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That's the extreme case, but there is also the less malicious one where because of stereotypes and average distributions at a particular company, people just as

That's the extreme case, but there is also the less malicious one where because of stereotypes and average distributions at a particular company, people just assume women they are speaking to to be less technical than they are and try to 'helpfully' explain things at an unnecessarily basic level. Say, a system's engineer explaining their work to a female college as if she were a front end developer by default, where they would ask a male college what their experience was before making that assumption. This is an easy mistake to make if you are a kernel hacker in an organization that has, say 20% female developers overall, but where only 2% of kernel hackers are women. Easy to make, not malicious, but not much less annoying because of it, specially if you are the 10th person to assume that. From your point of view, it is a very efficient cache prediction strategy, since you'll get it right 90% of the time[1], but from theirs, it means half their queries end up miss-predicted... [1] Yes, I am assuming 50% of all developers are kernel hackers, you can switch to something more realistic like product vs infra, front vs backend, etc. Also, the point is not about "lower-level systems programming being real-er programming!", but about making assumptions based partly on gender.

cauterized 10y ago
Think about what you just said about assumptions and how that dovetails with lack of respect. GP didn't suggest said lack of respect was necessarily malicious. Just that it exists and is uncomfortable. How does a perception being the result of stereotyping make it any more excusable?
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  First of all, I agree with the GP and I am emphatically agreeing with you here that such stereotyping is uncomfortable, unneeded and something that urgently needs to go away. But it is still somewhat different from fully dismissing someone as 'less than' because of gender, and the later (appallingly) still happens. In some circles, you will get people who think along the lines of "yeah, of course there is sexism in industry, I mean, look at Bob, he keeps cracking jokes about women and browses The Red Pill at work. But I am not like Bob, I don't have anything against women, I am trying to help, ergo I can't be sexist". Yet these people can be condescending without generally meaning to disrespect or make less on anyone. When confronted with a woman who is very technical and assertive about that fact, they quickly adjust to treat her as technical, but their default assumption still goes to 'relatively less technical than me' when meeting any new female developer (and doesn't when meeting a male college). I was trying to point out that sort of thing is a problem too.

cauterized 10y ago

Think about what you just said about assumptions and how that dovetails with lack of respect. GP didn't suggest said lack of respect was necessarily malicious. Just that it exists and is uncomfortable. How does a perception being the result of stereotyping make it any more excusable?

lazaroclapp 10y ago
First of all, I agree with the GP and I am emphatically agreeing with you here that such stereotyping is uncomfortable, unneeded and something that urgently needs to go away. But it is still somewhat different from fully dismissing someone as 'less than' because of gender, and the later (appallingly) still happens. In some circles, you will get people who think along the lines of "yeah, of course there is sexism in industry, I mean, look at Bob, he keeps cracking jokes about women and browses The Red Pill at work. But I am not like Bob, I don't have anything against women, I am trying to help, ergo I can't be sexist". Yet these people can be condescending without generally meaning to disrespect or make less on anyone. When confronted with a woman who is very technical and assertive about that fact, they quickly adjust to treat her as technical, but their default assumption still goes to 'relatively less technical than me' when meeting any new female developer (and doesn't when meeting a male college). I was trying to point out that sort of thing is a problem too.