You're not going to change this. Yes, virtually every great programmer or computer scientist is a male. So much so that we're all going to assume they're male, and when we see a female name (like "Leslie Lamport") we double-check to see if it's actually a female. This is just a normal tendency. We assume basketball players are over 6'3", we assume nurses are female.
There are many stories of people overcoming discrimination (say, Indian immigrants being thought to be unfit for executive positions in Silicon Valley), and they make the current hot topic of women in tech look incredibly dumb. We're talking overt discrimination, not occasional pronoun misuse.
Indians in Silicon Valley started a group called TiE to help establish a presence. Does it hurt for them to have labeled themselves as "Indus Entrepreneurs" and try to help each other? Doesn't seem so.
So maybe the right way to overcome this "oppression" you feel is just to quit fucking bitching, put your head down and code, and maybe help a few other women out along the way when you achieve success.
Your misogynist default behavior isn't the fault of the OP and kinda your own failing to overcome.
The onus isn't on the oppressed group to overcome discrimination, it's on the privileged group to cut it out.
And downplaying everyday casual sexism just because it's not literally witch burning anymore is a really privileged thing to do!
Careful: Computer science got big in the 50s and 60s, a time when "women and technology" was a topic consisting largely of the kitchen stove and the radio. Gender equality has come a long way since the 60s, especially in education, technology, and business (I'm not saying it's come all the way.)
Add to that, today's tech environment doesn't make your gender necessarily obvious, except if you choose to shove it into your readers' face. Take the linked blog, for example. It's indistinguishable from any other blog; the name "Amber" might as well be a male's pseudonym, and in any case, it's such low contrast and so small it's almost invisible. I know I skipped over it — also because I'm not typically interested in who wrote an article, but in the article itself.
So we have a population of males traditionally assuming everybody of relevance to technology is a man, and not many non-obnoxious ways for women to establish their gender in their postings (to be honest, I want it to stay that way. Your gender has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm interested in.)
Men need to stop whining and finally end the idiotic assumption that it is fine to use the default 'he'. English has a particularly elegant way out of the dilemma (just use 'they' whenever you'd use 'he') contrary to other languages where you will also need to adjust the inflection of verbs or nouns throughout the sentence.
It's a simple change. Nobody is going to get hurt, and it would do a lot to make women feel more welcome in the (formerly) manly sociotope 'technology'. Why is it such a problem for men to just make such a simple change?
(PS: please don't take my above post about women and their penetration into the technological sphere in the 50s and 60s all too literally. I meant the general population and the accepted role of women in society; I meant not to exclude the extraordinary achievements by some (few enough, unfortunately) women already accomplished in those times.)
This is how your comment reads to me: Misogyny is totally cool and you should never do anything to change it, not even write a harmless and polite blogpost. No, see, that's bitching. Mentioning a very clear and obvious problem is totally not cool.
dilettantism is way easier than work. And recently may be as effective. Heck i usually get hundreds of upvotes just by pretending i have some knowledge.
This one will skyrocket because i may be a woman. And maybe Indian.
Where are the technical articles written by women? There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression, while attacking men and claiming absurd stereotypes. Where are the technical contributions?
I think the author does a great job starting out by highlighting her own contributions via the linked write-up on Git submodules, but beyond the first couple of sentences on the topic nothing, and spends the rest of the article on a tear about the he/she dichotomy in comments.
While I can certainly understand the frustration when people get gender wrong, that seems to be the wrong place to focus on in this topic of women in tech. Is it possibly an indicator of the problem at large? Sure. Does it answer the question "Where are the tech articles written by women"? No.
It does play right into the exact same mold the commenter was talking about, that set this entire entry into motion:
There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression...where are the technical contributions?
Instead of highlighting great articles from the women in tech, or linking to other women in the industry with well trafficked blogs and talking about their contributions, the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem.
Mind you, I agree that there is a rift that rises when people make the wrong assumption, but that's nil imo.
> the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem.
You're missing the point of the article. The point is that if she does 'highlight great articles from the women in tech,' then she would be labeled a "female developer" instead of just a "developer." If she doesn't do this, then she gets labeled a male developer. She would like to be labeled "developer," but the two options she can see lead to undesirable outcomes.
This has been said before, but the key thing to take away is the concept of "othering." The author would like to be seen as a developer, not a subcategory of a developer that is somehow different from the norm. Perhaps a better way to demonstrate is to take this to the extreme:
"Instead of highlighting great articles from brown-eyed people in tech, or linking to other brown-eyed people in the industry with well trafficked blogs and talking about their contributions, the author fell right into the category that perpetuates this problem."
Sounds pretty absurd right? Who cares what their eye color is. On the other hand, imagine if everyone got it wrong. Imagine if you had brown eyes but there was a 'default assumption' that everyone had blue eyes. You wouldn't want to make a fuss every time people got it wrong, for fear of being "that person" who is annoying and pedantic, and "hey, it shouldn't matter! Technology is eye-color blind!" But if you don't do it, it gets a little grating when EVERYONE assumes you are something that you're not. It's a catch-22.
The solution is to remove the default assumption that developers are male. That is something that you, not the author, have to do.
What is the OP's point? That people don't pay attention to the gender of the writer? If someone did a dedicated study about the last 6 months of top Hacker News and top r/programming articles what percentage do we think would be male authors? I would set the over-under at 95%. (Please don't point out that those audiences are sexist because the OP just showed that the readers don't pay attention to the gender of authors.)
For the record I think there is sexism in tech but it mostly starts in jr high and high school - at least in the US.
No. What's absurd is that Amber Yust reaped all the benefits of having blue eyes in her profession for most of her life, and then proceeded to author this article about how it's wrong to assume that people in her profession have blue eyes, written with all the fury of someone who had brown eyes for their entire life.
I say this because she has a Y chromosome and only updated her driver's license to read Female one year ago.
I was not making an argument; I was stating a fact. Refraining from addressing someone's statement other than to label it "ad hominem" is itself an ad hominem argument, however.
The major thrust of her article is where she presents herself as the typical specimen proving that women both exist in the tech world in large numbers and are oppressed by pronouns in comments on the internet. Unfortunately, her chromosomes, as well as the male privilege she spent the majority of her life reaping the benefits from, make her the ultimate antithesis of her own point, and she does the opposite of dispelling any stereotypes people may harbor.
Ok, its been about 10 hrs, so maybe you would be able to read this comment objectively:
1. An Ad-Hominem argument is one where you attack the other based on their credentials to have an opinion on an issue without commenting on the argument itself. That's specifically what you did.
2. >>"Refraining from addressing someone's statement other than to label it "ad hominem" is itself an ad hominem argument, however."
-- this is a weird piece of logic I must say. See definition of ad hominem above. Where did I challenge your "statement" by saying that you are not un-biased enough to have an opinion. If you still disagree, see http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html and let me know what I am missing
3. Let me respond to your main argument as well - you say that the fact she was a guy "does the opposite of dispelling any stereotypes people may harbor" - ONE - not everyone knows she was a guy. Therefore, most people would take the argument for what it is and think about it. TWO - even if people know she was a guy, why do you assume that other readers are primitive enough that they will let that be a factor? Note - they aren't seeing her in real life - they are just reading an article at their leisure.
Y chromosome does not equal male. In most cases it does but you can't make a blanket assumption that sex is entirely determined by chromosomes because it is not.
> If someone assumed I was brown-eyed (when in fact I'm blue), I'm not going to write about it, because it is a non-issue.
(for the sake of argument I'm going to assume you're male). Imagine you moved to a country with a different language, and your given name sounded feminine in that language. Every time someone met you in person they would look at you strange and go "oh, I'm sorry! I thought you were a woman!" Perhaps you would be assigned to the female dormitory if you studied abroad there, and embarrassingly had to file paperwork to change that.
Would you want to make a small note on your email signature saying "I'm a man!"? I know I would. This is something you would write about, because it kind of is an issue.
These are the kinds of things female developers have to deal with all the time: "wait, you're here for the conference? As a developer? I'm sorry, I didn't realize!" "Okay, but you're not like a developer developer, right?" This shouldn't be the case. The annoying thing is that if a woman writes a note saying "I'm a woman!," they get put in a different class of developer than if they left it off.
The solution is to let it emerge naturally and subtly. Like the advice I've seen given to gays: don't have a big dramatic "coming out", just have a picture of your partner on your desk and let it come up naturally in conversation.
Sure, plenty of people will assume you're male (or straight) to start with. But keep writing good technical articles and don't hide your gender, let it come up naturally - just don't make a big fuss about it on day 1. If people read stuff you write, and appreciate your technical competence, and then realise you're female /once they already respect your technical ability/, then the attitude the OP complains about will change.
> The solution is to let it emerge naturally and subtly.
I reserve the right to let people know who I am at any time and to deliver it how I please. I don't want anyone to tell me I should "let it emerge naturally." If I want to do that then sure, that's very tactful. But sometimes I don't.
The author has an obligation to do nothing. It is up to the audience to change their perceptions.
If you open with angry social commentary about being a woman in tech, then the perception being complained about is in fact accurate and your audience has no obligation to change it.
As a counter example I have a good male friend, who, even being born in the US, still has a name most often mistaken as female.
He does not have any such note in his email, works in a well respected field with a much more even gender ratio and hasn't written about it, because as far as he is concerned it is a non-issue that only leads to harmless, sometimes funny mistakes.
Perhaps your example is just not perfect, but without a good non-gendered pronoun, this is hardly an easy problem to solve. And let's be serious, "he/she" sounds and reads awful, and "they" is dehumanizing. In many languages, ungendered items will takeon the male form, which seems to serve them well.
The author falls into no such category, having clearly made a considerable contribution already.
You've missed the point of the article. It doesn't set out to answer your quoted question with some faux-positive ra-ra laundry list of women's writing. Instead it unasks the question.
On the other hand, you've exhibited a classic indicator of unconscious bias by assuming that a woman was complaining. Especially when, as in this case, she clearly isn't.
> On the other hand, you've exhibited a classic indicator of unconscious bias by assuming that a woman was complaining. Especially when, as in this case, she clearly isn't.
"complain: to express dissatisfaction, pain, uneasiness, censure, resentment, or grief"
If people can't disagree with you without being accused of bias at the drop of a hat, then we can't have a true discussion.
The stereotype is primarily accepted by two groups of males:
1. Men who believe women do not succeed in the tech world due to social pressures
2. Men who believe women do not succeed in the tech world due to differences that are genetic in nature
For the second group, author Amber Yust only fuels the fire of the stereotype, because she was born a man. For the first group, using herself as an example of a woman succeeding in the tech world is invalid, because she was a man for most of her life and benefitted from all the consequent privileges.
I find it dumbfounding that she wrote this article.
She is not presenting a story of "a woman succeeding in the tech world"; she is presenting a story of how everyone assumes anyone who writes a tech article is male.
It is like the New York Times saying, "men invented the Internet", or all the people who have written, "Why are there no women programmers?" There are women programmers (22% in the US according to the Department of Labor.) There were women involved in the creation of the net (8% of RFC 1336). Just because there is not equal representation no excuse for erasing those that do exist.
If you mentally turn everyone male unless they are speaking about gender it is unfair to then turn around and complain that women only ever speak about gender. When you were listening to them talk about other things it wasn't that they were men, it was that you assumed they were.
That is all about you, and has nothing to do with the cis* status of the people pointing it out.
The point is that she shouldn't need to point out individual contributions by women. Because you'd hopefully understand that women don't go out of the way and say "hey, btw, I'm a girl!". So you'd understand technical articles by women are plenty, but they're not immediately obvious. Because women are not trying to make it immediately obvious. Because the internet is supposed to be gender neutral.
And hopefully, if you understand all that, you won't ask be asking "where are the technical contributions from women?" in the first place. So the question is mute, which is why she didn't answer.
This article is not one of them. Just because it doesn't answer the question the way you want it to be answered doesn't mean it's "perpetuating the problem".
In fact, one of the indirect points of this article is that demanding lists of female bloggers in the first place is silly - who demands lists of male bloggers?
Regarding you last post: it seems curious that there are actually lots of decidedly female tech groups (like geek girls or whatever), whereas male only tech groups would probably be met with outrage. That said, personally I don't need a list of female bloggers.
> Mind you, I agree that there is a rift that rises when people make the wrong assumption, but that's nil imo.
It's possible you are very open minded in such a way that even though you don't "see" a group, and its accomplishments, you still consciously afford them the same benefit of doubt as you do for the majority group. Unfortunately, this is not a trait shared by societies and social groups at large.
Most of the time people use "he" when they don't know the gender of the author. It's not assuming the author is a man. It's a place-holder word in English.
If you want a gender-neutral pronoun, "they" works perfectly well. It doesn't matter what you intend when you type "he", everyone reading it will interpret it as male.
We've had the same pronoun situation here in Sweden. Recently, however, a new pronoun started to become common in everyday speech: 'hen'. It's a mix of 'han' ('he') and 'hon'('her'). It's picked up in popularity fast since it solves the specific problems highlighted by this article.
The second person plural in my parents' idiolect of English is "you", but in mine there's effectively a familiar/formal dichotomy of "you guys" and "you", with the latter rarely used. In the American South, many people use "you" for singular and "y'all" for plural. I wouldn't be surprised if other dialects are also losing the plural "you".
Most of the time, context alleviates that confusion pretty quickly. "The developer of AppX [blah blah]. They wrote it in C#". Etc.
A lot of closeted or previously closeted homosexuals can tell you that it's not that terribly confusing. I used "they" for years to refer to a singular person. After coming out, I was accused of lying. My response was that I'd never lied about the gender of someone I was seeing or referring to. No one ever asked.
Which ironically plays into a whole different set of gender assumptions, but that's a can of worms I don't want to open in an already dangerous thread.
Not really. It's perfectly common as addressing a singular person of unspecified gender, and I can't think of a common way to use it to specifically reference royalty offhand.
I guess the plural in some languages is used to address royalty. And about the usage of "they", I tend to use it, and the only thing that I find a bit strange is sentences like: "If a user needs something, they have to do something." Note "needs" and "have" for the same subject, where usually they are either needs+has or need+have.
Yes in German the plural is used for royalty. I'll try to adapt to "they" but I have to fight a strong sense of wrongness that I have acquired somehow.
I think you are right about using "he" in a non-gender-specific way, but I think there are ramifications. It becomes obvious that all articles are written by men, since you see so many he's writing them.
Perhaps English needs a truly gender-neutral pronoun.
People have no need to write "he/she" when referring to the author when using "he" is correct 90% of the time.
If women really want people to be know them as women then they should make it clear that they are. Hell, the suffragettes persevered through much worse than creepy internet comments.
You should just write in caps "I don't get it". It would more helpful than what you're doing. You don't just seem to think it's okay, but you're actually excusing the fact that our society still defaults to male-first.
>Most of the time people use "he" when they don't know the gender of the author. It's not assuming the author is a man.
That's exactly what it's assuming. Why else would you "default" to "he" instead of "she"? Because you assume the author to be a man.
And what the hell is the suffragettes comment supposed to mean? In one sentence you managed to trivialize the way women are treated often in this industry and basically say the equivalent of "They've had it worse, so who cares".
1. Sometimes people use "he" to refer to people they assume are male.
2. Men outnumber women in tech, making it all the more important not to further alienate the women left.
3. Men make assumptions and then get super-defensive when it is pointed out that their assumptions are wrong.
4. Women attempting to correct those assumptions are told that men's assumptions aren't men's responsibility and women must take responsibility for what random men happen to think.
4.A. Those same men go on to whine about things that are only true in their assumption-filled heads and have no connection to reality. When called on it, they blame women through convoluted logic of refusing to take responsibility for their own actions.
5. The original author reports that sometimes those defensive reactions include harassment, which makes it even less fair to put the entire onus on women who not only are being asked to put in extra effort, but they are also subject to punishment for having done so.
6. Apparently verroq somehow thinks this double standard is fair and "better in the long run", probably because what he means it "it's better for me as a dude, since I don't have to do any work and can keep irrationally blaming women for my failings."
You realize your personal attacks hurt, not help, your message, right? Your snark, sarcasm, and overall angst is not going to get people to consider your point of view. That is your goal, right? If you just want to WTFPWN some random person on the Internet, well grats. Else, you probably just made things at least one unit worse for women in tech.
See I was agreeing with your post up to here, but I can't help but view the cynicism and angst as reflection on your character.
>6. Apparently verroq somehow thinks this double standard is fair and "better in the long run", probably because what he means it "it's better for me as a dude, since I don't have to do any work and can keep irrationally blaming women for my failings."
I said women should speak out against this double standard, even if they get hit with some personal attacks. I like the way you twisted my words to suit your self-righteous indignation.
Um, the double standard I was pointing to was you expecting women to "speak out" (which I interpret as, "label themselves in public") without expecting at least the same of men.
Alternatively, instead of requiring every post to be metaphorically coded pink or blue, we could all stop assuming any post not so labeled was written by a man. Your solution requires women to do irrelevant work so that we can continue assuming male-as-default while being wrong less of the time. My solution requires a minor shift in attitude, equally imposed on everyone, that would lead us to be wrong none of the time.
Actually, there is a third option that someone proposed below: we could start assuming every technical blog author was female unless we bothered to find out otherwise and use "she" as the default pronoun.
He has every right to be annoyed that you turn this into the female's problem by saying they should just speak up for themselves. You're either incredibly naive or incredibly in denial.
So you are saying that females are incapable of speaking up for themselves? Perhaps a legion of White Knights should lead the way? Least the feminist movement be lead by a man, if females don't have the resolve to help themselves, then I'd say they can't be helped.
Sure, you may call me naive to suggest the obvious solution, but do you have any evidence that it won't work?
Yes I have evidence it won't work: the only person who has control over that individual's behavior and beliefs is that person themselves. You can't change one group's behavior by focusing exclusively on a different group.
As for your vapid White Knight accusation, I'm not speaking up for women, I'm speaking up for myself against your illogical assertions. Lack of reason offends me.
Women are welcome to do whatever they want and they certainly don't need you telling them they are Doing It Wrong.
I believe women should be welcome to highlight their gender or not, because in neither case does their behavior directly hurt me so it's none of my business or yours. I do think men demanding that they do one or the other are way out of line, though, and people taking that as an excuse for why they ignore their existence are just acting scummy.
The obvious solution is for men to stop assuming everyone is male. That, in fact, has nothing to do with women at all and isn't their problem to solve.
I'm sorry that the absurdity of your implications are not more obvious. I don't have the patience to spell it out for you, maybe someone else does. You're in denial about the reality of the social forces that have created the gender inequality in the tech industry. It's a result of the actions of males, and it makes a lot of intuitive sense to address the problem there.
Do you understand how absurd the position that you've backed yourself into sounds? The people perpetuating the problem shouldn't be part of the solution or discussion? Women should speak up for themselves? Oh really, you mean like the article we're discussing.
Maybe if slaves had just fought harder, right, then we wouldn't have had to help them out?
>The people perpetuating the problem shouldn't be part of the solution or discussion?
I never said this. You made it up. Women standing up for themselves is not mutually exclusive to stamping down on asshats.
Funnily enough though, I figured you'd counter with something as vapid and baseless as
>Maybe if slaves had just fought harder, right, then we wouldn't have had to help them out?
You say it like no slave uprisings ever erupted in the course of history. But this is a strawman, unless women are slaves in our society. Some discrimination in tech hardly equates to a life of servitude.
Then what is your point in this conversation? All you've done is act like women aren't doing enough and defending the assumptions that lead to that discrimination in tech by placing men above women and defaulting to "he". You don't even understand why that's a problem after this discussion has been warped into something completely and entirely absurd.
I mean, you don't even understand how offensive it is to sit there and say "I don't care if they're bullied and harassed, they should do it because they should speak up for themselves".
Is that your response to all issues? Gay kids in school should learn to fight their bullies to affect change? Sure, it's a nice idea, I'm sure everyone on HN would love for everyone to feel so empowered, but you must be in one-helluva privileged class to sit in your armchair and hand out recommendations like that without any acknowledge of the personal implications. Again, precisely as the article talks about.
Your posts read, one after another, as someone who is really trying to say "Eh, it's not an issue [for me], if you think it is, you go do something about it".
>I was encouraging the author to not be afraid to reveal that she is a woman.
Then you missed the entire point of the article, or you're more naive than I could have guessed. Again, you act as if "revealing that she is a woman" is without consequence. Or else your "encouragement" is just completely empty and still has no appreciation for the abuse that often results from such a revelation. (For the third time, as the article talks about).
>I also find your "women must be helped" attitude offensive.
If that's what you took away, you haven't been paying a single bit of attention. How many times have I specifically talked about trying to address how men's actions have affected women in tech. Or are you really implying that "We should evaluate how we alienate women" to be "all women are helpless".
I find that gross misrepresentation to be offensive and dishonest.
>Again, you act as if "revealing that she is a woman" is without consequence
You can't have your cake and eat it too. There has to be sacrifices for the long run.
>How many times have I specifically talked about trying to address how men's actions have affected women in tech. Or are you really implying that "We should evaluate how we alienate women" to be "all women are helpless".
So buried inside all the cynicism and angst this was you were trying to articulate?
> Why else would you "default" to "he" instead of "she"? Because you assume the author to be a man.
I can say both from experience and personal perspective that, especially in America, it is a cultural norm to use "he" as a gender-neutral, non-normative pronoun. "They" sounds both awkward and invalid since it is taught as a plural pronoun.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and this is the way I and everyone around me spoke. We never used "he" exclusively as a male pronoun, especially when gender was indeterminate. Some people would correct themselves by saying, "He ... or she..." I myself have spent years training myself to use "they" instead of "he," and I still catch myself using "he" when I clearly mean to use a gender-neutral pronoun.
Please do not put words in people's mouths and assume that when we use "he" it means we think it's a man. Our subculture is different from your own. Our upbringing is different from yours. It is a fallacy to assume otherwise.
I never intended to imply that this was a conscious assumption, but I do believe the assumption is there. Language matters and shapes our thinking, and there is no reason to think that "everyone does it" doesn't mean it's sexist. Even where is a cultural norm, it sets male up as default and women up as weird variations from that norm.
It has been shown in German and Russian that the gender of inanimate nouns changes how people respond to them. Why do you think that wouldn't be true of referring to everyone as male?
You're missing the point too. Language is an important part of human perception, conscious and unconscious. The words you use shape reality, and using a pronoun that is specifically not gender neutral in a context has an effect, subtle or not. I'm not sure how else to convey this thought except to ask you to do some research into how language affects perception, particularly when it comes to social inequality. It's a well studied and well documented arena of sociology
"It" /ɪt/ is a third-person, singular neuter pronoun (nominative (subjective) case and oblique (objective) case) in Modern English. --Wikipedia, "It (pronoun)"
"neuter pronoun" links to "Gender-neutral pronoun".
I guess I should have specified an anthromorphic, gender-neutral pronoun. It has a long history of referring to non-human things, and when you do use it to refer to humans, it is almost always highly derogatory because the implication is the object of the it isn't human.
And you don't see how that leads people to unconsciously bias themselves towards thinking of the author as male, even if they don't actively decide to think of them that way?
"she" is a diminutive of "he". As with other female-specific diminutives ("poetess", "actress"), the solution is for women to start using the "male" version, making it gender-neutral.
Because that way they don't have to take responsibility for their actions.
Also note that their proposed solution doesn't solve anything; it might just prevent you, personally, from being able to complain about it. I'm guessing that is their actual goal.
Honestly, because I'm lazy. Maybe I'll use 'they'. Maybe I'll use 'he'. Maybe I'll use both. If I'm not given the gender of the author, I'm just going to write what sounds right rather than take the time to make it gender-less. It's not like I would blatantly disregard the author's gender if it was provided, though.
> Furthermore, doing so results in harassment and having my writing dismissed/trivialized/tokenized because of my gender. Hence why I don’t (or at least, hadn’t until this post).
I'd like to understand the severity of this issue. Can you provide examples of technical articles written by women that were dismissed due to their gender?
It's not actually a catch-22, it's just a shitty situation.
Catch-22 means you can't do something without doing another thing first, but you can't do that first either because it relies on the thing you wanted to do in the first place. It's a closed circle with no way in.
This, however, it's just painful. Women can't emphasize their gender without being ridiculed by assholes, but they can't hide it because they would then be helping prolong the ridicule for others.
"You're either part of the problem, or part of the solution." Sitting back and doing nothing allows the problem to continue. I'm as guilty of doing nothing as anyone.
I really don't care who wrote the article, only that it's a good article. If I see something techie don't by a woman, I generally think "Good for her" and then continue on with life. I don't assign any special weight to her words at all. They still stand on their own.
On the other hand, my experience is that closed communities are a lot better about not discriminating. If someone says, "the op is a She", everyone apologizes, switches, and continues on.
Open communities, where any asshole with a keyboard can leave a comment, tend to be slums. Assholes know they can post their opinions without censorship, so they do. Constantly. There's repercussions, either.
As much as I like finding random stuff on the net, the only communities worth joining are the private ones. And there's precious few of those any more.
> The catch-22 here is that if I choose to blend in, then people like the commenters above assume that everything they see was written by men, and use that as an excuse to dismiss the concerns of women in the tech industry
Couldn't this be solved by a little 'about the author' section at the end of your articles? Pull in your gravatar and add a couple of sentences about yourself. Now everyone knows you are a woman, and you didn't have to change your background to hot-pink to do so! :)
Did you read the article at all? Her whole point is that women should not have to do this, that they face discrimination if they do do this, and that we should refrain from assuming that if we don't see one of these, it's by a man. The problem isn't that they don't know she's a girl. It's that they assume she isn't one.
> Sure, I could go out of my way to make it obvious that I’m a woman. I could put my name at the top of my blog or on my About page, or I could mention it in passing in my writing. That’s not something a male author has to do, though. Furthermore, doing so results in harassment and having my writing dismissed/trivialized/tokenized because of my gender. Hence why I don’t (or at least, hadn’t until this post).
>Her whole point is that women should not have to do this, that they face discrimination if they do do this
I don't think this point is correct. The technical nature of computer science/technology makes it easier to judge a work by its technical merits, not by authorship.
Yes, that's very true, it can be more easily judged by technical merits, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be. Not to mention it invites less-than-appropriate or nice messages.
Interesting, but a bit of a strawman: one comment dismisses complaints of women because he accuses them of not contributing anything of merit. That is of course flawed in itself, but it is just one person's comment, not a general attitude towards female bloggers.
I also don't think that for example on HN it should be possible to "pay" with technical contributions for non-technical contributions, like, for every x relevant
articles you would be allowed an irrelevant article. Ideally, every article should stand on it's own (probably not realistic, but an ideal to attain to).
I fail to see how it's irrelevant. In this article, someone who was a man until a year or two ago used herself as the perfect example of a woman who succeeds in the tech world.
Second, it's quite possible that being a transgender woman would subject the author to even more discrimination, so what's your point? That Yust doesn't count as a real woman succeeding in the tech world because she was born with male intellectual attributes?
Chromosomes are directly responsible for most developmental differences between living creatures. If someone uses this fact to convince themselves it's why women aren't seen in the tech world, Amber has done nothing to disprove it.
Amber has benefitted from male privilege for most of her life. If people believe male privilege, brogrammer environments, etc. are why women aren't seen in the tech world, Amber has done nothing to disprove it.
She is literally the worst possible piece of evidence to use to disprove the stereotype.
This is not a burner account and I am not transphobic.
Addressing only this part: "Chromosomes are directly responsible for most developmental differences between living creatures."
Chromosomes are only part of sex differentiation in utero. Many of the developing embryo's/fetus' sex characteristics, both neurological and physiological, are the result of how it responds to the particular mix of hormones it is exposed to at different developmental stages. Sometimes the levels of androgens and estrogens are not consistent throughout the entire development process so the baby can be born with neurological characteristics of one sex but physiological characteristics of the other.
In humans, at least, hormones are responsible for the majority of developmental differences. Chromosomes usually determine what hormones will be released at different stages of development, but this doesn't always hold true - e.g. de la Chapelle syndrome and complete androgen insensitivity syndrome.
Trans men and women usually undergo hormone replacement therapy which sends their body through a second puberty; they develop the secondary sex characteristics of their transitioned sex. These hormones also influence emotional responses and other psychological aspects in the same way they would influence a cis (non-trans) person.
Several studies [1] have shown that there are similarities in brain structure of trans individuals to their cis counterparts. The most common hypothesis used to explain physiological differences in trans individuals is that infants are exposed to androgen levels that are either too high or too low, causing the brain to sexually differentiate towards a different sex than other parts of the body.
So, while trans women may have benefited from male privilege in their lives pre-transition, they may not necessarily "think like men". (And the inverse is true for trans men.)
In addition, wages for trans women tend to fall post-transition, while wages for trans men increase. [2]
Amber faces the same sexism as all women, and her physiology and brain structure are likely quite different than those of a cis man. That she was assigned male at birth is less relevant than you think.
I can't think of someone more apt to share experiences and criticism about treatment of gender in an industry that someone who has literally experienced both sides of it first-hand. (edit: from an exterior appearance standpoint, obviously, but isn't that the very point of this discussion. People are inappropriately judged on their visible, expressed exterior gender rather than by the merit of their contributions?)
Google her. You'll see a lot of news about her suing the DMV over her gender.
At the very least, it confuses everything she says. She spent most of her life as a man, and succeeded as a man... And now she's trying to use her tech articles as an example of a woman succeeding. Some will take the message to be 'You can succeed as a woman, but only if everyone thinks you're a man.' and that's not the case.
* I don't know her and can't speak for how she thinks.
Who are you telling to remember? Because if I was the author, who had shown she was creating things and trying to be known for that, I would be hugely offended at that kind of gender-stereotyped patronizing remark.
There are many stories of people overcoming discrimination (say, Indian immigrants being thought to be unfit for executive positions in Silicon Valley), and they make the current hot topic of women in tech look incredibly dumb. We're talking overt discrimination, not occasional pronoun misuse.
Indians in Silicon Valley started a group called TiE to help establish a presence. Does it hurt for them to have labeled themselves as "Indus Entrepreneurs" and try to help each other? Doesn't seem so.
So maybe the right way to overcome this "oppression" you feel is just to quit fucking bitching, put your head down and code, and maybe help a few other women out along the way when you achieve success.