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I'm not sure what you mean by positive change. Firstly, the article was very sexist and I don't see that changing any time soon. "programming is just another

I'm not sure what you mean by positive change. Firstly, the article was very sexist and I don't see that changing any time soon. "programming is just another skill to be mastered through persistence — with or without a Y chromosome.". Can anyone point me to a link where anyone (other than a feminist) has said this? Smashing of records? They came 2nd and 3rd in most instances. That's not refuting they may be talented, but the title is misleading, in more ways than one. Look, my wife is a damn good engineer. I am not intimidated in the slightest by good female engineers (I've mentored male and female engineers - despite constant accusations from feminists that this does not happen). Can we please establish a policy on YC that false, sexist or dishonest articles (like this one) be discouraged? This is a thinly veiled pulp piece of sexist journalism. There has never been a myth that women can't code. My wife is over 50 and is more than capable with specification, design, coding, testing (unit, integration, regression, acceptance) and maintenance. She also does network design, among many other skills. She's old school and got there on her own motivation and talent, not puff and propaganda. I went to university with many women in the same boat. This is nothing but a propaganda piece. It's s shame we can't celebrate these young people's success without resorting to sexism and untruths.

positivity89 10y ago
I think you're really underestimating these strong women. The title is not misleading because of this point: "I was one of the first few girls on the Georgian team in IOI and I was the second Georgian girl to win a medal." It doesn't matter if they are 2nd not 1st place. Bottom line is that these strong, awesome women are setting a great example.
- pedrosorio 10y ago
  Regarding IOI, that's a common misconception people have about high school olympiads: "The top 50% of the contestants are awarded medals, such that the relative number of gold : silver : bronze : no medal is approximately 1:2:3:6 (thus 1/12 of the contestants get a gold medal)."
lotso 10y ago
> Can anyone point me to a link where anyone (other than a feminist) has said this? Seems odd to tie this to being a feminist. I would hope all commentators on HN are feminists. What is your definition of a feminist? > There has never been a myth that women can't code. I don't think anyone says women "can't" code. I would say in most universities in the US, you could reasonably argue there seems to be more barriers to women majoring in CS than men for many reasons. edit: For the people downvoting me, it would be great to explain why the downvotes as opposed to participating in a discussion.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  > I would hope all commentators on HN are feminists. I would hope so too, but the empirical evidence is against us.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    A lot of people, especially here, believe that matters of equality are solved by treating peers as equals regardless of differences, rather than praise the differences, put them on a pedestal and give the people handicaps for being different. I'd also love to see all that "empirical evidence". HN is one of the most respectful communities in tech I've frequented. Sexist remarks and the like tend to be downvoted and flagged.
    - lotso 10y ago
      As a minority, I think it is incredibly valuable to see people like me succeeding. >HN is one of the most respectful communities in tech I've frequented. I don't think I've ever seen a thoughtful discussion here when the topic relates to gender or race.
      - scrollaway 10y ago
        > I think it is incredibly valuable to see people like me succeeding I feel the same way. In fact, most people here feel the same way, regardless of whether they are part of a minority or not. We all love to see people like ourselves succeed. It's incredibly empowering to feel that "this can be you". It doesn't just apply to careers, but in any situation where we feel we are faced with a challenge (this is why, for example, weight loss communities like /r/loseit are so successful). Displays of success don't have to be contextualized as "they are successful because they are a minority", or "it's a big deal because they are a minority". Doing this cheapens the accomplishment and (I think) that's what rustynails was getting at.
nostrebored 10y ago
Maybe this is coming from a generational gap, but your experience does not mirror mine at all. I went to an engineering school where women in CS were either assumed to be a management major or people assumed that they were taking the easiest courses available. I've had my wife answer questions for people thoroughly and correctly, and had them come to ask me the same question 20 minutes later and trust that my answer was right. I've talked to women who left computer science, not because of the difficulty of the courses, but because of the attitude that men at our university had towards them. The data supports this, take a look at the charts of women in CS over time. And honestly, talking to women older than me, a refrain I hear from nearly all of them is "I'm not a math person". I had a relative in her 80's with a math PhD who would not tell people because she thought it was "too manly." My coworker, who got into tech because she thought it was the only way she could stay in Seattle, frequently says "I'm not a coder." She just did a code review of one of the projects she's working on that is significantly better than any of the other work I've seen coming out of QA or DevOps at my job. Your wife is an anomaly. So is mine. It doesn't take much effort to see that in our field.
- home_boi 10y ago
  >take a look at the charts of women in CS over time. You mean the chart of video game growth over time? This might be a bit of a stretch but it has rung true with me and many other people. We all became interested in technology and computers because of video games. Our interests in video games transitioned to taking programming courses in high school and college.
  - ae_keji 10y ago
    Maybe Minecraft will change the industry before any of us can cook up a good solution to the gender gap.
- belorn 10y ago
  It seems fairly established that profession with highly unequal ratio of men and women tend to have a minority gender with a much higher exit rate than the majority, caused by the majority harassing the minority until they assimilate, quit or switch profession. The next step should be to ask why women working in a female dominated profession are harassing the men in the same profession, or why men working in male dominated professions are harassing women. Maybe if we could figure out a good answer to that, we could turn the tide of more work professions becoming gendered with unbalanced ratios.
dang 10y ago
> Firstly, the article was very sexist [...] a thinly veiled pulp piece of sexist journalism [...] a propaganda piece Even if the article is framed in a way that's not to your taste, the choice here is (1) celebrating how cool these sisters are vs. (2) angry denunciation leading to flamewar #3238. The latter is not a win for HN. If you can't turn off the ideological rage here, where can you turn it off? And if you can't turn it off at all, then it's not really discussion, just bile. Good discussion, the interesting kind, requires the discipline to resist mechanical triggers and respond to the most alive details in a piece, which in this case is clearly the story of the sisters and what they have to say. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538481 and marked it off-topic.
vacri 10y ago
> There has never been a myth that women can't code. I've seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears perfectly competent female programmers being patronised by male programmers of a similar skill (who in turn do not patronise other males that way). You're basically setting up an unusual situation, where someone has to literally say "women can't code" to qualify, when in reality, women are frequently treated as if they're not as capable as men in our industry. It's great that your wife is making her mark, but that doesn't mean there aren't problems that affect others. Similarly, there's been articles here on HN about how there were more female students in CS of your wife's uni era, but that these numbers dropped off precipitously in the 80s and 90s.
foota 10y ago
I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly, are you saying that men are better at programming or are you saying that no one is saying that they aren't?

positivity89 10y ago

I think you're really underestimating these strong women. The title is not misleading because of this point: "I was one of the first few girls on the Georgian team in IOI and I was the second Georgian girl to win a medal." It doesn't matter if they are 2nd not 1st place. Bottom line is that these strong, awesome women are setting a great example.

pedrosorio 10y ago
Regarding IOI, that's a common misconception people have about high school olympiads: "The top 50% of the contestants are awarded medals, such that the relative number of gold : silver : bronze : no medal is approximately 1:2:3:6 (thus 1/12 of the contestants get a gold medal)."

lotso 10y ago

> Can anyone point me to a link where anyone (other than a feminist) has said this? Seems odd to tie this to being a feminist. I would hope all commentators on HN are feminists. What is your definition of a feminist? > There has never been a myth that women can't code. I don't think anyone says women "can't" code. I would say in most universities in the US, you could reasonably argue there seems to be more barriers to women majoring in CS than men for many reasons. edit: For the people downvoting me, it would be great to explain why the downvotes as opposed to participating in a discussion.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
> I would hope all commentators on HN are feminists. I would hope so too, but the empirical evidence is against us.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  A lot of people, especially here, believe that matters of equality are solved by treating peers as equals regardless of differences, rather than praise the differences, put them on a pedestal and give the people handicaps for being different. I'd also love to see all that "empirical evidence". HN is one of the most respectful communities in tech I've frequented. Sexist remarks and the like tend to be downvoted and flagged.
  - lotso 10y ago
    As a minority, I think it is incredibly valuable to see people like me succeeding. >HN is one of the most respectful communities in tech I've frequented. I don't think I've ever seen a thoughtful discussion here when the topic relates to gender or race.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      > I think it is incredibly valuable to see people like me succeeding I feel the same way. In fact, most people here feel the same way, regardless of whether they are part of a minority or not. We all love to see people like ourselves succeed. It's incredibly empowering to feel that "this can be you". It doesn't just apply to careers, but in any situation where we feel we are faced with a challenge (this is why, for example, weight loss communities like /r/loseit are so successful). Displays of success don't have to be contextualized as "they are successful because they are a minority", or "it's a big deal because they are a minority". Doing this cheapens the accomplishment and (I think) that's what rustynails was getting at.

nostrebored 10y ago

Maybe this is coming from a generational gap, but your experience does not mirror mine at all. I went to an engineering school where women in CS were either assumed to be a management major or people assumed that they were taking the easiest courses available. I've had my wife answer questions for people thoroughly and correctly, and had them come to ask me the same question 20 minutes later and trust that my answer was right. I've talked to women who left computer science, not because of the difficulty of the courses, but because of the attitude that men at our university had towards them. The data supports this, take a look at the charts of women in CS over time. And honestly, talking to women older than me, a refrain I hear from nearly all of them is "I'm not a math person". I had a relative in her 80's with a math PhD who would not tell people because she thought it was "too manly." My coworker, who got into tech because she thought it was the only way she could stay in Seattle, frequently says "I'm not a coder." She just did a code review of one of the projects she's working on that is significantly better than any of the other work I've seen coming out of QA or DevOps at my job. Your wife is an anomaly. So is mine. It doesn't take much effort to see that in our field.

home_boi 10y ago
>take a look at the charts of women in CS over time. You mean the chart of video game growth over time? This might be a bit of a stretch but it has rung true with me and many other people. We all became interested in technology and computers because of video games. Our interests in video games transitioned to taking programming courses in high school and college.
- ae_keji 10y ago
  Maybe Minecraft will change the industry before any of us can cook up a good solution to the gender gap.
belorn 10y ago
It seems fairly established that profession with highly unequal ratio of men and women tend to have a minority gender with a much higher exit rate than the majority, caused by the majority harassing the minority until they assimilate, quit or switch profession. The next step should be to ask why women working in a female dominated profession are harassing the men in the same profession, or why men working in male dominated professions are harassing women. Maybe if we could figure out a good answer to that, we could turn the tide of more work professions becoming gendered with unbalanced ratios.

dang 10y ago

> Firstly, the article was very sexist [...] a thinly veiled pulp piece of sexist journalism [...] a propaganda piece Even if the article is framed in a way that's not to your taste, the choice here is (1) celebrating how cool these sisters are vs. (2) angry denunciation leading to flamewar #3238. The latter is not a win for HN. If you can't turn off the ideological rage here, where can you turn it off? And if you can't turn it off at all, then it's not really discussion, just bile. Good discussion, the interesting kind, requires the discipline to resist mechanical triggers and respond to the most alive details in a piece, which in this case is clearly the story of the sisters and what they have to say. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538481 and marked it off-topic.

vacri 10y ago

> There has never been a myth that women can't code. I've seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears perfectly competent female programmers being patronised by male programmers of a similar skill (who in turn do not patronise other males that way). You're basically setting up an unusual situation, where someone has to literally say "women can't code" to qualify, when in reality, women are frequently treated as if they're not as capable as men in our industry. It's great that your wife is making her mark, but that doesn't mean there aren't problems that affect others. Similarly, there's been articles here on HN about how there were more female students in CS of your wife's uni era, but that these numbers dropped off precipitously in the 80s and 90s.

foota 10y ago

I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly, are you saying that men are better at programming or are you saying that no one is saying that they aren't?