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Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't. Not all the people I socialize with are into computers. Most aren't. You can

by fleitz 16y ago

Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't. Not all the people I socialize with are into computers. Most aren't. You can't make all your friends in your own industry. I don't care if a person is a man or a woman, unless there are seriously extenuating circumstance I won't work or socialize with them if their assholes. The problem is that in geek circles there is a heavy social penalty of advocating that someone be ostracized for behaving like an asshole, everyone has to be included no matter how much no one else wants to hang out with them. There are a lot of anti-social retards in tech regardless of gender. I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms. As the OP pointed out quite accurately in their post 'I realized he was just an asshole who probably wouldn't get too far in life anyways.' Many people are hardwired to respect the opinion of anyone who forcefully and confidently expresses it. It's a two way street though, want people to think you know software engineering or any other topic? Just say something reasonably intelligent in a forceful and confident way, also if someone else has said it that they respect mention that person as having saying it. Most of the debates in software engineering are subjective in nature as much as everyone involved in the decision likes to claim otherwise. If you know your rhetoric you'll have no problem intellectually disarming most people in CS. CS geeks think they only pay attention to logos but realistically there are a lot of CS decisions made based on ethos and pathos. I'll probably be down modded for saying this but the appeal of open source is based largely in ethos and pathos, and not logos. I'd settle for more people in tech who can write working code with out being an asshole regardless of gender.

tjogin 16y ago
We are equal, but we are also different. These things are often conflated, but they are not the same.
- bethling 16y ago
  Exactly. And teams do better when there are different perspectives, different ways of thought. Women have a different set of life experiences, and if we're dissuaded from technology, then the rest of the technology world misses out of those different perspectives. There's nothing better or superior about them, they're just different. It's not that women should be encouraged because we're women. It's that 1/2 the population often feels (at least to some extent) like outsiders to the field. If there are other groups that feel the same way, then that needs to be dealt with as well. It's just that lack of women tends to be noticeable - in 15 years of software development I've only had 3 other women developers on my team.
  - patio11 16y ago
    I am unconvinced that women have different perspectives in a way which my XML file mapping university courses to university departments cares about, or that checking for absence of the Y chromosome is more efficient for identifying the different perspectives on XML files versus just asking for one's perspective on XML files. Additionally, it is highly likely that if we actually looked for different perspectives, optimizing for them honestly would routinely result in allocating scarce resources (like jobs) away from individual women. This is exactly what happened in university admissions: if you do something like e.g. give extra bonus points for foreign languages on the theory that it privileges children of immigrants over rich white kids at Andover, you'll find that rich white kids at Andover are quite capable of bending their considerable resources to the acquisition of foreign language skills if you give them sufficient incentive. (This is why universities desiring a particular racial balance in the United States achieve it through severe and pervasive racial discrimination.)
    - tjogin 16y ago
      Most of the solutions applied to even out gender imbalances are bad solutions, for several reasons, some of which you outline. The prevalence of bad simplistic solutions should not suggest that it is not a problem worth addressing, however. Only that the problem is not trivially addressed, if at all deemed a problem. I'm unconvinced that the problem, if it is one, can be effectively addressed at the college level. This is not a problem of admission, but one of interest. That interest needs to be encouraged, or at least not discouraged, far earlier.
    - bethling 16y ago
      The lack of a Y chromosome doesn't help or hinder any given task, but the best teams seem to have people who look at the big pictures differently. Having different points of view means having different ways of looking at problems, and will (I feel) lead to stronger teams. The solution isn't to optimize the process to hire more women, it's to look at the reasons why women avoid tech. Getting more qualified people into the hiring pool can only help. When I started off in CS, the introductory class was 60/40 (approximately the same as the school) at the start. By the end it was 85/15 - women dropped it at a far higher rate then the men. Why? I don't think it has to do with men being better at it than women, I think a lot of it has to do with what we're told to expect of ourselves. Everyone in that class was smart, and almost everyone was used to getting A's throughout high school. A guy who got a B or C would look at it as they we're doing well enough and work harder, a woman would be more likely to think that "they" were right and this field wasn't for them. In high school, my guidance counselor told me not to bother applying to MIT, and if it wasn't for my parents standing up for me, I likely wouldn't have. I know other women who heard the same sorts of things growing up. That's where the problem lies, it's not something that can be fixed easily. Maybe it's too deeply rooted in our society to be fixed any time soon, but I think that if we at least can help women over that hump and get them to realize that they can do it, that the numbers will come up, and everyone will benefit from it.
- revoltingx 16y ago
  That doesn't make sense to me. Either something is equal, or it is different. Not to say one is better than the other, but the mere fact that there is a difference defeats the notion that there is equality.
rb2k_ 16y ago
> anti-social retards > I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms That actually sounded pretty condescending to me.
loewenskind 16y ago
>If we're all equal then it doesn't. Equal in the sense of: TotalSum(Woman) == TotalSum(Man) not: Woman == Man.
rorymarinich 16y ago
> Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't. This is an argument that's popped up in a dozen varieties over the last century of slowly bringing equality to a bunch of different groups. An extreme example would be the "separate but equal" line that promoted racial segregation in America; if there is no codified barrier, the argument goes, then there must be no barrier at all! Right? The problem is that scripted barriers are not the only barriers that exist. Social barriers are much more prominent and damaging. If the culture around technology has been built in a way that encourages a certain type of usually-male character and discourages anybody else, and I would argue that this is the case, then even if everybody's invited they're not necessarily going to show up. This isn't a tech-only problem, mind you. The acting world is famous for its cliquishness; certain sports and school sports teams also have a certain exclusive attitude. It's not that you can't participate equally in theory; it's that the prospect of participating at all is so unpleasant to certain kinds of people that they choose not to of their own volition. The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds. It's very late at night so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not defining just what sorts of minds those are, but I know that I find programming a hostile and unapproachable subject in general. There's nobody out there teaching it or explaining it in a way that appeals to me. The programming courses I've taken in college failed to spark my interest entirely. So it's not just that women aren't in tech; there are a lot of sorts of people who simply aren't represented, and so the entire field misses out. This doesn't matter if your only goal is to maintain the status quo of programming — but I think that's a remarkably shallow ambition. The more people we have programming, the more diverse and creative we'll find programming becomes. Everybody benefits from such diversity, because each potential new approach to programming will yield discoveries that bounce back to benefit people in each field. Fact is that programming is still an incredibly new industry; we haven't begun to see the extent of what it can do for society. And our progress will be limited to the sorts of people who are able to develop a passion for programming. If we don't strive to invite and encourage new sorts of people to join the fold, we're hurting ourselves as well as those others. You're technically right that everybody's equal in tech. But in practice there's a severe discrepancy in gender, and that discrepancy will only naturally balance itself out very slowly. If we make an effort to push towards real equality we can speed up the process immensely, and it's also a nice thing to do, so I don't see much of a reason not to do it.
ig1 16y ago
Tech startups overwhelmingly focus on male or gender neutral problems. In sectors where female spending dominates there are far fewer startups, and that is a problem.
Shorel 16y ago
> If we're all equal We all have the same rights. This a very different thing than being equal.

by fleitz 16y ago

tjogin 16y ago

We are equal, but we are also different. These things are often conflated, but they are not the same.

bethling 16y ago
Exactly. And teams do better when there are different perspectives, different ways of thought. Women have a different set of life experiences, and if we're dissuaded from technology, then the rest of the technology world misses out of those different perspectives. There's nothing better or superior about them, they're just different. It's not that women should be encouraged because we're women. It's that 1/2 the population often feels (at least to some extent) like outsiders to the field. If there are other groups that feel the same way, then that needs to be dealt with as well. It's just that lack of women tends to be noticeable - in 15 years of software development I've only had 3 other women developers on my team.
- patio11 16y ago
  I am unconvinced that women have different perspectives in a way which my XML file mapping university courses to university departments cares about, or that checking for absence of the Y chromosome is more efficient for identifying the different perspectives on XML files versus just asking for one's perspective on XML files. Additionally, it is highly likely that if we actually looked for different perspectives, optimizing for them honestly would routinely result in allocating scarce resources (like jobs) away from individual women. This is exactly what happened in university admissions: if you do something like e.g. give extra bonus points for foreign languages on the theory that it privileges children of immigrants over rich white kids at Andover, you'll find that rich white kids at Andover are quite capable of bending their considerable resources to the acquisition of foreign language skills if you give them sufficient incentive. (This is why universities desiring a particular racial balance in the United States achieve it through severe and pervasive racial discrimination.)
  - tjogin 16y ago
    Most of the solutions applied to even out gender imbalances are bad solutions, for several reasons, some of which you outline. The prevalence of bad simplistic solutions should not suggest that it is not a problem worth addressing, however. Only that the problem is not trivially addressed, if at all deemed a problem. I'm unconvinced that the problem, if it is one, can be effectively addressed at the college level. This is not a problem of admission, but one of interest. That interest needs to be encouraged, or at least not discouraged, far earlier.
  - bethling 16y ago
    The lack of a Y chromosome doesn't help or hinder any given task, but the best teams seem to have people who look at the big pictures differently. Having different points of view means having different ways of looking at problems, and will (I feel) lead to stronger teams. The solution isn't to optimize the process to hire more women, it's to look at the reasons why women avoid tech. Getting more qualified people into the hiring pool can only help. When I started off in CS, the introductory class was 60/40 (approximately the same as the school) at the start. By the end it was 85/15 - women dropped it at a far higher rate then the men. Why? I don't think it has to do with men being better at it than women, I think a lot of it has to do with what we're told to expect of ourselves. Everyone in that class was smart, and almost everyone was used to getting A's throughout high school. A guy who got a B or C would look at it as they we're doing well enough and work harder, a woman would be more likely to think that "they" were right and this field wasn't for them. In high school, my guidance counselor told me not to bother applying to MIT, and if it wasn't for my parents standing up for me, I likely wouldn't have. I know other women who heard the same sorts of things growing up. That's where the problem lies, it's not something that can be fixed easily. Maybe it's too deeply rooted in our society to be fixed any time soon, but I think that if we at least can help women over that hump and get them to realize that they can do it, that the numbers will come up, and everyone will benefit from it.
revoltingx 16y ago
That doesn't make sense to me. Either something is equal, or it is different. Not to say one is better than the other, but the mere fact that there is a difference defeats the notion that there is equality.

rb2k_ 16y ago

> anti-social retards > I'm quite happy with it as there are lots of people willing to hire devs who are willing to not be condescending and have some semblance of adherence to social norms That actually sounded pretty condescending to me.

loewenskind 16y ago

>If we're all equal then it doesn't. Equal in the sense of: TotalSum(Woman) == TotalSum(Man) not: Woman == Man.

rorymarinich 16y ago

> Why does it matter how many women are in tech? If we're all equal then it doesn't. This is an argument that's popped up in a dozen varieties over the last century of slowly bringing equality to a bunch of different groups. An extreme example would be the "separate but equal" line that promoted racial segregation in America; if there is no codified barrier, the argument goes, then there must be no barrier at all! Right? The problem is that scripted barriers are not the only barriers that exist. Social barriers are much more prominent and damaging. If the culture around technology has been built in a way that encourages a certain type of usually-male character and discourages anybody else, and I would argue that this is the case, then even if everybody's invited they're not necessarily going to show up. This isn't a tech-only problem, mind you. The acting world is famous for its cliquishness; certain sports and school sports teams also have a certain exclusive attitude. It's not that you can't participate equally in theory; it's that the prospect of participating at all is so unpleasant to certain kinds of people that they choose not to of their own volition. The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds. It's very late at night so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not defining just what sorts of minds those are, but I know that I find programming a hostile and unapproachable subject in general. There's nobody out there teaching it or explaining it in a way that appeals to me. The programming courses I've taken in college failed to spark my interest entirely. So it's not just that women aren't in tech; there are a lot of sorts of people who simply aren't represented, and so the entire field misses out. This doesn't matter if your only goal is to maintain the status quo of programming — but I think that's a remarkably shallow ambition. The more people we have programming, the more diverse and creative we'll find programming becomes. Everybody benefits from such diversity, because each potential new approach to programming will yield discoveries that bounce back to benefit people in each field. Fact is that programming is still an incredibly new industry; we haven't begun to see the extent of what it can do for society. And our progress will be limited to the sorts of people who are able to develop a passion for programming. If we don't strive to invite and encourage new sorts of people to join the fold, we're hurting ourselves as well as those others. You're technically right that everybody's equal in tech. But in practice there's a severe discrepancy in gender, and that discrepancy will only naturally balance itself out very slowly. If we make an effort to push towards real equality we can speed up the process immensely, and it's also a nice thing to do, so I don't see much of a reason not to do it.

ig1 16y ago

Tech startups overwhelmingly focus on male or gender neutral problems. In sectors where female spending dominates there are far fewer startups, and that is a problem.

Shorel 16y ago

> If we're all equal We all have the same rights. This a very different thing than being equal.