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

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

code.likeagirl.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 179 posts

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

#111

Post by softawre »

drblast wrote: post #84

The title here is misleading, I think the article is right. I didn't get into tech because it was interesting, at least not initially. I got into computers because the movie War Games was cool as hell and I wanted to be like Matthew Broderick's character in that movie. I was 5 or 6 when I saw it. It was only after I got a Commodore 64 that I learned that it was going to be really difficult to do the things in the mov…

> gamer->modder->hacker path

This doesn't exist today? What about Minecraft mods, or building Redstone circuits? Game modding is as big as it was when I went through that cycle, isn't it?

At least, that's what I plan to show my daughter when she gets a bit older to test her interest.

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

#112

Post by epx »

drblast wrote: post #84

The title here is misleading, I think the article is right. I didn't get into tech because it was interesting, at least not initially. I got into computers because the movie War Games was cool as hell and I wanted to be like Matthew Broderick's character in that movie. I was 5 or 6 when I saw it. It was only after I got a Commodore 64 that I learned that it was going to be really difficult to do the things in the mov…

Jeez, War Games was my inspiration too. I saw myself as that clumsy nerd ("Remember you told me to tell you when you're acting rudely and insensitively?" I ask my wife to do that to this day :)

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

#113

Post by jandrese »

bdamm wrote: post #36
didibus wrote: post #9

This makes me wonder, have computers inherently been designed as boy toys? I don't support continuing the teaching that girls should like pink things, dresses and flowers, but it does exist quite strongly. So if we assume boys are thought or predisposed to like esthetic X, while girls are thought or predisposed to like esthetic Y. Have computers been designed to esthetic X? Basically, my point is, are computers gende…

It's telling that there isn't even a term for this. You've hit a major point here.

Also, you rarely see people fretting over the low percentage of males going for primary education jobs. In many ways these jobs are just as or more important than computer programming, but nobody cares that it has such a lopsided gender ratio.

Personally, I don't even care about it, but it makes me pause to consider why I have to be so concerned about the lack of women in CS. Am I being an asshole and trying to shove people into a career they have no interest in?

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

#114

Post by epx »

I guess that each market, each country has a different dynamic. For example, here in Brazil, there has always been a good % of women in IT and software. But there was one thing: 99.995% of jobs were ERP development or Novell Netware. I always liked low-level software and systems development, but I kept doing that as a hobby with very occasional consulting in systems development from 1988 to 2005.

Most of the few hobbyists were men as well, some even became lawyers to make a living, so scarce was the work in this area, even for the best. Now that non-ERP software development is the high-paid job and ERP development is drying up because big boys e.g. SAP are eating into the local market, everybody wants a piece of the action.

So I don't feel too bad about gender imbalance in this particular branch. Nobody is preventing anyone from buying an Arduino and/or publish apps on App Store.

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

#115

Post by jorjordandan »

waisbrot wrote: post #41
jorjordandan wrote: post #21

My daughter is six. I never wanted her to be interested in things that were traditionally gendered - but she just is. I would buy neutral toys, but her eyes would light up when she saw the babies and pink princesses. So, is she wrong to like those things? We have done the minecraft hour of code together, (she likes minecraft too) but if there was an even more 'girly' version I an guarantee that she would be more enga…

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…

She didn't really have any friends who were girls when she was small. She was just interested in that stuff. Additionally, I have a three year old daughter who is very not interested in dolls and princesses. You would think if it was a matter of socialization, then her little sister would be a prime candidate to be socialized into those preferences. Her little sister is much more interested in building puzzles than playing with dolls. It's actually astounding how much kids preferences seem to materialize on their own. They are these little people, and we think of them as being blank slates, but they are actually not blank slates at all.

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

#116

Post by ThrustVectoring »

ucaetano wrote: post #93
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's exactly my point. The fear of the future causes behavioral changes now, not the actual future, which hasn't happened yet and cannot affect your current self.

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

#117

Post by ucaetano »

stinkytaco wrote: post #109
ucaetano wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Wh…

I'm not sure what that data shows us. It shows us that more women get engineering degrees and fewer computer science degrees since 1980? It shows us that more women get degrees period, actually. It's also showing us a snapshot in time: women between the ages of 18-22. That doesn't really address at all the problem of "girls before 18". Girls have only recently drawn even with boys in attendance in high school stem cl…

> I'm not sure what that data shows us.

It shows that women were interested in tech, but something happened in the 80's that mostly killed that interest.

So the problem isn't that females aren't interested, but that something kills that interest. What is that?

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

#118

Post by didibus »

wccrawford wrote: post #78
bdamm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that there isn't even a term for this. You've hit a major point here.

Until a few minutes ago, I'd never heard of "pinkifying", either. Here, I'll make one up that will be instantly recognizable: Masculinizing.

Yes, pinkifying is not a real term, but the truth is, I was trying to describe the stereotype and couldn't for boys. I thought girls stereotypes are they like pink, flowers, dresses, sparkles, dolls, etc. And then I chocked on boys, I wouldn't be able to go ahead and "masculinize" something, because I wouldn't know what that means. I'm thinking boys like fighting, to argue, the color blue or red, trucks, cars, heavy machinery, computers, video games, etc.

This surprised me. My stereotype of boys is that they like things which leads directly to professions such as politic, business, engineering, policing or war. While my steteotypes for girls would seem to lead to low professional value activities in comparison, like house-wife, florist, artist, hair dresser/makeup artist, care taker. With the exception of fashion and lucrative care taking jobs like doctor, the rest doesn't pay well.

I make nothing of this, I think it might be a telling observation, but I'm not making any argument of it. I do find it intetesting. What would be other people's stereotype for boys vs girls about what we might think they "like"? I think that's a good exercise, and a good place to start better understanding the problems related to them.

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

#119

Post by imiric »

twobyfour wrote: post #61
randomdata wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did the medicine and legal industries do to "pinkify" themselves in the last generation?

Nothing except to start accepting women as equally capable as men and equally likely to have an interest in the profession.

At what level in the IT industry do you feel that this is not the case?

Education (at home, early, primary, secondary, higher?), in the workplace (companies are biased against women?), or somewhere else (conferences, meetups, trainings, etc.)?

It seems that lack of "acceptance" is thrown around to explain this phenomenon, but it's not clear what and where should be improved to change this.

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

#120

Post by kazinator »

didibus wrote: post #118
wccrawford wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until a few minutes ago, I'd never heard of "pinkifying", either. Here, I'll make one up that will be instantly recognizable: Masculinizing.

Yes, pinkifying is not a real term, but the truth is, I was trying to describe the stereotype and couldn't for boys. I thought girls stereotypes are they like pink, flowers, dresses, sparkles, dolls, etc. And then I chocked on boys, I wouldn't be able to go ahead and "masculinize" something, because I wouldn't know what that means. I'm thinking boys like fighting, to argue, the color blue or red, trucks, cars, heavy…

It's a real term. -ify is a productive suffix in English that can combine with nouns and some ajectives to create a verb. N-ify means "make like N, or endow with N, somehow"; Adj-ify is "make Adj".

Dictionaries do not exhaustively list every possible combination of a word with every applicable prefix and suffix.

Post reply on HN