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No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

code.likeagirl.io

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Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#91

Post by ucaetano »

stinkytaco wrote: post #85
ucaetano wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Isn't appealing to minority groups by definition setting them apart from other groups?" No, in a world where minority groups are set apart, appealing to them can be as simple as not setting them apart , by no harassing, abusing, discriminating, etc. You don't need pink office chairs to make an office space welcoming for women. You just need NOT to have catcalls, rapists, abusers, sexist jokes, etc. Simple stuff, rea…

The point I'm trying to make is that if we are indeed to engage to appeal to a specific group, we need to make assumptions about that group. Your example above is a different problem. In that situation we are trying to not be hostile to a specific group. That's really a much easier problem to identify (not solve) because hostile behavior is hostile behavior, no matter who you are. It's incredibly important to solve t…

> In that situation we've defined a problem: "girls are not interested in technology to the same extent that boys are"

Are you sure that's the problem? What if you restate it as "at some point in their lives, girls become less interested in technology than boys" or "at some point in their lives, girls' interest in technology declines, unlike boys'"

Now you have very different problems and very different solutions. Why does that interest decline? What is driving it? Could it be a self-propagating, hostile, "boy's club" environment in technology?

Maybe you don't even need to market to them, if they never lose the interest in it.

And based on some data, I believe that my definition of the problem is probably closer to the real problem than yours:

http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel...

So maybe we're asking the wrong questions.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#92

Post by Nursie »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #13
amiga-workbench wrote: post #3

I have noticed that some women only tech events tend to go very lightly into technical matters and lean more towards the social justice side of things and I can very easily see just how unappealing such events would be.

No, I'm pretty sure its "Code like a girl". That's the name of the submitted and is the completed form of said URL. I'm also reasonably sure that referring to women professionals as "girls" is also one of those things you shouldn't do. Right hand, meet left hand. These are adults, and they happen to be male/female/white/black/asian/whatever. (Unless we're actually talking about k-9 school aged females. Then girl is a…

Given that the very first sentence in the article is indeed about schools, I feel your objection may be less than cromulent here.

In fact the entire article is about education and kids - girls and boys. Not professionals.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#93

Post by ucaetano »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #80
ucaetano wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"YOU NEED TO TRY HARDER TO APPEAL TO MINORITY GROUPS by not stereotyping, patronizing, abusing them and creating a hostile environment " There, I fixed it for you. You can appeal to minority groups without using stereotypes.

Merely not driving away minority groups isn't enough to fix the imbalances in representation. People don't avoid things because of future negative experiences, they avoid things because they expect to get negative experiences there. Like, if police magically started treating African Americans like they ought to overnight, there's a lot of built-up fear that would still have the African American community avoid intera…

> People don't avoid things because of future negative experiences

Oh, people do, all the time. How many times have you avoided doing something because of the fear of pain, failure and shame?

It isn't a marketing problem.

http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel...

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#94

Post by knodi123 »

tempodox wrote: post #82

I would be genuinely interested in what “code like a girl” means in practial terms. Do girls/women code differently than boys/men, and if so, how? Since females are so exceedingly rare in our profession, I haven‘t had the opportunity to find out myself.

It's just a rhetorical device. The phrase "play like a girl" has already been established and associated with various advocacy groups trying to increase sports opportunities for girl who were previously discouraged from participating in the traditionally male activity.

But I think that the original phrase, "(do it) like a man" was meant to contrast with "like a boy", as in "be a mature and skilled adult, not an awkward and timid adolescent". If I'm right about that, then "code like a girl" is humorously ignorant, since "woman" would fit better. Unless this is a children's outreach thing? I dunno about that part.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#95

Post by ucaetano »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #86
ucaetano wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Isn't appealing to minority groups by definition setting them apart from other groups?" No, in a world where minority groups are set apart, appealing to them can be as simple as not setting them apart , by no harassing, abusing, discriminating, etc. You don't need pink office chairs to make an office space welcoming for women. You just need NOT to have catcalls, rapists, abusers, sexist jokes, etc. Simple stuff, rea…

Most workplaces have been doing this "simple stuff" for decades and the problem appears to persist.

No, they've been putting it on paper. There's a long distance between that and actual welcoming workplaces.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#96

Post by pmarreck »

Let anyone who is interested in the thing, do that thing. And then get the fuck out of that person's way.

This current obsession with gender-asymmetric ratios in various careers is ridiculous. There is absolutely no evidence that everything would be 50/50 man/woman in an ideal(ized) world.

I shouldn't even have to say this, but the smartest programmer I know is a non-cisgender female.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#97

Post by dang »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #29
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm pretty sure its "Code like a girl". That's the name of the submitted and is the completed form of said URL. I'm also reasonably sure that referring to women professionals as "girls" is also one of those things you shouldn't do. Right hand, meet left hand. These are adults, and they happen to be male/female/white/black/asian/whatever. (Unless we're actually talking about k-9 school aged females. Then girl is a…

You aren't allowed opinions, my friend. Right or wrong, you must be gender biased (unless it's against females) or you mustn't raise points.

Could you please not do this here? Comments like this only make the discussion worse for everyone. It's a form of peeing in the pool, and it breaks the site guidelines badly, so we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.

Any good-faith view is possible to express thoughtfully, so that's what we ask of HN users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#98

Post by tzahola »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #83
tzahola wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need to increase the amount of women in tech. How about truck drivers? Do we need to increase the amount of women there too?

Write a letter to your elected representative. With current DOT roles anyone who isn't willing to piss in a jug to save a couple minutes is at a severe disadvantage.

How about taxi drivers? They don’t pee in bottles too often.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#99

Post by eacr49nhah »

nullhypothewhat wrote: post #60
waisbrot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's not wrong, but to say "she just is [interested in things that are traditionally gendered]" seems a little incurious. Princesses, pink ponies, and frilly dresses did not exist when modern humans came into being. So liking or disliking those things is almost entirely a matter of socialization and not some kind of biotruth. While you may have tried to socialize her away from "girly" stuff, peers are often a strong…

let’s play a game - since you’re asserting a massively complicated social mechanism that instills these preferences, give us some evidence of its existence rather than just baldly assert it the way its taught in gender studies. elaborate it somehow. show us evidence that it works.

> give us some evidence of its existence rather than just baldly assert it the way its taught in gender studies.

Wait, wait... what? So go out and do a bunch of scientific studies - but don't refer to any of the existing scientific studies because ... reasons. Yeah, that's a really useful way to have a discussion.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#100

Post by fishtank »

jandrese wrote: post #50
ucaetano wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"YOU NEED TO TRY HARDER TO APPEAL TO MINORITY GROUPS by not stereotyping, patronizing, abusing them and creating a hostile environment " There, I fixed it for you. You can appeal to minority groups without using stereotypes.

But how? I'm being serious here. You put anything culturally appropriate into the system and someone is going to call it an offensive stereotype. So you have to make it relevant to the user while not referencing anything specific about them, not an easy problem to solve.

It is possible to include minority groups in a community without pandering or using reductive caricatures. It can be difficult if the community has little familiarity with the actual experiences of those minority groups. In that case, it would be important to seek out people who are from those minority groups, or who at least have a great familiarity with those groups, to direct efforts to grow the community in their direction.

If a person is anxious about being reprimanded for using an offensive stereotype, they do not have the expertise to employ "culturally appropriate" materials and ought to do more research/inquiry or delegate the responsibility of the outreach to somebody else.

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