4 ms·

Speaking as a young woman in the industry whose startup has successfully turned into a solid small business and had to deal with condescending remarks from my m

by marquis 16y ago

Speaking as a young woman in the industry whose startup has successfully turned into a solid small business and had to deal with condescending remarks from my male colleagues and clients (though very, very rarely on purpose), I would say it is due to both societal issues and the way computing is currently done. Another issue is that young girls just don't generally like to spend a lot of time alone, and technology is overall an isolating pursuit, at least while you hone your skills. It's pretty easy for me to sit down with my young nephews and hang out on the computer together, but my nieces get bored of staring at the screen and prefer to make things, so I get their attention more when we play with sensors and robots. I expect at some point technology will break out of the two dimensional confines, and young girls will pick up computing as much as they can excel at knitting and sewing, which I use primarily as an example of complex pursuits requiring attention to detail and logic but with a physical result. Give it time. Bring your girls up to love technology as much as your boys and they'll be participating equally but in different ways. Accept, and enjoy, that girls and boys approach technology with different goals.

warwick 16y ago
Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?
- saikat 16y ago
  One example - at a "nerd" event a couple weeks ago, one of the speakers said something to the effect of "it's really great to see all of you and your girlfriends at this event." Usually it's small assumptions like this. Another thing I've noticed, though without specific examples, is that people seem to assume girls at a hacker meetup aren't coders or will tend to give more attention to guys when discussions get technical. But of course this doesn't apply to everyone.
  - ahoyhere 16y ago
    The critical mistake is assuming that this is sexist. It's not. It's basic pattern-seeking, a simple and harmless assumption. Getting all up in arms over it is worthless! Everybody makes a million assumptions about other people every day -- you can't get around it, there are simply too damn many people that you come across to consider every one as if he/she were the first you'd ever seen. Sexism - and condescension - would imply they were saying things, or acting, in a way that said they didn't believe women were capable.
    - ahoyhere 16y ago
      Downvote me all you like, but I'm a successful woman developer and I'm the one saying it! I can't tell you how often I see women crying "sexism" and making themselves feel like victims, instead of just accepting that _people make assumptions with no ill intent whatsoever_. And I've overheard women speakers at conferences complaining about how sexist the board is, because their talks were rejected, when I was the one rejecting them because their talk proposals were off-topic, uninteresting and poorly put together... Real sexism is vicious. Normal, well-meaning human foibles are not. Conflate the two, and you impair your own ability to function in life.
    - saikat 16y ago
      The question I was answering was not "What are some sexist remarks you have heard" but "Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?" It's great if these kinds of comments don't bother you (I'm not a woman developer), but I know it would annoy me if every hacker meetup I went to, people had a greater tendency to dismiss things that I was saying partly because I was a woman, even if they didn't realize they were doing it.
      - ahoyhere 16y ago
        She didn't say that people dismissed her remarks, once she actually started speaking, or that they treated her unkindly after they realized she was a developer. The way I read it was that people assumed - before she opened her mouth - that she was a girlfriend/wife who came with. That's not offensive. That's just statistics.
doron 16y ago
What is it about the way computing is currently done that inhibits women outside of social norms? I wonder If programming syntax as it is designed might have some influence. There is some evidence that men and women use language differently, is it possible that common computing syntax designed mostly by men to actualize their thought process is biased towards the gender?
- vorador 16y ago
  Then maths would be biaised too towards boys. But studies have shown that gender doesn't affect competence in maths.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Other studies have shown that it has.
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  It's not the programming syntax I think so much as the teaching of it. Programming books, classes, etc., are led by people who "just get it" - and therefore taught badly - and therefore can only be understood by people who "just get it". And those people tend to look down on people who can't "just get it." I, on the other hand, am a girl, and an extremely visual/verbal girl at that... an excellent designer and accomplished writer. I was doing all of that basically from a young age. I also learned BASIC. When it came time to learn more complex programming, though, I got stuck, and nobody could explain it to me in a way that helped. I ended up teaching myself to draw loop diagrams, and procedural diagrams, and object diagrams, to visually THINK OUT the code, what it was doing. For a long time, I had to do this every time, or I was completely incapable of getting any traction on the coding problem at hand. The thing about programming is that you have to actually BUILD AN INTERPRETER in your head. Some people seem to be born with the ability to do this. They are almost all - but not entirely - male. I, on the other hand, am now an excellent developer. I know many developers who can write much tighter individual lines of code than me - but most of them can't analyze and break down a problem, and architect as well as I do. And my lines of code are still very good. So, I started out with a "disability" but now I'm really great. That's because I read programming books, and went to programming classes, and instead of thinking "ZOMG I'll never get this" I thought to myself, "I'm really smart - this class is shit!" And proceeded to nag everyone to answer my questions about my visual diagrams, until I got it. That's why I write and teach code in a visual way. And amazingly, I have a much higher percentage of women readers and women course attendees than the general coding population... and also many, many grateful men who come from non-traditional backgrounds, like history majors, artists, designers, musicians and linguists. Comp Sci problems aren't men vs women, they're super-crazy-almost-too-left-brain vs normal-or-right-brain.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ahoyhere 16y ago
Hi marquis, please write me! amy@slash7.com. I wanna hear what you're working on. I think your idea of "real world" / physical things is a really interesting thread. Check out my comment below about the teaching of programming and see how our ideas cross! By the way... young people, all young people, get condescending remarks from older people. The more successful you are, the more remarks you're going to get, because successful young people are equally loved and loathed. That's the way of the world. Don't assume that just because it appears to you that it appears in a certain form that it actually has anything to do with you being a woman. All of those remarks come from fear. They show that the person saying them is weak and afraid. Or simply a regular old foolish human being with no bad intentions who operates his/her mouth on autopilot, just like everything else in his/her life.

by marquis 16y ago

warwick 16y ago

Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?

saikat 16y ago
One example - at a "nerd" event a couple weeks ago, one of the speakers said something to the effect of "it's really great to see all of you and your girlfriends at this event." Usually it's small assumptions like this. Another thing I've noticed, though without specific examples, is that people seem to assume girls at a hacker meetup aren't coders or will tend to give more attention to guys when discussions get technical. But of course this doesn't apply to everyone.
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  The critical mistake is assuming that this is sexist. It's not. It's basic pattern-seeking, a simple and harmless assumption. Getting all up in arms over it is worthless! Everybody makes a million assumptions about other people every day -- you can't get around it, there are simply too damn many people that you come across to consider every one as if he/she were the first you'd ever seen. Sexism - and condescension - would imply they were saying things, or acting, in a way that said they didn't believe women were capable.
  - ahoyhere 16y ago
    Downvote me all you like, but I'm a successful woman developer and I'm the one saying it! I can't tell you how often I see women crying "sexism" and making themselves feel like victims, instead of just accepting that _people make assumptions with no ill intent whatsoever_. And I've overheard women speakers at conferences complaining about how sexist the board is, because their talks were rejected, when I was the one rejecting them because their talk proposals were off-topic, uninteresting and poorly put together... Real sexism is vicious. Normal, well-meaning human foibles are not. Conflate the two, and you impair your own ability to function in life.
  - saikat 16y ago
    The question I was answering was not "What are some sexist remarks you have heard" but "Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?" It's great if these kinds of comments don't bother you (I'm not a woman developer), but I know it would annoy me if every hacker meetup I went to, people had a greater tendency to dismiss things that I was saying partly because I was a woman, even if they didn't realize they were doing it.
    - ahoyhere 16y ago
      She didn't say that people dismissed her remarks, once she actually started speaking, or that they treated her unkindly after they realized she was a developer. The way I read it was that people assumed - before she opened her mouth - that she was a girlfriend/wife who came with. That's not offensive. That's just statistics.

doron 16y ago

What is it about the way computing is currently done that inhibits women outside of social norms? I wonder If programming syntax as it is designed might have some influence. There is some evidence that men and women use language differently, is it possible that common computing syntax designed mostly by men to actualize their thought process is biased towards the gender?

vorador 16y ago
Then maths would be biaised too towards boys. But studies have shown that gender doesn't affect competence in maths.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Other studies have shown that it has.
ahoyhere 16y ago
It's not the programming syntax I think so much as the teaching of it. Programming books, classes, etc., are led by people who "just get it" - and therefore taught badly - and therefore can only be understood by people who "just get it". And those people tend to look down on people who can't "just get it." I, on the other hand, am a girl, and an extremely visual/verbal girl at that... an excellent designer and accomplished writer. I was doing all of that basically from a young age. I also learned BASIC. When it came time to learn more complex programming, though, I got stuck, and nobody could explain it to me in a way that helped. I ended up teaching myself to draw loop diagrams, and procedural diagrams, and object diagrams, to visually THINK OUT the code, what it was doing. For a long time, I had to do this every time, or I was completely incapable of getting any traction on the coding problem at hand. The thing about programming is that you have to actually BUILD AN INTERPRETER in your head. Some people seem to be born with the ability to do this. They are almost all - but not entirely - male. I, on the other hand, am now an excellent developer. I know many developers who can write much tighter individual lines of code than me - but most of them can't analyze and break down a problem, and architect as well as I do. And my lines of code are still very good. So, I started out with a "disability" but now I'm really great. That's because I read programming books, and went to programming classes, and instead of thinking "ZOMG I'll never get this" I thought to myself, "I'm really smart - this class is shit!" And proceeded to nag everyone to answer my questions about my visual diagrams, until I got it. That's why I write and teach code in a visual way. And amazingly, I have a much higher percentage of women readers and women course attendees than the general coding population... and also many, many grateful men who come from non-traditional backgrounds, like history majors, artists, designers, musicians and linguists. Comp Sci problems aren't men vs women, they're super-crazy-almost-too-left-brain vs normal-or-right-brain.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ahoyhere 16y ago

Hi marquis, please write me! amy@slash7.com. I wanna hear what you're working on. I think your idea of "real world" / physical things is a really interesting thread. Check out my comment below about the teaching of programming and see how our ideas cross! By the way... young people, all young people, get condescending remarks from older people. The more successful you are, the more remarks you're going to get, because successful young people are equally loved and loathed. That's the way of the world. Don't assume that just because it appears to you that it appears in a certain form that it actually has anything to do with you being a woman. All of those remarks come from fear. They show that the person saying them is weak and afraid. Or simply a regular old foolish human being with no bad intentions who operates his/her mouth on autopilot, just like everything else in his/her life.