Interesting that she is autistic. Autism is apparently more common among boys than girls. Could this be one reason why tech attracts more men than women?
Arguably, a slightly autistic personality is helpful for a programmer. Possibly it could also be a big reason for many future programmers to turn to tech in the first place, where you deal with strict, deterministic rules instead of emotions.
This would obviously not excuse misogyny in tech, but could help explain the gender imbalance.
> Arguably, a slightly autistic personality is helpful for a programmer.
This sounds a bit like people who go "haha, I'm so OCD, I like my pencils all pointing the wrong way" - incorrect self-diagnosis. "Slightly autistic personality" unfortunately seems to be fairly frequently used as an excuse to be an asshole.
> And yet there may be a connection between a predisposition to work in tech and autism.
Maybe, or maybe wealthier folks are more likely to a) have computers for their kids b) have access to doctors for diagnoses and c) be white. We'll have to get the causation right.
I'm talking about the "I've never been formally diagnosed but..." and "I think I'm a little on the spectrum" sort of comments that often wind up in threads about programmers being socially awkward.
Side note: having Aspergers doesn't make you an asshole.
Having difficulty with social interaction due to a medical condition, IMO, doesn't make one an "asshole", any more than a cancer patient who lies in bed all day is "lazy".
It's the people who are aware of and excuse being an asshole by a self-diagnosed "oh I'm probably on the spectrum" statement I've issues with.
But it does exist. Diagnosing it wasn't the issue, it was labeling it as an illness that was. Of course, this opens the big question as to what is or isn't an illness, especially when you begin to look at things given hypothetical accepting societies that may not currently exist.
Interestingly, Silicon Valley has quadruple the national rates of autism, and it's speculated that the genes that contribute to excelling in engineering also contribute to autism spectrum disorders.
Wanting to solve every problem and dismissing solutions that don't fit constraints is not an autistic behavior. It's an engineering behavior, as in "this is what all engineers do." It's socially awkward when you can't turn it off, but it's not autism.
> Interesting that she is autistic. Autism is apparently more common among boys than girls. Could this be one reason why tech attracts more men than women?
"Maybe this group of people has more of X because X is more likely to have a neurodevelopmental disorder"? Nice. Thank you so much for associating a whole industry with autism.
A disorder that apparently 1-2 out of 1,000 people have, at that.
>"Maybe this group of people has more of X because X is more likely to have a neurodevelopmental disorder"? Nice. Thank you so much for associating a whole industry with autism.
You have it flipped. "This group of people with a neurodevelopmental disorder are more inclined to X and therefore industry of X has more of them."
Which is an entirely valid thing to say, by the way.
I'd be willing to bet that people with higher-than-normal levels of empathy and an outgoing attitude are more inclined to work social jobs than solitary jobs. Would you disagree with that?
I can understand a displeasure that the association is with something "negative", but that doesn't immediately invalidate the statement.
>A disorder that apparently 1-2 out of 1,000 people have, at that.
And how many people work in "the Tech industry", specifically coding/engineering related fields, compared to other areas like Marketing, Sales, Design, Social Workers, etc? Maybe 1 or 2 in 1,000? If this is your biggest defense against their statement being "wrong" I have to find it unconvincing at best.
> You have it flipped. "This group of people with a neurodevelopmental disorder are more inclined to X and therefore industry of X has more of them."
> Which is an entirely valid thing to say, by the way.
The point was the severity. 1 to 2 persons in a thousand, and you think this is sizeable enough to impact a whole industry which is not really small at all? To colour a whole industry? To such a degree that everyone or a majority is on the autism spectrum, to refer to your last paragraph? Ridiculous. Not to mention that would require all people with autism to be functioning enough to maintain a job. Assuming I would even accept your pulled-out-of-your-hat numbers.
What is effectively being said is that many of those nerd archetypes are born out of, or affected to a large degree, by people with neurodevelopmental disorder. A great springboard for people who hate nerds to claim that they are suffering from a kind of arrested development or other non-normal deficiency, for sure.
> I can understand a displeasure that the association is with something "negative", but that doesn't immediately invalidate the statement.
You're right that it wasn't as much of a statement about it being wrong as it was a statement like this betrays his attitude towards the tech industry. Hint: I didn't ever say that it being an outlandish belief made it wrong, for crying out loud! The mention of 1-2 in a thousand was more of a reference to how it was unlikely, however.
Maybe I'll start to consider the veracity of this claim itself when I see some effort to prove it one way or the other. But I don't have much patience for complacent musings on deficits of a whole group of people.
> I'd be willing to bet that people with higher-than-normal levels of empathy and an outgoing attitude are more inclined to work social jobs than solitary jobs. Would you disagree with that?
But that wasn't the comparison to begin with. The implicit comparison was with people who have a lack of empathy and social inclination due to neurodevelopment disorder, and normal people. Now if we change that comparison to people in general -- on average normal -- who can either be inclined to be people-oriented or not, then this becomes a whole other question. Not even objectionable anymore!
I thought that we were about to move beyond viewing people who choose to, or somehow have less talent for, being social as being underdeveloped in some way[1]. Apparently not. Do we ever hear about extra talkative or otherwise people-oriented people being deficit in some way? No, of course not. Such people are just good, normal people. Apparently people with some kind of high intellect (not that all such people have that) must have traded something else in some way, but people who are people-focused are just well-rounded and overall fantastic. Maybe we should also discuss one of those ridiculous tropes about how some high-powered jobs are "filled"[2] with people who are apparently sociable and outgoing, but really are sociopaths. Right? No one would ever be offended by that.
[1] In the sense of being medically diagnosed with autism.
[2] Again: it's the relative quantity that makes these discussions absurd. Certainly without any extraordinary evidence to back them up.
Arguably, a slightly autistic personality is helpful for a programmer. Possibly it could also be a big reason for many future programmers to turn to tech in the first place, where you deal with strict, deterministic rules instead of emotions.
This would obviously not excuse misogyny in tech, but could help explain the gender imbalance.