Why we don't need more women in tech... yet • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

#51

Post by kscaldef » Wed, Sep 08, 2010, 6:19 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #43

kellishaver wrote: post #23

As one of those elusive women in tech... I don't know. I have mixed feelings on the whole issue and usually try to avoid it, mostly because I just don't see it as a big deal. I've never felt like an outcast or that I didn't belong in this field because of my gender, nor have I ever been made to feel like the center of attention because of it (thank goodness). It just is. Of all the women I know personally, only one o…

A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with j…

This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents and providing feedback to help refine them; reviewing other developers' code and mentoring junior members of the team.

I absolutely _don't_ spend 8 hours just interacting with a computer. I won't argue that there aren't any jobs in the field like that; and, in fact, entry-level positions do tend more towards "just implement this spec". But I think it's misleading to give people the idea that there is no human interaction involved in our jobs.

Re: Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

#52

Post by alsomike » Wed, Sep 08, 2010, 6:58 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #22

alsomike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's actual data: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/cwsem/PGA_049131 What "natural disinclination" do you think women have, exactly? They don't like math? Women received 47% of math undergrad degrees in 2002 and that number has been stable for 20 years. They don't like computers? The physical sciences use computers pretty heavily, and women received 42% of undergraduates degrees in those fields in 2002, compar…

I think you think you are disproving my point with those numbers, but I think it reinforces it. In what exact manner has the computer field failed to be accepting of women in the way that somehow math and the other physical sciences haven't? In the strongly-politically-correct environment that all women entering college have grown up in (and I reiterate my parenthetical in my first posting for those who may have forg…

You don't have a hypothesis, you have an unfalsifiable conjecture that maybe women have some mysterious natural disinclination that you leave undefined and then conclude there's no problem.

Re: Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

#53

Post by phr » Wed, Sep 08, 2010, 7:38 PM UTC

spitfire wrote: post #9

Why aren't there women in technology today? Probably because they're smart enough to stay away. Technology today, particularly startups, is an ego driven, fad chasing death-march. What sane person would want to spend their time with emotional children reinventing the wheel and following every fad that comes along? Instead you could work in pr, or management, or even cabinetmaking. So why don't we have women in tech?…

See Phil Greenspun on women in science: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Re: Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

#54

Post by zeteo » Wed, Sep 08, 2010, 7:52 PM UTC

kscaldef wrote: post #51

zeteo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with j…

This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents…

Yes, but when you first take the job you'll spend at least a couple of years dealing mainly with just the computer.

Re: Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

#55

Post by ShardPhoenix » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 12:10 AM UTC

alsomike wrote: post #19

jerf wrote: post #12

I'm not sure this argument stands up to the facts. Women have been pouring into every discipline over the past twenty+ years. That's a significant number because we're now talking people born in the 1990s, which can not be said to be a decade untouched by feminism. Women are graduating with more degrees then men now, women are the majority on campus, and the proportions are rising. Every discipline, engineering and c…

Here's actual data: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/cwsem/PGA_049131 What "natural disinclination" do you think women have, exactly? They don't like math? Women received 47% of math undergrad degrees in 2002 and that number has been stable for 20 years. They don't like computers? The physical sciences use computers pretty heavily, and women received 42% of undergraduates degrees in those fields in 2002, compar…

Perhaps those numbers mean that programming has finally become a true engineering discipline :).

Re: Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

#56

Post by kellishaver » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 9:31 PM UTC

jlees wrote: post #49

kellishaver wrote: post #23

As one of those elusive women in tech... I don't know. I have mixed feelings on the whole issue and usually try to avoid it, mostly because I just don't see it as a big deal. I've never felt like an outcast or that I didn't belong in this field because of my gender, nor have I ever been made to feel like the center of attention because of it (thank goodness). It just is. Of all the women I know personally, only one o…

I wrote a (quite frankly dull and rambly) blog post about my upbringing to try to figure out why it made me an engineer, and it's pretty much the same. I was encouraged to tinker and nothing was ever discouraged. The only discouragement was lack of knowledge from careers and university advisors at school who didn't even tell me computer science was an option (for uni or a career). I think that kind of upbringing help…

Sad, but true. I know my daughter dealt with a bit of this a couple of years ago and we did a lot of bolstering of her self-confidence and talking through various scenarios during that period, until she eventually got to the point where she realized the issue was theirs, not hers. Fortunately, since then, she hasn't let it bother her and hasn't looked back and, really, once the kids involved saw that it didn't bother her, the shut up.

I was actually teased/bullied a lot as a kid, particularly around age 11-12, but it was more about my disability (I'm legally blind) than the stuff I was into. I kept a low profile at school and most of the kids doing the teasing didn't know me well enough to know my geek ways. I come from a long line of stubborn, though, so it didn't really have a lasting impact.

Re: Why we don't need more women in tech... yet

#57

Post by brownleej » Mon, Sep 13, 2010, 2:41 AM UTC

aphexairlines wrote: post #35

TheSOB88 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty sexist, isn't it?

Trashing the field isn't sexist. Bitter, maybe.

I think the implication was that it is sexist to imply that women have better judgment than men, and that this causes them to stay out of tech. It's the first part that's sexist, not the second.