351–360 of 420 posts
What I would be interested in is how many people look for images of Valerie Aurora that would not look for images if the article would be from a male author. +1 if you did look but wouldn't in case of a male author, -1 otherwise.
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An important point here - every time I read "X% of class A had this happening to them" I automatically ask "what's the baseline rate? If you weren't in class A, would it happen to you more often or less often?" If I don't find this comparison - and usually I don't - then the number of X% is useless for the purpose of deciding whether class A is an outlier or not. Unfortunately, as I said, very small number of people…
Yes. And the fact that they leave out the baselines pretty much everywhere is highly suspicious. The rest of the study provides even less information, just tendentious excerpts. What does "30% of underrepresented women of color were passed over for promotion" even mean?? The ACM did a study a while back that contradicted virtually all of the stereotypes[1]. "Men and women in our survey both generally reported a simil…
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I'm a white male programmer in my mid-50's, have a family, and I am very employable. Quit whining.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this to HN. The comment would have been just fine with only the first sentence.
I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much." If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. So don't ask "would this bother me?" Ask "would it bother someone?" And since you can't predict this from inside your head, you have to rely on firsthand acc…
>If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. I used to think like this. After years and years of refining my own behavior, a non-work, non-"tech" friend let it slip that my fiends though I had turned into a non-confrontational, lawyer-sounding, people-pleaser. He wasn't wrong, I had gotten in the habit of always walking…
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A more equal gender distribution doesn't mean that women are treated better. Take Hollywood, for example.
Does Hollywood have a more equal gender distribution? I heard the average movie has about 6 male roles for every female roles, including extras.
What I would be interested in is how many people look for images of Valerie Aurora that would not look for images if the article would be from a male author. +1 if you did look but wouldn't in case of a male author, -1 otherwise.
Please don't do this here.
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> We have firsthand numbers from companies like Google; after years of concerted effort to recruit and retain women, they just hit 20%. Is it possible that a "concerted effort to recruit and retain women" perhaps does more harm than good? Med schools in this country are now very nearly 50/50[1] and law schools are very slightly over 50% female[2]. Did medicine and law achieve this by the same type of concerted effort…
>females who are doctors as simply doctors (and likewise for lawyers), not female doctors whereas in tech we have a habit of treating them like female developers instead of developers (and I'm referring to when that's done with the best intentions such as female-only hackathons, bootcamps, and meetups). Female-only hackathons are what's wrong though. It implies that women cannot compete at the adult table, which is u…
(We're reading a blog post written by a woman kernel developer, for what it's worth).
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I'm focused more on infrastructure than software engineering lately: AWS/CloudFormation, but I still write some Python/NodeJS/Bash, mostly infrastructure glue rather than actual apps. The key to keeping yourself relevant is understanding the big picture, and learning stuff that is outside your area of expertise. For example, I started as a network engineer, but got into UNIX because I wanted to know how the provision…
Would you consider yourself to be a specialist in cloud storage/infrastructure? Anecdotally the people in their 40's--60's who continue to find employment as individual contributor software engineer seem to be specialists in a particular field.
I predict people will claim "our culture isn't that toxic. Some of those things happen, but they don't bother me much." If any non-zero subset of reasonable people are so offended by a behavior that they'd leave the industry because of it, we have to cut it out. So don't ask "would this bother me?" Ask "would it bother someone?" And since you can't predict this from inside your head, you have to rely on firsthand acc…
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In fact, it very probably is a tech-specific problem. Among the STEM fields, CS is almost uniquely imbalanced. STEM fields in general range from ~30-55% women, and those fields include things like Mathematics --- anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room --- which are strong proxies for CS ability. And, of course, among the professions in g…
>anyone who has gone to an academic cryptography workshop has probably noticed how many more women there are in the room As someone who has spent a lot of time in academic security conferences, I have to wonder what you are comparing them to. The only field with a worse female participation rate in my experience is networking (e.g. SIGCOMM). Check out this picture from EuroCrypt in 97 and count the ratio of women to…
I don't know what was going on at EuroCrypt in 1997, but I've been to workshops within the last 5 years, and the number of women involved was startling. Which, of course, squares with the statistics for gender parity in CS (bad) vs. mathematics (better).