5 ms·

Indeed; every geek/programmer already faces quite a bit of societal pushback and being a women adds even more on top of that.

by mtrimpe 13y ago

sdegutis 13y ago
I don't believe that. Don't get me wrong. I'm very sympathetic to anyone who is facing oppression. Any kind of oppression, especially that which is systematic and encouraged, should be done away with. I just don't believe this whole narrative that's been given lately. Call me a skeptic, but it looks like there are a lot more variables and moving parts to this story than just the typical female-oppression factor.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  What exactly don't you believe though? That it's harder for women to thrive in tech than men? That more girls would get into tech if it was as less of a "boys thing"? Or perhaps more interestingly: What do you believe?
  - sdegutis 13y ago
    Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, et cetera, et cetera. (Kinda off-topic, I'm aware. But I'm too tired. Good night.)
    - mtrimpe 13y ago
      I don't get it. Do you mean that you actually believe that all this women in tech stuff is nonsense and the reason there are so few women in tech has nothing to do with culture but is due to innate biological differences but that you feel that your opinion is not given space in modern day discourse and hence you're forced to toe the party line; just like how your parents made you recite this prair which you grudgingly went along with but actually didn't believe in? It's the only interpretation I can find, although equating a belief in gender-distribution in tech being non-cultural with atheism seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Whatever it was; sleep tight.
      - sdegutis 13y ago
        Nope. It was just a really sleepy half-joke, where "what do you believe?" is answered with something that starts with "I believe in ..."
  - sdegutis 13y ago
    (Now that I'm not so sleepy, I'll try to answer this better.) It's much more probable that males and females experience fundamentally different kinds of pushback against learning programming. It seems naive to say that females experience a simple superset of what males experience. In which case, it stands to reason that they probably don't necessarily have a harder time getting into it, just a different set of social obstacles. But I'm no professor of sociology. I don't know these things for a fact. I'm just saying that I approach this topic with a bit of skepticism when someone else (who also is not a professor of sociology) comes out claiming that females have more social obstacles to getting into computer programming than males do.
    - mtrimpe 13y ago
      That's a perfectly valid perspective and it's more than likely that there are indeed both differences and some amount of overlap in the obstacles. What we observe however is that: * in various countries the gender distribution in tech is quite close to 50/50 (-> probably little innate difference) * in the US and Western Europe there are much fewer women in tech (-> probably some cultural difference) * women in tech indicate encountering a lot of social obstacles (-> probably in the form of these self-reported mechanisms) Those observations together make operating on the assumption that the social obstacles for women in tech are stronger than those for men (and working on improving it) a reasonable thing to do. I agree that formalizing that as a 'goal of 50/50' is wrong but the underlying goal, which is the one that is actually getting support, is for the (systemic forces that give rise to) the gender gap to be reduced to an acceptable degree. There will always be things to improve of course as Eastern European countries for example already have much more women in tech than here, but are dealing with stereotypes which steer women towards QA and men towards development. Here we're not at the point yet though, so currently we won't do much harm by letting our main focus can still just be on increasing participation of women in tech, period.

Indeed; every geek/programmer already faces quite a bit of societal pushback and being a women adds even more on top of that.

by mtrimpe 13y ago

Indeed; every geek/programmer already faces quite a bit of societal pushback and being a women adds even more on top of that.

sdegutis 13y ago

I don't believe that. Don't get me wrong. I'm very sympathetic to anyone who is facing oppression. Any kind of oppression, especially that which is systematic and encouraged, should be done away with. I just don't believe this whole narrative that's been given lately. Call me a skeptic, but it looks like there are a lot more variables and moving parts to this story than just the typical female-oppression factor.

mtrimpe 13y ago
What exactly don't you believe though? That it's harder for women to thrive in tech than men? That more girls would get into tech if it was as less of a "boys thing"? Or perhaps more interestingly: What do you believe?
- sdegutis 13y ago
  Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, et cetera, et cetera. (Kinda off-topic, I'm aware. But I'm too tired. Good night.)
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    I don't get it. Do you mean that you actually believe that all this women in tech stuff is nonsense and the reason there are so few women in tech has nothing to do with culture but is due to innate biological differences but that you feel that your opinion is not given space in modern day discourse and hence you're forced to toe the party line; just like how your parents made you recite this prair which you grudgingly went along with but actually didn't believe in? It's the only interpretation I can find, although equating a belief in gender-distribution in tech being non-cultural with atheism seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Whatever it was; sleep tight.
    - sdegutis 13y ago
      Nope. It was just a really sleepy half-joke, where "what do you believe?" is answered with something that starts with "I believe in ..."
- sdegutis 13y ago
  (Now that I'm not so sleepy, I'll try to answer this better.) It's much more probable that males and females experience fundamentally different kinds of pushback against learning programming. It seems naive to say that females experience a simple superset of what males experience. In which case, it stands to reason that they probably don't necessarily have a harder time getting into it, just a different set of social obstacles. But I'm no professor of sociology. I don't know these things for a fact. I'm just saying that I approach this topic with a bit of skepticism when someone else (who also is not a professor of sociology) comes out claiming that females have more social obstacles to getting into computer programming than males do.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    That's a perfectly valid perspective and it's more than likely that there are indeed both differences and some amount of overlap in the obstacles. What we observe however is that: * in various countries the gender distribution in tech is quite close to 50/50 (-> probably little innate difference) * in the US and Western Europe there are much fewer women in tech (-> probably some cultural difference) * women in tech indicate encountering a lot of social obstacles (-> probably in the form of these self-reported mechanisms) Those observations together make operating on the assumption that the social obstacles for women in tech are stronger than those for men (and working on improving it) a reasonable thing to do. I agree that formalizing that as a 'goal of 50/50' is wrong but the underlying goal, which is the one that is actually getting support, is for the (systemic forces that give rise to) the gender gap to be reduced to an acceptable degree. There will always be things to improve of course as Eastern European countries for example already have much more women in tech than here, but are dealing with stereotypes which steer women towards QA and men towards development. Here we're not at the point yet though, so currently we won't do much harm by letting our main focus can still just be on increasing participation of women in tech, period.