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Computers are for girls (2022)
- empressplay 1y agoMy female cousins did learn how to load and play games on their Commodore 128, but of course that fell by the wayside when they got an NES. It was a lot easier to get a game going on the NES.
- klooney 1y agoThis is a real vibe shift kind of article, remember circa 2018 Hacker News?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoA few years ago, I thought it was remarkable how politically balanced the commenters on HN were. Crazy to think I ever believed that.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- swayvil 1y ago[flagged]
- dzink 1y agoYour imagination is lacking or you don’t know the right girls.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoBoys are interested in things, girls are interested in people. Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/ I like attempts to encourage women towards software engineering though because there is a large people component to it.
- swayvil 1y agoWhere's the people in software engineering? It's a bunch of abstractions floating in my head.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoGUIs, multiplayer, forums, text
- amarant 1y agoOne of the best backend developers I've ever known is a woman. I think most differences between sexes are cultural, and cultural norms are meant to be broken
- swayvil 1y agoI doubt that. I mean we look and act different, we're shaped different, we even smell different. Don't succumb to the temptations of irony.
- maxbond 1y agoI've also known women who were great hackers. I think the temptation to be concerned with here is the temptation to reject evidence rather than adjusting your priors.
- frumplestlatz 1y agoThere are average differences that persist across cultures and economic divides. One of the most interesting (to me) is color preference; across cultures, environments, and time, men consistently express a preference for colors near blue, while women consistently express a preference for colors near pink. I recommend a quick dive into Google scholar if you’re interested; it’s very fascinating in just how consistent it is. However, all this tells us is that differences in choices and outcomes at population levels do not necessarily indicate cultural enforcement or oppression. Outliers exist, and one should never judge or limit others based on measured average group differences, and especially not stereotypes.
- breakyerself 1y agoPink was considered a masculine color until the middle of the last century and blue is universally liked among all genders. I think you're finding things that confirm your own biases.
- frumplestlatz 1y ago
- zeroCalories 1y ago[flagged]
- breakyerself 1y agoI can easily imagine that
- pylotlight 1y ago> Why was home computing such a boys' club? I don't know, really. Are we seriously going to pretend the answer isn't simply guys and girls have different interests on average, why do we keep having to rediscover fire here?
- breakyerself 1y ago[flagged]
- koonsolo 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox explains it all, and should be common knowledge by now. Your reasonable comment being downvoted doesn't surprise me. I'm feeling more and more alienated from HN lately.
- chasil 1y agoComputers were girls. "Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans, sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand. Yet they powered everything from astronomy to war and the race into space. And for a time, a large portion of them were women." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-computers-180972202/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-... Also, the movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
- dzink 1y agoGrowing up the girls I know (including me) were much more drawn to making and coding on computers, while boys were more interested in playing games on the computers. If it weren’t for the games, many more boys might be coding, OR many more boys might not even be interested in computers. I wonder what a real representative survey would show. I’d still much rather have a computer spin cycles solving my problems than me spin cycles solving a game.
- cedws 1y agoGames played a big role in introducing me to programming and I think it’s the same for many others in my generation.
- theden 1y agoPeople underestimate how much our socially and culturally constructed gender roles impact interests and/or career paths. People have different tolerances with respect to conformity, and at different stages in their lives. It's a shame something as fundamental as computing is seen as a "boy" thing by many, often fatalistically, and I think we've been worse off for it.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago>People underestimate how much our socially and culturally constructed gender roles impact interests and/or career paths. I mean, if you read the OP, it basically presents a bunch of evidence against this position. (Specifically, if it were a matter of social construction, it wouldn't be so easy to find lots of computer ads featuring girls and women.)
- dzink 1y agoBoys who code seem to be more territorial about their craft and code and choices and content of teams. As a female who codes, I love the craft and making innovative work. Yet waaaay too many times I’ve encountered people who get severely attached to their own approach about something and religiously force others to subdue to their ways. To the point of bullying other teammates about things that don’t really matter. I wonder if that kind of culture has alienated women more than men.
- koonsolo 1y agoHow do you explain that more gender equal countries have less girls in STEM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
- didibus 1y agoI remember reading that there was an active re-framing of the computer worker. It was somewhat reflected by employers that started hiring exclusively men and of computer workers being associated with nerds and geeks, and the combination could have driven woman away. Also I don't know that finding ads that targeted woman by simply searching Google is a rebuttal that ads were almost entirely targeted at boys. As it tell us nothing of the prevalance and quantity of each. That said, I agree I don't think the ads were a major part of it. It's the culture, and what I heard is the culture shift happened once computer work was seen as requiring rigorous knowledge, intellectualism and was starting to pay well. I'm not gonna advance I know the truth of these hypothesis, but I think it would make a lot of sense that once the job was seen as lucrative and similar in qualities (like the skill needed) to other jobs culturally associated with men, that the culture similarly rebranded computers as being for boys.
- surgical_fire 1y ago> but I think it would make a lot of sense that once the job was seen as lucrative and similar in qualities (like the skill needed) to other jobs culturally associated with men, that the culture similarly rebranded computers as being for boys. This sounds very revisionist. When I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90s, absolutely no one spoke of "working with computers" as a glamorous career path or associated it with well paid jobs. Much to the opposite, being interested in computers made you into a sort of social pariah in school. Girls wouldn't touch computers much for that reason - hell, my group of friends would fall over one another to accommodate any girl that showed even a remote interest in anything nerdy, not that those were in plentiful supply. It was quite pathetic really. It was much later that "working with computers" was associated with being well off in terms of money, more or less at the same time when there was an explosion of active efforts to get more women into coding. And honestly, especially as a father of a little girl, I welcome the effort to make it more egalitarian and all. But let's not pretend that 30 years ago women were being held back from computers by a shadowy conspiracy to keep them from cushy jobs. They just didn't enjoy the thing.
- Martin_Silenus 1y agoThat's something about low-level feminism that has been making me furious for the past 10 years. Because these people didn't even live through that era, when most women only started taking an interest in personal computers once these machines became a vehicle for social interaction (they were born after Internet became a thing, so they don't take into account the fact that these machines weren't connected, that it was a solo activity... and that, to me, explains everything about most women's lack of interest at that time). When I was young, I would have sold my soul to hook up with a hardcore female coder who ate 68000 for breakfast. Met on February 32 at a code party, perhaps. It would have been love at first sight. We would have started a family, had kids, ethical hacker seeds, in binary underpants, learning to code before they could even walk. The Addams Family of hacking. The Tarantino-esque Killers of dev. Throwing around scroll texts writhing in all directions, nauseating rotozooms, while breaking borders in HBL sync, chasing cathode rays to spew psychedelic plasma effects in 4096 colors... damn it!
- defrost 1y agoGrowing up in the 1970s in high school I met few people into math or computers, although there were a few. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given it was the Kimberley. Once I hit university nearly half the math stream was female, as were the staff in the computing services and early CS courses. Many had come across to Australia from Dartmouth (UK). As PC's became more and more popular at home items purchased for boys to play games on the number of women in the mechanics of CS started to decline, veering more into law, medicine, and sociology.
- Martin_Silenus 1y agoYeah... schools ARE social places. Jobs too. Personal computers at home were NOT. That's the point.
- defrost 1y ago> Personal computers at home were NOT. Subjective. I'm still in touch with a wide circle of both genders who had PC's at home back when we collaborated on projects together. eg: one of these authors: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/geometric-mechanics-and-symmetry-9780199212903 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/geometric-mechanics-... had a father who sold early Apple & IBM home computers, much fun was had by my circle building transputer array's and other such things in back sheds.