How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
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Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#2I am well aware that the climate is well against this position, but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand. He is not just 'wrong'. The Damore view is at the very least plausible and tarring a whole industry filled with many thoughtful and introverted (i.e. not messing with others, often taken advantage of themselves) individuals to support some view of gender economics is morally wrong.
We now live in a time where we are increasingly told what we should believe. In my view morality shouldn't extend to belief. For one it leaves certain individuals (like myself) out in the cold. Sorry, I cannot be told what to believe.
Maybe this is just the current hot topic and many people want to read it, but to me it reads as a form of propaganda (by definition media created to determine what people believe) or at least journalistic activism, and who is this guy (apparently some business journalist) to write authoratively on the subject, based on one fact (the predominance of women in early programming jobs). The fact of the matter is that programming has changed beyond recognition, particularly between 1950 and 1980 or so and that is more than enough to at the very least plausibly explain the change in programmer demographic. Anyone who is in the industry knows these eras cannot be compared (surely?).
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#3I have always wondered: People often point to graphs showing a massive decline in the percentage of women in CS in the 80's. But has anyone seen a graph of the absolute number, not percentages?
If 1 million women were coding, then 100 billion men started coding, those 1M women would still be coders. So there wasn't necessarily a decline. Or maybe there was, and the numbers will reflect that.
I am interested in the actual numbers, not graphs or interpretations. But I've never found a data source, so hopefully someone knows of one.
The whole debate is interesting because there are at least four separate sides: men who don't believe it exists, men who recognize it as a systemic problem, women who believe it's the most important aspect, and women who wish the debate would go away so they can focus on doing good work instead of on doing good work as a woman.
Me, I don't know enough about it. I'm just curious about the numbers over time. And if I have a daughter hopefully I'll think of some crafty way to make programming seem interesting. The one badass female dev I know said she regretted not getting into it from a younger age, so it seems worth fixing.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#4Such bunk. I spent thousands of hours fighting with computers due to obsession, certainly not because I had some notion that it was important or that it would be considered a good occupation 20 years in the future. I was practically living a double life as a computer bodybuilder, despite the reaction society gave me about it. When I look back over how I got good at computers and programming, I see no reason women could not have done the same thing. Yet most didn't. Why they didn't, I don't know. Sexism could probably stop a woman from being in construction, but not so much programming. Let's stop with these persecution myths.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#5I am well aware that the climate is well against this position, but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand. He is not just 'wrong'. The Damore view is at the very least plausible and tarring a whole industry filled with many thoughtful and introverted (i.e. not messing with others, often taken advantage of themselves) individuals to support some view of gender economics is morally wrong. We now live in…
Yeah this article felt like clickbait to me. Also Google's reaction to Damore kind of proves at least half of his assertions correct. That many topics are too sacred to discuss critically without being labeled a certain way.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#6There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige.
Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men realized it was going to transform society as we know it.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#7I don't understand this whole thing.
Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.
These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.
To me it seemed that they started doing computer stuff, because no one, including women, wanted to have anything to do with them.
The "cool", way more aggressive, kids wanted to do sales, law, finance, management and stuff.
Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good included into society.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#8The _very first sentence_ is a misrepresentation of Damore's memo.
"Why aren’t there more female software developers in Silicon Valley? James Damore, the Google engineer fired for criticizing the company's diversity program, believes that it’s all about “innate dispositional differences” that leave women trailing men."
"Innate dispositional differences" is a _quote_ from a paper he cites, Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures, a 2008 paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Damore introduces the quote with the phrase "research suggests."
The computing revolution is dominated by men because men have no problem at all spending thousands of hours tinkering with something just for its own sake. The real world confirms this.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#9I am well aware that the climate is well against this position, but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand. He is not just 'wrong'. The Damore view is at the very least plausible and tarring a whole industry filled with many thoughtful and introverted (i.e. not messing with others, often taken advantage of themselves) individuals to support some view of gender economics is morally wrong. We now live in…
James Damore's arguments are only plausible in the weakest sense of the word. The only way someone would find his arguments convincing is if one's priors already favor his conclusion.
If one weighs the evidence for social factors against biological factors, the question is how should a critical person weigh one against the other? It turns out if one ignores all the evidence for social factors and squint really hard at the biological ones, one can, I guess, scam oneself into thinking there's a strong argument there.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#10There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige. Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men realized it was going to transform society as we know it.
When do you think programming began to have high prestige?
I didn't think programming in the 80s or 90s was a particularly prestigous or high status job, salaries back then kind of reflect that too