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We have had article after article claiming it is obvious women are being oppressed in the tech industry. Every week there is one of these. Many make bigoted cla

We have had article after article claiming it is obvious women are being oppressed in the tech industry. Every week there is one of these. Many make bigoted claims about male engineers, enforcing stereotypes of male geeks I have never actually seen in industry. Where are the technical articles written by women? There are plenty of contributions complaining about oppression, while attacking men and claiming absurd stereotypes. Where are the technical contributions?

sp332 14y ago
Here's Lady Ada (real name Limor Fried) who runs a $1M+/year tech company out of a live/work space in NYC. https://www.adafruit.com/about/ https://www.adafruit.com/about/ And here's her story about ridiculous levels of harassment in the tech scene. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165434
Produce 14y ago
More than that, where is the defense of masculinity? Why should anyone, men and women included, have to apologise for their nature? Yeah, men, on average, are more to the point when they speak. Yeah, women, on average, are more in touch with their emotions. Let's pull our collective heads out of our asses, admit that we're not identical and learn to respect each others' differences, the fact that those differences are based averages and that exceptions occur both ways. Not to mention that we're on the fucking internet. There is no gender, race, colour or creed here. Everybody pick a neutral username and, hey, presto! Problem solved. I'm a woman. Or am I... Ooooh! Who gives a shit.
ktizo 14y ago
Where are the technical contributions? A selection of some of the major early contributions in chronological order; first programmer - Ada Lovelace foundational paper for computerized algebra - Grete Hermann original programmers of the ENIAC - Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Fran Bilas, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman first compiler written - Grace Hopper first person to use a computer in a private home & first developer of an operating system (LAP) for the first minicomputer - Mary Allen Wilkes And all of this was done before Mary Keller became the first American woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science, in 1965, and it wasn't until 1989 that IBM had their first female fellow, Frances E. Allen. If you are claiming to be finding it hard to find technical contributions to computer science by women and that you see no evidence of discrimination, it means you are being willfully blind, at best.
- Produce 14y ago
  Wil van der Aalst – business process management, process mining, Petri nets Hal Abelson – intersection of computing and teaching Serge Abiteboul – database theory Samson Abramsky – game semantics Leonard Adleman – RSA, DNA computing Manindra Agrawal – polynomial-time primality testing Luis von Ahn – human-based computation Alfred Aho – compilers book, the 'a' in AWK Amos Nuwasiima – PHP Programming book Frances E. Allen – compiler optimization Alexander Scaranti – Image Processing, Image Retrieval Gene Amdahl – supercomputer developer, founder of Amdahl Corporation A. Annerl – multidimensional processing, computational complexity theory Andrew Appel – compilers text books Bruce Arden - programming language compilers (GAT, MAD), virtual memory architecture, MTS Sanjeev Arora – PCP theorem (Hahaha. Right, I want to see who came up with Ketamine theorem.) A. E. Hugo - parallel computing on heterogeneous multicore architectures[citation needed] John Vincent Atanasoff – computer pioneer Ali Aydar - computer scientist and CEO of Sporcle Leonard Ayunar - Computer Programming Enthusiast, 1997 - At Present Software Developer That's just surnames beginning with A. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    Hal (Harold) Abelson is a man :) If you haven't already, shame on you; You should check him & Jerald Jay Sussman's EPIC 1986 SICP course for (I think) HP employees (SICP: Structure and Interpretations of Computer Programs). videos are available here: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma... [EDIT]: I notices that you've apparently listed male computer scientists (it's 5:23am here). But I won't remove my comment as the SICP link might be useful for others.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    I wasn't trying to find a massive list, droithomme asked "where are the technical contributions" by women in computing, not "who has the biggest list". Really, all I needed to write down was Grace Hopper. Compilers being fairly useful in the field.
    - 14y ago
ohgodthecat3 14y ago
I'd imagine they are read as if they are written by men and don't get added to the woman category. The internet still seems rather men oriented I know if I don't know the gender of a person and can't make a guess by their username I default to using male pronouns and most other men seem to do this as well. (I wonder if the women of the internet do this or if they default to she or something else entirely.)
- Ralith 14y ago
  > The internet still seems rather men oriented I know if I don't know the gender of a person and can't make a guess by their username I default to using male pronouns and most other men seem to do this as well. This is not a property of the Internet; it is a property of the English language.
  - easp 14y ago
    A property of the English language? I don't think so. Perhaps you were referring to a dominant tendency English-speaking cultures?
  - taryneast 14y ago
    This is not a property of the English language. It is a property of the person reading the article.
easp 14y ago
Well, for a start, did you look at any of her other blog posts, or did you just assume that all she does on her blog is complain about oppression and attack men with absurd stereotypes?
bethly 14y ago
Everyone seems to ignore the hundreds of articles that are written by women. Their technical articles get maybe 10 comments, while gender related articles get hundreds. I know personally my one gender related post has 50% more viewers than my top non-gender related post, and that one is one that people often find via google to help solve a specific problem. The problem with "we should focus on women's technical achievements!" is that it rapidly becomes "but we shouldn't focus on women's technical achievements because they are women! We should focus on technical achievements!" which even more quickly magically morphs into "We should focus on men's technical achievements!" Wired represented Grace Hopper with a picture of a dude in glasses last week. The NYT thinks men invented the internet. How many men even know that Liskov of the Liskov substitution principle is a woman? Or that Alan Turing is gay? As long as we don't address benevolent sexism and erasure, the best intentions for meritocracy will continue to fail.
- droithomme 14y ago
  Thank you, you may be the only one that caught my point. Technical articles by women don't often get submitted here and those that are don't get many upvotes, but articles claiming discrimination or industry wide hostile work environments are quite popular and usually feature long discussions and front page status.
lucisferre 14y ago
> enforcing stereotypes of male geeks I have never actually seen in industry The irony of this is awesome because I see it every week in the comments for these posts on Hacker News.

sp332 14y ago

Here's Lady Ada (real name Limor Fried) who runs a $1M+/year tech company out of a live/work space in NYC. https://www.adafruit.com/about/ https://www.adafruit.com/about/ And here's her story about ridiculous levels of harassment in the tech scene. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165434

Produce 14y ago

More than that, where is the defense of masculinity? Why should anyone, men and women included, have to apologise for their nature? Yeah, men, on average, are more to the point when they speak. Yeah, women, on average, are more in touch with their emotions. Let's pull our collective heads out of our asses, admit that we're not identical and learn to respect each others' differences, the fact that those differences are based averages and that exceptions occur both ways. Not to mention that we're on the fucking internet. There is no gender, race, colour or creed here. Everybody pick a neutral username and, hey, presto! Problem solved. I'm a woman. Or am I... Ooooh! Who gives a shit.

ktizo 14y ago

Where are the technical contributions? A selection of some of the major early contributions in chronological order; first programmer - Ada Lovelace foundational paper for computerized algebra - Grete Hermann original programmers of the ENIAC - Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Fran Bilas, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman first compiler written - Grace Hopper first person to use a computer in a private home & first developer of an operating system (LAP) for the first minicomputer - Mary Allen Wilkes And all of this was done before Mary Keller became the first American woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science, in 1965, and it wasn't until 1989 that IBM had their first female fellow, Frances E. Allen. If you are claiming to be finding it hard to find technical contributions to computer science by women and that you see no evidence of discrimination, it means you are being willfully blind, at best.

Produce 14y ago
Wil van der Aalst – business process management, process mining, Petri nets Hal Abelson – intersection of computing and teaching Serge Abiteboul – database theory Samson Abramsky – game semantics Leonard Adleman – RSA, DNA computing Manindra Agrawal – polynomial-time primality testing Luis von Ahn – human-based computation Alfred Aho – compilers book, the 'a' in AWK Amos Nuwasiima – PHP Programming book Frances E. Allen – compiler optimization Alexander Scaranti – Image Processing, Image Retrieval Gene Amdahl – supercomputer developer, founder of Amdahl Corporation A. Annerl – multidimensional processing, computational complexity theory Andrew Appel – compilers text books Bruce Arden - programming language compilers (GAT, MAD), virtual memory architecture, MTS Sanjeev Arora – PCP theorem (Hahaha. Right, I want to see who came up with Ketamine theorem.) A. E. Hugo - parallel computing on heterogeneous multicore architectures[citation needed] John Vincent Atanasoff – computer pioneer Ali Aydar - computer scientist and CEO of Sporcle Leonard Ayunar - Computer Programming Enthusiast, 1997 - At Present Software Developer That's just surnames beginning with A. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  Hal (Harold) Abelson is a man :) If you haven't already, shame on you; You should check him & Jerald Jay Sussman's EPIC 1986 SICP course for (I think) HP employees (SICP: Structure and Interpretations of Computer Programs). videos are available here: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma... [EDIT]: I notices that you've apparently listed male computer scientists (it's 5:23am here). But I won't remove my comment as the SICP link might be useful for others.
- ktizo 14y ago
  I wasn't trying to find a massive list, droithomme asked "where are the technical contributions" by women in computing, not "who has the biggest list". Really, all I needed to write down was Grace Hopper. Compilers being fairly useful in the field.
  - 14y ago

ohgodthecat3 14y ago

I'd imagine they are read as if they are written by men and don't get added to the woman category. The internet still seems rather men oriented I know if I don't know the gender of a person and can't make a guess by their username I default to using male pronouns and most other men seem to do this as well. (I wonder if the women of the internet do this or if they default to she or something else entirely.)

Ralith 14y ago
> The internet still seems rather men oriented I know if I don't know the gender of a person and can't make a guess by their username I default to using male pronouns and most other men seem to do this as well. This is not a property of the Internet; it is a property of the English language.
- easp 14y ago
  A property of the English language? I don't think so. Perhaps you were referring to a dominant tendency English-speaking cultures?
- taryneast 14y ago
  This is not a property of the English language. It is a property of the person reading the article.

easp 14y ago

Well, for a start, did you look at any of her other blog posts, or did you just assume that all she does on her blog is complain about oppression and attack men with absurd stereotypes?

bethly 14y ago

Everyone seems to ignore the hundreds of articles that are written by women. Their technical articles get maybe 10 comments, while gender related articles get hundreds. I know personally my one gender related post has 50% more viewers than my top non-gender related post, and that one is one that people often find via google to help solve a specific problem. The problem with "we should focus on women's technical achievements!" is that it rapidly becomes "but we shouldn't focus on women's technical achievements because they are women! We should focus on technical achievements!" which even more quickly magically morphs into "We should focus on men's technical achievements!" Wired represented Grace Hopper with a picture of a dude in glasses last week. The NYT thinks men invented the internet. How many men even know that Liskov of the Liskov substitution principle is a woman? Or that Alan Turing is gay? As long as we don't address benevolent sexism and erasure, the best intentions for meritocracy will continue to fail.

droithomme 14y ago
Thank you, you may be the only one that caught my point. Technical articles by women don't often get submitted here and those that are don't get many upvotes, but articles claiming discrimination or industry wide hostile work environments are quite popular and usually feature long discussions and front page status.

lucisferre 14y ago

> enforcing stereotypes of male geeks I have never actually seen in industry The irony of this is awesome because I see it every week in the comments for these posts on Hacker News.