231–240 of 375 posts
If there is no gender parity, there is a problem. No, there isn't. We don't have a "gender parity problem" in nursing, pre-k education, garbage collection, nor boilermaking. Just because it isn't 50/50 doesn't mean it's a problem.
Says who? I'm less familiar with the latter two sectors, but I've certainly seen considerable gender issues raised with the first two.
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Forgetting these folks don't have the institutional power to harm others. Really? I'd say an accusation from those groups can ruin a career.
whose career ? Name one.
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> The reason there are fewer of them is because fewer of them are interested. Which is at least somewhat due to societal pressures though.
Could it not also be said that societal pressures push men towards tech and other high stress/paying work?
Are men going into these roles because they all have a death wish, or is it maybe some sort of cultural push to be "manly" and a "provider"?
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I have no idea what NDT has to do with anything but this seems like a level-headed, fair reply that is indeed on-topic. What is off-topic about it?
It's the subthread that is off topic, and we detached it at the point of offtopicness ("Just ask Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.").
If there is no gender parity, there is a problem. No, there isn't. We don't have a "gender parity problem" in nursing, pre-k education, garbage collection, nor boilermaking. Just because it isn't 50/50 doesn't mean it's a problem.
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>If women are disadvantaged Except they're not. In fact, in tech, they're advantaged. Female names on resumes get more callback than male names. This has been studied. The reason there are fewer of them is because fewer of them are interested.
Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments. While I'm sure that not all "tech environments" are sexist, enough of them are to convince women not to pursue careers in this field. That's a disadvantage, especially because tech careers are luxury careers these days.
Personal story time...I was at a recent conference, listening to men, women given talks. One of the women, in her talk, uses an interaction with her daughter as the framing narrative for the talk (imagine Socrates and Glaucon, only this woman and her daughter). Almost immediately, three guys to my right start making fun of the speaker, sotto voce, making all manner of little jokes to themselves, that are becoming inc…
You did the absolute right thing in that situation. I was in a meeting once with a CIO, middle management, and two female developers. At one point, the CIO got bored with the tech-talk and drove the conversation to his recently taking his son around to visit college campuses... and then onto the topic of which campuses had the hottest female students. The middle-managers immediately joined in the conversation, while…
A lot of this stuff is basic understanding of what is appropriate for the given situation. It is simply understanding what is polite in the given context. It seems so simple, but maybe a lot of people aren't tuned into the feelings of others.
I can't speak on the military thing. That is an entirely different culture that I don't have any understanding of. I do remember people saying things like "stop acting like a girl" when I was young, but that seems to have gone away. I know that I don't use phrases like that - and I am not making a conscious decision not to use them. They just seem innapropriate.
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I'm not entirely sure you can tell if this group was biased or not with this one interaction with them. As you mentioned: > I also don't think they'd have sat there, chattering away, if a man had used the same framing story (father and son, father and daughter). If you didn't observe them sit quietly for a talk before this given by a man, who's to say they didn't just do this to every presenter (man or woman) for the…
You must go to a very different type of conference to me. I've never heard anyone being heckled at a professional programming conference.
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You had colleagues who didn't want to hire someone just because they were "working class"??? Seriously? Were these colleagues a bunch of fedora-wearing hipsters or something?
I would actually argue that classism is far and away the worst problem in this industry. It just plays out in ways that you don't expect. Hiring mostly grads from top schools is exactly that. In my circle are a lot of junior and fresh out of school developers and one guy I know who killed it in his interview was ultimately not hired and told it was because he didn't "look like a developer". He dressed in normal busin…