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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
One question. Why is it important to make, quote: "computer science more attractive to women..."?
I mean I get that the sex discrimination stuff and treatment of women we read here on hacker news is bad and of course it would help if there were more women in tech.
But other than that, if you think of the women in general and not some "diversity would be good" (which it probably would be), why the worry?
Why aren't we as worried that not enough men show interest in being nurses or kindergarten teachers or social workers? I know from experience that it would be very important to get a more "balanced" look at things in those fields.
Are we still treating women as little girls who we need to be worried about because they "only like superficial things and nail polish" and can't really take care of themselves unless we make changes so that "important stuff" is more attractive to them?
I think this is a very patronizing attitude, and dismissing the stuff some women may find more interesting than "hard sciences"
The greedy answer: because systematically discouraging 50% of the brainpower of the human species from entering one of our most productive and simultaneously short-staffed occupations is bad for technological progress and the growth of global wealth.
The humanist/utilitarian answer: because computer science is intrinsically awesome and rewarding, so global utility is maximized by ensuring that anyone who might be interested has an unimpeded path towards experiencing that awesomeness.
We don't know that 50% of the brainpower relevant to computer science is female. Male and female brains differ, and it is quite possible that they choose to specialize in different areas.
That doesn't follow in the slightest. There's more to "dominating" an industry than being effective at a job (I'd put that fairly low on the list as long as you hit some threshold, actually).
Are promotions handed out to only the worthy? Are technical decisions always made by the expert that should have been there? Is every interview candidate perfectly evaluated and ranked relative to their competitors? Are only expertly programmed and well tested code bases valued at billions of dollars?
Of course not. Political skills, connections, self promotion, being in the right place at the right time etc etc are all hugely important. Ask anyone giving advice on everything from getting a job to advancing your career to funding your startup. Within a huge (huge) swath of ability, your technical chops just aren't correlated with your eventual success.
But why should we force that "interest." If girls don't want to do it, why should we be "encouraging" it. We should encourage everyone to follow their passion and talents regardless of what those might be.
I agree with the original post, however the question here is something to the tune of: "do women not like it or are they being pushed away (passively) by social factors?"
If it's the former, then everything is fine, if it's the latter then there is room for improvement.
There's essentially no evidence that women are biologically predisposed against CS. There's quite a lot of evidence that social factors do push women away. That doesn't guarantee that there's no biological component, but even if there were, we'd still want to fix the social factors.
and the inferences from those evidence is that women are predisposed to studies that involve human interactions and very less evidence that social factors play a part...
infact it is in unequal societies( relatively speaking) where social factors play a part that forces women to consider professions like CS.
This is the top voted comment right now, but I'm struggling to understand it.
You grant (at least for the sake of discussion) that more women would help with the tech industry's sex discrimination problems, and that diversity itself would "probably" be good.
But then you ask, "but other than that, why is it important?"
It makes no sense to disregard sex discrimination and diversity when considering whether this topic is important. Sex discrimination and diversity are themselves already important.
It's like asking about the benefits of exercise, setting aside the health benefits and psychological benefits.
> Why aren't we as worried that not enough men show interest in being nurses or kindergarten teachers or social workers?
People do worry about those topics, but we mostly talk about tech here on Hacker News.
The article says multiple times that when young people make choices about e.g. should they learn programming, they of course use their own free will, but they often decide based on incorrect expectations. As another example it mentioned how men often avoid becoming an English major for similar reasons. I'm not sure if english majors consider a skewed gender representation for their craft, but frankly I don't think I even care. What I do care about is the fact that computer science now gets dumber people by scaring away people through false expectations.
Doing small things to fix these flawed expectations has nothing to do with dismissing others as little girls who only care about nail polish. Articles suggestions like changing the course name from "programming in java" to a more descriptive "creative problem solving with python" hardly warrants such criticism.
No matter who you are, applying broad strokes to the industry is going to paint many incorrectly. The idea that there is one factor that "really" keeps women out of tech implies that the other reasons are false. In reality, it is very subjective. I would also have been put off by her experience with pressure to "act like a man" and I'm a man. But, just as anecdotally, I only encountered this once: the cs department of umass. Every job I've held has been much more diverse in terms of interests than one would think reading this article.
Perhaps not speaking for huge swathes of people based on anecdotal evidence would lead to better insights. I see the hiring pipeline as a problem. A college professor might see high school as the problem. The high school might see the parents as the problem. The parents might see society as the problem. Etc etc. In reality, there are so many opportunities to become persuaded or dissuaded the idea that one dominates requires extraordinary evidence.
Personally, I'm a queer, anti-authoritarian, emotional, book worm nerd. I feel repulsed by nerd/tech culture several times an hour. It's honestly embarrassing to be associated with it. If ONLY that were the only problem.
I am a software engineer, male, Asian. Somehow I can relate to the article. Although I was always one of the top students in math and science and enrolled the top university, I was both intimidated and kind of disgusted by the culture stereotypes at the beginning of my career. I had self doubts if I would ever become a good software engineer, since I was far from the stereotypes. Sometimes, I was deeply disgusted by the childishness and shallowness of the stereotypes.
I rarely play video games. (I played some in college, simply for finding bugs and backdoors so that I could win easily, not for the fun of playing itself. After one year, it became boring and I stopped.) I don't like Star Wars. I am not in particular interested in Sci-fi. I think the time can be better spent in other books. For example, the non-technical books I just finished are Madame Bovary (translated by Lydia Davis. Highly recommend), On the Move (autobiography by Oliver Sacks). I am re-reading The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Also, I don't like beer. When I go out with colleagues, I drink wine or strong liquors.
I can tell my colleagues what I like now, but it was different when I first joined the industry. I cram-watched all the Star Wars, most Star Treks, etc. I forced myself to finish some popular sci-fi novels. I drank beer when going out. It was like you are trying to fit yourself into a model that is not you. I still remember one scene during the first week of one job. All the engineers were playing Guitar Hero, loudly, when waiting for a push. They invited me, which I greatly appreciate. I said I didn't know how to play and I rarely played video games. They were astounded. One engineer said, "It is not a game. It is a life style."
So—first, empathy, I don't get video games at all.
Second—this strikes me as fairly standard cultural shock. It's one thing to find yourself immersed in a culture, it's quite another to find that you have to immerse yourself in that culture to reach your teammates. This is an experience I have not encountered before; people have surprised me with the lengths they go to ensure a healthy diversity in company culture so that everyone feels like they have an opening to communicate. Why would you NOT want to get to know your teammate? If they have different interests, it's an opportunity, not a problem.
That said.... sometimes you need to be the person to push for the cultural diversity, and unfortunately, that's not going to be easy for most people regardless of sex or industry. I would even imagine non-tech companies actually have a much worse case of this where EVERYONE feels alienated from their coworkers based on my personal experiences.
It's complicated. But monocultures are certainly terrible teamwork oriented groups of people—I think we can all agree with that.
Veering a bit off-topic: I used to get video games when I was younger, and played them obsessively, but around the age of 18, I almost completely lost interest. I occasionally will play online games with friends nowadays, but I do that more for the "hanging out with friends" enjoyment. The game is just a vehicle for that.
I can't play a single-player game for more than 5 minutes without losing interest.
Yea, it really stands out to me how much the narrative matters to me now as opposed to when I was younger, when it was all about gameplay. I get bored basically once I've figured out the controls and what the character does, etc.
However. I really like playing Mario Kart in a group. But then it is more of a social thing, not a hobby.
> It's complicated. But monocultures are certainly terrible teamwork oriented groups of people—I think we can all agree with that.
I don't know. That thought sounds kind of monocultural.
So -- first, empathy. I've felt cultural shock. I've lived places and done things where many people around me lived lives that made no sense to me.
Second -- that's not just a snarky one-liner. I'm suggesting that your notions, as explained, constitute a different kind of monoculture. You've gone up a meta-level. Instead of everyone having the same interests, you now expect everyone to have the same general attitudes.
Don't you want people with different attitudes around? If you encounter someone with different attitudes, isn't that an opportunity to expand your mind and come to understand a different perspective?
I think a monoculture with respect to opinions about monoculture would be just as bad, yes, but it's not a terrible rule of thumb to diversify culture. You definitely need to be surrounded by all types of people... including people like yourself.
This is a really good post. I identify with a lot in it.
I double majored in english literature and math, and I added the math late. I was very interested in CS and math (it wasn't a thing yet in the mid 90s but now they call my interests "data science"). Of course, aspirations about what life will be like when you "grow up" are always a bit of a naive fantasy, but I thought (or at least hoped) that I would be able to join a more urbane, sophisticated, adult world at some point. That may sound a bit naive, but there's nothing wrong with aspiring to it. When I joined the tech working world, I was disappointed that my office manager seems to think that a foosball table and video game machine turn fit into some kind of nirvana, or that my office went to dave n busters for a retreat… it's not that I can't enjoy it, I can, but I heard about the retreats friends in law firms were taking, and I was envious of how much more sophisticated, adult and grown up it all sounded). I don't mean to sound like I'm putting life in a law firm as all roses, I am absolutely aware that it isn't, but I was envious that they seemed to have joined an adult world whereas tech seemed to be a relatively immature, almost extended adolescent culture.
Unfortunately, over time, I've slowly started to believe there may be something more insidious in the juvenility of tech culture, and that it may be imposed as much from the outside as the inside. I'm not sure the people who hire programmers really want to view them as adults. More like minions, talented but immature young men rotating through, happy with their video games and foosball tables and salaries that pay well enough to enjoy a delayed adolescence but never enough to put down roots and raise a family where they live and work… ultimately, I think this is damaging and may very well deter a lot of potentially talented people from entering the field, or cause others to leave.
>> I'm not sure the people who hire programmers really want to view them as adults. More like minions, talented but immature young men rotating through, happy with their video games and foosball tables and salaries that pay well enough to enjoy a delayed adolescence but never enough to put down roots and raise a family where they live and work…
I have seen this attitude several times and these guys are selling the products/services produced by such minions for real market value while the minions think they have hot the jackpot with the video game consoles. I keep telling such folk to charge top dollar and f&^*ing donate the unwanted money to charity or a struggling video game startup..
So it's okay if we only throw 30% of women (or whatever other underrepresented group is optimized for) under the bus because they're not like the others?
Isn't "just behave like the others (to succeed)" exactly what we're trying to get rid of?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
Am I the only one here that finds more issue with the open secret embedded throughout this article? The article is written from an assumption that we're powerless to overcome the desire to brand ourselves by the outward facing image of our chosen interests.
I should be careful not to state I'm not taking the position covered by the well-worn pre-rebuttal in the article. I'm not scoffing at this phenomenon. It's real and I'm wondering: why aren't we trying to make kids immune to it?
Instead all I see is people that want to exploit it and steer people into selecting careers such that the superficial representation found on a spreadsheet makes the commentariat happy.
e: It just comes across as working to makes your metrics look good, without reaching the underlying goals the metrics are less-than-perfect at measuring. If there really are societal issues keeping people that would have otherwise entered a "tech field" out, shouldn't fixing it be about helping everyone overcome the obstacles in achieving that step of self-actualization? Instead I just see social engineering designed to balance the gender ratio.
Well I'd say changing human behavior is harder than changing perceptions. And most of the article (outside of the behavioral bit about the sexism she experienced, which is unfortunately a harder problem) is therefore focused on perceptions, which seems very justifiable given this bit:
"As Dr. Cheryan points out, 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."
So the male nerd culture aspects inside the system aren't as offputting as however the current popular stereotypes make them out to be. Sounds like there are some lower hanging fruit than changing people's desires.
(As to why we'd want to fix it in the first place... I don't know many tech companies right now that are satisfied with the size and depth of the talent pool. Getting more education to more people to become potential candidates could only help with that, and increased demand for a major tends to increase department size, so I don't think it's a zero-sum game with males losing out here. More people with at least a cursory or exploratory level of education in science could eventually lead to better policy around it, etc, too.)
The basic dogma of the modern activist is that reality follows language and culture, which implies that if activists can only adequately police language and fiction, real life will eventually match their desires. The world doesn't work that way, and activists efforts in this area are doomed to produce only frustration and an inevitable backlash, the beginnings of which we're now seeing.
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.
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).
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.
> 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 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 ;)
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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 :)
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, ...
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".
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.
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.
> 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 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'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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
There seems to always has been a problem of diversity in tech. Yet US has done just ok with males (white and asian) doing this stuff. Ie better than anybody else in the world.
Why is this a problem (something the writer - who is a literature professor, by the way) considers a given? Is there any proof that increased diversity has any effect (except employment opportunities for the otherwise underrepresented)?
Our society has agreed that if any specific subset of the population is being biased against its wishes to pursue a path, then this is an injustice that shall be remedied. Distinctions include but are not limited to race, gender, socioeconomic background or current status, geographic origin, sexual orientation, and preexisting medical conditions.
It is an implied social contract that forms the foundation of our modern American society, irrespective of functional necessities or efficiencies. Efficiencies are not the point here.
The majority of college students are female. Most prisoners are male. Most homeless people are male. If we take it as a given that any group being under- or overrepresented in some category is a violation of the social contract, maybe we should start by fixing these glaring injustices.
You're also not supposed to point out such advantages. You'll be ostracized and placed into "male rights" sub group which has very negative connotations in general society.
As long as you dispassionately and sensibly point out the injustice being done in the name of justice, what is the problem? The biggest issue now seems to be men not speaking up against their detractors.
On the lighter side:
"Women are constantly patting themselves on the back for how difficult their lives are and no one corrects them because they want to fuck 'em." – Bill Burr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoJrMaFlxOk
I don't think the comment meant that dispassionately and sensibly pointing out the double standard is problematic but that one runs the risk of facing a large, internet backlash for pointing out certain classes of double standards of which the one above is one.
Let me rephrase what I said for clarity: the biggest issue now seems to be men not speaking up against their detractors for fear of being ostracized, of being labelled a member of a group with negative connotations, of facing a large internet backlash.
So coming back to what I said - as long as you dispassionately and sensibly point out the injustice being done in the name of justice, what is the problem? Our fear is what makes the SJW shaming tactics effective.
Men -- men in tech in particular -- gotta buckle up and speak frankly. Learn to stand up for themselves, without letting other people -- women in particular -- control their every thought.
Kind of a false dichotomy. The APA has found that men are more likely to become substance abusers, which is linked to homelessness and conviction rates.
Why not help both men and women? Why does one need to be first?
> Why not help both men and women? Why does one need to be first?
I'm not arguing that we should or should not help some group. I just think that if every instance of disparate impact is assumed to be solely due to discrimination, then we also need to start treating homelessness and the prison-industrial complex as gendered issues disproportionately affecting men.
> The APA has found that men are more likely to become substance abusers, which is linked to homelessness and conviction rates.
One could (tongue firmly in cheek) argue that this is due to implicit anti-male biases in society.
It is - in fact, the preexisting ideas of masculinity is a bias that makes men feel that they don't need to seek help when they really need it [1], which can lead to self medication and substance abuse.
That was the point - that these gender biases exist for both sexes and need to be addressed at the same time (not one before the other).
> Why not help both men and women? Why does one need to be first?
Because whenever there are limited resources available to help people, there's going to be a need-off to decide who takes priority.
A lot of politics flows from this. This is why you will often find lots of jockeying for position and heartstring-pulling from nonprofits and NGOs. If you don't do well enough in the need-off, you might not get any resources.
That's the bone of contention here. Nobody is keeping women out of computer science; they're largely just preferring not to enter the field. The point of the article, echoed by many commentators over the past few years, is that it's a "problem" that women are largely staying out of computer science.
If you believe in the blank slate theory of human nature, of course it's a problem, because under this worldview, women's default preferences are the same as that of men, so some external factor must be pushing them away from computer science. The teach for this factor has become increasingly desperate the past few years: now we're down to Star Wars posters.
I believe it's more parsimonious to reject the blank slate theory and understand the world through the lens of innate differences in life preferences between genders, and that it's this innate difference that leads to different gender balances in various fields.
> Nobody is keeping women out of computer science; they're largely just preferring not to enter the field.
Ted is the new kid at school, and he wants to make friends. At recess he approaches a group of smiling, laughing boys to introduce himself. But as he nears the group they get quiet. Ted says hi and his name, and mentions he's new and wants to know if they play "tag" here. The boys reply, "we don't play tag, we play Weasel Escape." Ted asks how to play, and they say "How do you not know how to play? You needlefish. Needlefish!" The other boys laugh, but Ted doesn't get the joke. They walk away and Ted feels embarrassed. Over the next few days he continues trying to befriend the group of boys but they have so many inside jokes! There's one nice kid in the group that explains the jokes to Ted, but most of the time one of the other boys loudly interrupts and teases Ted for not knowing, and nobody really enjoys standing around explaining things because standing around means not playing. Ted eventually decides that the boys he's been trying to befriend aren't very nice, and that even though he enjoys playing weasel escape now that he figured out the rules, it's less degrading to spend his recess in the library playing Magic cards with the weird kids. They actually seemed excited to explain their inside jokes and how the game works.
Nobody is keeping Ted out of that group of friends. He just largely prefers not to join them. But of course, why he prefers not to join them changes the story.
I've been that Ted, and honestly, I'm happy in how this turned out. The "group of friends" were jerks and I would be worse off if I got accepted by them.
Also, the example is interesting in this context because it's usually Teds who become programmers. Or at least it used to be back when programming wasn't a popular career choice but something you did because you were into technology and building things.
That's clearly bullying. The article describes things that I would have thought are really benign:
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.
The researchers also found that cultural stereotypes about computer scientists strongly influenced young women’s desire to take classes in the field. At a young age, girls already hold stereotypes of computer scientists as socially isolated young men whose genius is the result of genetics rather than hard work. Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.
In another experiment, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues arranged for female undergraduates to talk to an actor pretending to be a computer science major. 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 — even if the T-shirt-clad actor was another woman.
Such superficial stereotypes might seem laughably outdated. And yet, studies show that the public’s image of a scientist hasn’t changed since the 1950s. And such stereotypes do have a basis in reality. Who could fail to notice that only one of the eight people awarded Nobel Prizes in science or medicine last week was a woman?
If this is accurate, then the idea that women simply like other things, like rewqfdsa proposes should get more merit.
If that turns out to be the core of the problem, then there may be nothing for people in STEM to do. Because we could be the most welcoming and inclusive bunch but the majority of us are going to turn women off by decorating our walls with Star Wars/Trek posters, reading sci-fi, wearing nerdy T-Shirts and playing video games.
My point is not that women might like different things, just as Ted still enjoyed playing Weasel Escape, but that because of the T-shirts and all that they feel unwelcome. It's like the inside jokes making Ted feel left out. Sure they could explain the jokes and culture, and sure, there are probably lots of nice people in software willing to explain the culture, but it's tiring to feel like you're on the outside culturally even if the actual job (coding) is unrelated to the extraneous culture.
That's not what the article said though. The women in the studies mentioned were turned off STEM by classroom decor, and by both men and women wearing nerdy t-shirts who mentioned the like to play video games.
Sounds like they are judging us!
We need to be clear about what's happening here. Otherwise we'll spend millions of dollars trying to 'fix' things and it turns out what should have happened, is that we need to stop watching Star Wars and stop wearing XKCD t-shirts.
If I understand your parable correctly, you're suggesting that men deliberately mock and reject women trying to enter the field. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. I have never, not once, witnessed the behavior you describe. I've seen nothing but welcoming behavior toward everyone who wants to learn software.
Even among proponents of the systemic discrimination theory, the consensus these days seems to be that bias must be subconscious, since overt bias is practically extinct in the wild.
I suspect a more realistic scenario is that it's the other girls who do the mocking and rejecting as a reaction to one person's interest in computer science.. that's the thing.
the question then becomes.. why does the little girl care what the other little girls think ? Why isn't she more than happy hanging out with the more open and accepting group of computer cherishing boys ?
I assume it has to do with social norms, early childhood developmental experiences, not wanting to break certain social guidelines passed down through family values, the anticipation of "dating"..
My childhood best friend and college roommate shocked me by calling one of our CS classmates a "huge bitch" for not going on a date with him after they had lunch together our first week of college.
I've lost track of how many sexist lines I've heard, like:
"make me a sammich bitch, haha",
"don't be an emo bitch about it, haha",
"if we don't let people freely express themselves on the CS listserv, then this is a tyrannical school that has been ruined by feminists (this one after of course, a guy posted a several page rant about why women are bitches, 'haha')".
Also, let me tell you this story of two friends I knew who applied at a certain internet start-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2014:
A was male, 21 years old, a stoner and business school drop-out with a portfolio consisting of a Java tower defense game.
B was female, 30 years old, with several years experience doing QA on computer peripheral drivers who had re-trained herself as a web developer and had a Rails StackOverflow clone and a Meteor KhanAcademy clone for her portfolio.
A got offered a six-figure full time position.
B got offered an internship.
Final point, I've seen so much elitist and arrogant behavior from MEN directed towards OTHER MEN. Nothing could be further from the truth than software being completely welcoming. Of course it's still a very good industry overall; it's by no means the worst.
"that guy was kind of a dick" is an offhand comment that just means "rude" or "jerk" and you hear it all the time from college age women when referencing the slightest deviations from their standards of behavior. It refers to the male genitalia in a negative connotation and is terefor far more explicit than the dog word.
It sounds like you're trolling, but if you aren't:
1. One wrong does not make another wrong right.
2. "Dick" is used as an offhand comment usually because it is considered less offensive than other words with the same meaning, like "asshole" or "piece of shit".
3. I agree that women treat men badly as well. People suck.
4. Imagine your daughter or mother being called an "emo bitch" because they reacted angrily to an insult. Would you tell her "well at least they didn't explicitly insult your genitalia?"
True but the two neutralize each other when thinking in terms of a running tally of gender-specific offensive terminology.
> used as an offhand comment usually because it is considered less offensive than other words with the same meaning
the fact that it's considered less offensive simply illustrates a bias towards the acceptance of gender-specific negative remarks or "putdowns" when they're directed away from the feminine and towards the masculine. This goes to my point that actually women do throw a lot of these remarks around but we've just learned to tune them out. If a man makes a 'putdown' remark towards a young lady in class which references the female reproductive anatomy then he's on shaky ground and theoretically could have to worry about a lawsuit, but not the other way around.
> 4. Imagine your daughter or mother being called an "emo bitch" because they reacted angrily to an insult. Would you tell her "well at least they didn't explicitly insult your genitalia?"
I don't know a ton about the word "emo" but I assume it means "overly emotional" and the word "bitch" is a gender-specific word which insinuates that she's not attractive. While I'm sure we both agree that such a rude and insulting phrase is a terrible thing to say to anyone it's still only aimed at the individual.
On the other hand when you use a phallus reference as an implied negative connotation then you've just made a sexist remark because it denigrates an entire gender.
If I had to choose one or the other I'd rather my mother or daughter be exposed to rudeness or insult before obvious yet normalized sexist remarks.
> A was male, 21 years old, a stoner and business school drop-out with a portfolio consisting of a Java tower defense game.
> B was female, 30 years old, with several years experience doing QA on computer peripheral drivers who had re-trained herself as a web developer and had a Rails StackOverflow clone and a Meteor KhanAcademy clone for her portfolio.
Unfortunately, that's how college kids talk. I wish they wouldn't be so crude, but the language isn't CS-specific. That women in general are doing so well in college in general relative to men suggests crude language on the part of college men is not a serious problem. In the professional world, that kind of denigration would be completely unacceptable.
> Also, let me tell you this story of two friends I knew who applied at a certain internet start-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2014
I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from this anecdote. Maybe he aced his interviews and she flubbed them.
Thanks for this... It appears that a lot of folks here fail to recognize that they are part of an in-group in the context of tech.
In any other circumstances, this kind of social discouragement would be looked at as a discrimination/exclusion issue. Instead, the prevailing argument seems to be that "they're just different".
You misunderstand. I'm not making a statement on the cause of the gender disparity in computer science. I'm making a higher-order argument about why we're so apt to attribute this difference to discrimination. I hope you understand the distinction even if you disagree with my argument.
The idea is that if you believe that humans have no innate differences and you observe group differences, then you must attribute these group differences to external discrimination, and hence injustice.
If you accept that groups of humans might have innate differences, you are no longer required to attribute group differences to discrimination. Some group differences might arise from discrimination, but it's plausible that they might not.
A lot of people take it as an article of faith that there are no human group differences, so they're forced to look for discrimination in order to explain the world. For these people, no amount of evidence can prove the fairness of the CS world, since the idea that (gender disparity -> discrimination) is a necessary logical consequence of their worldview.
Indeed. You can show by simple calculations that slight innate differences giving slightly different preferences lead to significant differences in recruitment if you select entirely fair and purely by merit. In fact, restoring the 50/50 split requires significant amount of discrimination to counter the natural disproportions.
We do that in CS because it's a hot sexy field with shittons of money, so everyone wants in (also makes this field sucks more, it was better when people actually cared about doing great work instead of earning a lot, but I digress). Nobody cares that there is serious (intentional) gender imbalance among e.g. shop clerks or bank tellers. Those are not sexy jobs.
> Nobody cares that there is serious (intentional) gender imbalance among e.g. shop clerks or bank tellers. Those are not sexy jobs.
On the contrary, most of those who are interested in addressing gender imbalances in fields like computer science are simultaneously interested in addressing the gender imbalances in "unsexy" jobs, since these are just two sides of the same coin. Since higher paying jobs in fields like computer science tend to be had by men, the individuals who tend to hold the "unsexy" low-wage jobs tend to be women. The fact that people don't explicitly name the unsexy occupations does not entail that nobody cares about their gender imbalances.
The reason that high-wage positions are usually the positions of focus may simply be a product of our tendency to be more interested in leveling up rather than down when it comes to addressing distributive injustices.
> On the contrary, most of those who are interested in addressing gender imbalances in fields like computer science are simultaneously interested in addressing the gender imbalances in "unsexy" jobs, since these are just two sides of the same coin.
That's another claim that, if true, would be pretty, but happens to be false. (Just like "men are mean to women in technology and so keep them out of the field.") It's just another bromide to smooth over unpleasant reality.
A Google News search for "women in technology" yields 61 million results. A Google News search for yields 1.5 million. There's nowhere near as much attention to getting men into traditionally women's roles as there is increasing the number of women in technology.
>A lot of people take it as an article of faith that there are no human group differences, so they're forced to look for discrimination in order to explain the world. For these people, no amount of evidence can prove the fairness of the CS world, since the idea that (gender disparity -> discrimination) is a necessary logical consequence of their worldview.
I think that you would be hard pressed to find people who actually believe that. Most who point out problems with the CS environment probably feel no need to have any sort of robust view of innate differences between groups, and many are likely to be open to the possibility that some of the gender gap can be explained by such differences.
Note that much of the discussion of this issue has focused upon ways in which the CS culture is one which is overtly and unnecessarily hostile to women. It's not just that men vastly outnumber women in the field, it's that those men frequently engage in behaviors that are hostile, threatening, and demeaning to women. It is not implausible that these behaviors play a significant role in determining the gender imbalance in CS.
> CS culture is one which is overtly and unnecessarily hostile to women...men frequently engage in behaviors that are hostile, threatening, and demeaning to women
Many people repeat this claim, but I don't think it's true.
Innate differences between genders may play a part, but the idea that "women tend to be less interested" is not the only possible innate difference. What's to say the innate difference in play here isn't "men tend to be more hostile to women joining their space"?
That's different. Yours is a bias that necessarily influences other people.
But you are right; other innate biases are possible. Men could be better at logical/mathematical reasoning, which is necessary for technical skills. A difference in interest though is the most popular proposal.
I don't think it's a problem of group or national achievement as a group. We do very well, and so do undiverse Russians and undiverse Chinese students (and yes, both countries have underrepresented minorities) The problem we want to solve is spreading success across the members of society who could take advantage of the opportunity. Just different priorities.
One interesting observation, for which I don't have any citation, is that I find there is less trepidation to enter CS and Engineering careers from women who curiously come from Russia and China, which at least historically have been quite patriarchal. In some ways it might be that constant drumbeat to succeed and emphasis on science over softer subjects could have an impact, but it's all speculation on my part.
Your argument seems to be basically: is 2 really a bigger number than 1? We are 1 right now, and the rest of the world is less than 1, so isn't that proof that its better? Show me the studies that prove 2 is better than 1.
I imagine that to someone of your political persuasion, this is self evident. But humor someone who doesn't share your views and actually demonstrate (empirically for example) that you are right.
I personally don't care whether the geeks who work at a given tech firm are of particular gender or race, as long as they produce quality stuff.
I would care if someone couldn't get into the industry because they are X - but if these individuals don't want to - it's not something I consider a problem.
Not sure where my political orientation comes into it. Also note I am not from the US, so it is unlikely I fit into whatever weird party conceptions you have over there anyway :)
The point I was making that increasing numbers and diversity in something means more stuff is produced and there is greater innovation. It means the pool of candidates for a given role is larger, allowing better selection. This is all self-evident - as Bill Gates has said, doubling the size of your workforce cannot help but improve things.
Ok - you think so, I don't. So we can agree to have a difference of opinion.
However - on my side is every single real-life example of success in tech. EVERY SINGLE successful technology company was NOT diverse (and only once they get big enough to be targeted by diversity scammers that they start to pay lip service to this). Therefore if diversity was indeed at all important, wouldn't you be able to point to examples of more diverse companies being actually more successful? Heretofore the empirical argument is 100% against you.
My argument is that correlation doesn't imply causation. Just because all current examples are biased does not mean that the only way to do things is to be biased, right?
To put it another way, the concept of disruptive change is when some company does something different than all the other companies have done up to that point. I imagine uber, airbnb et al being told by someone that the 'empirical evidence is 100% against them' as well.
Here's an economic rationale for diversity in hiring:
Your project's total addressable market probably includes a diverse population of people. Meanwhile, the decisions in your project are made by the folks involved in it -- maybe some PMs, hopefully some UX and design engineers, and probably some programmers. I believe that our opinions are informed in part by our environment -- as someone living in California, I come up with California-oriented solutions to problems a bit more easily than ones suited to other locations. (I think this is why Dark Sky came from a team in New York, for example.)
So, I conclude that a diverse team will come up with ideas that are broader, and as a result, solutions that help more people, than would a less-diverse team.
A diversity of technical perspectives can be helpful, but there's no reason to suppose that 1) gender diversity correlates to a diversity of technical perspectives, or that 2) to achieve a diversity of technical perspectives, we need to force the demographics of programmers to match that of the population.
If you want to increase diversity of thought, you'd be better off recruiting from schools other than Stanford and the ivys.
Seriously, with even a cursory amount of thought (which is far more rigor than proponents of diversity tend to give policy proposals) it's clear that much of the ideas coming out of tech these days caters to the problems of young urban fairly affluent users, which is in large part due to the tendency to want to solve problems that you're familiar with (and to be fair, the fact that it's harder to monetize low income users). Diversity of perspective across class lines makes way more sense than just assuming that more women of the same social and educational background will magically open up an appreciably wider set of technical perspectives.
As an aside, comments such as "which is far more rigor than proponents of diversity tend to give policy proposals" tend not to make your arguments more persuasive.
Yea it's pretty late in my timezone and I'm typing on a phone, but it did occur to me that that could be misinterpreted.
Contrary to what my overly succinct comment may have suggested, I think that diversity initiatives are critical, both for a society and a company. Companies need to stay vigilant for potential sources of bias in hiring and retention and deal with issues aggressively when identified.
My comment about proponents of diversity wasn't intended to malign everyone who recognizes the importance of diversity initiatives (which as I said, includes myself), but rather, a particular philosophical strain that I've encountered as the dominant force amongst diversity initiatives in the companies I've experienced (including within the "big 4").
What frustrates me specifically is precisely what I mentioned: an often unqualified rejection of rational consideration of facts when they even resemble an unpalatable conclusion. In the example we're talking about: there are less women than men in company X. Either the company is discriminating, women are somehow innately less suited to work there, or there's upstream discrimination so that hiring reflects an equal assessment of the candidate pool. The evidence pointed strongly to the latter situation (ie the proportion of women cs majors was equal to the proportion of women technical employees, and non technical employees broke down 50/50).
And yet, any suggestion that the company wasn't explicitly discriminating (and that the problem existed upstream) was shouted down with "If you think we're not discriminating then you must think women are innately unsuitable and will be reported to HR for creating an unwelcome misogynist work environment"[1].
So when I talk about proponents of diversity lacking rigor, it was shorthand for "IME, in places that are quite reasonably considered the mainstream, the prevailing school of thought with respect to diversity initiatives focuses more on appearances and social signaling than actual progress".
[1] note that I was smart enough to stay out of these conversations so I wasn't ever actually the victim of this sort of lunacy.
> So, I conclude that a diverse team will come up with ideas that are broader, and as a result, solutions that help more people, than would a less-diverse team.
Will seems like a very strong claim to make. Can, certainly, but will? Maybe it all depends on what kind of sample size you have in mind.
I think it's a serious problem when more than half of society is denied a fair opportunity.
> Yet US has done just ok with males (white and asian) doing this stuff. Ie better than anybody else in the world.
That doesn't mean the US and others can't do much better. Think how much talent is lost - more than half of it. There's a shortage of talent in SV. There is much that needs to be done in the world.
> Is there any proof that increased diversity has any effect
I've read about a lot of evidence that more diverse groups make decisions significantly better.
> I've read about a lot of evidence that more diverse groups make decisions significantly better.
You have to be careful with this one. It only applies to certain kinds of diversity and certain kinds of decisions, and even then only over a sizable number of decisions. It's not as simple as diversity makes things better, full stop.
First-order logic: if (A AND ~B -> ~C) AND C, then (~A OR B).
The persistence of the gender gap in technology despite decades of effort to "fix" it is an annoying refutation of the blank-slate theory of human nature on which the entire worldview of many people, particularly gender activists, rests. In other words, if it's simultaneously true that tech is gender-imbalanced and that there is no systemic discrimination involved in this gap, then groups of human being might have innate differences, and acceptance of this fact has far-reaching and upsetting consequences.
Therefore, there must be no gender gap or there must be systemic discrimination. Since the existence of the gender gap is obvious, there must be systemic discrimination, and the pundit class has been on the warpath trying to uphold this narrative and cherry-pick evidence supporting it.
I got somewhat distracted by your use of words (e.g. pundit class) which seem to be meant to be purely inflammatory (not sure if you meant to be - but it is).
But, let's say I follow your logic on its own. Should I just believe that there's no systematic discrimination? How could I be confident that there's not any?
And, as a parent of a bright and mathematically-inclined daughter, should I discourage her from a field in technology because she likely has some otherwise hidden trait that will make her less useful or successful? How do I even know what that trait is? Is there a test for it?
You're right that "pundit class" is too inflammatory. I've edited my comment.
> Should I believe that there's no systematic discrimination? How would I be confident that there's not any?
Nobody can prove the absence of systemic discrimination. You also can't prove the absence of lizard people. The burden of proof rests on those making the positive claim. Look at how the technology industry tries very hard to attract women. Look at the outreach programs, the hackathons, and the scholarships from dozens of foundations and open source projects. Look at the mentorship programs available for women. That's some evidence _against_ systemic bias.
Now look at evidence _for_ systemic bias _other_ than the gender disparity itself. We're left with, what, rugs about meritocracy and a few off-color comments about dongles in a private conversation between two friends at a conference?
I just don't think the non-gender-disparity evidence is strong enough to support a claim of bias.
> should I discourage her from a field in technology because she likely has some otherwise hidden trait that will make her less useful or successful?
You should introduce her to many fields and let her decide which one interests her most.
Still not following. Believe me, I'm really trying, but something seems off. Maybe an analogy would help.
We have two populations A and B. A has walked slower than B. One individual, a1, says 'hey I suspect B (who controls the food) is withholding vitamin X'. Evidence is uncovered showing this to be true. A is given vitamin X, and A begins to walk faster.
However a subset of A still doesn't walk as fast. Again, an investigation is done, and it's shown that B has also been withholding vitamin Y. After vitamin Y is given, that subset of A also begins to walk faster.
Then, a smaller subset of that subset shows initial gains in walking speed, but recently their speed has dropped off significantly. So, A is given even more vitamin X and Y. But, that doesn't help. So, instead of suspecting that B is withholding vitamin Z, we should take them on their word that recently the terrain has changed so that B just naturally walks faster than A?
In other words, correlation DOES imply causation right? And any evidence to the contrary is a conspiracy theory by the 'pundit class'.
Gender bias towards a given domain is a generational problem, like racism or homophobia and so on. Changes do not happen overnight, and because they haven't happened over night does not imply that 'white or asian men are innately better at tech than the other 95% of the population'.
Programming is a purely intellectual activity, so I would argue that there is no gender or racial advantage one way or the other.
Contrast this with, for example, physical professions like professional basketball, where the faster ability to grow in fitness and strength, along with certain racial advantages with height or speed means the population tends to skew in one direction - enough so that creating separate leagues allows for fairer representation.
Software development is not like that. The very fact that the majority of programmers used to be women back when it started should be enough to show that current bias' are societal or fashion-based.
So, for clarity: your answer to my second question is "no, such a world is inherently unfair"?
> Programming is a purely intellectual activity, so I would argue that there is no gender or racial advantage one way or the other.
Thank you for so succinctly stating the blank-slate position. I don't see any reason to agree with it. You acknowledge that there are important group differences below the neck; why should there be none above it?
> majority of programmers used to be women
I read that article too. You don't mention that "programming" back then was largely data entry.
How is it possible that you don't see the problem in this line of reasoning? Do you really not?
Edit: honestly, I'm curious how this mindset comes about. How is it possible to ignore the importance of people being given the opportunity to work wherever they are capable? How is it possible to ignore the impact of being denied access to an incredibly lucrative and glamorous industry? How is it possible to ignore the many ramifications that has on lives and livelihoods?
How would you feel if you were kept out of the tech industry? Would you be placated by sentiments that the industry was seemingly "doing just fine" without you?
I think the idea is that women CAN get into compsci if they want to or are interested, it's just that on average, they appear not to be?
It sort of feels like saying there aren't enough people named Gavin in compsci. Why do we need people named Gavin? If Gavin wants to do compsci, that's cool, but if not, then he can go do whatever makes him happy?
The point is, we don't need _person type X_ simply for the sake of an equal number of all types of people. Unequal numbers/types of people don't necessarily mean they're being kept out, that doesn't follow.
There aren't enough male hairdressers? There aren't enough female linesmen? There aren't enough Democrats named Duane?
Whether or not this is true I don't know, I just consider this the popular sentiment.
I could be an elementary school teacher as a male, I'm just not inclined to. I don't feel kept out.
> 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.
One thing I noticed / learned about when we had our child is that we are all social creatures. We yearn to be with others like ourselves and to fit in.
It's an incredibly strong pull, and the attitude of "if they really were interested, they'd be interested" that is prominent here greatly underestimates how strong our desire to fit in is.
In poor neighborhoods, few rise out of their situations to become scholars and professionals. Do we believe it is because they don't want to? Or is it because the social currents -- the pull to fit in, sell drugs, check out, be cool -- are too strong? We have deeply evolved social genes, and our fear of being alienated trumps a lot of things.
Unconscious bias is real. You can take a test and see for yourself. We think we view the sexes, other races, other tribes as we view ourselves. But the fact is we're deeply biased. It is ingrained.
So, we might not be best suited to say whether our tribe is inclusive -- we probably couldn't give an objective answer if we tried. But what we can do is make a better attempt to be more inclusive of ideas; especially the ones that make us uncomfortable.
> We yearn to be with others like ourselves and to fit in.
The idea is that this is what "keeps people out". Surely, the flip side is true, and people are defined / made happy by the same notions.
People in the west are so far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that we've stopped caring about the basics of life. Specifically, of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#... we no longer choose a job that gives us food, shelter or safety (the first two), and instead we choose jobs based on how well it provides us with love/belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. That is why young people choose jobs less and less with money as the sole or even primary determinant.
If this is the case, that people are choosing professions that help them feel self-actualised or belonging, no matter what tech does, or what Public Relations, Child-care workers or predominantly female dominated occupations do, is less important that the people it attracts / already has attracted. And these same sorts of people will dominate, as this belonging and fitting in becomes increasingly entrenched, and snowballs on itself like runaway recurssion.
That seems, to me, the logical conclusion of slight biological gender differences combined with a rise up the pyramid of needs, which lessens the pressure of the former two to create cultures that trump biology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a documentary about Scandinavia's attitude to gender relations, and the whole series is brilliant, and shows that gender separation is, if not inevitable, certainly understandable.
Not buying the argument, since according to Maslov, very few people become self-actualized. His own research was sparked by a very limited set of individuals that exhibited the qualities of being what he later described as 'self-actualized'. So it's hard to believe that enough people in tech are self-actualized for that to be a big differentiator. In other words, it just doesn't seem realistic that the current gender balance snowballed out of males being drawn to technology out of self-actualization.
> 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.
That last part sounds so banally corporate. And later in the article the author suggests we redecorate many/most programming spaces, academic and professional, into banal corporate farms like every other soul-crushing workplace.
The best high school teachers I remember were the ones to fill their classrooms with zany stuff related to their subject/field. Creatures from Disney's Hercules in a Latin classroom. Ancient Roman coins, sorted on a timeline by metallurgic debasement and inflation, in an economics classroom. A wall of student painted musical posters in a theater/dance classroom.
Is telling those teachers, "no, you can't decorate your classroom the way you want; it must look like the front office of ACME business park tenant," really the answer?
Or is it reforming our education system, especially high school, into an institution that discourages conformity? Or at least doesn't punish nonconformity?
I guess Star Wars and (much of SciFi) has no strong tie to a computer class except for a certain subcultural influence not shared universally (and so they don't _need_ to be part of the class room).
But if the computer class isn't just a editor/spreadsheet/media class (which is okay, and maybe even important, but not "computer"), having computer parts and tech magazines around (within reason) provide a relatively realistic representation of what the field is about.
To me that paragraph read as "computer class is okay when it has nothing to do with computers" - which I think is sad.
But then the description is so non-descript, that it's hard to tell what kind of images they provided. If the "computer parts and magazines" version looked like http://moo.acadiau.ca:7000/865, that may indeed not be very attractive.
(Also: coffee makers in class rooms? yuck. I wouldn't want to be in a class that smells like coffee all the time)
The "Star Wars" reference is really just an insinuation that geek culture signals social suicide to conformist high schoolers. But geek culture also signals passion.
My objection is really that mandating bland décor in the name of some "ambient sense of belonging" discourages passionate teachers, however their offbeat classroom decorating may or may not relate absolutely to the field. And the system already discourages passionate teachers in countless ways. We don't need one more nail in the coffin for love of learning and those who encourage it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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 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).
>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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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???
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.
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.
>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.
Art and nature posters, plants and general-interest magazines do not sound neutral to me.
One question which perhaps should be made explicit: Who ought to be responsible for remedying the negative stereotypes that young women hold about computer programmers and STEM workers? And who is affected most negatively by attitudes such as they hold?
Maybe creative writing profs can play a role by writing some stories that make STEM sound more enticing.
There are a few hundred citations to sort through, but it looks like they are just building on these conclusions. Keep in mind that they were published very recently, and psychology has less of an emphasis on reproducing studies than, say physics, for instance. IOW, I have no clue. Haven't read the papers either. Looks like a bunch of copy + paste from SPSS/SAS, plus a little polemical rhetoric, like most social science papers. I find such to be tiring to read closely as a consequence (so I don't).
The first sentence of the article is a claim without any substance and the rest on the article builds on it.
Regarding "gender diversity", I know for sure that construction, road works, automechanic, welding, mining and many other fields have "overrepresented men problem", while teacher, nurse have "overrepresented women" problem, so why focus on technology sector which is pretty good compared to those?
The answer is simple - personal monetary gain. Women see technology sector rise in terms of wages during recent years, and feminism, a.k.a "women labor union", are using their influence to gain unfair advantages for women in that particular profitable spot.
They have already reached quite good results in divorce and alimony laws, so we can't underestimate them now. This trend that puts women (and in some cases minorities) in front of others have to be killed once and for all.
Can someone from US write their senators to create a law that forbids any kind of discrimination or PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT based on gender and race? That law would be enough to basically kill feminism in terms of legal rights at least.
> Regarding "gender diversity", I know for sure that construction, road works, automechanic, welding, mining and many other fields have "overrepresented men problem", while teacher, nurse have "overrepresented women" problem, so why focus on technology sector which is pretty good compared to those?
I am in Norway, and men are hardly underrepresented in teaching and nursery here. I also visit tunnels under construction due to my work sometimes, and can't say a girl in reflex and hard hat is that uncommon sight. They are still under-represented in STEM overall, however. Not sure what the conclusion is here, but it is probably not the one you are trying to make.
> I know for sure that construction, road works, automechanic, welding, mining and many other fields have "overrepresented men problem", while teacher, nurse have "overrepresented women" problem,
Each of those have industry and education groups dedicated to changing the disparity.
And America's general anti-intellectual culture. Basically, the idea that it's not "cool" to be smart. Also, society generally socialized boys to be more independent (hence making it easier to ignore anti-intellectualism).
but then individuals like Amelia Earhart, Jane Goodall, and Maria Mayer (to name a few) come along and inspire a generation of young women. Maybe the problem is that we simply don't have a worldwide recognized women's role model for Tech yet. Hell there are only a handful of male ones.. people like Gates, Jobs & Wozniacki, Zukerberg, Knuth, Kay, Turing, etc.. inventors of programming languages, famous tech authors (W. Richard Stevens, Sussman & Abelson, etc).. they're pretty much all men. I think that eventually this will change.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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. 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.
The thing is that computer science and english lit are not exchangeable. In fact, if computer science were done in pink cubicles adorned with the above-mentioned purportedly feminine accoutrements, men and women would still do computer science, because it would still be critical to technological advance and modern economies in a direct, and remunerated, way which English Lit is not.
It is a response to a passage quoted from the article under discussion in this thread on hacker news, an internet site that is structured around discussion of articles.
"To make computer science more attractive to women, we might help young women change how they think about themselves and what’s expected of them. But we might also diversify the images of scientists they see in the media, along with the décor in the classrooms and offices in which they might want to study or work."
No. I don't expect liberal arts and women's studies departments, and the home decorating industry to adapt a more masculine culture. I don't see CS and the tech industry as this uber masculine frat bro jock culture anyways. This is ridiculous. Let people make their own choices instead of dictating how people should act constantly.
Does anyone else feel that targeted statistical studies would advance this discussion far more than yet another anecdote? The state of understanding of this situation could be much improved. And yet, despite how strongly people feel about this issue, the studies are still sparse to non-existent.
Unfortunately for the author, the numbers simply don't support the narrative she wishes to paint:
> The percentage of women studying computer science actually has fallen since the 1980s. Dr. Cheryan theorizes that this decline might be partly attributable to the rise of pop-culture portrayals of scientists as white or Asian male geeks in movies and TV shows like “Revenge of the Nerds” and “The Big Bang Theory.”
CS degrees took a huge jump from 5,000 per year in 1975 with 18% being women to 39,000 per year in 1985 with 37% being women. Perhaps she should ask what caused that.
I'll tell you what--Punchcards, COBOL and the PDP/Vax. Suddenly everybody put their accounting systems on computers, and you needed people who could program them or feed them data. And that required keyboard skills--which were taught to women because every high school had secretarial classes (typing/shorthand/dictation). And, right around when the decline started happening (1984/1985), those secretarial programs all got wiped out.
Perhaps if we start training women to be secretaries again, we'll fix the CS enrollment problem (CAUTION: I'm being sarcastic here about drawing stupid conclusions that fit your desired narrative).
In addition, if you look at Master's degrees awarded, you find that the percentage of women earning Master's in CS is about 28% and has bounced around that number since 1985 and been around 30% since 2001. The percentage of PhD's going to women in CS has been gradually increasing every year since 1977 or so and stands at 21% in 2010.
These aren't the statistics for a field women are having difficulty entering (take a look at electrical engineering for that ...). The fact that female CS undergraduate percentages crashed in 2005 is a bit concerning (similar downblip in EE--wonder what the issue is), but that should be a local cause that should be discoverable rather than systemic.
Stereotypes are putting me off too - I am a male. Not sure if this can really explain why there is fewer women in tech.
At the local university where I was a bit involved into the whys of fewer women it seems to be that interestingly enough it seems to be related to friends and family of someone entering IT. If friends and family come up with questions like "But aren't there mostly men" and "Aren't to all video game nerds" or similar, then those stereotypes affect people and especially women, cause they are usually the target of such statements way more when deciding whether to study at a certain university.
So it's social expectations of others. I think if one wants to study computer science then it's not that much of a deal. After all students in general have a lot of room for stereotypes. Women in communication, men in medicine and students in general have stereotypes applying to them that many people simply don't identify with at all. I think if that would be having such a huge effect then there would be way fewer students overall.
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.
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
Female students are more interested in enrolling in CS if they think it doesn't involve computers or science... maybe instead of trying to trick them encourage them to like computers and science? If you think solving problems by looking pretty rather than thinking is 'being female' then you don't think being a Computer Scientist is very 'female'.
(Obviously I think being female is orthogonal to such concerns.)
To sum this up, men in software engineering are like a bunch of children and expect everyone around them to be exactly the same. I couldn't agree more. I'd wager that most software companies (all i've worked for) have no sense of work etiquette because a lot of engineers are in some sort of la-la land where you don't have to grow up and the smarter you are the more you get to act as an odd, grown child. Is anybody really surprised that this is driving women away? It would be interesting to know how this compares to professional engineers (mechanical, electrical etc) and the environments they work in. I'd be shocked if the same level of immaturity passes there.
"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 run-in with a woman on my team. We disagreed on the design for a module she had just implemented. It wasn't going to meet the requirements, I argued. She disagreed - it'd be fine. Many times we sat in front of her code, I took her through exactly how her design was failing. You know that extra 250msec mental processing time where you see it click in their heads when they realize they were wrong or had a faulty assumption? There were like 3 of those times sitting with her, and she always changed the subject or insulted me for not understanding what she was trying to do - end of discussion. Other team members backed me up from time to time when the issues I was raising were serious enough, I wasn't completely alone. There were other communications breakdowns, she NEVER requested anyone to pair with her, never did any design work nor discussed with the team what she was going to develop that sprint, was frustrated and defensive when her PR's were full of criticisms (primarily from me.)
I was vocal, I was dissatisfied with her performance and did not keep it a secret, and I was demanding the same level of excellence from her as from anyone else on the team. This went on for about two weeks ... and then she cried to the boss. Told him she thought she might have to quit the company over the altercations with me. So, they gave me the official sit down reprimand. There was no interest hearing in my side of the story, not that it would matter the way HR is structured. And, I got the distinct feeling they started keeping a file on me to try and get me canned.
My reaction to this, so as to keep my sweet job and food on the table, was to be just one more go-with-the-flow, smiley-faced, that-all-sounds-good kind of guy. No more confrontation trying to get the best out of people. Life is really nice now, I don't have to care. My work is still good, but I'm just doing as I was told and cashing my paycheck now. Any actual love and passion for the work now goes into my hobby projects, and I don't work late anymore. Soon after all this blew over, the bosses remarked cynically that I was working so well with this woman, like it was surprising that I could turn off combat mode so easily/at all! I just smile and laugh meekly, "yeah, we're working well together. It's all so great" as I choke back the bile.
God help that woman if she ever needs help and I'm the only one to give it. I've had to endure team dynamics 10x worse in my career than what she experienced with me and I didn't rat out the other guy. I cannot countenance such disloyalty. The team must resolve its differences internally and not go informing on each other at the drop of a hat!
Anyhow, we are still on the same team, (thanks management!), and I casually try to avoid pairing with her most of the time and smile with gritted teeth when we do have to work together. When I see her make a mistake, I don't point it out and just laugh to myself about it.
I will outlast her but she has definitely put a damper on my moving into a lead role unless I switch departments.
> 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".
This article raises an interesting question, but then give no good answer to it.
The actual answer is that women generally like modern programming noticeably less than men do.
Women are better at nurturing and maintenance.
Men are better with handling abstract concepts and solving deep problems by having narrow focus.
Before computers became mainstream (prior to ~1980) typical programming job was more about nurturing and maintenance.
Typical women skills were a good match for programming back then.
However what programmers did back then in 1960es-1970es is now covered by ~electronic spreadsheets.
Modern programming is much deeper and more focused than it was 35+ years ago, so most women prefer moving to other professions.
In spite of affirmative action that tries to attract women to tech.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
>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'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.
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.
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.
There's a "gender problem" in public relations as well as in mental health counseling professions. The vast majority of professionals in those fields are women. I'm not sure I understand why that "problem" isn't warranting a New York Times story. In a great many PR and Marcom departments there's a very real bias against men. So much ink is being used on the STEM and women issue but oddly such "diversity" isn't quite important when the straight male is consistently marginalized in certain fields. How many straight male hairdressers do you know? How about makeup artists? Male kindergarten teachers? How about straight male fashion buyers or merchandisers or designers? How many men work at the cosmetics counter at Saks Fifth Avenue?
Is there any concept that men and women might actually be different and thus drawn to different interests? Obviously there's crossover and not everyone fits the mold but should we be trying to shoehorn the video game introvert into public relations and the outgoing fashionable social butterfly into particle physics? I don't doubt that there is a gender disparity in many professions, but my honest question is whether it's actually a 'problem.'
If girls (or boys) are being denied their passion because of discrimination, then yes, absolutely, but if we're just sitting around complaining because more boys like computers and more girls like public relations, then it seems like a silly thing to worry about. More girls like to play with dolls and more boys like to play with sticks and pretend they're laser guns. That's a fact. If a girl wants to play with a laser gun stick (or a boy with dolkls,) then I'm all for it, but just achieving diversity just to please some statistian or some gender studies professor is to deny that biology does, in fact have an influence on behavior and choices. I know that in some feminist circles, that idea is blasphemous, but reality doesn't really care about what some adjunct professor thinks.
Trying to "feminize" computers or make it less "nerdy" (i.e. Changing the Code Therefore I am shirt) is ridiculous and actually insulting. There are plenty of girls that like Star Wars, "nerdy" things and math and science. Just because that type of girl is a minority doesn't mean there's some kind of conspiracy.
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.