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How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

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Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#71

Post by deepnotderp »

Notice how they make the claim that males used underhanded tactics to force women out of the software industry, but they never provide a single bit of evidence for that.

The entire article is basically about the software industry evolved into more male positions and things like altitude tests and requirements of advanced degrees which are apparently part of some coordinated conspiracy to be sexist against women.

I agree that aptitude tests and degrees are stupid , but for totally different reasons. This is just incredible mental gymnastics to push an agenda.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#72

Post by deepnotderp »

pron wrote: post #62
k__ wrote: post #7

I 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 st…

A couple of things. 1. Programming didn't start in the 80s or 90s. It started in the 40s-50s, and we've been doing it for seventy years now. When you were (by your own admission) a socially awkward boy interested in PCs, there were 50-year-old professional programmers working in banks, defense, aerospace and other industries whose programming culture was very different, because they didn't have computers at home at a…

I think number two is a very important point. My problem is that the entire media, including this article, is using it with ill intent to paint men as sexist.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#73

Post by deepnotderp »

pron wrote: post #55
lsd5you wrote: post #2

I 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…

> but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand But it is not dismissed out of hand. It is dismissed by serious scholars after significant research. It is Damore who dismisses their well-informed position out of hand by taking out of context some papers whose significance he is not qualified to judge. It is he who rejects scholarship and serious investigation in favor of gut feelings. If Damore's view wer…

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#74

Post by [deleted] »

cmiles74 wrote: post #53
belorn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> did the work materially change? I don't think that's the case at all How much money was the computer programming industry creating 1950 vs 1980. In the memo, one of the larger points was that men are exceptional pushed/forced/heavy incentivize by society towards high paying jobs. Would you argue that this claim is false?

I don't understand where you are going with this... Is your argument that since society seems biased to pay men more money, we should blindly do so? Does that logic apply to race as well as gender? IMHO, Damore was playing to the misplaced belief held by some men that they are innately better then everyone else and that societal biases have played no role in their successes.

[deleted]

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#75

Post by lhnz »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #51
lhnz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I remember it in the UK, too. Computers were incredibly uncool and only people with zero interest in being cool were willing to invest their time in learning about them. If anything, these people were crowded out from lots of other domains and picked computing because it was the only place which would accept them. Now everybody is trying to turn this around, and imply a conspiracy to "[create] the now-fam…

The stereotype wasn't created be a shadowy group of men to exclude women. That is absurd. Why would sexists block women from programming, while letting them into plenty of other more high status jobs? Well, we should be careful with claims like that. Think of the gender of most of the secretaries at all the jobs we've had. And little things, like if you're in a relationship, how often do you do the laundry and dishes…

That is my point though: as sexism reduced women joined high status industries to take jobs that require high verbal intelligence. They didn't join programming despite it being a high growth industry: why?

I'd source this but what I'm discussing is just a Google away and a bunch of studies are never going to convince anybody.

Anyway, my point is that the narrative of the article goes against my lived experience. One is allowed to believe their own eyes.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#76

Post by pron »

deepnotderp wrote: post #72
pron wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of things. 1. Programming didn't start in the 80s or 90s. It started in the 40s-50s, and we've been doing it for seventy years now. When you were (by your own admission) a socially awkward boy interested in PCs, there were 50-year-old professional programmers working in banks, defense, aerospace and other industries whose programming culture was very different, because they didn't have computers at home at a…

I think number two is a very important point. My problem is that the entire media, including this article, is using it with ill intent to paint men as sexist.

But that's the point. The term "sexist" itself, at least in its scholarly meaning, does not imply intent. Sexism is a feature of a social structure where women are granted significantly less power than men. The prevailing hypothesis -- which has a lot of supporting evidence -- is that we are all sexist, men and women alike, merely by virtue of being socialized in a sexist society.

When people first discovered microbes and claimed that people were spreading diseases by, say, not washing their hands properly, they did not mean that people were spreading disease intentionally, but it was nevertheless a fact that they were. But to understand why, you had to know about germs (which are invisible to the naked eye, and were only known to those who study the subject), and you had to be proactive in order not to spread diseased.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#77

Post by abalone »

This is an important and well-written article that succinctly exposes the history and mechanisms of sexism in the industry. How once software became a valued profession a complex of obstacles at the cultural and professional level were put in place to change its composition from primarily women to men.

It is also a damning indictment of the HN community. It is clear this post has suffered a campaign of down voting. Every comment that is positive toward the article, even just summarizing its content, has been downvoted. By the time I finished reading it it had disappeared off the front page entirely.

Meanwhile, many of the comments merely state anecdotal experiences and armchair theories reinforcing why men end up dominating the field, while entirely ignoring the content of the article.

There are clearly some high-karma men aggressively censoring this topic. I hope this article makes it back onto the front page because it's really worth a read by our whole community -- even if you disagree.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#78

Post by pron »

deepnotderp wrote: post #73
pron wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand But it is not dismissed out of hand. It is dismissed by serious scholars after significant research. It is Damore who dismisses their well-informed position out of hand by taking out of context some papers whose significance he is not qualified to judge. It is he who rejects scholarship and serious investigation in favor of gut feelings. If Damore's view wer…

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-... http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Both are conservative publications, which is fine, but: There are certainly some researchers, like those in the first article, who agree with Damore's position, but they are by far the minority; if you're interested in the subject, I suggest you at least read some research written by the majority opinion. The second link is written by a non-expert, and therefore does not constitute a scholarly opinion at all. I occasionally enjoy reading some of Alexander's writing, but he is clearly not a serious social scholar, and his writing suffers from some obvious methodological problems that have been well covered in social scholarship.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#79

Post by booleandilemma »

"More women should be coding"

I see an article with some variation of this argument here every week. I’m starting to believe that society has become obsessed with getting more women to open up Visual Studio every morning.

But this isn't like recycling, saving the rainforest, stopping ozone depletion or global warming. All of humanity benefits from doing those things. I couldn't care less if the person who develops the next hot phone app is a man or a woman. I don't think any end user cares.

Because the fact is it doesn't matter. A Git repository doesn't treat code any differently depending on the gender of the person who pushed it.

And yet I see a new article about getting women to code every week.

Are women themselves fighting for the right to hit F10 and step through code every day? Is it akin to another woman suffrage movement?

I don't think so. In fact, I think the majority of women just don't seem to be interested in coding.

It's as if this is someone else’s agenda. An agenda to get more women to code, whether they want to or not.

So who’s pushing this agenda? If corporations are pushing it, then the end goal is probably to save money, because that's why corporations will push any agenda.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#80

Post by deepnotderp »

pron wrote: post #76
deepnotderp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think number two is a very important point. My problem is that the entire media, including this article, is using it with ill intent to paint men as sexist.

But that's the point. The term "sexist" itself, at least in its scholarly meaning, does not imply intent. Sexism is a feature of a social structure where women are granted significantly less power than men. The prevailing hypothesis -- which has a lot of supporting evidence -- is that we are all sexist, men and women alike, merely by virtue of being socialized in a sexist society. When people first discovered microbe…

Minor problem: that's EXACTLY what the media and outrage engine is specifying.
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