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A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

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Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#381

Post by yosito »

arkis22 wrote: post #371
yosito wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how that works. ^ This comment is me being dismissive of you, and it's also true.

You have the right to be dismissive, but you don't have the right of proving me wrong without arguing against my point with a coherent argument. You are basically saying that women have never treated men differently based on their attractiveness, which is absurd.

> you don't have the right of proving me wrong without arguing against my point

Did you have a point? I missed it. The closest thing I've seen to you making a point in this thread was when you said "the problem is perhaps with you".

> You are basically saying that women have never treated men differently based on their attractiveness

That's not what I'm saying. But I'm tired of repeating myself, so please re-read my previous comments.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#382

Post by meowface »

peoplewindow wrote: post #195
cbradshaw wrote: post #48

Is CS really “lauded as a haven for antisocial people?” Ouch. Some of the evidence in this article is anecdotal (female friend at a hackathon gets excluded by males, etc.). Has no one else seen the plethora of “Women in Tech” meet ups, events and hiring fairs? Anecdotally, I have several female friends that have interviewed and been hired at companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. I understand this isn’t statisti…

"Women in tech" events are a good example of how women exclude themselves. A typical event has the following attributes: - Men strongly discouraged or banned from participating. - Many of the attendees are "women in tech" but not "technical women", it's common to see women who describe themselves as co-founders, activists, HR staff and so on but relatively rare to find someone who actually spends all day banging out…

That's an interesting theory, but do you have any evidence that most of these events are more political in nature than actually talking about programming and technology? Your girlfriend's one or two anecdotes aren't really sufficient to make a generalization like that.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#383

Post by yosito »

meowface wrote: post #373
yosito wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasonable enough, but if that's the case, we should be blaming the avoidance on men for their social incompetence, not on women for having boundaries.

Or we shouldn't be blaming either men or women and instead should work towards more open communication and solidarity regarding these issues.

You're right.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#384

Post by ravenstine »

yosito wrote: post #370
manicdee wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why men who aren’t able to read those boundaries prefer to simply avoid getting anywhere near those boundaries. The easiest way of not transgressing is to avoid contact altogether.

Reasonable enough, but if that's the case, we should be blaming the avoidance on men for their social incompetence, not on women for having boundaries.

What exactly does a man get for going out of his way like you suggest? Most of the time, nothing. Unless I can read that a woman is receptive to friendship, trying to befriend women because they're women is time better spent on working. It's a two-way street, and while I have had my share of female friends, the majority of women are either not receptive(i.e. won't give men the benefit of the doubt) or content to wait for men to take the initiative.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#385

Post by meowface »

yosito wrote: post #261
stcredzero wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have missed all the comments of men complaining that they can't be friendly to women because they're an unattractive man. I've missed them. Can you aggregate links? I honestly find this interesting. (You can "cheat" this using the reply links.)

CMD+F unatt I'm not gonna do your work for you.

Most of these commenters don't appear to be whining about their situation, but rather replying to the question of why men in tech positions don't try to befriend more women. Their answer is that they're concerned about the optics of trying to initiate the friendship.

And by unattractive, they don't necessarily mean "ugly" but rather geeky, asocial, with niche interests, no fashion sense, little in common with most women, etc. It can be the way they carry themselves, their posture, the way they walk, the sound of their voice, stuttering, lack of vocal control... For someone like that with poor social skills and a lot of anxiety, it's not at all uncommon for a woman to misconstrue their efforts at friendship as a romantic overture or worse. It can also just be shyness due to inexperience interacting with women.

This is not necessarily the fault of the women; they likely do receive a lot of uncomfortable romantic overtures from socially awkward people like this. The commenters aren't placing blame on anyone, but describing the reality of their situation.

Some of the commenters have a rather rude and selfish attitude about it, but this is a genuine issue for a lot of men and explains part of the reason why some women in CS may feel isolated. If anything, I think people should try to have more empathy for this particular predicament, so that men and women can hopefully become more comfortable fostering professional and platonic relationships in the workplace.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#386

Post by phlakaton »

stcredzero wrote: post #267
phlakaton wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it: 1. Making friends isn't even remotely close to a line. The line is way out in workplace romance and sexual power politics land. The very basic mitigation strategy you have is simply not to go there. If you can't not go there, then you have other problems to deal with first, and the sooner you go about that the better! 2. If making friends isn't crossing a line, it's therefore not sticking your neck…

Making friends isn't even remotely close to a line. The line is way out in workplace romance and sexual power politics land. The very basic mitigation strategy you have is simply not to go there. As it stands now, this line is very easily "shifted" by spin and outright lying.

And how often do you think this happens--where there is an accusation with absolutely no basis in reality? What data do you have to back this up? Would you really cast out all women from your professional circles because of it?

Sheesh.

Men talk about how aggrieved they are in this new world of transparency and accusation. This transparency has come about because many women have been subject to some really, truly awful stuff. Yet reactions like this this are unbelievably unfair to women too. It's almost like it's _women_ who are in a lose-lose situation here, not men!

What on earth will it take to get men to simply treat women as reasonable, decent people?

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#388

Post by meowface »

throwawy010101 wrote: post #46

"women are more social" wait I thought conclusions about the capabilities of people by gender are verboten ??

>I thought conclusions about the capabilities of people by gender are verboten

Where did the author express this sentiment?

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#389

Post by sidlls »

walshemj wrote: post #32
ghaff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which also corresponded to home PCs and gaming consoles becoming common. So computers became more about a hobby with often limited social interaction as opposed to being solely about something that college students and adults pursuing computing as a profession did. Which arguably also led to this idea that if you haven’t been doing computing recreationally since you were a kid you obviously are not Passionate enough…

I have to admit if you only started programming after you went to University your going to struggle with the course and afterwards work. You would not expect to do a Degree in English lit and have done no reading of the cannon before getting to university.

There's a big difference to formal exposure in a programming class in high school and a lifetime of hobbyist tinkering with tech.

Re: A female engineer's opinion on why there are fewer women in tech

#390

Post by blattimwind »

mikeash wrote: post #344
mundo wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, improving your social skills can be damned hard. But that’s irrelevant if you don’t even want to do it. Er... your theory is that "too shy/awkward to carry on a casual conversation with a woman" is something that some men prefer ? That they could overcome it, but don't want to? That seems more likely to you than "they would like to overcome it, but haven't been able to"?

When the discussion consists entirely of people saying they just avoid talking to women entirely, yes, that seems much more likely. I’m not saying they’re happy with it, but prefer it over self improvement? You bet. People usually hate trying to change themselves.

> I’m not saying they’re happy with it, but prefer it over self improvement?

You can want something yet fail to achieve it, that's fairly obvious, no? Compare: fat people who want to be not-fat.

Of course, the blatant counter-argument would be that those just don't want it enough; this entire train of thought seems rather damning to me.

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