Nice theory. Sexism is still the most compelling reason though. What her mother told her was sexist. Most of her negative experiences can be categorized as sexist. The excuses about social stuff seems like bs coverings for general sexism that people try very hard to be in denial about. This is plainly obvious if you talk to women from other cultures who don't experience this stuff.
A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
161–170 of 482 posts
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#162Pretend you're a woman and then read the comments on this post. That makes it pretty obvious that one of the reasons women have a hard time feeling welcome in tech is because men don't listen to or empathize with them when they speak about their opinions or perspectives.
I've been browsing this thread for about 45 minutes. Not a single comment is rude, most of the comments are trying to debate about the issue. If you post a submission on a forum and expect everyone to blindly agree with you or you else you consider it as "hate", then the problem is perhaps with you.
You must have missed all the comments of men complaining that they can't be friendly to women because they're an unattractive man. Not sure where you got the word "hate" from. I'm not saying anything about hate.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#163> [If you’re a dude and you’re reading this article] Go befriend a girl in your class or company. It’s not creepy. Include her, ask her for advice, introduce her, learn about her work and her life in the same way you would with any male friend or coworker. If you’re an investor, professor, journalist, or manager, take it on yourself to sponsor a young woman’s career. While I totally agree with this advice, I think th…
JFC. If you're afraid of accidentally harassing or molesting someone I think you have the wrong idea of how to interact with people.
I don't think that's what they were saying at all. My interpretation was that people don't want to risk the perception of any kind of special friendly treatment of women, because of what people might read into it.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#164> young men are less likely to approach women and invite them to join a study group or happy hour, poker night, or whatever else they do with their male peers/coworkers. As a man I've never been approached and invited to anything like this..
Maybe you should invite some others, then. Be the change you want to see, and all that.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also notice that even though she had the option, she didn't approach anyone to try an secure a lab partner. She posted her own position opening and waited until all spots were taken. She could very well have clicked on anyones post and that would have been the end of it.
This seems to be a common symptom in most of these 'women-in-tech' articles. Each one of them has advice for men who are in the industry, but never for any women trying to get into it.
Because the idea that gender disparities are due to the choices men and women make is some sort of ideologically impure heretical thought, for some reason. If it's not to do with oppression/awful men then where's the fun? Where's the virtue in fighting for it?
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#166Are the rest of the STEM career paths seen as more social than CS? Is mathematics more social than CS? Because CS is almost (not quite: physics is almost as bad) unique among STEM specializations for its gender disparity. I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technolo…
I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people. I recall a paper I read in grad school which found that programmers actually had more need of interaction than other fields. As jdavis notes elsewhere, acco…
I don't know. But I do know that the masculinization of computer science seems to line up chronologically with the emergence of the home computer movement, which was began as a male-dominated 1970s hobby.
And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#167Interesting that popular perception is that it is hard to be a woman in STEM because you get so much unwanted attention, but in this case it was exactly the opposite. She wasn't able to find lab partners for projects in male majority classes and felt lonely.
Maybe the chilling effect of several decades of gender politics put a damper on the unwanted attention. Boys are hammered with messages about sexual misconduct, and so even ones without any such intentions want to avoid the mere perception that anything is going on.
It puts a damper on attention in general, but the attention that is less dampened is precisely the unwanted attention.
Think about it. A considerate well intentioned person might mistakenly overcompensate and give too little attention to female colleagues, while an inconsiderate person who doesn't care about gender politics will keep doing what they were doing all along. The result is that the ratio of unwanted/wanted attention goes up, even as total attention goes down.
This general principle is called "the asshole filter"[1] and it applies to all sorts of social interactions, not just sexual harassment.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alexander believes a lot of things. But you can just look up the stats on STEM fields yourself; they're not hard to find. There are STEM fields that approach parity, there are a couple in which women slightly lead men, and there are a bunch with more men than women. But CS is, by what to a casual glance looks like multiple stddevs, worse than the rest. Unless math is "warmer" than CS --- it isn't --- this explanation…
Maths is clearly warmer. Go look at the stats for undergrad vs postgrad. There's a huge difference. Women get maths degrees to become teachers, more or less.
Women do not get math PhD's to become math teachers, nor do they publish cryptography research to do that.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All they had to do to find a lab partner is have a pulse. Eh, that sounds a bit like those lab partners may have had dubious motivations. I figure it's on those of us who strive for the highest degree of professionalism to take the lead on inclusion.
So, summarizing the comments here: A: Dudes, go befriend a girl, include her! It's not creepy! B: My anecdata experience suggests girls in my lab, where they were in minority, had no problem being included if they wished to, dudes were very eager to do it. C: Motivations of those dudes sound very dubious and creepy! Yup, yup.
You left out the creepy “have a pulse” part.
Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a talented, and wonderful, female dev on my team. One thing though:. She has described to me some of the male coders as being "creepers". When I asked for specifics, she couldn't provide them. She simply stated it was a "feeling". The one commonality I found with the creepers is that they are pretty clearly below average in looks. The question is whether this is a correlation or a casual factor. But definitely…
It's funny how that works. I heard one man say to a woman that he didn't schedule a meeting for a particular time because he saw that she had a conflicting meeting. Later that same woman described (to another woman) that the man had been "creeping on her calendar". If it weren't for society's deference to women's feelings, that would probably be read as a hostile comment.
Isn't checking attendees' schedules for conflicts standard procedure when scheduling meetings?