It is the weekly females in tech industry time again?
At the risk of derailing the thread, why do so many people want to get more women into programming? Isn't that just as misguided as trying to get more men into nursing? Just because we strive for gender equality doesn't mean every job has to have exactly the same gender ratios.
I don't want to get more women into programming. I want to end the endemic and prolific discrimination against women in programming. The lack is a symptom.
I also find it very weird that an entire industry went from being female dominated to male dominated and everyone defends it saying "it's always been this way! Equality isn't about enforcing even ratios!"
Well no, it's not, but when you have these situations, where the number of people who could do something is vastly different to those that stick it out as a career, and those that do talk about systematic intolerance and abuse, there is a problem there.
As others have said, it's very hard to discriminate against women since it's is mostly based on problem solving/programming skill. But that is not to say there isn't a general air chauvinism and/or objectification in the tech industry.
I agree that getting more women into tech is a solution, but this always operates under the assumption that women actually want to be in tech.
The point isn't to have exact same gender ratios in the tech industry.
There are women out there who would make great programmers / sysadmins / etc, but never finish the process of becoming one, are dissuaded from ever starting, or flat-out quit the industry after N number of years, simply because of the barriers put in place by men assuming that the field is only for men.
What sort of barriers?
Most of this seems to come down to "Women feel uncomfortable in tech because there are too many men" which of course prevents there from being more Women in tech.
It's also possible that some of the pressure comes from other women , not just men. A woman might be considered weird by other women for wanting to hang around in an environment dominated by geeky men.
I know tech women who have been called dykes by their female pier group in the same way male nurses might be accused of being gay.
People will naturally make assumptions based on prior experiences and statistics , essentially "optimising for the common case". In the same way that I would make an assumption that somebody from say Pakistan is more likely to be a muslim than christian.
This is simply how humans operate, probably because it has survival value and is more a function of evolution than prejudice.
It's not a difficult assumption to get past anyway, talking knowledgeably about something a recruiter would probably not know or even wearing a tech related T shirt would make people change their assumptions.
The only way to solve that particular problem properly would be to have more women in tech.
An actual barrier would be a company or a CS programme deliberately discriminating against women by not employing them. Now I'm sure this does happen in some cases and would be difficult to gather evidence of because any company admitting to this practice would be open to law suits. Another example would be of creating a workplace that was somehow misogynistic in some way, but I actually find that more common in other industries than in tech.
OTOH , many universities seem to actually discriminate in favour of women for CS, in some cases lowering entry requirements on giving a priority on placement. They still tend to end up with 80%+ men though.
One observation I have made about women who work as developers or in an engineering/science field is that the majority I have met have tended to be chinese. This makes me wonder if there is in fact a stigma attached to western women going into tech but I don't necessarily think this stigma comes from the inside.
Programming is about most gender-agnostic industries there are: there's no heavy lifting of anything (except figuratively speaking) and you don't need to deal with that many people so it doesn't basically matter if you're a man, woman, or an alien.
It certainly is that programming isn't for everyone, men included, and the current bias seems to signal that significantly more men are interested in programming as a career than women.
The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait which might contribute to the outcome in the case of programming, but similarly the heavy use of aesthetics and social interaction in cosmetology is a feminine trait which might contribute to the outcome of the gender distribution for that vocation.
You can bring the horse down to the water but you can't make her (or him) drink.
The pervading attitude of The heavy use of logic is a masculine trait is a rather good example of at least one barrier. Do you not see how that statement is extremely problematic?
How is that a barrier? Extremely problematic? What the heck?
First, note that it's my impression that logic and action are more dominant with men. Based on my experience on life, women, men, and relationships, logic and action seems to strenghten men's inherent identities. Men feel manly when they build stuff and solve problems, and that's generally essential to a male identifying himself as a man. This applies to cocky behaviour and winning women, too.
Now, women can certainly do both. I know women with high capabilities in logic and action such as my wife but the thing is that women often choose not to: their identities are enforced by other things in life. Unlike with men, for women it's not essential to exercise logical problems in order to be a woman. My wife doesn't rediscover her feminine identity in solving problems and fixing stuff eventhough she has done and succeeded in that before we met. My daughter is more interested in fixing bicycles and learning to use the tools in my toolbox than my son is, but it's the other things that she already does that she's using to learn how to grow up to become a woman.
Thus, I suggested the especially masculine trait of enjoying logic might contribute to the gender bias of programming as it seems to contribute to the gender bias of other activities, too. (Or it might not, but I didn't happen to suggest that.)
It's not a barrier, however. It's choosing not to drink, even if brought down to the water. And that's perfectly okay!
This might just be too much to accept for people of naivete. Men and women are different and there's generally no way around that in the long run.
EDIT: Back to the topic: programming doesn't give a squat about whether you're a man or a woman. It only requires logical capabilities and the willingness to use them. It doesn't dictate where the willingness comes from and for what I know, my fellow programmers don't give a rat's ass who wrote the code. They would accept women where they accept men because gender isn't a criteria in communicating with source code.
There is no way to make that assumption irrelevant. In absolutely no way is programming a perfect meritocracy, and social factors come into play just as much as any field. If the pervading attitude is "men are inherently better at this task," why would a woman want to enter the field?
Besides, if programming ability could be accurately quantified, there wouldn't be a constant stream of articles on how difficult it is to separate the wheat from the chaff when hiring.
OK, this is Poe's Law territory. You're trolling us, right? Because otherwise you just wondered aloud what possible barriers there could be to women joining our field and then exposed yourself as one of them.
There is a huge stereotype that tech is for men. There is a ton of misogyny in the tech sector. The hope is that by bringing women into the tech sector this stereotype ceases to exist. This is important because there are women out there that get interested in tech but society pushes them away because it's not feminine. There is a ton of wasted potential out there.
It's worse than just females in tech, it's OMG men and women are different! Eeek!
I kinda like the difference myself. Not because I don't want women in tech, but because women should be able to pursue whatever they want that makes sense when you consider their differences from men.
Blacks and Whites are different. There's no discrimination, it's just that Blacks are more interested in basketball and driving taxis and making music then getting into Harvard or practising law. We should celebrate these differences instead of trying to tear down barriers that don't exist.
I know you're being sarcastic, but you bring up a point that I wonder about: there's certainly a difference in cultural values that contributes to the racial and gender profile of different occupations. Do we have a responsibility to change those values? Most ways of measuring progress on the problem have the unstated expectation that the difference in values doesn't exist, and you can't meet the measurement goals without eliminating that difference.
Let's switch from talking about race and gender and use the words "Insiders" and "Outsiders" and think of a big structure, we'll callit "The Keep."
I think the first and most urgent job is to change cultural assumptions amongst the insiders. If they are thinking that outsiders aren't biologically inclined towards living in a keep, not qualified to maintain a keep, &c., that's a huge barrier, a moat if you will.
So we remove that. The next problem is that even with the moat gone, the outsiders fear being uncomfortable inside, whether from being one of a very few outsiders amongst a lot of insiders or from other outsiders resenting them moving into the keep.
I think it's important to remove those sources of discomfort and to actively encourage outsiders to consider moving inside so that we get all of those who woud like to come inside but fear unpleasant consequences.
After that, I don't think we need to try to convince people who like living outside to come in. Let them be happy outside! But I do think we should remove barriers to coming inside and encourage coming inside to counteract any fears of negative consequences for those who would otherwise like to come into the Keep.
Upvoted as well.
I see more and more of these complaints lately and it just feels that people complain just for the sake of complaining. Perhaps for the rest of the women (me being a woman in tech) programming and tech just isn't interesting enough to pursue it? That could just be one of the reasons - like i have no interest in nursing, thus i am not pursuing that as a career. Stop looking for reasons for complaining and go and pursue stuff you love.
Because if there were more women in programming I might not have to deal with people doing a double take as they walk into my office and saying 'oh I expected you to be a guy!'
Yes because there is no evidence that such differences are anything but a result of variables such as socio-economic status, how stable your upbringing was and the amount of calories you had as a child.
I'm kind of disappointed by the comments here. Not just by the fact that people couldn't read the entire article before making judgments but more that I would have thought the people of this website would understand why it's important to bring women into tech.
Women aren't biologically inclined to not like STEM fields (which I sadly see is a popular sentiment). The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture. The stereotype of a computer whiz is a man. Ask yourself why you never considered becoming a nurse (if you are a man) and you will understand why women reject the idea of working in the tech industry.
>Women aren't biologically inclined to not like STEM fields (which I sadly see is a popular sentiment).
True.
> The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture.
Ehm... not always. I've found that there is a cultural bias that the STEM fields are considered asocial and culturally women/girls have been raised to dislike asocial activities.
+ for recognizing that. Consider this though, what causes first, the asocial stigma? And what causes our society to keep girls from asocial activities?
An argument could be made for a broader more general form of misogyny.
> what causes first, the asocial stigma? And what causes our society to keep girls from asocial activities?
In most western societies there is very little that keeps girls from these activities. But then there is the boob tube, watch some disney channel and study the stereotypes present in the shows. It kind of answers both questions. But it is not only Disney Channel I would consider it pervasive in western culture as a whole. e.g. Like TV shows like The Big Bang Theory.
If there were a lot of women with the kind of monomania that gets them through http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/L/larval-stage.html, but repelled from the profession by incidentals like role models, then there would be a lot of women hacking alone outside their day jobs. Are they really out there, and just aren't identifiably publishing that work or going to these conferences? Or is that kind of anti-social obsession not evenly distributed among teenagers?
I think you missed the point on that by a bit. See the point was men don't generally become nurses as often as women, because of the social stigma that it's a woman's job.
The way I figure there is no biological reason why a girl wouldn't want to expand her mental capacities via technology and programming. It's strictly because it's seen as a nerdy guy stuck in basement thing, then the brogrammers came out and people realized it's also a guy-that-views-women-as-objects field. Yeah, those brogrammers really helped the cause.
Actually, I was intentionally pointing out the absurdity of the blanket statement being made, whilst attempting to apply humour. I did consider being a nurse, when training to help with a family members illness the nurse teaching me suggested I would be good at it. I was not interested, in large part for the exact reasons I listed above.
I would also like to point out that the gender imbalance in nursing is not blamed on the nurses - you yourself describe it as a social stigma.
Fixing societal attitudes needs something rather more than an introspection on the tech industry and why we are full of terrible people. It needs parents and schools to encourage girls to study the relevant areas, it needs schools to get all of their pupils trying out basic programming in a rewarding, exciting and gender neutral environment.
I could be wrong - but to my mind this is a problem in all of STEM and fixing it needs a broad response to treat it as a single issue.
N.B. Women not going to conferences because they are home to a host of manchildren who spend half their time drunk is a separate issue and one deserving of serious attention.
EDIT: I have no idea why some of this seems to be in italics. Sorry :(
> The reason women don't go into these fields is because of the misogynistic culture.
That is quite an assertion. Surely you can see that there are many, many more factors than just this one, even if you discount "biological inclination"?
She isn't upset by the fact that the ladies room was relabeled as a mens room, she was frustrated by the fact that she didn't find as many female peers at the conference. She felt encouraged around other women to discuss technology and wants to encourage other women to become excited about the field.
I have some insight into this. I'm engaged to a mechanical engineer who works in a largely male dominated industry. To this point, I've never heard her discuss another female engineer at her company. We've discussed the issues of women in engineering and how interesting the dynamics are for a woman and I can agree that it would be an enjoyable ideal if there were more women in her field. At the same time, she wants nothing to do with women in her field that are simply there to prove that women can do the same jobs as men. I have to agree with her on this point. Every time I see ads for computer schools encouraging people with no experience to get a degree and flood the market, I shake my head. Why should I want someone with no passion, who simply wants a job, to enter my market and drive down the price of labor?
So, I understand where the author is coming from here. She enjoys the company of her sex and would like to have a larger network of her peers be female. I have no problem with that. I would say, though, to be careful about what you wish for. You want women who are passionate to join the workforce, not just any old gal.
“Why should I want someone with no passion, who simply wants a job, to enter my market and drive down the price of labor?”
Because for every 10 people with no passion who simply want a job, you get one who is incredibly passionate but simply wanted a job. One who didn't realize that hey, this is actually pretty cool stuff, and maybe it's more than just a job, it can be a passion and a career.
I am of course making up the numbers. But discarding someone because they don't care before they've even learned a subject is even sillier than assuming that women don't want to be in tech because they're not interested in tech, rather than simply because they never took to looking into it because of all of the stereotypes (many of them true) about the male dominance of the industry.
I may not have made it clear enough, but I'm not saying we shouldn't encourage women or non-technical people to pursue technical experience and/or education. I personally prefer to work in a diverse workforce and enjoy sharing my workday with people of different sexes, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. I'm not sure what stereotypes you're referring to, either, as I personally have worked across a multitude of domains and have not seen any difference in the approach of the professional development world to that of the rest of the market (my last software company was co-founded by a woman in fact).
I'm saying that simply wanting women or any other sociological division of people to be more prevalent for the sake of presence is a mistake. In your example, you say that out of 10 people that are encouraged/trained, you might get one very passionate developer. I know the math is made up, but if you look at this in the other direction, you now have 9 developers that are bad at their job, dislike/don't care about their job or possibly both. This would mean that 90% of the workforce is now comprised of people who are hindering the other 10%. That 90% of the code written is probably poorly executed.
I think that the career of being a developer is attractive enough that anyone interested in pursuing it would see it as a viable option. Segregating encouragement along the line of sex I think does more harm then good though.
We already have the more-to-fewer split of terrible programmers to great programmers. They just mostly happen to be men. That's all. Not having a passion for programming is not an exclusively female characteristic; neither is having an undiscovered passion.
I expanded a bit on my underlying point at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597547 , and there is an excellent reply regarding early-stage discouragement by nancyhua there as well. I have no interest in a sociological division being more prevalent just because. The problem is they're subtly discouraged from joining our field altogether, and, as others have pointed out in the past, that means we're missing out on a full 50% of potential awesome developers (or whatever other subfield you want to talk about).
Or potentially so. We don't know, because there isn't a truly equal sense of this field being a possibility.
I just want to say that I think it's great that you're impassioned about this topic. I'm definitely not trying to discourage you from it. My reticence comes more from the fact that this is such a complicated topic for me.
On one hand, I'm all for supporting the goals and opportunities of all individuals equally. When it requires special interest in certain groups though, I sometimes worry that it will create a larger divide. Sexual identity has such a huge impact on us during our developmental stages. The pressures of it don't just stem from adults, but from peers and school as well. I'm of the opinion that rather than singling out individuals by sex, it would be more valuable to expose all of them to it.
This is anecdotal, but I have a personal experience with a program that encouraged more adoption of specific fields by females in my classes. In middle school, a large number of girls were separated from the regular classes to attend special math and science classes. These girls were provided a more in-depth education when it came to mathematics and were given more support in learning the material. It really irked me, especially at that young age. I couldn't understand why these girls were being singled out for certain topics and why I couldn't be involved with them simply because I was a boy. I can't speak to the effectiveness of this program. I do know that a large percentage of these girls ended up in my high school math and science classes which regularly had a nearly 50/50 split, but again, that's not evidence that the program worked.
What it did do, though, was make me realize that I was not an equal. It was probably my first realization that not everyone was treated equally and that there was really no rhyme or reason to why. I saw similar things throughout my years in school, but this one affected me the most. When I hear about the professional female organizations that go to schools and encourage girls specifically to pursue careers in mathematics or engineering, I cringe. I want equality, but I don't know how inequality gets us there.
I think the point of those situations is to make sure they're not under the impression they're alone in domains where, if you don't do specific programs, girls often think they are. Essentially, you create a social support net that may not otherwise be there.
In my view, you're technically right. We shouldn't have to emphasize one side over the other. The problem is we're combating an existing, underlying emphasis. If a balance scale is unbalanced towards one side, you don't balance it out by adding weight to both sides. You have to add weight to the one side until you've restored balance.
Now, I think it's fair to question how much we should segregate and isolate with respect to that. What you describe as happening in middle school is probably not the best approach. I think it would probably make more sense to open a whole class, gender-unspecific, but, again to create that social support, perhaps try to group the girls in the class into one of the sections (assuming there are multiple ones). The problem is, in that case, probably a marketing one. Presenting it as an girls only course may increase the mystery and interest, and, thus, enrollment.
She's complaining that at an event with 97% of attendance by men (by her own statement), they got, say, 92% of the bathroom facilities, and then throws a fit.
Not buying it.
If this is the biggest outrage in your life you should consider yourself fortunate.
I don't think she has a problem with the fact that men got 92% of the bathroom facilities. Especially when it was logically justified. I just think she was disillusioned by the fact that there were so few woman at the conference that a decision like that could be justified.
Wait, what are you basing this generalization on? If it's purely based on numbers, I've worked with more female programmers than african americans. If the allegation is that the software industry is sexist purely because women don't participate, then the software industry must be even more racist.
Umm...assuming no bias, institutional or otherwise, you should randomly encounter a woman programmer once for every male programmer. Whereas you'd only encounter an African American one out of eight programmers (12% of the total pop).
Some certainly are. It's important for us to have diversity in a variety of areas (and intersections of areas), not just women. That being said, this specific article is focused on a woman's experience, so it makes sense that it would focus on gender.
Low afro-american/hispanic participation can be explained in large part by lack of high quality education, lack of computers, etc. There is some residual, but nothing like the vast disparity that exists for women despite a lack of acceptable reasons.
She's wasn't upset that there was less bathroom capacity for women, but rather that this illustrated the (in her view) woefully meager representation of women at the conference.
I had the same initial reaction, but I think that the bathroom situation isn't the point at all, just a symbol of the shrinking number of women in the field - which is what she's actually concerned about.
I think it was more of a trigger for the realisation that 97% of attendants are men. i.e. when you're so male heavy you need to convert bathrooms, there is a real problem.
Not exactly. It's poorly written. It takes a lot of effort to read this and determine the author's point. She does a poor job of transferring from her bathroom story to the general issue of there being an absence of women in IT.
Then she starts throwing around statistics in paragraph 6 with absolutely no segue. She goes from whiny complainer about something trivial to I'm gonna fix the world's problems by talking to other women at this conference.
She's just not a good writer and her being a woman has nothing to do with that.
Oh, come off it. It's not in the least hard to understand what she's talking about, and it's objectively no worse than any other self-indulgent post that gets fawned over here. Come back when you have a critique grounded in content rather than form.
You can't see why a woman would want to be paid quite handsomely to do work that is mentally challenging, not physically arduous, and -- in many cases -- can have a positive societal effect?
Let's compare this to golf, circa 1965. Caving to pressure, a local club opens its memberships to Blacks. One or two tokens with strong business relationships to Whites join, but where are all the other Black businesspeople and professionals?
A liberal White member sighs, "I don't understand why the Black people don't want to relax in our luxurious club, play a round on our excellent course, and eat our sumptuous dining fare. What is the problem?" Meanwhile, the Blacks are thinking, "Who needs to join the club and have all these racist assholes resenting the fact that we're in their club and tiptoeing around us in case the N-word slips out in our presence. How fucking uncomfortable."
p.s. Did I say 1965? What's the deal with Agusta National and Blacks and/or Women?
For those of you who will undoubtedly complain that this is an unfair/exaggerated analogy, think back to how many posts have been on HN about the rampant sexism women have experienced at tech conferences.
To be perfectly clear, I am not saying that conferences are sexist. I'm not denying it either, but I'm trying to make a slightly different point, which is that when a group is overwhelmingly underrepresented, members of that group might fear that they will feel uncomfortable if they join.
I can't really speak for women (for that matter, in 1965 I was too busy potty training to join any golf clubs). But I do wonder whether a certain number of them might look at the industry and shy away even if they haven't been personally exposed to any hostility or overt discouragement.
Just a conjecture, I am not speaking from data or anecdotes.
> Did I say 1965? What's the deal with Agusta National and Blacks and/or Women?
Augusta National isn't remotely comparable to the issue at hand. Its a VERY private, invite only club. There are numerous private clubs of all sorts that only allow men, only women, only blacks, etc. You can't compare a private club to a employment profession.
I don't necessarily agree with Augusta's position but they are a private club, so I just wouldn't join. If you were going to force Augusta to admit everyone then you'd have to go tell the Junior League they have to let men in, head up to the Ladies Golf Club of Toronto and tell them they have to admit male members, etc.
That said, Augusta National has invited black members since ~1990 and two women as of last month, Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore if it tells you anything about the exclusivity of this club.
I'm familiar with Augusta National even if I just noticed that I misspelled the name!
I think it's very relevant to the discussion at hand. We're talking about a profession that outght to be nothing at all like a private club, but the point is that it does behave like a private club. if we in fact didn't behave as if we were members of a club, not only would my comment be irrelevant, these kind sof blog posts wouldn't exist in the first place.
So.
Yes, I agree that the social dynamics of a private club ought not to have anything to do with the social dynamics of a profession, but alas they do in this case.
I will protect Augusta's right to have just male members (not true anymore), just as I will protect the rights of every female-only gym. I will further bet that the female-only gyms have larger benefits than Augusta opening up to female members.
It is an unfair comparison between a profession and a club. They do not hold even close to the same place in society.
Who said Augusta shouldn't have male-only members? The point is that IT departments shouldn't behave like private clubs. The industry behaves like a private club, but it isn't a private club.
Well, I interpreted you p.s. to mean that. A lot of industries in the US (cannot speak for outside the US) need to be more receptive to members of the opposite gender. I am hoping both CompSci and pre-K education both make strides in the coming years.
Equal rights means equal ability to free association.
"Female only gyms protect women from being leered at and feeling objectively and justifiably unsafe."
So, the basic premise is all men are leering and will act on their animal instincts. That isn't true as some men aren't interested in women, yet they too are not allowed. Others, were taught by their parents to be gentlemen. They too are not allowed. Never mind the women interested in other women.
"Male only anything is bullshit"
There is so much wrong with this statement, I don't know what to make of it. I could go with the basic support groups as one basic example.
If you expect female-only to be allowed then male-only needs equal protection.
Because there are plenty of jobs that are mentally challenging and physically arduous that can have a positive societal effect, but come without all the jerks you get in IT.
IT might beat ditch digging or hauling garbage (or not, I think those are both honest work), but how does it compare to other avenues, such as business or medicine?
I had a similar experience when I (a gent) took my grown daughter to a NKOTB reunion concert as a nostalgia trip. The audience was at least 95% female, and the arena restrooms were re-purposed accordingly. I asked an usher and he told me it was common practice to adapt to the gender mix of the audience. I observed many groups of women noting this reallocation with loud triumphant braying laughter. I doubt the Strange Loop men had a triumphal reaction to the bathroom allotment.
There was probably triumphalism because in nearly all large arenas the lines for the women's room are routinely much longer than those for the men's room. So for the men at Strange Loop not having to wait was normal, but for the women at the NKOTB concert it was a highly unusual, pleasant surprise.
No, I don't have statistics to prove this, but it's been the case throughout my 30+ year life living in various places throughout the US. The only time there's typically a longer men's room line in my life is at tech gathering, and it's usually still not the kind of wait where people give up, as often happens to women I know.
That is not a similar experience at all. Even if we ignore that you completely missed the point of the article (she's not complaining about the bathroom situation at all, as seventy trillion other commenters have already pointed out - presumably you didn't read them either?) we still have:
First, you wouldn't have gone to a NKOTB (New Kids on the Block) concert if you weren't going with your daughter. You didn't actively want to be there. The author of the article was going to a programming conference of her own will.
Second, I don't think that NKOTB are important enough that it matters what the gender composition of their audiences are. Programming, on the other hand, is very important, and will only get more important in the future. Such a huge gender imbalance at the most important PL conference will be problematic for women in the future (and for men as well, if you can believe it).
Third, you "doubt" that there was a similar reaction at the PL conference. I presume you weren't actually there, then? I wasn't there either, so I wouldn't even begin to think about making up random suppositions and using them to support my argument.
The issue is something like this. Most people have a tough time realizing that 99% of the times their net condition on any day is result of their own doing.
You see the problem manifest here.
1. Notice non equal participation of women.
2. Blame men.
3. Shift the onus of change on men not women.
4. Wash your hands off the situation, and claim high moral high ground.
Now notice what women did when there was a non equal participation of men. They treat it as it is supposed to be. Which is that men didn't take the initiative to be there and hence laughter.
The first step to change the world is basically start by changing oneself first. Now if you do all this and still get limited by the environment around you, then you can start by blaming the other things.
But even before starting, trying and doing something. You have 100 people to blame you are not likely to see any improvement soon.
"That day in the Family Restroom I threw a fit. Hurled my water bottle at the wall and screamed, "This is not OK!""
How exactly after this do you expect anyone to take you seriously?
Gender equality isn't about having just as many women programmers, and it certainly isn't well servered by having tantrums over the bathroom arrangements.
She had a tantrum in private, which is the correct place to throw a fit. After you've calmed down, then you can do something about the problem, which she's doing.
There's no such thing as a "tone" argument. Recall your freshman year Greek rhetoric course -- what are the three main elements of argumentation? Logos (logic), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (morality or "greatness" of character).
If you start yelling at someone, chances are you're going to destroy your pathos and ethos. Being persuasive involves more than just logos, it involves convincing your audience that you are on the right side.
This, by the way, is why many technical people are awful at arguing. They don't understand that argumentation is about convincing people, not having a bullet point list that you haughtily defend to the last.
The real reason you're right is that the author was clearly adding a bit of dramatization and flair to the piece, rather than blowing up and insulting their opponent.
The "Tone argument" doesn't apply to the person who's being annoyed (they are not making a tone argument), but to someone who 'replies' to them.
Think of "tone argument" like "ad hominem", it's a reply to what someone says, but you don't actually respond or address what they said, instead you address how they said it in a very angry manner ("tone argument"), or based on what sort of person they are ("ad hominem")
It really comes across that way at first. My first reaction was to close the tab at the "throw my water bottle" statement, but after reading the comments here, I read on and saw the author had more to say than just "someone move my bathroom." It's just poorly written, that's all.
Nope, the level of reader comprehension here is too low. She said that there was no line at the family restroom before she said she threw her water bottle. If that isn't enough to clue readers in about the real source of her anguish as opposed to the thing that first tipped her off, there's the whole rest of the article.
It's also poor writing. It was a third of the way through the article before she clued us in about what she was actually mad about. It very much read as if she were angry about the restroom situation.
However, this isn't especially relevant to the real point of the article.
Not really, the anecdote was described poorly and the exit to her main point messy.
I am also slightly bored of people finding things they wish to change and then simply publicising the observation. I was actually hoping that somewhere near the bottom she would offer some insight and/or offer solutions. It might be "Not OK" - but please take a few extra steps and suggest what you think could be done?
Then you missed the point of the article - she was upset when she realised that they had to convert toilets as there were so few women. Her upset was about the lack of women at the event, not at the toilet arrangements.
It could have been more clearly explained, and closer to the start of the article, but if you read the rest of the article you would have seen this.
Women (and other humans) are allowed to be angry about both perceived and actual injustice. TFA isn't even an actual emotional outburst. It's a reasoned account of something happened to the author.
Sometimes inappropriate tone can turn people off of a discussion. That's one of the perks of reading; if you don't care to be shouted at, you can stop reading. Presenting what you think in a way that makes people want to keep reading is important, and failing to do that lost her a reader.
Sometimes. But sometimes it's used as an excuse to not listen to someone. Sometimes no-matter how valid someone's point is, some people always find and excuse to derail the conversation (look at that long list). So not matter what you do, you always lose. Sometimes one gets tired of that.
Meta-question for both men and women. If you were a woman considering a career in IT and you were to read the comments on a thread like this, would you be more likely to join, less likely, or unaffected by reading the thread?
Certainly less likely to join (unless it made me want to get in and change things, which I hope is what women reading this will do). What that gets me is the criticism of her writing, which seems harsher and less constructive than the average on HN. The thing is that it isn't completely false, and the people who post it think we won't notice they're being mean, because there's some truth to what they're saying. But it's only bad writing if you raise the bar of what makes good writing much higher than it normally is for a blog post on HN.
John Gruber calls this "Grading on a curve." For example, if we make a big fuss over her throwing a water bottle in private but celebrate Steve Jobs for throwing temper tantrums over software quality, we're grading on a curve.
(Not that anybody is doing that, it's just an example).
If i was reading a thread like this, it would mean that I am already interested in tech and there was NO WAY that a thread like this would put me off continuing doing what i am interested in.
Not necessarily. What if you are following @raganwald because you know him from mountain biking and he tweets about this thread?
More importantly, I think it's valid for you to have a very binary perspective on tech, either you aren't interested or you're so interested that "To hell with the torpedos, full speed ahead." I know of at least one such woman with the same perspective:
Of course, that doesn't mean everyone will have the same reaction. Some might be more inclined to join, perhaps some less. I'm not a woman, and I don't want to be patronizing and try to suggest that there's going to be one overwhelmingly consistent reaction.
I was just trying to point out that our discussions about gender are as much a part of our culture as the culture we're allegedly discussing.
Love the story! Very inspiring and i think this quote sums up what my belief is, too: “...The computer didn’t care that I was a woman or that I was black..."
It is the same with any other passion one might have - you will always come across brick walls and jerks and what not.
Perhaps I was lucky or unbeknownst to me, ignored all the obstacles that commenters here are stating, but i never had people stopping me to pursue programming and tech. Or looking down at me.
I am in the field not because I want to make a difference and rise up the female % .. actually i do not even notice the ratios at all. To me, we are all just people that share a common interest - tech. And, frankly, I am a bit annoyed with all the winning that is becoming common. It really feels like people complain just for the sake of complaining.
At first I thought she got angry about an relabeling of the women's room, which would be ridiculous, but I think what she means is that it is not OK that there are only so few women. Could be worded clearer...
At first I thought she was complaining about the fact they took away the girl's bathroom... But I think the article evolved into a critic of the lack of women in the field in general - saying it's Not OK that so few women are in the industry...
She probably could have been more clear of what she was not okay with. But a decline in women in the tech field is a deep and complicated topic, and the solutions weren't probed in this article. This article was more of how things are today - and we all already know that there's an extremely small percentage of women in the field. What would have been more provoking of an article would have been discussions of the root causes and reasons of why there are so few women in the industry, and why their career paths tend to differ than their male counterparts. Contributions to this topic by someone like her would be enlightening for sure.
I definitely agree with your view that there aren't enough women in the field, but starting an article, where most of your readers are going to be men, by saying you threw a temper tantrum because a venue swapped the bathrooms to benefit men is inviting readers to disagree with you before you even started making your point.
I read the first part and immediately thought how immature you were, then I read more, and being more open-minded I read over your point, swallowed my previous thought and agree. Not everyone will do that.
I agree we need more women representation, I disagree with the manner the article was written.
I definitely agree with your view that there aren't enough women in the field, but starting an article, where most of your readers are going to be men, by saying you threw a temper tantrum because a venue swapped the bathrooms to benefit men is inviting readers to disagree with you before you even started making your point.
I read the first part and immediately thought how immature you were, then I read more, and being more open-minded I read over your point, swallowed my previous thought and agreed. Not everyone will do that.
I agree we need more women representation, I disagree with the manner the article was written.
Empathy, noun: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
I think this is our[1] problem. Or a generalization of it: the ability to share another's viewpoint. To step into their perspective and say “oh. I see.” And to accept that maybe, just maybe, their viewpoint is valid. This isn't always true, by the way. But it is sometimes true, even often true. And even if it is valid, you may not agree with it.
But here's the thing. There's this idea that maybe women aren't in tech because they aren't interested. That's cool. I'm not interested in nursing, right?
Well it turns out, I've never done nursing. I haven't even looked into it. I haven't talked to anyone about it. Because I just assumed hey, I'm a guy, nurses aren't guys. Not even worth thinking about. That's the mindset. It's not that you know you're not interested, it's that you don't even give it a second thought! [2]
The funny thing is, people here have generally found their passion—be it startups or tech. And when you have your passion and it fell into your lap, it's easy to say “well these people who aren't interested shouldn't be doing this anyway, because they're not passionate”. Even if they had no chance to develop that passion? Even if there was no exposure? Maybe we're being a tad too dismissive here, no? Perhaps we should give people a chance to explore a subject before assuming they'll never be passionate about it. Just a though.
What about those who did reach that passion? Those who entered the tech world, found a minefield of sexism (of which that's-what-she-said jokes are just the very very tip of the iceberg, but more on that in a second), and said “screw it, I'm out of here”.[3] Usually those stories lead to another set of excuses, because the first set of excuses just weren't effective enough to deal with the full scope of the people being shut out of technology, willingly or not.
Let's talk about that's-what-she-said jokes. There are men who say “psh, seriously? Come on, it's just a joke! Why would you have a problem with that?” And there are women who say “well, I can take them. Not only that, I dish them out! Why would you have a problem with that?” Why would you have a problem with that? The trouble with that question is it's so often rhetorical. Not only do you not reaaally want to hear the answer to it, but you don't stop to think about the answer before asking. That kind of question should lead to more understanding.
So I propose, without further ado, that instead of trying to understand why something (anything!) is a problem from your point of view, you consider trying to understand why it's a problem from the other person's point of view, and if, with a little effort, you still can't figure it out, then you ask and look for a real answer. And read the answer. And try to understand then. Because I see far more effort devoted in most of these threads to defending one's own point of view than to understanding the other person's. And these questions, the question of women in tech, the question of social awkwardness, the question of sexism in tech, they are not math problems. There is not necessarily a single correct answer. One person being right doesn't mean the other person is wrong. And right vs wrong is not always immediately obvious.
[1] - when I say our, I mean the tech industry.
[2] - I can't speak to whether or not this is considered a problem in the nursing industry. It's irrelevant to the point at hand.
It depends on whether you believe women are trying to enter the tech field and are being scared away, or whether they are not interested in the first place.
I would suggest it is mainly the latter, look at any IT/CS type course at a college and you will see mainly men and these are people who haven't even entered the field yet to get a chance to be scared off.
The point regards passion is an interesting one, I imagine that there are a fair number of people here who got an interest in tech at an early age long before they had to worry about starting a career.
The question for these people would be, if you were at that age and were instead a born a woman but had the same interests would there have likely been anything that would hold them back? If so what would it most likely have been?
We bring up nursing: well, doctors used to be 100% men. Maybe doctors or biologists used to say, "Women are not interested in medicine or biology." Would any person say that now? Poets probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in writing at all." When women became poets, writers probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in serious literature." Artists probably used to say, "Women aren't interested in art- they prefer to pose as our nude models." Would anyone claim women aren't interested in these fields now? I've never taken a woman's studies class or anything but I imagine many of these arguments have occurred in the past regarding industries that used to be male dominated but aren't anymore.
I think we are generally wrong when we try to presume what a group of people would be interested in. Like who knew Japanese people would get so good at baseball? Whoever said, "Japanese people aren't interested in baseball in the first place bc they like samurai swords, not projectiles," would've been totally wrong, as wrong as whoever said, "Women aren't interested in being doctors. They get hysterical and like to sit quietly in drawing rooms," or as wrong as people who say, "Women don't like math or science or computers. They prefer art and writing and medicine and biology." Maybe one day people will be saying, "Women don't like intergalactic war travel, they prefer math and science and computers and tesseracts."
I don't feel any desire to downvote you. Here's my take as a woman who studied math at MIT and was always one of few if not the only woman in her classes/ nerd camps/ jobs throughout my entire life:
If you're the type of person who always knew what you were passionate about, you should realize this focus and passion is not common. There are some people who can explode out of some small town where everyone's main interest is football and still become a tech mogul. Most people are not like this- people do what their peers do and what they perceive as normal for whatever group they identify with. I think this might actually be especially true for children. Very few children see a scientist doing science or see something cool like a machine and then say, "Mom and Dad, I want to learn to do/make this thing," or then go online and research it. Most of the time, someone is showing the kid what they think this kid should learn or the kid is looking at stuff other people are giving to them, including their peers. Based on this, many girls who aren't deliberately introduced to tech/science as a possible interest don't realize they are interested in tech.
Most kids are friends with kids of the same gender. In middle school, when I went into a classroom to learn QBASIC as the only girl, it was less fun in every way except 1 than being in a classroom filled with girls who were my friends. I didn't make any friends in any of my middle/high school programming classes and generally kept quiet because boys made me shy, and vice versa- I also made them shy when I spoke to them. They weren't doing it on purpose- I think it's just human nature for us all to behave the way we did.
If I were less interested in programming and more motivated to have a fun classroom experience or to fit in (being a girl with my interests made me weird, which bothered me slightly but I was also interested in art so that kind of evened it out. I can imagine it bothering other people much more than it bothered me, sufficient to make them avoid this feeling of strangeness by avoiding atypical (for their peer group) activities), I easily could've not gone to those CS classes or to any of my nerd camps. When I went to a Theoretical CS nerd camp called Andrew's Leap at CMU, out of the other 30 kids, only 3 others were girls. We 4 girls were all Chinese and we became great friends. We also befriended the boys but it wasn't as easy because both boys and girls interested in Theoretical CS don't tend to have PhD's in male-female interaction or even human-human interaction.
Most kids do whatever their friends do. Most people do whatever they perceive people of their type to do. I think having a woman scientist in a popular movie does a lot more for planting that possibility in the popular imagination than many types of affirmative action programs. If anyone is saying, "Black people don't like hockey bc they prefer basketball," I think it just takes a great movie about a famous black hockey player to get more black kids to start saying, "I want to play hockey."
If I have a thesis, it's this:
1) Most people do whatever they perceive the group they self-identify with as doing. If you're a person who self identifies as an intelligent male, maybe you're more likely to think, "I should become a businessman," than, "I should become a nurse." In contrast, a person who self identifies as an intelligent female might be more likely to think, "I should become a doctor," instead of "I should become a programmer." If you're a person who self identifies as an athletic, white male, you might be more likely to think, "I should play basketball," than "I should play pingpong." People don't tend to want to be "weird" because of complex cognitive stuff to do with identity.
2) Most kids do whatever their friends do, and most kids are friends with people their own gender, and most people prefer being with their friends than not. So if you're a girl walking into a classroom full of nerdy, Starcraft-playing boys or a man walking into a yoga studio full of giggling females, you might think, "I should find another room where I fit in better," instead of discovering whether you have an interest in this strange field. Hence the chicken and egg thing. It's less fun for kids to be "weird" because being weird is lonely.
My mom always says(Who had a working career of almost 30 years), that working women live in a world of their own. Her sisters never went to work. She always found that amazing, that a few individuals can spend their whole life doing nothing. Yet now when you talk to my aunts they live in their own world where they have every reason in the world why not working is right. When they both talk about it, men and their influences rarely pop up. Its always discussions about work life balance, stress, affects on kids and own physical and biological selves.
In my opinion the bigger struggle in empowering women will not be to counsel men, but women themselves. Most women who don't go to work do for their own reasons, and not because men don't want them to work. If you can convince women to come out of their comfort zones, take risks, try and even taste failure at times. Let me tell you women will be far well off.
But there are always going to jobs which are going to very demanding for women. There are also security issues with respect to working and traveling late nights, pushing very tough long work hour schedules. Most of those clots will dissolve slowly with time.
Remember in ancient times, women used to work in fields with men all the time and that generally used to do a lot of work more physically demanding than what most women have today. If it worked fine then, it can now. But the transformation will be slow.
You're right that fear of failure prevents many people from reaching anywhere near their full potential.
The working mom thing is a separate issue from representation of women in various industries such as tech. For me, I'm hoping to band together with friends so we can all watch each others' kids and cooperate more and have the whole childrearing thing be more "village"-centered and less of an individual burden.
I think you are making good points, but you might detect, in the work of the Guerrilla Girls, a contrary view on the world of art and how women fare in it.
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. I don't know if women are dominant in art. I meant many art classes these days have a lot of girls so people are probably less likely to claim women don't like art.
I didn't downvote you, but I think the counterpoint might be that the 'trail' of being discouraged from taking certain career paths starts a lot earlier than you might suggest.
Can you quantify somehow that the tech industry is more sexist than other industries? It has become this meme, but I never really saw any data, just anecdotes.
I have seen men from all walks of life crack ugly jokes, so I am really not convinced that it is especially bad in the tech industry. Not to defend ugly jokes, I just think the problem is blown out of proportion. There are bad apples everywhere, but the majority of people are actually fine and nice to get along with.
I am a guy and I wouldn't be comfortable in a sexist environment, and I haven't found the tech industry particularly uninviting so far.
If anything, I guess modern women have a problem in that computers are sometimes more interesting than women. If that is sexist, too, OK, we have a problem in the tech industry.
As for nursing, I suspect part of the problem is that men can not afford it. That is, it doesn't pay well enough to support a family.
First, I didn't read it as she was mad about the bathrooms other than what that implied about the ratio of attendance between men and women[1].
I'm not real fond of the ratio, mainly because lack of female programmers means we get a lack of female managers with programming experience. Women who came up through the ranks and get the gig. I have encountered too many men and women who have no clue how to manage technical projects.
I should point out that at least female programmers are not subjected to the crap that happens to male ECE (early childhood education) instructors. Many places will say to an applicant's face that, because of potential lawsuits, they will not hire males.
[1] There are actually a lot of facilities that have sliding partitions that allow the number of stalls to be changed between events. I cannot find it right now, but there is a video explaining research done into average time using the stalls - male vs female and percentage of people doing #1 vs #2.
Yes, I absolutely do. The concept of women as "emotional" AKA "hysterical" is an old, untrue, patronizing and dismissive stereotype, with a long history of being used to oppress women (sometimes in the most horrific of ways). "Calm down dear" and its close paraphrases are a way of asserting male privilege to ignore a woman's reasoned argument, because she got angry.
"calm down dear" has been said frequently to men, women, and children by both men and women. Also, there is nothing uniquely male about using that phrase in a patronizing tone.
Fair point. I was thinking the last 1000 years as opposed to 1000, 2000, etc. In that state the same could be said about the last century or even the last decade really.
Barbara Liskov won the Turing award this decade. Cynthia Dwork won the Djikstra prize this decade. Jennifer Chayes is the head of the new Microsoft Research lab in NYC. They're pretty awesome people, but probably not that highly visible outside academia.
In short, it comes down to that she wants more women in the industry. Maybe she seemed a bit lonely among so many men, or maybe something else—I don't know and she didn't tell.
People always complain that there aren't enough women in tech fields, yet no one ever complains about there not being enough men in, say, fashion. I've always found this odd.
Two. The consensus among fashion industry veterans seems to be that if a guy wants to work in the fashion industry, he must be gay or at least bisexual.
It's not ok that only 3% of people present liked peanut butter! I'm going to make it my mission to get more people that like peanut butter into conferences.
It was constructive because she then to do something constructive about it.
Compare and contrast to the story about John Orwant throwing his mug at a wall at a Perl conference - and single handedly inspiring the start of the Perl 6 project.
At the risk of derailing the thread, why do so many people want to get more women into programming? Isn't that just as misguided as trying to get more men into nursing? Just because we strive for gender equality doesn't mean every job has to have exactly the same gender ratios.