5 ms·
You apply for a job or you build a startup and you want to be a professional. You want to do awesome things. Then someone else comes around, whether from a posi
by DrJokepu 12y ago
You apply for a job or you build a startup and you want to be a professional. You want to do awesome things. Then someone else comes around, whether from a position of power or not and displays romantic or sexual interest towards you. No matter how polite it is, it irreversibly changes the previously professional relationship in a very discomforting way.
It's a dick move and it's shit like this why many women shy away from participating in technology.
- elleferrer 12y ago>it irreversibly changes the previously professional relationship in a very discomforting way. This is very true.
- yummyfajitas 12y agoDo you believe that this "dick move" is absent in other fields with lots of women? Specifically, do you believe doctors and lawyers ask each other out less than techies? If "shit like this" is present in every field, it's a poor explanation of why women avoid technology but no those other fields. Now if you want to rescue this hypothesis, you could point out that doctors aren't a bunch of low status nerds. But that's a naughty hypothesis, so I'm sure you won't go there.
- DrJokepu 12y agoI was not making an hypothesis, I was describing how situations like this make people feel and then I described how that makes me feel. The irony is that even though you believed that you made a rational counter-argument what you really did is describing your very own feelings with a comment that is betraying your insecurities.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago...it's shit like this why many women shy away from participating in technology. That's a hypothesis, a claim about how the world works. That's the point I'm questioning. I don't much care about your feelings, nor was I commenting on them. You can feel whatever you like. If you want to make status lowering comments ("betraying your insecurities"), have at it. I'm well aware that personal attacks and the like are one of the results of questioning the orthodoxy.
- DrJokepu 12y agoI don't much care about your feelings, nor was I commenting on them. But that's exactly the problem, bro! It's a good thing to care about other people's feelings.
- tptacek 12y agoNo, you haven't shown the explanation to be poor. You've implicitly invoked one possible reason why unprofessional behavior among men might create obstacles for women, rebutted it, and declared the debate over. If this was an argument over the right way to interpret statistics over a website optimization scheme, you'd laugh at you. Considering only gender policy, what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology. Stipulate that romantic overtures are as common in medicine as in technology. What basis do you have for your implied claim that the impact of such an overture is the same in medicine as it is in technology? It seems straightforward and reasonable to presume that the impact of an unwanted overture is much more powerful for someone who is part of a small minority, for whom the overture comes from a member of the overwhelming majority. Michael O. Church has conjured an entire ethos in which he's been oppressed not just by venture capitalists but the entire industry they fund. He believes it so strongly that he has advocated violence to address the problem. And he's a guy, who feels locked out of the industry not because of a gender bias that has persisted overtly through pretty much all of human history, but instead due to unfair performance reviews. From your comment history, you strike me as someone who has in his life actually talked to a woman. But comments like this force me to remind myself of that. Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are, and I've managed to hear this story from actual women repeatedly. If you have heard this story before, how are you managing to handwave it away so easily?
- yummyfajitas 12y agoThe OP's explanation is indeed poor. You can possibly add additional hypothesis which rescue it (I suggested one in the post you just responded to), but that doesn't mean the original hypothesis by itself isn't poor. what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology. The key word here is "is". This was not true in the past. Yet somehow, medicine attracted women but tech didn't. At this historical point, did boy doctors not ask out girl doctors, but boy programmers did ask out girl programmers? Same for law, etc? Your "minority + asked out" theory predicts women can never escape minority status, which is evidently false. If you want an explanation it needs to be specific to computing. Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are... I've heard this story before. I've heard of women being hit on in church gatherings also, yet church is full of women. Thus it fails as an explanation of why women are underrepresented in technology but not other fields. Also, can I suggest leaving Michael O. Church alone? It's not necessary to drag him into a random conversation on topic completely unrelated to VC-istan.
- angersock 12y agoSo, easy enough way of testing this is to go and compare, across fields, gender ratio and percent dating within that field. A different field might be, for example, perhaps nursing--traditionally a very female-heavy field. I'm not aware of any such dataset, unfortunately.