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My positive experience as a woman in tech

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Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#251

Post by tangled_zans »

reitanqild wrote: post #239
tangled_zans wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, "she cost them their jobs". That's a "valid interpretation" of the story.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#252

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

dragonwriter wrote: post #228
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.

> 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. As someone whose listened to actual women with Math, CS, and EE degrees (and women who are working in technical roles without degrees in those fields, as both women and men in the field do), I…

It's the "actually listen to women" part that a lot of people here have problems with.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#253

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

ManFromUranus wrote: post #243
mysticllama wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why does nobody make this argument about Nursing, or Teaching, or Social Work, or Psychology, or any of the "Female dominated" fields? When men don't go into a field, they find a way to blame men for it, when women don't go into a field, they find a way to blame men for it. Don't women have any agency? Are they dumb robots that only do what men tell them? Maybe they don't WANT to be in STEM fields...

People bring this up in every single thread about sexism in HN and almost every single time somebody gives them a cite to any of the several of efforts dedicated to getting dudes in those fields.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#254

Post by tangled_zans »

Great article.

Odd though that so many commenter choose to interpret this as "look! clear proof that there is no sexism! everyone has been overreacting about it!"

If you don't believe that sexism is a real issue, look at source [0]. It says so right there:

"While women have gained many more rights and freedoms in most of the developed world, especially since the beginning of the 20th century, women still face discrimination and harassment worldwide. Until then, women in most of the world did not have the right to vote, and were treated with even greater disrespect than today."

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#255

Post by cmiles74 »

tomp wrote: post #74

That's the general theme of public discourse... Americans killing Muslims in Iraq are "soldiers", wherears Muslims killing Americans in the US are "terrorists". Edit: Looks like I've hit a very sore point...

I believe anyone killing Americans in the US is at risk of being labeled a terrorist. Typically the violence is often linked with political or religious beliefs but that is not a requirement.

You say "that's the theme of public discourse" as if this is something novel. On the contrary, I think any nation attacked on it's own ground is likely to view the perpetrator as a terrorist; in my opinion this is consistent with the US usage. For instance, victims of a US drone attack might view the US as terrorists in that scenario.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#257

Post by kazinator »

Balgair wrote: post #245
userium wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on discussions we have had with women in tech at https://keepwomen.com , it's not just sexism, but many women leave tech due to working conditions (low salary, no advancement), work-life balance (too much travelling, commuting), or the company environment (poor cultural "fit"). Some solutions for retaining women in tech are e.g. flexible working hours, personal development opportunities and workforce diversity.

Hmm, what does flexible working hours, personal development opportunities and workforce diversity mean in practice? The faults are hard measurable things, but the solutions are more fuzzy and not as easy to measure. When you measure flexible hours, what is your metric for saying that someone has that? When you say dev opportunities, how do I know if I have given my employees enough of them and of what quality? What d…

Probably this has to be just be looked as simply avoiding being bad. To avoid being bad, you don't have to overcompensate; that just creates reverse biases. Just don't have a bias: for instance, don't make a decision because someone is a woman, or Asian or whatever. Any decision: hiring, awarding a raise or promotion, etc.

A discriminatory bias cannot be measured by simple proportions, like how many women work at Company X out of the total, and therefore it cannot be eliminated by something naive like a hiring quota or similar. Such a program necessarily involves making decisions based on gender, and so on and so doesn't avoid being bad.

The concept of "workforce diversity" is basically rooted in poor understanding of statistics, together with a willingness to apply a corrective discrimination. Even if half the software developers in a country are women, and there is no bias anywhere, it can still so happen that men constitute, say, 80% of the developers in some organization. Such an event has a certain nonzero probability which allows it to happen.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#258

Post by v64 »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #113
pervycreeper wrote: post #94

Blackstone's formulation for those who didn't bother to click through: >"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" Wise to keep this in mind if you wish to be justice-conscious.

Given 11 people who each have a 90.9% chance of having significantly harmed a child and the option to release all or jail all, how many would be for releasing all of them? I find that most people don't follow Blackstone's formulation in practice. Maybe if it was 1 guilty person, but not 10.

Release them all. Innocent until proven guilty.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#259

Post by jenshoop »

This is one narrative in an overall spectrum of experiences. Important not to sidebar someone's very real experience or assume every "woman in tech" goes through the same thing, so I welcome the introduction of a new perspective that runs against the grain a bit. I wonder if this was prompted by a well-intentioned friend asking "what it's like to be a female in tech these days"? This is a question I get frequently and I'm just sort of at a loss as to what to say -- I see a lot of problems with the lack of diversity especially at the senior leadership level and have been through my fair share of negative experiences, but I've also been fortunate to have insane mentors -- male and female (well, if I'm keeping score, more male than female) -- to help me progress, learn, develop. For me, and maybe this is fraught with its own issues, I've always just sought to prove myself, demonstrate my value by working hard, and earn respect that way. Few people -- male or female -- can hold you in poor esteem if you constantly work to be an ethical, industrious team-player.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#260

Post by dang »

tomp wrote: post #74

That's the general theme of public discourse... Americans killing Muslims in Iraq are "soldiers", wherears Muslims killing Americans in the US are "terrorists". Edit: Looks like I've hit a very sore point...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10758044 and marked it off-topic.
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