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Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

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Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#301

Post by andrepd »

deciplex wrote: post #180
andrepd wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that your single anecdote (or "data point" or whatever you want to call it) isn't indicative of the statu quo. Does it mean there are places where men are discriminated against? Yes. Does it mean the statu quo is discrimination against men? No.

The "status quo" can be discrimination against men even if a small minority of schools actually implement this policy. If one tech company out of one hundred had a policy in place whereby female employees were required to come to work early in order to make coffee, we'd likely be talking about regressive culture at all tech companies, not just complaining about a shitty policy enforced by a few outliers. We would do…

Yes, it can be. And it can not be. You have NO data to say either way. A single event is statistical noise. Come back to me with actual data and we can continue this discussion.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#302

Post by bastijn »

DanBC wrote: post #87
bastijn wrote: post #29

I wonder how much of the balance difference is due to boys liking tech more than girls. I'd say that if you ask 10-15 year olds, who hardly think about their future, about what they do in their free time you will find equal balance on the reply "gaming/stuff on my PC". Most girls don't like it, that translates to later stages in life I guess. Never see the reports for other fields where females excel in acceptance ra…

> I don't see people fighting there for equal rights. every time the gender imbalance comes up on HN someone makes the same comment you have. Did you try Google? Because those programmes are trivially easy to find. People will often make a similar comment about the lack of programmes to get women into construction or mining. But those programmes are really easy to find too.

I wasn't hinting at other programmes for women. I was hinting at programmes where men were at a disadvantage and fought for equal rights. Or even better, where women acknowledged the fact that only 20% of psychology, teachers, or whatever are men. There suddenly it isn't a problem to have the imbalance? Should we favor men in those categories over women? Just because we have fewer male teachers? So unfair! To think that women are better with children and thus hire them faster.. (Just to be sure: im exaggerating)

I do curse the fact that women who found a job in tech are handled differently but in return I would love to have front fighters for women equal rights drop the whole "we have so few women in tech" statement. I think most of that is due to the difference in what men or women have affinity with, not hiring process or disadvantages.

In other words, stop confusing amount of women in tech with equal women's rights. These are not casually related.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#303

Post by dang »

H0n3sty wrote: post #238
deciplex wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refrained from calling you a racist even after you said the obviously racist thing. Moreover you first implied I'm racist out of the blue, because I disagree with a SCOTUS Justice who happens to be black. Also: > The belief that races may be different in average ability with respect to certain characteristics or that members of certain races have their own preferences is not racist. Quoting this for posterity in ca…

I'm still trying to decide if you're holding the racism of lower expectation beliefs. Privileged and oppressed are just code words with no clear meaning. I don't know you, so I don't know why you would use profanity to describe Justice Thomas. He has solid principles based on his life's experiences and has had to endure a lot to serve so it makes no sense to me that anyone would describe him that way. You're probably…

This kind of generic ideological flamewar, as unresolvable as it is tedious, is off topic on HN. Please don't do this again.

It's instructive how you managed to leap from gender to race without skipping a beat. That's an example of what I mean by generic. This is a marker—maybe the primary marker—of low quality discussion. It's always about pre-existing views, held for extraneous reasons, pretending to be a rational response to the story under discussion but reflexively heading straight for one of the same two or three places. A few people insist on taking every discussion there; the rest of us have visited countless times and wish not to return. This community exists for interesting things, of which these ideological back-and-forths are the antithesis.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#304

Post by dragonwriter »

H0n3sty wrote: post #214
deciplex wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice subtle accusation of racism, person-who-literally-thinks-that-some-races-are-inferior-to-others.

You have that backwards. If you don't believe that some races are inferior then there are no reasons for things like affirmative action.

> If you don't believe that some races are inferior then there are no reasons for things like affirmative action.

"affirmative action" is short for "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".

Please explain how belief that some races are inferior is necessary to the belief that affirmative action is necessary. (Affirmative action often includes action directed specifically at addressing ways in which processes which might superficially seem neutral are, in effect, taking race indirectly into account because of circumstances resulting from the material effects of past discrimination and segregation, but that's a disadvantage of circumstance, not inherent inferiority.)

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#305

Post by dang »

falsestprophet wrote: post #118

The two sexes are not identical. Boy are you going to be surprised about what pants are hiding.

Please don't post glib comments on divisive subjects. Comments here need to be civil and substantive; yours was neither, and this is a particularly bad choice of thread to further degrade.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826451 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#306

Post by nostrebored »

H0n3sty wrote: post #203
nostrebored wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know exactly what I mean. Arguing for the idea of "brain sex" is essentialist and ridiculous. There's nothing that makes my wife or the average woman a less capable programmer than anyone else in the field other than a consistent problem with socialization.

Men and women have been subject to different pressures throughout the evolution of our species. Its seems unlikely that this would not lead to some differences either on average or across the populations.

If you can provide me with any well-done research showing that evopsych is anything besides the modern phrenology I'd be surprised.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#307

Post by thomasatethose »

wpietri wrote: post #296
MollyR wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we have to work on the equality of outcome ? Isn't equality of opportunity enough ? My friends who are nurses wanted to be nurses, they didn't want to go medical school. They didn't want to wait to make money until their 30's, they considered career paths in relation to having a family. As long as they had the option, I don't see why forcing outcome is important here. As for helping men into nursing, if divers…

We don't have to force an equality of outcome. But it behooves us to be suspicious when the outcomes aren't equal. For centuries we had unequal outcomes in terms of doctor gender; one defense was "women don't want to be doctors". But when we finally removed the barriers, we see medical school admissions run about equal. I'm all for men going into nursing. You can work on shifting that ratio if you like. But I'm not p…

Two wrongs don't make a right. All throughout history rich men AND WOMEN of all races, colors and creed tortured the poor.

The real issue isn't color, or gender. Its Class.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#308

Post by NTDF9 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #294
NTDF9 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Laws in the US default to women as caregivers. - Women get maternity, men don't - Women get default custody of child in divorce, men don't - Women get to adopt easier than men - Domestic violence on men is ignored/laughed upon, presumably because men are not caregivers but violators by default - Women don't have mandatory military conscription, men do (presumably because men have to be fighters and women…

> Laws in the US default to women as caregivers. Mostly, they don't. > Women get maternity, men don't Well, by definition, its only "maternity" when the mother gets it, but the federal requirement for unpaid, job-protected family leave in FMLA applies equally to parents of both genders, as does (for one example) the California state requirements for job-protected unpaid family (CFRA) and paid family leave (PFL) > Wom…

> There is no legally-specified default custody in divorce; women get custody in divorce more often because they are more likely to request it. Men get custody more often when it is contested between the parties.

> Again, to the extent that's true, that's not an example of the law treating them differently; as a matter of law, domestic violence is equally prohibited when a male is the victim.

You are onto something. The laws seem to treat men and women the same.

So why is there a need for an organizations like "Women who code"? The law, on paper, treats both men and women the same right?

If your answer is that the laws are unfair towards a particular gender, then you yourself contradict the above mentioned points.

else if your answer is that "in practice" women get treated unfairly despite equal on-paper laws, that is exactly what I meant by "US laws default to women as caregivers". Men get treated unfairly in domestic and family issues.

Written law and law as it is enforced and practiced is very very different when it comes to gender issues.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#309

Post by H0n3sty »

dragonwriter wrote: post #304
H0n3sty wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have that backwards. If you don't believe that some races are inferior then there are no reasons for things like affirmative action.

> If you don't believe that some races are inferior then there are no reasons for things like affirmative action. "affirmative action" is short for "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin". Please explain how belief that some races are inferior is necessary to the belief that affirmativ…

Affirmative action sets a lower barrier to entry for people of certain races, or it establishes quotas around certain races. This is to say that they cannot be held to the same standard of merit and expect a proportional outcome to something like admission to a particular college.

> without regard to their race, creed, color...

Affirmative action does the very thing it purports to ensure against, by discriminating on the bases of race.

If you believe that one race is inferior in some way and cannot compete on a level playing field then you may feel that affirmative action is necessary to give them a greater advantage. You mentioned circumstances which basically form an inferiority from past accrued disadvantage (I know you called it disadvantage of circumstance, but try to follow me for a moment). This doesn't seem to be the case with affirmative action admissions programs because they lower the bar for Blacks and raise the bar for Asians. Sure Blacks, were treated worst than Asians throughout most of American history, but Whites were not treated better than Asians.

Often the greatest beneficiaries of these programs are not native born African Americans, but recent African immigrants whose ancestors were not enslaved in the US, and not subject to past discrimination and segregation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/nyregion/long-island-high-...

http://nypost.com/2015/04/05/meet-the-student-accepted-into-...

Incidentally, the two cases above would make good counterpoints to the idea of racial intellectual inferiority regardless of affirmative action and would likely have been able to gain admissions to a top university without it. But the unfortunate consequence of affirmative action is that many people will assume it is all because of their special treatment. Clarence Thomas had much more difficult obstacles to overcome, and he was subjected to this unfortunate assumption after graduating from law school.

I think the real intention of affirmative action is to achieve more equal outcomes across racial divides. I think that's a good objective. But I also think this is a policy that sounds much better than it actually works. If we're to have more equal outcomes, then we need more equal opportunities and we need an end to all forms of discrimination.

Re: Women Who Code (YC S16) helps female engineers level up in their careers

#310

Post by dragonwriter »

NTDF9 wrote: post #308
dragonwriter wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Laws in the US default to women as caregivers. Mostly, they don't. > Women get maternity, men don't Well, by definition, its only "maternity" when the mother gets it, but the federal requirement for unpaid, job-protected family leave in FMLA applies equally to parents of both genders, as does (for one example) the California state requirements for job-protected unpaid family (CFRA) and paid family leave (PFL) > Wom…

> There is no legally-specified default custody in divorce; women get custody in divorce more often because they are more likely to request it. Men get custody more often when it is contested between the parties. > Again, to the extent that's true, that's not an example of the law treating them differently; as a matter of law, domestic violence is equally prohibited when a male is the victim. You are onto something.…

> So why is there a need for an organizations like "Women who code"? The law, on paper, treats both men and women the same right?

There are many social reasons that the situations women face in the programming might be different than those faced by men that have nothing to do with differences in law, either on their face or in practical application.

> If your answer is that the laws are unfair towards a particular gender

But its not, so that's okay.

> else if your answer is that "in practice" women get treated unfairly despite equal on-paper laws

But my answer is not that they in practice get treated unfairly in the execution of the law, either.

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