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Ah, you're saying SV is the front line not because it treats women worse than anyone else in the world, but rather (to use the military analogy) because it's an

• Alex3917 12y ago
  People aren't complaining because they think SV treats women badly, they're complaining because they perceive SV as preventing women across the country from being as successful in business as men are.
• tptacek 12y ago
  It doesn't treat women worse than every other place in the world, no, but it treats them worse than many other places. Computer science has a sharply worse gender participation gap than other professions, and even from other STEM fields. It also continues to allow that gap to reinforce itself, for instance with apologia about how women aren't taught computers when they're younger and (by implication) how they're too far gone by the time they're 20 to remedy that problem. And that's one of the more charitable pathologies to focus on.
  • yummyfajitas 12y ago
    It doesn't actually treat women worse than lots of other places that have plenty of women. Islam, acting and modeling all treat women worse than computing (flogging them for rape, casting couches), yet have far more women. Women are sometimes treated badly in technology. Technology also has few women. But what evidence do we have that the former is a significant cause of the latter? It's hard to even demonstrate a correlation, let alone causation.
    • deleted 12y ago
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    • geofft 12y ago
      So is our primary goal increased representation of women, or treating women well? (Put more directly, if we find that mistreating women makes more of them enter technology, what should we do?) It's certainly possible that not as many women are interested in technology careers as men. (Seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me based on both anecdotal and rigorous evidence, but as a good scientist, I should say it's possible.) But why does that justify mistreating those women who are interested? And why should we be satisfied with our behavior based on merely being not as bad as a religion or another industry?
    • tptacek 12y ago
      The notion that there is some intrinsic property of women that makes them uncompetitive in computer science, but not in accounting, actuary, law, medicine, &c is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. No such evidence has been presented. The notion that a male majority which happens to almost entirely comprise the upper echelons of the technology industry might, intentionally or (just as likely) not, set up self-reinforcing cycles of encouragement for men and discouragement for women is not an extraordinary claim. It is bog-standard human pack-animal clique behavior. And nevertheless, clear, ringing evidence of these phenomena are published routinely.
      • raldi 12y ago
        That's a strawman. The actual claim is that playing with computers at a young age has a high correlation with becoming a great programmer later in life, and that generally young girls are not encouraged to play with computers.
        • tptacek 12y ago
          So the claim is that playing with computers at a young age is vital to the development of programming skill, just as the Hasbro game "Operation" is for physicians. See: "extraordinary claims...".
          • raldi 12y ago
            No, again, you're creating a strawman. I never said it was vital; just that it helps a lot. And I see no reason such a claim would require a similar effect to be present in every industry. In fact, the evidence supporting the idea that programming is special in this regard is precisely that you don't hear doctors talk about how they had spent their childhood years endlessly playing Operation, while meanwhile you do hear many great hackers say they spent their whole childhoods playing with computers (or, when unavailable, then the nearest facsimile: taking apart electronics, playing with Game Genie codes, building erector sets...)
            • 12y ago