally I think that one of the best way to accomodate the uniqueness that makes us all individuals, is to embrace that individual nature and give people solo offices. Of course, that's not the only reason I advocate for private offices, but it's hard not to think that it would help in this regard as well.
Part of "professionalism" is the recognition that you can be whoever you want to be on your own time, but while you're at work your personal identity is partially subsumed into your identity as a member of a profession. That means you dress, decorate, talk and behave in a way that's a bit more neutral and respectable than you might in your college dorm room.
This is a bit dull, sure, but it also enables all sorts of people to work together effectively by papering over their individual differences with a shared professional identity. The fact that your coworkers are of a different sex or generation to you and like different things is pretty immaterial when you're all wearing suits, sitting at undecorated desks and talking about work. Nobody will be alienated by your dick jokes, because nobody makes dick jokes.
Greater professionalism is the solution to many of the tech industry's problems.
Computer parts and tech magazines might be inevitable detritus of any office/area focused on working with technology. Do I have to lockup my programming books and hide away the spare components I'm working with?
Are Time and Newsweek even being published anymore?
Vogue and Cosmo!? As a 'feminine' counterpoint to the supposedly masculine 'computer parts' and 'tech magazines'!?
This is "Science. It's a Girl Thing"[1] all over again: "To get women into STEM, you have to show makeup and fashion". Fuck this view of fashion being a fundamental part of the female psyche. The article has some good points in it, but I think it overplays "women like fashion" and underplays "my computer time was gatekept by sexist arseholes".
[1]https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Science+it%27s+...
I've seen a little bit of TV this year - every hacker I saw was female, and most were goths. Doing a google search of "top TV 2014" and looking up the ones that are likely to have a hacker as a character, I discover "Arrow" (female hacker), NCIS (female hacker), 24 (female hacker), Criminal Minds (female hacker), Person of Interest (male and female hacker), Agents of Shield (female hacker) and The Strain (female hacker).
Why do we believe that pop culture portrays scientists or computer people this way at all?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvertedTrope
If the trope is "basement dwelling male nerd = good hacker" then they're inverting it and making the female a good hacker.
(Which is fine, of course. But let's not kid ourselves that we're breaking media stereotypes that were gone years ago.)
The women are all hyper-capable, responsible and determined. The men are all petty, flawed, impulsive and frequently fighting with each other. It's absurd if you realize what is happening.
Hollywood has a history of being a canary in the coal mine when it comes to stereotypes...both good and bad. For example, when homosexuality started becoming more accepted in American culture one of the first signs were prominent gay sitcom characters.
I suspect that was a cause, not an effect, of widening acceptance of homosexuality.
Now that I think of it, was the reality of hacking being primarily male ever displayed in popular media?