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My positive experience as a woman in tech

lea.verou.me

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Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#231

Post by logfromblammo »

zeveb wrote: post #169
cubano wrote: post #27

Here is my personal experience with the fringes of this issue over a lifetime of watching it play out before my eyes... If a female is attracted to the guy, things he says or does are considered "cute", "flirtatious", and/or "interesting". If not, the same actions are often considered "creepy", "jerkish", and yes even "sexist". I think its just human nature to perceive things in this way, and since women grow up in s…

> If a female is attracted to the guy, things he says or does are considered "cute", "flirtatious", and/or "interesting". > If not, the same actions are often considered "creepy", "jerkish", and yes even "sexist". In my experience, the exact same thing is true with the sexes switched: behaviour which I find attractive in a woman I find attractive is awful in a woman I don't find attractive. I think this is probably a…

On the other other side of the coin, as I know myself to be physically unattractive and boring, if anyone approaches me at all, that's automatically suspicious behavior, whether I find their appearance to be pleasing or not. If an attractive person approaches me, that's a honeypot for sure. Or a crazy. Maybe so drunk that a trip to the hospital might be warranted. Perhaps they're soliciting donations for charity. Possibly someone triple-dog dared them to talk to me. I immediately wonder what the ulterior motive is.

That makes it easy to not be sexist. The probability of any sort of romantic relationship with any given stranger is effectively zero, therefore it doesn't matter what they are.

And I try not to inflict myself on others at parties. Or on the party venue. Or anywhere in public, really. If you think it's hard talking to an ugly bore, it's far worse being one. We can tell that you want us to go away. We're not oblivious to the repellent body language. We just have to ignore it sometimes, because otherwise we'd never get to talk to anybody.

Sorry for being creepy, or jerky, or whatever. From the lips of Lord Farquaad, we know that it's already rude enough being alive when no one wants you. So thanks for being polite enough to not just look disgusted and walk away when we start talking. Because that's a thing that actually happens.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#232

Post by squeaky-clean »

gotchange wrote: post #103
indifferentalex wrote: post #19

10/10 Will read again. The sexism debate has indeed painted a bleak picture, people so often try to show a different side of the picture but end up using the wrong words or simply adding ambiguity to the discussion, most of the time only making the matter more complicated, and worst of all, pulling us even further from a potential solution. This one showed us not only a potential solution, but also proved it's effect…

> but simply by people treating others (women included) nicely, or as my first grade teacher taught me, by following the golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated, So, no more "ladies first" and gentleman treatment for women?

More like no more gentlemanly treatment just because they're a woman. A real gentleman will be gentlemanly to everyone.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#233

Post by dcre »

SCHiM wrote: post #110

Keep in mind that the situation she recalls, the one with the guy that apologizes to her for cussing, is perhaps not the sort of sexism you would want to try and get rid of. The way I see it, this coming from a early 20s male (read, shall we say, constantly aware of the opposing sex), is that that attempt to be polite to a woman has nothing to do with her being a woman in tech, but simply being a woman in a social si…

I consider it "impolite" (to put it politely) to treat adult women like they're children, so to me this is absolutely a kind of sexism we should get rid of.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#234

Post by dragonwriter »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #152
blowski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Sexism is not identical to misogynism. Where the latter is about being nasty, sexism is believing something about somebody solely based on their gender. So if I assume you don't like pizza and football because you're female, so instead buy you frozen yoghurt, I'm being sexist even if it's with the nicest of intentions. We're all human and we all make mistakes, but sometimes people blow those mistakes out of…

Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Consider the following procedure: 1) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt. 2) For a man I don't know, I buy him pizza. Now suppose my stereotypes are actually accurate - i.e., P(likes froyo > pizza|woman) > 0.5 and P(likes pizza > froyo | man) > 0.5. This procedure, based purely on stereotypes, will make everyone happier than flipping a…

> Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct?

Judging people based on group membership rather than individually on axis that are not essentially tied (even if they are correlated with) that group membership is prejudice; prejudiced based on sex is sexism. So, yes, making probabilistic assumptions based on sex and acting on them is, in many cases, sexism.

> ) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt. 2) For a man I don't know, I buy him pizza.

If you want to get people food that they want, you can just ask them. (And, in any case, context is probably more important than sex: IME, women are more likely to prefer pizza to froyo for a meal, and men are more likely to prefer froyo to pizza for a dessert; there're are very few contexts where "pizza" and "froyo" are comparable alternatives where sex would be the prime differentiator on how people would respond to them -- and elevating sex above more relevant decision criteria is a pretty strong indication of sexism.)

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#236

Post by yummyfajitas »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #226
yummyfajitas wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Consider the following procedure: 1) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt. 2) For a man I don't know, I buy him pizza. Now suppose my stereotypes are actually accurate - i.e., P(likes froyo > pizza|woman) > 0.5 and P(likes pizza > froyo | man) > 0.5. This procedure, based purely on stereotypes, will make everyone happier than flipping a…

Whether or not they understand Bayes, some groups of people are more concerned about what their posteriors will become proportional to whether they choose pizza and/or froyo. In those cases, despite your information being generally probabilistically correct for your goal, the worst decision could be giving them something that they'll eat (and enjoy) or want to eat but can't. You're predicting for what to bring on a f…

It's not always possible to gather better information - sometimes all we have is base rates. Furthermore, even when we do have other information, combining other information with base rates yields a superior result.

If you don't agree, by all means write down a distribution and an objective function, and show me decision process that is better than the Bayes optimal decision rule.

(Hint: you can't. http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~vittorio/BayesProof.pdf Or for a simple example illustrating why, consider the first 20 slides of this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/webanalisten/chris-stuccio-data-sc... )

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#237

Post by anon4 »

mysticllama wrote: post #192
SuperComputing wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the "sexism" debate was stirred by people who were only tangentially involved in Tech, like the PR person "Adria Richards". If you listen to actual women with actual Math, CS, or EE degrees, you'll hear a different story.

Look at the population of women in fields such as:law, medicine, social science, etc. and you'll see that STEM lags behind in parity. The percentage of women in computing, according to some studies, isn't much higher than it was in 1960! [2] From my perspective as a software engineer, we work in a male-dominated field, and we've made the work culture and norms what we want them to be [1]. The few women who do end up…

For law and medicine - is it because there's less sexism, or because the fields are more prestigious and therefore women who wish to be in those fields let more of it slide in the interest of retaining and advancing their career?

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#238

Post by kaitai »

humanrebar wrote: post #219
andrewvc wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got a point. I'm sure being physically attracted to someone enhances or diminishes the effect of their actual approach. Additionally, attractive people are more confident, and confident people tend to not behave in as many creepy behaviors. That being said, the underlying theme of cubano's comment was blaming women for (shockingly) responding positively to flirty men who they find attractive, and responding ne…

I think you're jumping to some conclusions there. Most "creepy" men are socially awkward and can't do anything about it, or at least they haven't been able to do anything about it yet. To villainize them out of hand isn't helpful either. Some of them undoubtedly have social disorders, so coming down on them seems unfair as well. Maybe there are some people that are creepy on purpose , but I suspect that is a very sma…

I have to say, I've met a number of socially awkward guys who flirt in a cute way, and a number of socially smooth guys who are super creepy. And some people are creepy on purpose -- negging, pushing boundaries, looking for the weak one in the herd or the woman who can't say no because of her own internal algorithms. They are often not socially awkward, either.

I think Captain Awkward and Dr. Nerdlove have done some excellent writing on how not to be creepy when approaching someone.

Going back to the point of the article, the poster says she hasn't had many bad experiences in tech and so she continues with confidence. She wants to show these good experiences to encourage others. This is a good idea. When it comes to rejecting people, for instance, women hear so many stories or have so many experiences of men taking rejection very badly that they often feel they must reject indirectly to preserve their comfort or safety. http://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2014/12/bitches...

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#239

Post by reitanqild »

tangled_zans wrote: post #218
nv-vn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Don't see why this was flagged Because some people would rather silence people who disagree with their opinions rather than debate them or just learn to live ignore them if it's too hard.

It's not about disagreement. The poster put "scare quotes" around sexism, implying that the issue does not even exist or is worth discussing. That's not an "opinion" it's an implicit way of saying that everyone talking about it is kind of dumb for even bringing it up. EDIT: OH WOW, I HAVE BEEN DOWNVOTED. Which is not something I normally care about since I post quite controversial things anyway. But downvoted by the…

It is about one specific incident where a very privileged woman cost two normal developers their jobs because she took offense from a conversation she was not part of.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#240

Post by reitanqild »

coldtea wrote: post #211
reitanqild wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds ugly, do you happen to have good sources?

Here are some quick starters with further pointers: http://www.globalresearch.ca/profits-ber-alles-american-corp... http://www.americainwwii.com/articles/americans-for-hitler/ http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/american_supporters_of... http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796

Thanks!
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