6 ms·

Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology

54 points by seldo 16y ago

indiejade 16y ago
The WSJ article cited in Arrington's article: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-the-lack-of-women-leading-tech-start-ups/ http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-th... It's one thing to aspire to focus on small-scale businesses that benefit a local area / community (as do most female entrepreneurs). It's another thing entirely to focus on some kind of ambitious VC-funded enterprise that's visioned to scale big / globally from the get-go. Ambition is an interesting animal.
enjo 16y ago
This is such rubbish, and I hate that we're having this argument again. The last wave of resumes for a software engineer position came out to something like 97% male. The one female that passed the screening was really impressive with a degree from M.I.T. and a very impressive track record. We couldn't afford her. Arrington is not very often right, but he is in this case. Look around your average computer science classroom (from which the majority of startup founders originate) and tell me what you see. It's not because women aren't allowed, it's because they choose not to be.
- m0th87 16y ago
  Why can't both sides be true? I've never seen or heard of gender bias in the hiring process, but that doesn't discount the possibility that women aren't going into computer science for a reason.
- lolhn 16y ago
  I also hate that you're arguing it again. Especially since your argument is nothing more than a moronic tautology. It's a shame that shallow thinking like yours is considered worthwhile on this site.
- edanm 16y ago
  Yes, but "Why do women choose not to be entrepreneurs?" is a valid question. And one of the possible answers (not necessarily the right one) is "our society biases women against becoming entrepreneurs". If that is the reason there are less female entrepreneurs, then the conclusion is "many women who could have been successful entrepreneurs don't do it because society biases them against it". Assuming we believe that the more people who become entrepreneurs, the better, then our society should take corrective action to make sure the women who could be entrepreneurs actually do it.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
zaphar 16y ago
I must work in a really weird office then because I know 4 women engineers personally and several others in our office peripherally and no one in our office takes the attitude this guys seems to think is the norm. Everyone I've heard in this debate argues from a subjective personal experience/viewpoint. I haven't really seen any hard data on the subject presented so it's strange that everyone is so certain they are right. (ok not really all that strange, human nature being what it is.)
metamemetics 16y ago
Michael Arrington's real argument was: Few women choosing to study CompSci\Engineering -> Few women in tech _startups_. As long as you agree that a subset cannot be larger than its parent set, I don't see how you can disagree with that. It's as close to observational fact as you can get.
Towle_ 16y ago
This is the United States of America in 2010. It's not ancient Egypt. It's not feudal England. It's not even the U.S. in 1950. You can do whatever you want to do and be whoever you want to be. Nobody is stopping you but yourself. Might your climb to the top be steeper than mine? Sure. But realize that nobody who's ever made it to the top of their mountain complained about how steep it was. They just climbed. If you want to be the best, whatever that means to you, you have to go Jackie Robinson that shit. No matter what the douchebags throw at you along the way, you have to just smile back and hit home runs.
- philwelch 16y ago
  You should find some new material: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643294 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643294
  - Towle_ 16y ago
    If it can be used again, I'll use it again. No sense it paraphrasing just for the hell of it. You can't plagiarize yourself.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Imo, a good rule of thumb for when you're copy/pasting the same comment you've made before is to mark it somehow, e.g. "as I said the last time this same issue came up (perhaps link to comment here): [paste]". A bigger question might be why you're saying the same thing over and over to begin with, paraphrasing or not. Is your one-paragraph comment filled with self-help-type platitudes really interesting enough to spam in every relevant discussion?
      - Towle_ 16y ago
        You're right, I'll do that next time. I didn't get the kind of discussion I was interested in last time, so I thought I'd try a second time. Not "over and over." A second time.
- 16y ago
philwelch 16y ago
People make generalizations based upon the world around them. OK, so people don't expect a woman to be a programmer when they see her. Similar expectations didn't stop women from becoming lawyers or doctors or bankers, and now when you see a woman walking around a hospital or a courthouse she very well may be a doctor or a lawyer. Women can and did overcome the same barriers to enter other fields. If you want to explain why women aren't in software, there's no explanatory power in explanations that equally apply to fields which women did become a part of.
- 146 16y ago
  One thing is that it took a long, long time for women to break into medicine and start being taken seriously as doctors. Tech is still relatively young, so I'm hoping that we can start making movements towards that level of parity faster than then several generations it took medicine.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Sure, if you count from the beginning of the medical profession (though technically, women dominated some parts of medicine, like delivering babies, for millennia before men ever became involved, and then women broke back in). If you count from the beginning of women-in-the-workplace style feminism, software should have had women almost from the outset. If a new profession or a new sector of the economy arose now you'd expect it to have tons of women because as a culture we're used to women in the workplace, right? What about biotech--are there more women in biotech than software?
char 16y ago
Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white? The fact that there are so few women in tech is an issue that is likely caused by multiple factors, some of which were addressed in this article, and some of which were addressed in the Arrington post. No one is wrong; each just seems to be arguing over which the greater factor is, but refuses to recognize the other. Arrington cites factors dealing with biological and societal tendencies of women as reasons for them to not engage in risky lifestyle choices such as startups, or to not be interested in tech in the first place. I agree with this. This isn't 'bad' or 'good', but it's the truth. People need to stop ignoring that there ARE (on average) differences between men and women. We (women) just aren't as interested in tech or building our own businesses in general. I'm just one data point, but based on many experiences, I would strongly argue that in general, women do not have the desire to take as many risks as males, or deal with day-to-day uncertainties. A vast majority of my female friends thought I was absolutely nuts when I first started doing startups. (They still think I'm a little nutty, despite being able to pay my bills now). The most common questions were, "What are you going to do for money if it fails?" (Answer: Get a job, or build something else), and "How do you deal with not knowing what you're going to be doing in the next [insert some time period]?" On the other hand, my male friends overwhelmingly asked about the technologies I'm building and admired me for taking a risk. Also interesting to note is that the reaction of female friends to my (male) co-founder was more of admiration than thinking he was crazy (but I was looked upon as crazy). On the other hand, for the women who ARE interested in tech (or could be persuaded to be interested), there are certainly existing challenges within the field itself. Again, I'm just one data point, but I am always amazed at the reactions I get from males in the startup world when they find out that I code. They are SHOCKED. Not only because I'm a woman, but also because I'm a white, blonde woman who is reasonably attractive. Sometimes I really do feel like I'm not taken seriously by many people until I do something completely bad ass to prove myself. The other article certainly has a point there.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- shareme 16y ago
  I disagree, one of the highest risks currently is: -Marriage -Getting Married to raise a family Most of those have failure rates higher than starting a small business...and some would argue its approaching the risk level of startups. Women on the whole are no more or less risk averse than Men.
gojomo 16y ago
...offensively wrong... Why wasn't 'wrong' enough? Why should any honestly-presented, based-on-experience opinion like Arrington's generate 'offense'? Why not assume good faith?
- Towle_ 16y ago
  It's "offensively wrong" because the author (a male) is striving for an image of being genuinely sympathetic to The Plight. "Look at me, I'm so understanding."
  - gojomo 16y ago
    So you think he's lying about his internal mental state and specific efforts in areas he controls? Why not assume good faith?
    - Towle_ 16y ago
      I don't think he's lying to us, I think he's lying to himself.
      - 146 16y ago
        I think that's a rather unfair assumption to make. Do you have evidence that he's being disingenuous?
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
        Towle_ 16y ago
        'Disingenuous' isn't quite the word I would use. I'm sure the author really does think he's contributing to The Crusade, which is precisely the problem. He can't just dissect the errors in Arrington's logic. No, that's not good enough. He needs to put on a Crusader uniform and act like he thinks those people are supposed to act: offended. He can't just BE offended, he must explicitly tell you he's offended, and start swinging his sword around so you know what a noble Crusader he is. If he were responding to a blog post offensive to men, would he have used that language? No, because being offended for yourself isn't noble, it's being offended for others. And telling everyone about it as much as you can. How else will people know what an altruist you are?
amalcon 16y ago
Here's how it happens: if a woman engineer starts talking, men will wait until she says something notably clever before they start taking her seriously. Men on the other hand are taken seriously by default, and only get dismissed if they say something notably dumb. I was neutral to mildly positive on the post until this point. It is simply false. In tech, nobody is taken seriously by default. I certainly never have been, and I'm a young tall skinny white guy with glasses (the very computer-geek stereotype if ever there was one). I have to re-prove myself every time. I've never observed anything different with regard to anyone else. It turns out that there is one way you can get people to take you seriously from the get-go: "earn the respect of your immediate peers" (people take you seriously if it's obvious that everyone else does). I suppose it might appear that this implies that the majority is taken seriously by default, because most of the people who have the respect of their peers will be from that majority by simple averaging. Now, I don't mean to comment on whether or not it's harder for women to "prove themselves". Never having been a woman myself, and not being a neutral observer, it's hard to make that comparison. My only point is that the amount of effort is nonzero for men as well.
- sprout 16y ago
  Techies take nobody seriously by default. But when it comes to non-technical management types, I think what he says is very true. As a clean-cut, twenty-something male who speaks articulately, simply me saying "I'm a computer guy" gives me an enormous amount of credibility, far more than a girl my age could get.
javajones 16y ago
You do realize that this is a Western societal phenom? I work with women who are from India and China. Quite a few of them in fact. What is different in their cultures that they have so many women in this field and we do not?
- Goladus 16y ago
  Yes I've noticed that in the "Women in IT" phenomenon. That doesn't really explain tech startups, though. All the Indian and Chinese engineers I know work for established, stable companies.
whalesalad 16y ago
Funny enough, I'm in the group that thinks EVERYONE is incompetent and absolutely worthless until they prove themselves to me. This might not be as big of a deal in the bay area where tech is a bigger deal, but here in LA there are posers everywhere. We ask candidates in interviews to hand-code a front-end page, assuming that is the position they're applying for. Some will actually be able to write markup on a piece of paper, which is a pretty stressful test. "Code this page, here." (slides pen and paper) But a lot of people end up saying something like "Oh well I'd just throw a div here, throw a div there." It's literally a joke. I've had to stop laughing in meetings. We'll ask a rails developer what kind of stack he's familiar with, and they'll look at you like a deer in the headlights. I don't go into an interview with a woman assuming she wont be nearly as good. In fact, right now the ladies are 1 for 1. Unfortunately she's no longer working with us due to some family issues. A lot of the guys we've interviewed are actually quite literally living in their parents basements and building porn websites with their buddies. I could care less what people do in their personal time but holy shit, make something of yourself. Anyway, this doesn't really side with either particular argument in this whole man/woman debate, I just personally have gotten so jaded with worthless people who have no skills or drive whatsoever that their sex doesn't matter.
lawlit 16y ago
"... the expectation that women don't get into tech is what keeps them out of it..." Yeah well, how did this stereotype got built in the first place? and why isn't it the case with marketing? why this same expectation is not happening in sales? why tech?? The answer is clear: Women did it to themselfs. Men are not to blame. Women are not hackers by nature. It's usually a man who gets dirty. In my classroom, despite having the same teacher and the same lessons, it's always the boys who are trying to explain how things work to the "lot" of ladies who didn't get it. I personally can't imagine a lady creating C, Python, or running facebook on her dormroom. Ladies usually have guys over there, not data servers. I just can't imagine a bunch of ladies locked in a garage working on something. Whenever I think of a group of women, The only thing that comes to my mind is that they are talking about how cool is desperate housewives, or how great was Sara's date. This is not my fault, they are responsible for what we the men think of them. And don't tell me there's a white male controlling their brains to do such things. They just do them. face it. SO WOMEN, STOP BLAMING THE MEN and BE PROUD OF WHAT YOU LOVE. be it cooking or dating magazines or what ever. why do you want to hate what you love and force yourself in men things? are you ashamed of what you do? Why do you consider what you do as the work of a second class citizen? Women tend to love different things and I don't understand why people are trying to force them into tech. PEOPLE, women DID NOT ask for your help. Too sad for the ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow you, you are just an exception.
- symkat 16y ago
  "Too sad for the ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow you, you are just an exception." Computer addictivness? My group? Too sad? You seem to have this odd perception that you cannot be both feminine and a programmer. Why can't women both program and talk about "how great Sara's date" was?
  - lawlit 16y ago
    I said I CAN'T imagine women in a room discussing tech. Maybe 01% of women will be doing that. But yet, that's MY head. You can't make me imagine what I can't imagine. This has nothing to do with being a girl programer that talks about dating. wich is totally normal and happens to everyone.
Goladus 16y ago
Men don't get taken seriously by default. Almost every man I know has to work pretty hard to be taken seriously, and in my experience reputation is the overwhelming factor anyway. If you've got a good reputation you'll tend to get a favorable bias, otherwise you won't.

54 points by seldo 16y ago

The WSJ article cited in Arrington's article: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-the-lack-of-women-leading-tech-start-ups/ http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-th... It's one thing to aspire to focus on small-scale businesses that benefit a local area / community (as do most female entrepreneurs). It's another thing entirely to focus on some kind of ambitious VC-funded enterprise that's visioned to scale big / globally from the get-go. Ambition is an interesting animal.

enjo 16y ago

This is such rubbish, and I hate that we're having this argument again. The last wave of resumes for a software engineer position came out to something like 97% male. The one female that passed the screening was really impressive with a degree from M.I.T. and a very impressive track record. We couldn't afford her. Arrington is not very often right, but he is in this case. Look around your average computer science classroom (from which the majority of startup founders originate) and tell me what you see. It's not because women aren't allowed, it's because they choose not to be.

m0th87 16y ago
Why can't both sides be true? I've never seen or heard of gender bias in the hiring process, but that doesn't discount the possibility that women aren't going into computer science for a reason.
lolhn 16y ago
I also hate that you're arguing it again. Especially since your argument is nothing more than a moronic tautology. It's a shame that shallow thinking like yours is considered worthwhile on this site.
edanm 16y ago
Yes, but "Why do women choose not to be entrepreneurs?" is a valid question. And one of the possible answers (not necessarily the right one) is "our society biases women against becoming entrepreneurs". If that is the reason there are less female entrepreneurs, then the conclusion is "many women who could have been successful entrepreneurs don't do it because society biases them against it". Assuming we believe that the more people who become entrepreneurs, the better, then our society should take corrective action to make sure the women who could be entrepreneurs actually do it.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

zaphar 16y ago

I must work in a really weird office then because I know 4 women engineers personally and several others in our office peripherally and no one in our office takes the attitude this guys seems to think is the norm. Everyone I've heard in this debate argues from a subjective personal experience/viewpoint. I haven't really seen any hard data on the subject presented so it's strange that everyone is so certain they are right. (ok not really all that strange, human nature being what it is.)

metamemetics 16y ago

Michael Arrington's real argument was: Few women choosing to study CompSci\Engineering -> Few women in tech _startups_. As long as you agree that a subset cannot be larger than its parent set, I don't see how you can disagree with that. It's as close to observational fact as you can get.

Towle_ 16y ago

This is the United States of America in 2010. It's not ancient Egypt. It's not feudal England. It's not even the U.S. in 1950. You can do whatever you want to do and be whoever you want to be. Nobody is stopping you but yourself. Might your climb to the top be steeper than mine? Sure. But realize that nobody who's ever made it to the top of their mountain complained about how steep it was. They just climbed. If you want to be the best, whatever that means to you, you have to go Jackie Robinson that shit. No matter what the douchebags throw at you along the way, you have to just smile back and hit home runs.

philwelch 16y ago
You should find some new material: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643294 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643294
- Towle_ 16y ago
  If it can be used again, I'll use it again. No sense it paraphrasing just for the hell of it. You can't plagiarize yourself.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Imo, a good rule of thumb for when you're copy/pasting the same comment you've made before is to mark it somehow, e.g. "as I said the last time this same issue came up (perhaps link to comment here): [paste]". A bigger question might be why you're saying the same thing over and over to begin with, paraphrasing or not. Is your one-paragraph comment filled with self-help-type platitudes really interesting enough to spam in every relevant discussion?
    - Towle_ 16y ago
      You're right, I'll do that next time. I didn't get the kind of discussion I was interested in last time, so I thought I'd try a second time. Not "over and over." A second time.
16y ago

philwelch 16y ago

People make generalizations based upon the world around them. OK, so people don't expect a woman to be a programmer when they see her. Similar expectations didn't stop women from becoming lawyers or doctors or bankers, and now when you see a woman walking around a hospital or a courthouse she very well may be a doctor or a lawyer. Women can and did overcome the same barriers to enter other fields. If you want to explain why women aren't in software, there's no explanatory power in explanations that equally apply to fields which women did become a part of.

146 16y ago
One thing is that it took a long, long time for women to break into medicine and start being taken seriously as doctors. Tech is still relatively young, so I'm hoping that we can start making movements towards that level of parity faster than then several generations it took medicine.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Sure, if you count from the beginning of the medical profession (though technically, women dominated some parts of medicine, like delivering babies, for millennia before men ever became involved, and then women broke back in). If you count from the beginning of women-in-the-workplace style feminism, software should have had women almost from the outset. If a new profession or a new sector of the economy arose now you'd expect it to have tons of women because as a culture we're used to women in the workplace, right? What about biotech--are there more women in biotech than software?

char 16y ago

Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white? The fact that there are so few women in tech is an issue that is likely caused by multiple factors, some of which were addressed in this article, and some of which were addressed in the Arrington post. No one is wrong; each just seems to be arguing over which the greater factor is, but refuses to recognize the other. Arrington cites factors dealing with biological and societal tendencies of women as reasons for them to not engage in risky lifestyle choices such as startups, or to not be interested in tech in the first place. I agree with this. This isn't 'bad' or 'good', but it's the truth. People need to stop ignoring that there ARE (on average) differences between men and women. We (women) just aren't as interested in tech or building our own businesses in general. I'm just one data point, but based on many experiences, I would strongly argue that in general, women do not have the desire to take as many risks as males, or deal with day-to-day uncertainties. A vast majority of my female friends thought I was absolutely nuts when I first started doing startups. (They still think I'm a little nutty, despite being able to pay my bills now). The most common questions were, "What are you going to do for money if it fails?" (Answer: Get a job, or build something else), and "How do you deal with not knowing what you're going to be doing in the next [insert some time period]?" On the other hand, my male friends overwhelmingly asked about the technologies I'm building and admired me for taking a risk. Also interesting to note is that the reaction of female friends to my (male) co-founder was more of admiration than thinking he was crazy (but I was looked upon as crazy). On the other hand, for the women who ARE interested in tech (or could be persuaded to be interested), there are certainly existing challenges within the field itself. Again, I'm just one data point, but I am always amazed at the reactions I get from males in the startup world when they find out that I code. They are SHOCKED. Not only because I'm a woman, but also because I'm a white, blonde woman who is reasonably attractive. Sometimes I really do feel like I'm not taken seriously by many people until I do something completely bad ass to prove myself. The other article certainly has a point there.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
shareme 16y ago
I disagree, one of the highest risks currently is: -Marriage -Getting Married to raise a family Most of those have failure rates higher than starting a small business...and some would argue its approaching the risk level of startups. Women on the whole are no more or less risk averse than Men.

gojomo 16y ago

...offensively wrong... Why wasn't 'wrong' enough? Why should any honestly-presented, based-on-experience opinion like Arrington's generate 'offense'? Why not assume good faith?

Towle_ 16y ago
It's "offensively wrong" because the author (a male) is striving for an image of being genuinely sympathetic to The Plight. "Look at me, I'm so understanding."
- gojomo 16y ago
  So you think he's lying about his internal mental state and specific efforts in areas he controls? Why not assume good faith?
  - Towle_ 16y ago
    I don't think he's lying to us, I think he's lying to himself.
    - 146 16y ago
      I think that's a rather unfair assumption to make. Do you have evidence that he's being disingenuous?
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - Towle_ 16y ago
        'Disingenuous' isn't quite the word I would use. I'm sure the author really does think he's contributing to The Crusade, which is precisely the problem. He can't just dissect the errors in Arrington's logic. No, that's not good enough. He needs to put on a Crusader uniform and act like he thinks those people are supposed to act: offended. He can't just BE offended, he must explicitly tell you he's offended, and start swinging his sword around so you know what a noble Crusader he is. If he were responding to a blog post offensive to men, would he have used that language? No, because being offended for yourself isn't noble, it's being offended for others. And telling everyone about it as much as you can. How else will people know what an altruist you are?

amalcon 16y ago

Here's how it happens: if a woman engineer starts talking, men will wait until she says something notably clever before they start taking her seriously. Men on the other hand are taken seriously by default, and only get dismissed if they say something notably dumb. I was neutral to mildly positive on the post until this point. It is simply false. In tech, nobody is taken seriously by default. I certainly never have been, and I'm a young tall skinny white guy with glasses (the very computer-geek stereotype if ever there was one). I have to re-prove myself every time. I've never observed anything different with regard to anyone else. It turns out that there is one way you can get people to take you seriously from the get-go: "earn the respect of your immediate peers" (people take you seriously if it's obvious that everyone else does). I suppose it might appear that this implies that the majority is taken seriously by default, because most of the people who have the respect of their peers will be from that majority by simple averaging. Now, I don't mean to comment on whether or not it's harder for women to "prove themselves". Never having been a woman myself, and not being a neutral observer, it's hard to make that comparison. My only point is that the amount of effort is nonzero for men as well.

sprout 16y ago
Techies take nobody seriously by default. But when it comes to non-technical management types, I think what he says is very true. As a clean-cut, twenty-something male who speaks articulately, simply me saying "I'm a computer guy" gives me an enormous amount of credibility, far more than a girl my age could get.

javajones 16y ago

You do realize that this is a Western societal phenom? I work with women who are from India and China. Quite a few of them in fact. What is different in their cultures that they have so many women in this field and we do not?

Goladus 16y ago
Yes I've noticed that in the "Women in IT" phenomenon. That doesn't really explain tech startups, though. All the Indian and Chinese engineers I know work for established, stable companies.

whalesalad 16y ago

Funny enough, I'm in the group that thinks EVERYONE is incompetent and absolutely worthless until they prove themselves to me. This might not be as big of a deal in the bay area where tech is a bigger deal, but here in LA there are posers everywhere. We ask candidates in interviews to hand-code a front-end page, assuming that is the position they're applying for. Some will actually be able to write markup on a piece of paper, which is a pretty stressful test. "Code this page, here." (slides pen and paper) But a lot of people end up saying something like "Oh well I'd just throw a div here, throw a div there." It's literally a joke. I've had to stop laughing in meetings. We'll ask a rails developer what kind of stack he's familiar with, and they'll look at you like a deer in the headlights. I don't go into an interview with a woman assuming she wont be nearly as good. In fact, right now the ladies are 1 for 1. Unfortunately she's no longer working with us due to some family issues. A lot of the guys we've interviewed are actually quite literally living in their parents basements and building porn websites with their buddies. I could care less what people do in their personal time but holy shit, make something of yourself. Anyway, this doesn't really side with either particular argument in this whole man/woman debate, I just personally have gotten so jaded with worthless people who have no skills or drive whatsoever that their sex doesn't matter.

lawlit 16y ago

"... the expectation that women don't get into tech is what keeps them out of it..." Yeah well, how did this stereotype got built in the first place? and why isn't it the case with marketing? why this same expectation is not happening in sales? why tech?? The answer is clear: Women did it to themselfs. Men are not to blame. Women are not hackers by nature. It's usually a man who gets dirty. In my classroom, despite having the same teacher and the same lessons, it's always the boys who are trying to explain how things work to the "lot" of ladies who didn't get it. I personally can't imagine a lady creating C, Python, or running facebook on her dormroom. Ladies usually have guys over there, not data servers. I just can't imagine a bunch of ladies locked in a garage working on something. Whenever I think of a group of women, The only thing that comes to my mind is that they are talking about how cool is desperate housewives, or how great was Sara's date. This is not my fault, they are responsible for what we the men think of them. And don't tell me there's a white male controlling their brains to do such things. They just do them. face it. SO WOMEN, STOP BLAMING THE MEN and BE PROUD OF WHAT YOU LOVE. be it cooking or dating magazines or what ever. why do you want to hate what you love and force yourself in men things? are you ashamed of what you do? Why do you consider what you do as the work of a second class citizen? Women tend to love different things and I don't understand why people are trying to force them into tech. PEOPLE, women DID NOT ask for your help. Too sad for the ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow you, you are just an exception.

symkat 16y ago
"Too sad for the ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow you, you are just an exception." Computer addictivness? My group? Too sad? You seem to have this odd perception that you cannot be both feminine and a programmer. Why can't women both program and talk about "how great Sara's date" was?
- lawlit 16y ago
  I said I CAN'T imagine women in a room discussing tech. Maybe 01% of women will be doing that. But yet, that's MY head. You can't make me imagine what I can't imagine. This has nothing to do with being a girl programer that talks about dating. wich is totally normal and happens to everyone.

Goladus 16y ago

Men don't get taken seriously by default. Almost every man I know has to work pretty hard to be taken seriously, and in my experience reputation is the overwhelming factor anyway. If you've got a good reputation you'll tend to get a favorable bias, otherwise you won't.