Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 258 posts

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#111

Post by pron »

deepnotderp wrote: post #88
pron wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 occas…

> I suggest you at least read some research written by the majority opinion. Little bit difficult when all those articles scream sexist, but sure, links please.

Again, your reaction to the word sexism suggests you may be confusing it with misogyny, but anyway, here are some starting points, and you can follow the references from there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) (pretty much a prerequisite to understanding any social research)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#112

Post by komarichiii »

funion wrote: post #102
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…

This is just one anecdote, but I'd like to share my personal experience. Fitting in with the typical boys who took computer classes in high school was really difficult and unpleasant. I'd been using computers and writing code longer than anyone there thanks to parental encouragement, but as a girl that didn't matter. Girls in the class got picked on all the time. I got nicknamed "secretary" and singled out every clas…

This resonates with my own experience as well. I have been programming since I was 10 in a country where I was the first of my peers whose family got a PC. I got bullied both by the "jocks" and by the "nerds." The jocks bullied me because I was a nerd while the nerds made fun of my ambitions and disparaged my looks. Fun times!

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#113

Post by canadian_voter »

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…

And little things, like if you're in a relationship, how often do you do the laundry and dishes?

I've been in a relationship for 3 years. I do literally all of the dishes, all of the cooking, all of my own laundry and my GFs laundry more often than she does. I'm also the only one who vacuums. I'm probably selfish here: caregiving and housekeeping can be very rewarding.

We like to act like that was so long ago, but that's one grandpa's lifetime.

But there is no reason we have to do things like our grandfathers. Change can be hard, but it's also incredibly liberating to do what you believe is right without worrying about so-called "social pressure". Change comes from the inside out.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#114

Post by deepnotderp »

pron wrote: post #109
mpweiher wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm...where is this "majority opinion"? So far I haven't seen a single article opposing him that didn't (have to) resort to crass misrepresentation of what he actually wrote, when it even bothered at all. If you have to lie about your opponent, you're probably not in the right.

He's not an opponent; he's just some random guy on the internet, who, by his own admission, has no idea what he's talking about, because he writes about a subject he has not studied nor shown interest in studying. Many of the people arguing against him or for him are other random guys on the internet, and your entire opinion on this very important matter, which has occupied hundreds of researchers for decades and aff…

Okay, I'll bite. Give me links to the "majority opinion".

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#115

Post by deepnotderp »

pron wrote: post #107
deepnotderp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3389 Scott Aaronson considers it to be valid. Being conservative doesn't negate its arguments.

Scott Aaronson is not an expert on this matter, either, and, as far as I know, he hasn’t even seriously studied the subject as an amateur. I didn’t say that being conservative negates the argument in the first article (and the second is irrelevant regardless of Alexander’s conservatism); I just pointed it out to note that the publication picked scientists who reflect their views rather than attempted to neutrally pre…

> I just pointed it out to note that the publication picked scientists who reflect their views rather than attempted to neutrally present the current state of affairs in the relevant social scholarship.

In stark contrast to liberal publications who never do that. /s

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#116

Post by deepnotderp »

pron wrote: post #110
deepnotderp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sexist+google+memo&source=ln...

What am I supposed to see here? (Are you, by any chance, be confusing the word "sexism" with the word "misogyny"?)

You're supposed to see that the media considers it to be malevolently sexist. Redefining the terminology so that "sexism" somehow is a neutral term is, for lack of a better phrase, "not an argument".

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#117

Post by pron »

deepnotderp wrote: post #114
pron wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not an opponent; he's just some random guy on the internet, who, by his own admission, has no idea what he's talking about, because he writes about a subject he has not studied nor shown interest in studying. Many of the people arguing against him or for him are other random guys on the internet, and your entire opinion on this very important matter, which has occupied hundreds of researchers for decades and aff…

Okay, I'll bite. Give me links to the "majority opinion".

Haven't read it, but this was the very first hit on Google Scholar: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509653.pdf Seems like a review with a lot of relevant references.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#118

Post by deepnotderp »

pron wrote: post #117
deepnotderp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll bite. Give me links to the "majority opinion".

Haven't read it, but this was the very first hit on Google Scholar: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509653.pdf Seems like a review with a lot of relevant references.

Okay, that's a general study, not a direct refutation of what the Damore memo said.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#119

Post by mpweiher »

pron wrote: post #117
deepnotderp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll bite. Give me links to the "majority opinion".

Haven't read it, but this was the very first hit on Google Scholar: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509653.pdf Seems like a review with a lot of relevant references.

Hmm...a "report" created by and for an advocacy group.

Which links very tenuous studies about performance on tests to interest in tech by...nothing.

And of course it doesn't address what I think is the elephant in the room: how can people be so arrogant as to claim that all the women flooding into other fields don't know what they want? "You poor girl, you may think you like early childhood education, but you're deluded, you really want to to do CS and are prevented by the evil sexism"

Which is about par for the course for the "blank slate" side of the debate.

Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution

#120

Post by tptacek »

rhapsodic wrote: post #70
rayiner wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, that's not true. https://i.imgur.com/pkZPrOI.png . CS was a third women in the mid 1980s, dropping to under 20% today. Twenty years ago, the Space Shuttle's software team was quite gender balanced: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff . Second, nerds can do a perfectly effective job pushing women out of the profession without being aggressive or having social power. We do a lot to gender th…

> Second, nerds can do a perfectly effective job pushing women out of the profession without being aggressive or having social power. We do a lot to gender the profession in ways that has little to do with the work. Think about all the references to hiring "cowboy coders" and "code ninjas." We emphasize hiring the lone gunman coder who learned to code in their basements, while the job actually is highly collaborative…

So, they're engaged in other STEM fields at 2x-3x the extent they're engaged in CS, despite the fact that those other fields are often more intellectually rigorous and challenging and despite the fact that most of those fields are dominated by computers and software --- in fact, many of them are even more challenging from a CS perspective than computer science itself as it is practiced in the industry, which is mostly about connecting database rows to HTML forms --- but despite all that, you're convinced that women just "tend not to be interested enough in software development"?
Post reply on HN