Eventually, as I was trying to figure this stuff out, one expert told me: "Of COURSE women are MUCH more emotional than men. That's the cause of all the problems [between men and women]."
It does appear that from, say, SAT test scores, that the girls and boys have somewhat different aptitudes. But, girls can be plenty bright, really, at darned near anything. E.g., my wife was Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow, and Ph.D. in mathematical sociology. Her memory, verbal, and social talents were astounding: E.g., early in our marriage, we played Scrabble. She beat me like a rented mule. But I kept trying. I improved! She improved faster than I did; the situation for me was hopeless; and she refused to play me anymore.
She did beautifully in analysis of variance and, really, all the material in statistical hypothesis testing and multi-variate statistics, material that is still in significant ways ahead of the usual in AI and ML.
Still, the expert was correct: She was MUCH more emotional than I was.
COULD she be rational? Yes, especially for something far from her core concerns. Otherwise, nope: On any of her core concerns, especially as a female, her emotionalism wildly overwhelmed her rationalism.
Often it's not that the females can't be rational; instead, it's that they are also emotional, strongly emotional, and their emotionalism can just overwhelm their rationalism. The expert told me that this commonly happens very strongly near age 22. He'd been there, seen that, for years.
Female emotionalism? A lot of it, especially the more visible cases, has a single cause -- anxiety disease, and there are other experts who claim that anxiety disease is four times more common in human females, including across cultures, than in human males. Consequences of anxiety disease can include hysteria (overreacting to things), paranoia (overestimating dangers and external intentional threats), obsessive/compulsive disorder (thinking/doing things without ability to stop), etc. These can lead to stress, especially as these symptoms cause practical problems in relationships and careers. The stress can lead to depression and more problems in relationships and careers, thus, more stress, clinical depression (a scary, ugly, desperate situation), and suicide. Yup.
The stereotype of a dangerous situation with the female trembling, closing her eyes, ready to scream and the male, cool, calm, calculating, planning, plotting, quiet, hunting, and about ready to strike at the danger, the wild pig, the deer, the snake, the bear, the enemy, maybe these days a bug in a computer program, etc. is not fully wrong and in too many cases close to correct.
Men who insist that human males and females are just interchangeable and equal in all respects except the most obvious anatomical differences can be in for some serious, life changing, reality checks.
My strong advice: Without strong evidence to the contrary, treat each human female one by one as unique and quite different from a human male. Maybe slowly begin to see the main cases of human females accurately enough to speed up how you regard them, that is, not just one by one unique.
Sure, some human females can be tough, mean, cold hearted, ruthless, calculating, combative, emasculating, etc. Yup, SOME can. Commonly, easily? No. Sometimes? Yes. So, have to be ready for all the major, more common cases.
This is not nearly new stuff: As many parents discover and as some recent careful research has shown, right from the crib human males and females are very different. In particular, the males are paying attention to things and the females, to people. No joke.
For a simple view, the boy is there in the crib plotting how to hack the latch, crawl to the floor, and install a Raspberry Pi in the toy firetruck on the floor so that he can drive it via his Android, maybe tease his sister, and t...
Sometimes I also fall for "treating women like men" and then I realize they perceive & react differently to their surroundings
Once a soccerball almost landed on the head of my daughter (could have broken her scull) and my wife was standing 100% unaware next to her (and not catching the ball): Luckily the ball just touched my daughter's cheek (when returning from the sky) and made her _only_ cry
I was showing off how high I could kick a (real) soccerball to my family. Highly idiotic in hindsight. BUT: I was looking out for my son and my wife for my daughter......
We are constantly told (especially by girls/women) that there is no difference and it's convenient to believe it. Is part of being a women denying differences between man and women? Is that just another skill they want to have in us men, that we make them feel 'not different at all'? Are men looking/searching for different skills/things in women ;)?
I am sorry for your loss (and currious what happend?)
I apologize only because what I am about to say may sound crass, but the length of your diatribe only adds to the fruitlessness of your central point.
Even a complex idea can be explained far more briefly.
The fact that you felt compelled to respond to my chastising in such a fashion speaks to your defensive position.
Men and women are in no way the same, but to extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded -- at least in your response. You resolved to ply me and and everyone else with the opinion of a colleague you agree with and only that - that serves nothing.
In short, I'll be more crass: you're full of shit.
You failed to make any rational case. So, you resulted to insults.
> extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded
I explained (A) the astounding ability for "rational thought" but also (B) how emotions can overwhelm that ability. So, your comment shows you have poor reading comprehension, and some junior college may be able to help you.
On length, what I wrote was not long enough with enough details, examples, and explanations for you to understand it. So, at least for you, what I wrote was not long enough.
For your obsession with excretory matters, neither HN nor I can help you.
I didn't owe you any rational case. I was dismissing your essay.
The very basis of applied rational thought is overcoming emotion. Your first target seemed to be that women are inevitably overpowered by emotion, then you switched to they -can- be overpowered.
Of course emotions can overwhelm, but that was not the original target comment at all. When OP stated that women are incapable of rational thought you came to OP's defense Please don't move the goalposts and condemn me for being irrational.
Besides, you didn't address your sole source being anecdotal and personal -- it doesn't matter how much highschool english class terminology you use.
This comment is unsubstantive and violates the guidelines with incivility and by introducing a classic flamewar topic with nothing new to say about it. If you want to keep posting on Hacker News it can't be like this.
On the other hand, why are so many crystallographers women? Dorothy Hodgkin, Olga Kennard, Eleanor Dodson, Kathleen Lonsdale, it's easy to come up with all these and many more, they are among the greats.
You'd think it's due to J D Bernal. He was a pioneer of x-ray crystallography and was involved with many women, all of whom he treated with respect. That set the tone in the field.
China + India + the portion of US/Europe that aren't white must be close to half. Region oriented stats though, so I don't know how much of the AsiaPAC total is Australia, Russia, etc.
In near homogenous countries, it's unsurprising that there aren't very many counter examples to the demographic (e.g. very few white programmers in Ghana).
At a certain Java school in the South that is attended mostly by Indians, the gender ratio amongst the Indians is fairly even. The Americans, they are all white and male. What this means is open to interpretation.
I believe in Indian culture, engineering and programming are respected as solid, lucrative professions, while in general (white) American culture they're seen as second best to being say, a doctor or lawyer, which is where more high achieving women end up.
I have a background similar to the author of the post. I gather his scope is the US, or North America.
Personally, I had my foot in more than one world. I grew up not wealthy, lower-middle-class in rural Ontario. I rowed because of my parents' history as athletes and their involvement helping establish a club in the small town we lived in. I also skateboarded and preferred old punk music to the Tragically Hip (which was the popular stuff where I grew up. How things change). I was also notoriously uncool and didn't hit parties, and spent a lot of time on the computer I urged and urged my parents to buy after coming in contact with GUI's (after years of messing with the 286 my mom had from her days working in the city.)
From my perspective then, his outlook is accurate. On a global scale, totally off. It's far more complex than he makes it out to be.
I would contend that in North America, a lot of the business leaders in tech are white because of the economic advantage typically afforded to them. But it's not universally the case. To start any business, you need resources. That's either money to run a server and access to a half-decent computer, or more. You also need time -- the most expensive and rare of resources in NA.
Everywhere, the majority of people in every field will be of the majority race of that country.
In USA, that is white; where I live, it's latino/hyspanic.
The gender disparity does seem to be widespread, though: For instance, of the 90 students that were accepted for SI in my University, only 10 were women. Of the 30 who ended up graduating, 5 were women.
Funny, that means that women have a higher success ratio, at least in that sample.
That part seems sketchy, by sheer force of population size of China and India it's very likely that "Asian males" is the dominant demographics globally. "White males" might have a solid #2, but "Asian females" wouldn't be that far behind.
Because women are smart. The women I've worked with claim ignorance to programming, have no desire to learn programming, and give me a mile high task list of things to do. Then they take all the credit for my work while I'm being worked to the bone. I burn out and quit while they hire the next fresh programmer ready to accept work.
I've tried teaching employees to program, but when they realized how much painful/frustrating work they can now accept with this fresh new skill, they immediately stop learning how to program. Easier to give me all the work.
Become a manager and play the same game. But seriously, it may be a function of your workplace culture. Where I work, the programmers have a typical 8 hour work day, and their managers are very protective of their time. In fact, if I need some programming work done, I have to do it myself, even though I'm supposedly not employed as a programmer.
Another option is to find a role where you use your programming skill, but you're not developing software for someone. That's my case. My title is "scientist," and truth be told, I spend a considerable portion of my day programming, but I'm using code to solve problems, and my code will never be used by a customer.
I used to get teased for being so interested in computers and electronics during grade school, and for staying in at recess to program or read.
Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege. So it's easy to see how many of the rarest skills and ingenious founder stories are examples of someone going against the grain to do something he or she cares about.
When people decry privilege, they seem to think that it's a bad thing, that we should all feel the insecurity, the doubt, and the drive to conform that most people feel.
I think the opposite is true, we should strive for all people to feel the empowerment of privilege and the freedom to pursue whatever moves them.
As a corollary, it's not a coincidence that the top schools admit the most privileged applicants. Those are the people whose privilege has allowed them to think about what is important to them... not just simply trying to be popular, avoiding getting beaten up by the kids who hate nerds, or avoiding ticking off an abusive parent, etc.
Privilege puts a person years ahead when it comes to moral clarity, purpose, curiosity, and self-actualization. Metaphorically, everyone else is in some sort of minimum security prison.
I think you've got a valid point. I would add that genetics plays a part. I grew up the same way, but my family didn't have much money. However my parents were former athletes and ensured my siblings and I took part in a regular physical activity (in one form or another) from a young age. I think that staves off some of the aggression -- if you don't look like they could just give you a knock around regardless of your demeanor.
That and I was often told I looked angry or sad while I spent my spare periods or lunches reading. Woops.
I think this at least applies to younger ages.
edit: wanted to add, I'm sure this changed some time ago. I'm referring to the 90's and early 2000's in particular.
There are multiple factors, but basic discouragement, starting from childhood, is a big one.
100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts:
"Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?"
At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited.
So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math.
Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does).
The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club.
Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.
It's not the general wisdom, it's a fact. But not a simple one. There's an experiment (heard of it from an philosopher women talking about women in philosophy) showing that girls perform as good as boys in math, BUT, if asked to color a drawing before the math test, they perform less. Which means, I think, that we don't live in a void of emotions. Men tend to be more aggressive and a hard problem requires aggressiveness. Unfortunately this comes with a shown tendency towards sociopath behaviour, Angular vs React thingy. :)
Women, on the other side, go towards sadness and depression and anxiety. Which is hard on coding. Speaking from my own experience, as a white male.
All in all is unfortunate. Coding is a tiny thing in developing software, and I personally believe that it's much, much easier to work with women. But when they are surrounded by 90% men teammates, I can imagine that it's hard to be a woman in IT.
Good points. Being female puts a person at a disadvantage in certain ways, and particularly makes it more likely that teachers and parents will believe that the easier path of study is preferable to the one that requires more challenges, particularly in mathematics and science.
This does likely have an impact on how many female programmers we see today.
Men are disadvantaged in other ways, such as being taught to suppress emotions and to prefer aggression to problem solving. Many men are permanently damaged by this and the effects harm their employability and relationships for their entire lives.
I'm not suggesting there is equality/equivalence or that large-scale social biases and patterns don't disproportionately effect some people. Just making the point that there may not be an ideal and we may always be trying to correct for various excesses. One notable excess is the pressure put on working parents, which are asymmetrical and backward for both sexes in many ways.
That looks like a perfectly sealed argument. You're popular - surely it's privilege. You're unpopular - you have so much privilege you can even afford being unpopular! Society loves you - clearly privilege. Society shuns you - you're so privileged you can take on the whole society, clearly you have the whole privilege in the world!
If any outcome leads to the same conclusion, it usually means the argument is faulty, or at least redundant.
The problem here is that survival while being unpopular is taken as the evidence of existence of privilege. So whether you are popular or not, both is the evidence that you are privileged.
Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege
That's not privilege. That's the benefit of being on the aspie end of the neurotypical<->autistic spectrum.
It's a lot easier to ignore (or even be unaware) social pressure and focus on tasks for hours on end when you have less dopamine in your brain than your peers.
This whole "everything is a privilege" argument is pure nonsense most of the time it's trotted out.
While you have correctly identified a trait of those who graze the autistic spectrum, you also appear to have discounted the possibility of being able to ignore social pressure otherwise. I think you are kind of proving the point of the person you are responding to. To me it came off as if the comment made you uncomfortable, and you responded in a way that is, in my opinion, short-sighted. I believe what he meant is that often times with privilege, people don’t feel the need to defend a certain viewpoint - because they aren’t negatively affected by it.
Disclaimer: I grew up poor as dirt in a house of 7 children, so I’m definitely not speaking from experience as far as being privileged goes. I never graduated college, I just read regular old books. I do have a younger brother who struggles with a slight case of autism though, and he has no interest in computers whatsoever. In fact his life is somewhat in shambles. Also, the term “asperger’s” has been deprecated.
First off, I didn't use the term asperger's. I used the term aspie. One is the DSM-IV term and the other is a derivative term used by the community of people on that end of the spectrum.
I didn't suggest that there are no other possible contributors to being able to ignore social pressure. That's what you read into my comment. What I did do is dismiss the very handwavvy explanation of stating it's caused by "privilege", which is one of the most bullshit masturbatory terms to come out of liberal academia in a long time. It is not specific, measurable or testable. Hypotheses and theories based on it lack all the hallmarks of good science.
If one wants to talk about something testable based on criteria like income, zip code, educational attainment of parents, or a variety of other aspects that are specific and measurable, that's great, but "privilege" is not specific nor measurable.
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
Philip K. Dick
The term "privilege" is a weasel word and anyone interested in having an honest intellectual debate should reject it outright.
I'd like to add though that I disagree with the parent comment about privilege putting people ahead in the moral sense. I believe that some of the most compassionate people have grown that way through hardship.
> I believe that some of the most compassionate people have grown that way through hardship
This is very true, and all of the most dedicated physicians I know were inspired as children to pursue medicine because of some situation they were involved in involving the health of a loved one (or their own health).
> putting people ahead in the moral sense
Compassion is not the only relevant aspect of morality. The way I'd argue my point is that one of the big reasons we can all sit back and think about how to make the world a better place is because our basic needs are met. Over time, as humanity has overcome basic scarcity and basic fear, we have been able to look outward and prioritize things like making the world better for others.
Someone who is privileged is more likely to have had an excellent teacher explain the labor movement or the holocaust, and is more likely to have vacationed to places where other ways of life (including far subpar standard of living) can be observed, or even gone on a humanitarian school-cation to help people in need. Experiences like this help to break a person out of his/her safe little world and help create an understanding of broader issues, problems, and opportunities.
Meanwhile, the middle class kid's family got a nice new TV allowing a great view of music videos and action films.
This is not about blame or credit. A person alive in 2017 America is more likely to think slavery abhorrent than a person alive in 1830 America. This isn't because there is something superior about modern people, it's because economic prosperity offers the luxury of thinking about others more empathetically.
There are always outliers, people who are morally ahead of their time or unusual for their class. Nothing about my argument in this thread applies to them. I'm talking about the average person.
Thus the average privileged person is simply ahead at the age of 18 relative to those from more humble backgrounds or from decades past.
What scares me most is the large percentage of Harvard and Stanford grads who go into investment banking and similar careers. Those are fine choices for someone whose goal is to "level up" his/her family's wealth status in a single generation, but they are not the sorts of careers chosen by people who had the chance to develop moral clarity and self-actualization early on. It suggests a great deal of cynicism or timidness that should really not be the result of the best education in the world.
> It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer.
Indeed the seeds were sown a very long time ago. My father bought a PC with some inheritance money he had, then he immediately regretted it because I spent all my time and summer on it rather than playing sports or hanging out with friends!
Back then nobody realized how in demand our field would be. By the time I started college I had already been programming.
The author makes a good point as to the high cost of computers in the US in previous decades, which meant kids who grew up using computers tended to be upper-middle class, but what about places like Britain where the Sinclair Spectrum and various Amstrad machines reigned in the 1980s-early 1990s? These were cheap machines. It would be interesting to see if this cheapness led to a more diverse set of programmers.
I think this hits the nail on the head, and explains why some people feel gilted by the recent push for diversity in tech -- like it or not it's only a popular issue because tech is now sexy where it absolutely wasn't before. Other fields have worse gender ratios by a fair margin (in both directions) but you don't see news articles about it -- maybe because there's no Zuckerberg of mechanical engineering.
"It was flat out unpopular and the only people I found that were really into it were nerdy white kids like me who somehow tricked their parents into buying a computer."
This.
I tricked my parents 3 times to buy my brother I computers. I took well over a year each time of pestering and took them the whole year to save $2000.
We are immigrants and didnt have much money then.
It's obvious to me and the author... that's what this hysteria is ridiculous and funny.
We got picked on and bullied for being nerds and into computers at the age of 13.
I understand the logic. But data about the diversity among programmers around 20~25 years old must be significantly different from ~40 if he is right. We do not have to sit and wait 20 years hoping he is right. Is there any such data available?
About the cost of the equipment to learn. Is there any raspberry pi based computer that one can use to learn to code? Like, something below USD100? That would also help more class diversity.
That's pretty much every RPi. Computers are cheap now, and the RPi in particular is incredibly inexpensive and has more than enough power for people to learn programming skills.
There's little benefit to screwing around with a RPi, unless that's your hobby and you want to mess around with the hardware, when you can go to Best Buy and get a real laptop for $300.
By the time you've bought a keyboard, mouse, display, and storage for the Pi, you've spent just as much money.
Yeh $1500 computers.... you where looking at the wrong thing.
Everyone else was looking at the not Microsoft market... commadore, Atari etc. I bought my first computer with Christmas money when I was about 10 for under £100 in the mid 80's.
The whole girls weren't into computers is looking at the bubble from the inside and not looking at why there's a bubble.
Parents in the 70's tended to point the boys at building and engineering toys and the girls at dolls etc. Those children followed on in the same fashion. That's left us in the gender bias we have now.
As for ethnic groups... that's complicated and depends on local demographic, plus imigant families tend not to be overflow in spare cash....
I had the same reaction to the pricing in the article. I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas 1982. I think it was a few hundred dollars at most.
I got it because I begged my parents to buy it for me. My two older sisters had zero interest. None whatsoever. I spent 12 hours a day on it especially after I got my first 300 bps modem in 1985.
I got mine for Christmas and it was $300 just for the computer. The floppy drive was another $300. Got the monitor which was another $300 about six months later.
Add in the dot matrix printer and 1200 baud modem and it was over $1000 for the complete system.
The video game crash of the early 80s put a stop to those cheap programmable computers. By the 90s, any cheap home computer, like the NES/SNES/Genesis/Gameboy was not programmable by the end user.
When I was a kid, I learned BASIC on a 10 year old Tandy 80 to write games like I had on my NES (which was marketed solely to boys btw). Eventually my dad dropped $2000 on a 486 (and subsequent upgrades) and that's when I was able to start writing C with the DJGPP toolchain, installing Linux, rebuilding machines out of spare obsolete parts, etc.
If my family wasn't well off, there's no way I'd have progressed past having known BASIC for a couple of summers.
I think this is a common refrain for anyone born between about 1980 and maybe 1995. By 2010, there were cheap laptops, netbooks, and whatnot.
I'm not sure you got the entire impression of what was going on in the early 90's and late 80's then. There was a massive scene in the Amiga and Atari ST market.... over here we also had the Spectrum and Amstrad things in the mid 80's with the BBC Micro too.
The cheap home computer era only really came to a crashing halt once Windows 95 got bedded in.
In 95 I'd just started Uni and there was still a large user base on the Amiga and Atari ST.
I've intentionally not mentioned Apple here... as they have never been called cheap....
My family weren't at all well off when I was growing up in the UK, but my Dad had some contacts in a local IT business who had a spare BBC microcomputer that he got hold of around 1988 when they were throwing it away.
I was born at the end of 1984 and played games on it with him from around age 3, then started tinkering myself and learning how to load games and play them at around age 5. In another couple of years I was going to the library and checking out books full of lengthy game listings in BASIC, painstakingly typing them in, running them and saving them to tape. That experience basically ignited my love for computers and for programming. When the family managed to get a cheap PC I was about 9 or 10 and I spent as much time on there as I could, learning how to use MS-DOS 5, Windows 3.1 and playing games.
After this point I scrounged whatever hardware I could - I acquired an old IBM 286 with an EGA monitor that a local school wanted to get rid of, various other components, borrowed software off friends to copy the disks, etc. My parents were pretty supportive and at age 13 they were a little better off - I persuaded them to get me my own PC as a joint birthday and Christmas present, using an old monitor and peripherals we already had. I got access to the internet and started viewing the source of web pages, copying the HTML, learning what it did and editing it to make my own pages. I started to learn CSS, how to edit images and how to write Perl.
The story goes on and on - I'm mostly just going on a bit of a ramble about my past and fondly remembering all the experiences I had. The point is that yes, if your family is absolutely on the breadline while you're growing up then you probably won't have access to this stuff, but we were by no means upper middle class and I managed to get a great start with computing. It's mostly about passion and people looking out for you. I scrounged so much old hardware and software from people who didn't want it any more because I knew it'd be a fantastic learning experience, and I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me to do this and didn't spend the _entire_ summer telling me to go outside and "do something".
This article makes some decent points around class and the expense of a computer in the 80s/90s. But it dodges more substantial questions, and a lot of the substance is either circular logic or confirmation bias.
There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. It probably is socioeconomic for the reasons the article points out, so that's fine - I think we can leave it at "white and asian people dominate programming because they tend to come from wealthier families".
I think the much harder question is why women aren't in programming. They make up 50% of the population and come from the same exact socioeconomic background as men. This question is important because the repercussions still haunt us today. The article starts this question with "girls weren’t interested in computers or video games at all", and then circles the logic with "people tend to do things that they see other people who are 'like them' doing". Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming. In my circumstantial experience it wasn't a conscious decision or peer pressure, it was coming top down from society. I saw many parents encouraging their sons to play with computers and completely ignoring that their daughters may want to also. The article completely avoids this topic, sadly.
edit: downvoted within 30 seconds - if you're gonna downvote, please at least reply and start a discussion about it.
> There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing.
That whites aren't the only race disproportionately advantaged does not in any way support the conclusion that it isn't (in part or in whole) “a race thing”.
The article doesn't even argue that it's a race thing, it simply starts with the premise but explains it as socioeconomic. I agree with the article on that one. I am not white and I was never discouraged in any way from programming because of my skin color or ethnic background (I've been doing it in some form since I was 6 in the late 80s with full support from pretty much everyone, including a lot of monetary support from my upper middle class parents).
edit: it actually does get into race, but around blacks/african americans. But it didn't get into Asians - my point really is this isn't a white thing per se.
I once had plans to create a small scripting language, specifically designed for woman in tech.
I always envied woman for the ability to hold such huge social networks in their memorys and manipulate them. Maybe if you you made a programming language whose basic datastructure is similar to another person, and who's classes communicated with each other.
Then i held a C-Introduction course at university for a womans only class and abandoned the idea. Its not that woman are not smart enough to grasp tech, quite the contrary, on average they where faster learners then men.
The problem is that woman constantly evaluate their surroundings, and value their prospects accordingly.
And sorry, Nerds dont make for a high-value surrounding. This is no shiny glass apple-shoe-box a programmer princess lands- this a dorm shoe-box filled with Ramen eating nerds, partially unwashed, seemingly stuck in infinite childhood( W40k as a break talk), which to make things more bewildering, is a bonus to the job, because you are able to grasp things faster with a playful mindset. Lots of Hitchiker and LoRs insider jokes between the Bachelors and the graduating Masters dont help to that either.
Its like a great Insiders game - to which you have come much too late - and which compared to other groups doesn't look very glamorous.
Now, hold against this, the other study groups- lawyers, MBAs and doctors who hold at universities quite the social high life (every fraternitys part is famous, except for the Infoguys) already- and you begin to grasp why programing doesn't keep woman interested. Its small stuff, and its eroding away confidence, one day at a time.
I guess the question is why aren't the unwashed ramen eating nerds of the female gender interested in programming? Now let's not pretend they don't exist, they're key members of any university anime club. Why did they choose systems, civil, and chemical engineering over computer science?
I forgot the neurotics and otherwise social outcasts. Not that unwashed, but definitely not bragging material for someone who defines his value by the showman factor of the company he spends time with.
> Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming
A better question would be, what are girls doing in their child and teen years instead of isolating themselves in their basement playing video games/trolling online communities/learning a little programming?
Is it really a privilege for kids who are interested in programming to be isolating themselves like that in their adolescent years?
It's anecdotal but programming has always been social for me. It started when I was 8 going over basic programs with my father looking over my shoulder. It continued as my cousins and I planned out and tried to make games. I was lucky enough for every school I had to have a programming club and class. Our club spent hours after school together and went to contests across the state. To me it wasn't isolating anymore than any other hobby could have been.
The premise is that due to both physical differences and differences in hormonal episodes over a lifetime, the brains of men and women wind up with somewhat different architectures. One architecture is more suited to linear thinking, as in flow charts. The other is more suited to network thinking, as in connecting attributes.
Computers were overwhelmingly designed by men and a computer's architecture and programming methods are reflective of the way men think. Hence, there is little natural draw for women.
The reason men are more inclined to program is autism. Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude are traits that make a good programmer. It's no coincidence that men are 4.5x more likely to be diagnosed with autism[1]. Look at any early interview with Zuck or Gates or Musk or Jack - it's like an educational video on how to spot mild Asperger Syndrome.
This is what programmers tell themselves but it sounds bizarre to me.
1) There is almost no profession where thinking is required for which "Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude" isn't helpful. Programming isn't special in this regard.
2) Having empathy with your users seems even more important to me, and a lack of this is the cause of a lot of shitty software.
Also, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as being Asbergery at all but maybe that's just because I work at Facebook.
You seem like someone who is way outside of the autistic spectrum.
Imagine the sound of other people talking sounding like nails on a chalkboard. Now imagine working a job in sales, biz dev, marketing, customer support, investing, legal, management, child care, or HR. How many hours can you go in a day without hearing that screeching sound? Maybe 1/2 hour if you tried hard? Now imagine working in a good programming environment where you can frequently spend 1-3 hours without talking to anyone, and when you reluctantly do it's for very short periods with people who understand you don't like talking. Or maybe you can just work at home and almost never deal with anyone.
Are you the type of person who wants to spend weeks at home, alone, no travel, no dinners, with almost no human interaction outside of say 4 family/close friends? A very large number of programmers I've met are.
There is a common misconception that autism means not having empathy with people, its more of lacking the tools to express that empathy and pick up on other social cues.
> Having empathy with your users seems even more important to me, and a lack of this is the cause of a lot of shitty software.
Ideally, yes, it would be nice, in practice - not at the least. That's why there is a separate occupation (or several) created to bridge the gap. But the gap is real, and yes, this is the cause of a lot of shitty software, but that's exactly what we've got. Not that "empathy with your users" is an easy thing - there is a vast diversity of users, and it requires extraordinary abilities to be able to predict their feelings and needs. That's why user tests and focus groups exist - because it's usually the only way to get some feeling of it.
Watch some early videos of Zuck and it'll be much more obvious. He's had a lot of training in public speaking and engagement and he's a ton better than he used to be now.
I'm not saying he's autistic, but he has the same temperament and characteristics as people who have mild Aspergers - essentially what the OP said.
Throwaway, because race is a sensitive topic, and below is a potentially unpopular way to look at things in regards to race (I am not addressing gender in this comment).
1. Whites actually do not make up a disproportionate number of the programmers in the US! Whites are 74% of the workforce and 72% of the programmers.
2. Asians do make up a disproportionately high number of the programmers in the US, they are 6% of workforce but 20% of programmers.
3. I'd suggest that programming is a job where intellectual ability (specifically math-type logic) is highly correlated with success. Everything else held equal - on average more intellectual ability will lead to a better programmer.
4. Black Americans have on average significantly lower math skills (measured by the SAT) than white Americans. The factors leading to this are widely debated, but the fact remains that the gap still exists in a big way.[2] Asians have, on average, much better math skills than whites and blacks.
5. This doesn't seem to me primarily a culture issue, it seems like an intellectual ability issue.
Conclusion: I am not qualified to say what drives the intellectual ability gap (education, infant diet, genetics, culture, etc). But the fact remains the highest IQ people (and therefore highest IQ groups) will continue to perform the best in jobs where IQ is a big factor for success.
Do you agree that higher IQ (on average) makes a better programmer, and that as a group asians have higher IQs than blacks?
If so, how do you expect blacks (as a group) to have the same number of quality programmers as asians?
Again, I am NOT saying this needs to be inherently true in the future, that this is unsolvable, is genetic, etc. I am simply saying that today (on average) 18 year old asians have more intellectual ability than 18 year old blacks - and therefore, I would expect the asians (as a group) to do better in programming today.
Maybe in 20 years the IQs of the various race groups will be equal. And if that becomes the case and there is still a gap, then my thesis is disproven. But that is not the case today.
The race numbers make a lot more sense when you look at it in context of local base rates. About 50% of engineers in Silicon Valley are white and about 30% are Asian. That's approximately the same as the demographics of San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties.
The other thing to keep in mind is that these three counties do NOT represent the United States. IIRC correctly, for these three counties, approximately 37% of people were born abroad and moved to the United States. Another 35% or so were born in California. Only only 27% or so were born in all the states that aren't California.
I would also add that talking about Asians as one group is misleading as well. It's mostly five countries: China, India, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. The reason is that those 5 countries put special emphasis on two important subjects: (1) engineering; and (2) English.
> The race numbers make a lot more sense when you look at it in context of local base rates. About 50% of engineers in Silicon Valley are white and about 30% are Asian. That's approximately the same as the demographics of San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties.
That probably has more to do with the numbers of people who move to those areas specifically for tech jobs. The demographics you describe did not just occur naturally - they are driven by SV employers hiring from all over the world. According to http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/37-percent-of-silicon-vall... 37% of the population of Silicon Valley isn't even born in the US, much less the urban areas of California.
"Asians do make up a disproportionately high number"
Are you referring to 1st gen Asian Americans? or Anyone from Asia?
One reason why Asian numbers tend to be disproportionate, especially w.r.t Indians and Chinese, is that only those with advanced degrees in STEM education (among Indians and Chinese) can get a temp work visa to US. They dont have access to Diversity lottery or direct International Student to Green Card option (get work auth on Green Card before 36 month OPT expires) that people from other countries get.
So, if you want to look at diversity numbers, it probably makes sense to consider US born people in the work force, instead of all people in the work force.
The 'white' part is pretty straightforward. THe 'male' part is trickier. If it's a simple matter of role-model discouragement, why has it been getting worse? Depending on which data set you look at, the percentage of CS graduates (bachelor's) who were female has been declining since the early to mid 80s. This matches my own experience, with a steady decline in the percentage of my developer colleagues who were female from 1989 until this year. It's not all about the so-called pipeline. There are many forms of discrimination and discouragement that apply even to women who are already in the field. That includes everything from differences in conversational style to pay disparities to actual assault.
To a large extent, most programmers are men because the people driving the culture - not just programmers themselves but execs, investors, etc. - have been men, and that culture has been more comfortable for other men than for women. (BTW I was going to use "male" and "female" but the objectifying way that "female" is used by the MRA/alt-right crowd made it sound creepy.) When those people stop injecting their old-boy-network ethos and habits into our workplaces, we might stand a chance of creating an ecosystem where someone who's not just like them can still feel like an equal.
According to National Science Foundation figures, the decline in female CS graduates stopped around 2008/2009. It bottomed out then and has been on the rise since.
There's no way this is positive or even neutral. Even the high of 35% was unimpressive. The long-term trend is still downwards, despite a mere couple of years at least 10% below that peak. Leveling off at 18-24% is still unacceptable, and we're still a few years short of being able to say even that is more than a statistical anomaly. When that number has reached its previous peak and is still trending upward, so that we're within a generation of full parity, then we might be able to say we're making sufficient progress.
Do you think there should be 50/50 parity in all professions from mining to nursing? I'm trying to understand why 35% would be impressive or not impressive. It's just a number and it's not clear that any profession or area of study has an established ratio that would be considered "natural" or unnatural.
Here are the NSF figures for total undergraduate degrees awarded by gender:
This is a highly reputable primary source data that contradicts your secondary source articles. Can you please point me at primary source statistics that support your claims.
Don't bother. You already mentioned an statistic and he dismissed it on the exclusive basis of his arbitrary perspective and then provided less relevant alternatives as a show of his confirmation bias (not actual confirmation).
What this says is that this person is not interested in having a discussion, he just wants people to agree with him and will move the goalpost against any rebuttal of his view provided.
Thanks for the ad hominem. You might want to note that the person you're supporting just made a claim that is contrary to their own evidence. Next time, contribute.
Mentioning that you moved the goalpost is not an ad hominem; it's literally an evaluation of your argument, not of you. Specially given that I didn't address you at all.
Is it mentioning that someone used a fallacy itself a fallacy now? Of course not. Next time, provide actual arguments.
Are you seriously trying to claim that "What this says is that this person" is not an ad hominem? That's simply untrue, and obviously so to any reader. Also, I didn't move the goalposts. I asked for proof, and got back a non sequitur. The numbers didn't show what my interlocutor claimed they did, and I'm still waiting for piece #1 of the proof I originally asked for. You're awfully aggressive for someone who has engaged entirely in meta-argument without providing a single fact relevant to the topic at hand.
Your highly reputable source (appeal to authority) doesn't show what you claim. For the last four years, the percentage of computer-science graduates who were female according to their numbers is:
18.2% 17.7% 18.2% 17.9%
That's pretty darn flat, and pretty darn low. You're the one claiming an uptick. Prove it.
> Do you think there should be 50/50 parity in all professions from mining to nursing?
Of course not (strawman). However, a male:female ratio of 7:2 is a huge disparity. Few fields are so skewed. It's also remarkably inconsistent with other data - e.g. gender ratios in other STEM fields, enrollment rates, quantitative measures of ability. It's too glaring an anomaly to be passed off with a shrug.
I said it bottomed out in 2008/09, which is why I included that table. It then stayed flat for a few years. The rise has been seen in the last 3 years, not the last 4 years on that table which ends in 2013. If you look at data since 2013, you'll see it is rising.
I'm looking around to see where I previously found figures for 2014-2016.
> If it's a simple matter of role-model discouragement, why has it been getting worse? Depending on which data set you look at, the percentage of CS graduates (bachelor's) who were female has been declining since the early to mid 80s.
It depends on your perspective. You don't have to see the situation through percentage of total market share.
The absolute numbers for female CS graduates are increasing. It is just that more males are enrolling and becoming interested in CS than females.
When did this all start? when video games became mainstream
> The absolute numbers for female CS graduates are increasing. It is just that more males are enrolling and becoming interested in CS than females.
I'm honestly not sure how that changes anything. "Why isn't the growth the same for women" is practically the same question as "why aren't the absolute numbers the same for women". The same explanations and the same remedies are likely to apply either way, and over time lower growth rates will still leave us with lower absolute numbers. So no, I don't think it really depends on perspective.
That is so spot-on... the only reason people care about forcing diversity in tech is because its now a fashionable industry that gets you respect and makes you money. If coders were not lauded for being super-smart, rich, and working in "fun environments" nobody would care how big of a white sausage fest it'd be.
I was wondering if other industries (construction, commercial fishing, oil drilling, nursing, coal mining, aircraft maintenance) were as focused on diversity as tech. And if not, what made tech an outlier.
I'm black and my family wasn't upper middle class. My parents bought a computer when I was 11 years old and I lived on that thing. After I dropped out of HS and was living on my own at like 18, I would put dollars into the machine so I could build my music website as I didn't have a computer at the time.
The point is people who are interested will do what they have to even if they don't have large amounts of money.
I think your experience is highly admirable. But I think even you have to admit that most people, regardless of background, do not have the sort of will power and drive you exhibited.
So yes, any particular person could overcome the obstacles in their path. But most will not. And it's the "most" that will lead to skewed statistics over time.
This kind of article is trashy at best. We all know the answer alread, and the solution is found in the answer!
Encouragement from the time people are young. "Cultures" that can't respect what a kid wants to be curious about and lets them explore that shouldn't be allowed to persist.
Reading, scientific exploration of subjects, using their minds.
The society and culture that shuns learning and education need to die off.
How much of the beneficial parts of the "hacker ethos" are rooted in having to circumvent the disapproval and blockers that attempted to prevent access to the machine?
Nobody was encouraging me to dick around on the computer and learn what have turned out to be hugely beneficial skills. Instead it was "Get the fuck off that thing and go outside and stack the firewood!"
149 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadI sure hope so.
Eventually, as I was trying to figure this stuff out, one expert told me: "Of COURSE women are MUCH more emotional than men. That's the cause of all the problems [between men and women]."
It does appear that from, say, SAT test scores, that the girls and boys have somewhat different aptitudes. But, girls can be plenty bright, really, at darned near anything. E.g., my wife was Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow, and Ph.D. in mathematical sociology. Her memory, verbal, and social talents were astounding: E.g., early in our marriage, we played Scrabble. She beat me like a rented mule. But I kept trying. I improved! She improved faster than I did; the situation for me was hopeless; and she refused to play me anymore.
She did beautifully in analysis of variance and, really, all the material in statistical hypothesis testing and multi-variate statistics, material that is still in significant ways ahead of the usual in AI and ML.
Still, the expert was correct: She was MUCH more emotional than I was.
COULD she be rational? Yes, especially for something far from her core concerns. Otherwise, nope: On any of her core concerns, especially as a female, her emotionalism wildly overwhelmed her rationalism.
Often it's not that the females can't be rational; instead, it's that they are also emotional, strongly emotional, and their emotionalism can just overwhelm their rationalism. The expert told me that this commonly happens very strongly near age 22. He'd been there, seen that, for years.
Female emotionalism? A lot of it, especially the more visible cases, has a single cause -- anxiety disease, and there are other experts who claim that anxiety disease is four times more common in human females, including across cultures, than in human males. Consequences of anxiety disease can include hysteria (overreacting to things), paranoia (overestimating dangers and external intentional threats), obsessive/compulsive disorder (thinking/doing things without ability to stop), etc. These can lead to stress, especially as these symptoms cause practical problems in relationships and careers. The stress can lead to depression and more problems in relationships and careers, thus, more stress, clinical depression (a scary, ugly, desperate situation), and suicide. Yup.
The stereotype of a dangerous situation with the female trembling, closing her eyes, ready to scream and the male, cool, calm, calculating, planning, plotting, quiet, hunting, and about ready to strike at the danger, the wild pig, the deer, the snake, the bear, the enemy, maybe these days a bug in a computer program, etc. is not fully wrong and in too many cases close to correct.
Men who insist that human males and females are just interchangeable and equal in all respects except the most obvious anatomical differences can be in for some serious, life changing, reality checks.
My strong advice: Without strong evidence to the contrary, treat each human female one by one as unique and quite different from a human male. Maybe slowly begin to see the main cases of human females accurately enough to speed up how you regard them, that is, not just one by one unique.
Sure, some human females can be tough, mean, cold hearted, ruthless, calculating, combative, emasculating, etc. Yup, SOME can. Commonly, easily? No. Sometimes? Yes. So, have to be ready for all the major, more common cases.
This is not nearly new stuff: As many parents discover and as some recent careful research has shown, right from the crib human males and females are very different. In particular, the males are paying attention to things and the females, to people. No joke.
For a simple view, the boy is there in the crib plotting how to hack the latch, crawl to the floor, and install a Raspberry Pi in the toy firetruck on the floor so that he can drive it via his Android, maybe tease his sister, and t...
Once a soccerball almost landed on the head of my daughter (could have broken her scull) and my wife was standing 100% unaware next to her (and not catching the ball): Luckily the ball just touched my daughter's cheek (when returning from the sky) and made her _only_ cry
I was showing off how high I could kick a (real) soccerball to my family. Highly idiotic in hindsight. BUT: I was looking out for my son and my wife for my daughter......
We are constantly told (especially by girls/women) that there is no difference and it's convenient to believe it. Is part of being a women denying differences between man and women? Is that just another skill they want to have in us men, that we make them feel 'not different at all'? Are men looking/searching for different skills/things in women ;)?
I am sorry for your loss (and currious what happend?)
Even a complex idea can be explained far more briefly.
The fact that you felt compelled to respond to my chastising in such a fashion speaks to your defensive position.
Men and women are in no way the same, but to extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded -- at least in your response. You resolved to ply me and and everyone else with the opinion of a colleague you agree with and only that - that serves nothing.
In short, I'll be more crass: you're full of shit.
> extend that to the capacity for rational or logical thought is ridiculous and unfounded
I explained (A) the astounding ability for "rational thought" but also (B) how emotions can overwhelm that ability. So, your comment shows you have poor reading comprehension, and some junior college may be able to help you.
On length, what I wrote was not long enough with enough details, examples, and explanations for you to understand it. So, at least for you, what I wrote was not long enough.
For your obsession with excretory matters, neither HN nor I can help you.
The very basis of applied rational thought is overcoming emotion. Your first target seemed to be that women are inevitably overpowered by emotion, then you switched to they -can- be overpowered.
Of course emotions can overwhelm, but that was not the original target comment at all. When OP stated that women are incapable of rational thought you came to OP's defense Please don't move the goalposts and condemn me for being irrational.
Besides, you didn't address your sole source being anecdotal and personal -- it doesn't matter how much highschool english class terminology you use.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(The comment originally began with "How many women do you know who can actually think logically" and was edited after sctb replied.)
You'd think it's due to J D Bernal. He was a pioneer of x-ray crystallography and was involved with many women, all of whom he treated with respect. That set the tone in the field.
China + India + the portion of US/Europe that aren't white must be close to half. Region oriented stats though, so I don't know how much of the AsiaPAC total is Australia, Russia, etc.
In near homogenous countries, it's unsurprising that there aren't very many counter examples to the demographic (e.g. very few white programmers in Ghana).
Personally, I had my foot in more than one world. I grew up not wealthy, lower-middle-class in rural Ontario. I rowed because of my parents' history as athletes and their involvement helping establish a club in the small town we lived in. I also skateboarded and preferred old punk music to the Tragically Hip (which was the popular stuff where I grew up. How things change). I was also notoriously uncool and didn't hit parties, and spent a lot of time on the computer I urged and urged my parents to buy after coming in contact with GUI's (after years of messing with the 286 my mom had from her days working in the city.)
From my perspective then, his outlook is accurate. On a global scale, totally off. It's far more complex than he makes it out to be.
I would contend that in North America, a lot of the business leaders in tech are white because of the economic advantage typically afforded to them. But it's not universally the case. To start any business, you need resources. That's either money to run a server and access to a half-decent computer, or more. You also need time -- the most expensive and rare of resources in NA.
I'm estimating that > 50% of programmers in the USA are recent immigrants or the American children of recent immigrants.
In USA, that is white; where I live, it's latino/hyspanic.
The gender disparity does seem to be widespread, though: For instance, of the 90 students that were accepted for SI in my University, only 10 were women. Of the 30 who ended up graduating, 5 were women.
Funny, that means that women have a higher success ratio, at least in that sample.
I've tried teaching employees to program, but when they realized how much painful/frustrating work they can now accept with this fresh new skill, they immediately stop learning how to program. Easier to give me all the work.
Another option is to find a role where you use your programming skill, but you're not developing software for someone. That's my case. My title is "scientist," and truth be told, I spend a considerable portion of my day programming, but I'm using code to solve problems, and my code will never be used by a customer.
Being able to ignore social pressures and just be yourself is definitely a benefit of privilege. So it's easy to see how many of the rarest skills and ingenious founder stories are examples of someone going against the grain to do something he or she cares about.
When people decry privilege, they seem to think that it's a bad thing, that we should all feel the insecurity, the doubt, and the drive to conform that most people feel.
I think the opposite is true, we should strive for all people to feel the empowerment of privilege and the freedom to pursue whatever moves them.
As a corollary, it's not a coincidence that the top schools admit the most privileged applicants. Those are the people whose privilege has allowed them to think about what is important to them... not just simply trying to be popular, avoiding getting beaten up by the kids who hate nerds, or avoiding ticking off an abusive parent, etc.
Privilege puts a person years ahead when it comes to moral clarity, purpose, curiosity, and self-actualization. Metaphorically, everyone else is in some sort of minimum security prison.
That and I was often told I looked angry or sad while I spent my spare periods or lunches reading. Woops.
I think this at least applies to younger ages.
edit: wanted to add, I'm sure this changed some time ago. I'm referring to the 90's and early 2000's in particular.
100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts:
"Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?"
At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited.
So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math.
Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does).
The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club.
Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.
Women, on the other side, go towards sadness and depression and anxiety. Which is hard on coding. Speaking from my own experience, as a white male.
All in all is unfortunate. Coding is a tiny thing in developing software, and I personally believe that it's much, much easier to work with women. But when they are surrounded by 90% men teammates, I can imagine that it's hard to be a woman in IT.
This does likely have an impact on how many female programmers we see today.
Men are disadvantaged in other ways, such as being taught to suppress emotions and to prefer aggression to problem solving. Many men are permanently damaged by this and the effects harm their employability and relationships for their entire lives.
I'm not suggesting there is equality/equivalence or that large-scale social biases and patterns don't disproportionately effect some people. Just making the point that there may not be an ideal and we may always be trying to correct for various excesses. One notable excess is the pressure put on working parents, which are asymmetrical and backward for both sexes in many ways.
If any outcome leads to the same conclusion, it usually means the argument is faulty, or at least redundant.
To the less privileged fitting in just right can be a matter of survival.
It's a lot easier to ignore (or even be unaware) social pressure and focus on tasks for hours on end when you have less dopamine in your brain than your peers.
This whole "everything is a privilege" argument is pure nonsense most of the time it's trotted out.
Disclaimer: I grew up poor as dirt in a house of 7 children, so I’m definitely not speaking from experience as far as being privileged goes. I never graduated college, I just read regular old books. I do have a younger brother who struggles with a slight case of autism though, and he has no interest in computers whatsoever. In fact his life is somewhat in shambles. Also, the term “asperger’s” has been deprecated.
I didn't suggest that there are no other possible contributors to being able to ignore social pressure. That's what you read into my comment. What I did do is dismiss the very handwavvy explanation of stating it's caused by "privilege", which is one of the most bullshit masturbatory terms to come out of liberal academia in a long time. It is not specific, measurable or testable. Hypotheses and theories based on it lack all the hallmarks of good science.
If one wants to talk about something testable based on criteria like income, zip code, educational attainment of parents, or a variety of other aspects that are specific and measurable, that's great, but "privilege" is not specific nor measurable.
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
Philip K. Dick
The term "privilege" is a weasel word and anyone interested in having an honest intellectual debate should reject it outright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
This is very true, and all of the most dedicated physicians I know were inspired as children to pursue medicine because of some situation they were involved in involving the health of a loved one (or their own health).
> putting people ahead in the moral sense
Compassion is not the only relevant aspect of morality. The way I'd argue my point is that one of the big reasons we can all sit back and think about how to make the world a better place is because our basic needs are met. Over time, as humanity has overcome basic scarcity and basic fear, we have been able to look outward and prioritize things like making the world better for others.
Someone who is privileged is more likely to have had an excellent teacher explain the labor movement or the holocaust, and is more likely to have vacationed to places where other ways of life (including far subpar standard of living) can be observed, or even gone on a humanitarian school-cation to help people in need. Experiences like this help to break a person out of his/her safe little world and help create an understanding of broader issues, problems, and opportunities.
Meanwhile, the middle class kid's family got a nice new TV allowing a great view of music videos and action films.
This is not about blame or credit. A person alive in 2017 America is more likely to think slavery abhorrent than a person alive in 1830 America. This isn't because there is something superior about modern people, it's because economic prosperity offers the luxury of thinking about others more empathetically.
There are always outliers, people who are morally ahead of their time or unusual for their class. Nothing about my argument in this thread applies to them. I'm talking about the average person.
Thus the average privileged person is simply ahead at the age of 18 relative to those from more humble backgrounds or from decades past.
What scares me most is the large percentage of Harvard and Stanford grads who go into investment banking and similar careers. Those are fine choices for someone whose goal is to "level up" his/her family's wealth status in a single generation, but they are not the sorts of careers chosen by people who had the chance to develop moral clarity and self-actualization early on. It suggests a great deal of cynicism or timidness that should really not be the result of the best education in the world.
Indeed the seeds were sown a very long time ago. My father bought a PC with some inheritance money he had, then he immediately regretted it because I spent all my time and summer on it rather than playing sports or hanging out with friends!
Back then nobody realized how in demand our field would be. By the time I started college I had already been programming.
This.
I tricked my parents 3 times to buy my brother I computers. I took well over a year each time of pestering and took them the whole year to save $2000.
We are immigrants and didnt have much money then.
It's obvious to me and the author... that's what this hysteria is ridiculous and funny.
We got picked on and bullied for being nerds and into computers at the age of 13.
About the cost of the equipment to learn. Is there any raspberry pi based computer that one can use to learn to code? Like, something below USD100? That would also help more class diversity.
By the time you've bought a keyboard, mouse, display, and storage for the Pi, you've spent just as much money.
I got it because I begged my parents to buy it for me. My two older sisters had zero interest. None whatsoever. I spent 12 hours a day on it especially after I got my first 300 bps modem in 1985.
My first computer was a TI-99/4A at about half that, and I was grateful.
Add in the dot matrix printer and 1200 baud modem and it was over $1000 for the complete system.
When I was a kid, I learned BASIC on a 10 year old Tandy 80 to write games like I had on my NES (which was marketed solely to boys btw). Eventually my dad dropped $2000 on a 486 (and subsequent upgrades) and that's when I was able to start writing C with the DJGPP toolchain, installing Linux, rebuilding machines out of spare obsolete parts, etc.
If my family wasn't well off, there's no way I'd have progressed past having known BASIC for a couple of summers.
I think this is a common refrain for anyone born between about 1980 and maybe 1995. By 2010, there were cheap laptops, netbooks, and whatnot.
I was born at the end of 1984 and played games on it with him from around age 3, then started tinkering myself and learning how to load games and play them at around age 5. In another couple of years I was going to the library and checking out books full of lengthy game listings in BASIC, painstakingly typing them in, running them and saving them to tape. That experience basically ignited my love for computers and for programming. When the family managed to get a cheap PC I was about 9 or 10 and I spent as much time on there as I could, learning how to use MS-DOS 5, Windows 3.1 and playing games.
After this point I scrounged whatever hardware I could - I acquired an old IBM 286 with an EGA monitor that a local school wanted to get rid of, various other components, borrowed software off friends to copy the disks, etc. My parents were pretty supportive and at age 13 they were a little better off - I persuaded them to get me my own PC as a joint birthday and Christmas present, using an old monitor and peripherals we already had. I got access to the internet and started viewing the source of web pages, copying the HTML, learning what it did and editing it to make my own pages. I started to learn CSS, how to edit images and how to write Perl.
The story goes on and on - I'm mostly just going on a bit of a ramble about my past and fondly remembering all the experiences I had. The point is that yes, if your family is absolutely on the breadline while you're growing up then you probably won't have access to this stuff, but we were by no means upper middle class and I managed to get a great start with computing. It's mostly about passion and people looking out for you. I scrounged so much old hardware and software from people who didn't want it any more because I knew it'd be a fantastic learning experience, and I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me to do this and didn't spend the _entire_ summer telling me to go outside and "do something".
There are plenty of asian men in programming, so this isn't a race thing. It probably is socioeconomic for the reasons the article points out, so that's fine - I think we can leave it at "white and asian people dominate programming because they tend to come from wealthier families".
I think the much harder question is why women aren't in programming. They make up 50% of the population and come from the same exact socioeconomic background as men. This question is important because the repercussions still haunt us today. The article starts this question with "girls weren’t interested in computers or video games at all", and then circles the logic with "people tend to do things that they see other people who are 'like them' doing". Well, I'd like to know why women weren't interested in programming. In my circumstantial experience it wasn't a conscious decision or peer pressure, it was coming top down from society. I saw many parents encouraging their sons to play with computers and completely ignoring that their daughters may want to also. The article completely avoids this topic, sadly.
edit: downvoted within 30 seconds - if you're gonna downvote, please at least reply and start a discussion about it.
That whites aren't the only race disproportionately advantaged does not in any way support the conclusion that it isn't (in part or in whole) “a race thing”.
edit: it actually does get into race, but around blacks/african americans. But it didn't get into Asians - my point really is this isn't a white thing per se.
Then i held a C-Introduction course at university for a womans only class and abandoned the idea. Its not that woman are not smart enough to grasp tech, quite the contrary, on average they where faster learners then men.
The problem is that woman constantly evaluate their surroundings, and value their prospects accordingly.
And sorry, Nerds dont make for a high-value surrounding. This is no shiny glass apple-shoe-box a programmer princess lands- this a dorm shoe-box filled with Ramen eating nerds, partially unwashed, seemingly stuck in infinite childhood( W40k as a break talk), which to make things more bewildering, is a bonus to the job, because you are able to grasp things faster with a playful mindset. Lots of Hitchiker and LoRs insider jokes between the Bachelors and the graduating Masters dont help to that either. Its like a great Insiders game - to which you have come much too late - and which compared to other groups doesn't look very glamorous.
Now, hold against this, the other study groups- lawyers, MBAs and doctors who hold at universities quite the social high life (every fraternitys part is famous, except for the Infoguys) already- and you begin to grasp why programing doesn't keep woman interested. Its small stuff, and its eroding away confidence, one day at a time.
A better question would be, what are girls doing in their child and teen years instead of isolating themselves in their basement playing video games/trolling online communities/learning a little programming?
Is it really a privilege for kids who are interested in programming to be isolating themselves like that in their adolescent years?
Before you label it a trope, read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book)
The premise is that due to both physical differences and differences in hormonal episodes over a lifetime, the brains of men and women wind up with somewhat different architectures. One architecture is more suited to linear thinking, as in flow charts. The other is more suited to network thinking, as in connecting attributes.
Computers were overwhelmingly designed by men and a computer's architecture and programming methods are reflective of the way men think. Hence, there is little natural draw for women.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html
1) There is almost no profession where thinking is required for which "Thinking systematically and enjoying some level of solitude" isn't helpful. Programming isn't special in this regard.
2) Having empathy with your users seems even more important to me, and a lack of this is the cause of a lot of shitty software.
Also, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as being Asbergery at all but maybe that's just because I work at Facebook.
Imagine the sound of other people talking sounding like nails on a chalkboard. Now imagine working a job in sales, biz dev, marketing, customer support, investing, legal, management, child care, or HR. How many hours can you go in a day without hearing that screeching sound? Maybe 1/2 hour if you tried hard? Now imagine working in a good programming environment where you can frequently spend 1-3 hours without talking to anyone, and when you reluctantly do it's for very short periods with people who understand you don't like talking. Or maybe you can just work at home and almost never deal with anyone.
Are you the type of person who wants to spend weeks at home, alone, no travel, no dinners, with almost no human interaction outside of say 4 family/close friends? A very large number of programmers I've met are.
Ideally, yes, it would be nice, in practice - not at the least. That's why there is a separate occupation (or several) created to bridge the gap. But the gap is real, and yes, this is the cause of a lot of shitty software, but that's exactly what we've got. Not that "empathy with your users" is an easy thing - there is a vast diversity of users, and it requires extraordinary abilities to be able to predict their feelings and needs. That's why user tests and focus groups exist - because it's usually the only way to get some feeling of it.
I'm not saying he's autistic, but he has the same temperament and characteristics as people who have mild Aspergers - essentially what the OP said.
1. Whites actually do not make up a disproportionate number of the programmers in the US! Whites are 74% of the workforce and 72% of the programmers.
2. Asians do make up a disproportionately high number of the programmers in the US, they are 6% of workforce but 20% of programmers.
3. I'd suggest that programming is a job where intellectual ability (specifically math-type logic) is highly correlated with success. Everything else held equal - on average more intellectual ability will lead to a better programmer.
4. Black Americans have on average significantly lower math skills (measured by the SAT) than white Americans. The factors leading to this are widely debated, but the fact remains that the gap still exists in a big way.[2] Asians have, on average, much better math skills than whites and blacks.
5. This doesn't seem to me primarily a culture issue, it seems like an intellectual ability issue.
Conclusion: I am not qualified to say what drives the intellectual ability gap (education, infant diet, genetics, culture, etc). But the fact remains the highest IQ people (and therefore highest IQ groups) will continue to perform the best in jobs where IQ is a big factor for success.
[1]https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/
[2]I'm using SAT math scores to show this here, which of course have faults, but it's tough to argue they don't show an actual difference. IQ tests show similar results: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...
If so, how do you expect blacks (as a group) to have the same number of quality programmers as asians?
Again, I am NOT saying this needs to be inherently true in the future, that this is unsolvable, is genetic, etc. I am simply saying that today (on average) 18 year old asians have more intellectual ability than 18 year old blacks - and therefore, I would expect the asians (as a group) to do better in programming today.
Maybe in 20 years the IQs of the various race groups will be equal. And if that becomes the case and there is still a gap, then my thesis is disproven. But that is not the case today.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...
The other thing to keep in mind is that these three counties do NOT represent the United States. IIRC correctly, for these three counties, approximately 37% of people were born abroad and moved to the United States. Another 35% or so were born in California. Only only 27% or so were born in all the states that aren't California.
I would also add that talking about Asians as one group is misleading as well. It's mostly five countries: China, India, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. The reason is that those 5 countries put special emphasis on two important subjects: (1) engineering; and (2) English.
That probably has more to do with the numbers of people who move to those areas specifically for tech jobs. The demographics you describe did not just occur naturally - they are driven by SV employers hiring from all over the world. According to http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/37-percent-of-silicon-vall... 37% of the population of Silicon Valley isn't even born in the US, much less the urban areas of California.
Are you referring to 1st gen Asian Americans? or Anyone from Asia?
One reason why Asian numbers tend to be disproportionate, especially w.r.t Indians and Chinese, is that only those with advanced degrees in STEM education (among Indians and Chinese) can get a temp work visa to US. They dont have access to Diversity lottery or direct International Student to Green Card option (get work auth on Green Card before 36 month OPT expires) that people from other countries get.
So, if you want to look at diversity numbers, it probably makes sense to consider US born people in the work force, instead of all people in the work force.
To a large extent, most programmers are men because the people driving the culture - not just programmers themselves but execs, investors, etc. - have been men, and that culture has been more comfortable for other men than for women. (BTW I was going to use "male" and "female" but the objectifying way that "female" is used by the MRA/alt-right crowd made it sound creepy.) When those people stop injecting their old-boy-network ethos and habits into our workplaces, we might stand a chance of creating an ecosystem where someone who's not just like them can still feel like an equal.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-should-we...
According to AAUW (unsourced but with NSF as a sponsor) it remained level through 2013.
http://www.aauw.org/research/solving-the-equation/
There's no way this is positive or even neutral. Even the high of 35% was unimpressive. The long-term trend is still downwards, despite a mere couple of years at least 10% below that peak. Leveling off at 18-24% is still unacceptable, and we're still a few years short of being able to say even that is more than a statistical anomaly. When that number has reached its previous peak and is still trending upward, so that we're within a generation of full parity, then we might be able to say we're making sufficient progress.
Here are the NSF figures for total undergraduate degrees awarded by gender:
https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/uploads/1/12/at02-1...
This is a highly reputable primary source data that contradicts your secondary source articles. Can you please point me at primary source statistics that support your claims.
What this says is that this person is not interested in having a discussion, he just wants people to agree with him and will move the goalpost against any rebuttal of his view provided.
Is it mentioning that someone used a fallacy itself a fallacy now? Of course not. Next time, provide actual arguments.
> Do you think there should be 50/50 parity in all professions from mining to nursing?
Of course not (strawman). However, a male:female ratio of 7:2 is a huge disparity. Few fields are so skewed. It's also remarkably inconsistent with other data - e.g. gender ratios in other STEM fields, enrollment rates, quantitative measures of ability. It's too glaring an anomaly to be passed off with a shrug.
I'm looking around to see where I previously found figures for 2014-2016.
It depends on your perspective. You don't have to see the situation through percentage of total market share.
The absolute numbers for female CS graduates are increasing. It is just that more males are enrolling and becoming interested in CS than females.
When did this all start? when video games became mainstream
I'm honestly not sure how that changes anything. "Why isn't the growth the same for women" is practically the same question as "why aren't the absolute numbers the same for women". The same explanations and the same remedies are likely to apply either way, and over time lower growth rates will still leave us with lower absolute numbers. So no, I don't think it really depends on perspective.
The point is people who are interested will do what they have to even if they don't have large amounts of money.
So yes, any particular person could overcome the obstacles in their path. But most will not. And it's the "most" that will lead to skewed statistics over time.
Encouragement from the time people are young. "Cultures" that can't respect what a kid wants to be curious about and lets them explore that shouldn't be allowed to persist.
Reading, scientific exploration of subjects, using their minds.
The society and culture that shuns learning and education need to die off.
The rest is race and gender baiting garbage.
Nobody was encouraging me to dick around on the computer and learn what have turned out to be hugely beneficial skills. Instead it was "Get the fuck off that thing and go outside and stack the firewood!"