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Why Women Don't Code?

quillette.com

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#21
post #2

Recent studies have shown that gender differences in personality tend to be larger in developed countries. I think more developed countries tend to have a toxic set of socal standards. If you want to figure out why women are underrepresented in technology, examine the differences between boys and girls toddlers and how they interact with their environment. There is a 'girls toys' isle in store but not a 'boys toys'.…

Or it was banned in China for basic economic reasons as highlighted in this article? http://adage.com/article/global-news/real-reason-china-banne...

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#22
post #15
post #7

My first computer was a BBC micro and I "wrote" my first code using GW Basic when I was between the age of 5 and 10. I now have two daughters, and it's my goal to give them every opportunity to do the same. Recently I sat down with my eldest and we wrote Ruby together to print out her name in rainbow colours on a terminal. She loved it. As part of the journey of being a parent, I've come to realise how gender biased…

If you want to see the foundations of our society, ask and investigate what create social status. Even at preschool, kids usually arranging themselves into group with a hierarchy. Usually those groups are separated on gender, through at the youngest age group they tend to be a bit mixed and by the time kids hit puberty its almost fully sorted into groups of single-gender. Age 5 to 10 should provide a bit of insight i…

I think there's discussion about how segregation of the sexes during a period can lead to improved outcomes, and that children cross-culturally self-segregate.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#23

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that women have to hear "Well... maybe it's just that women aren't naturally good at programming" 17 billion times throughout their careers.

Do they hear this from white men smoking cigars?

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#25
post #20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My mother taught me to flip all pro-nouns to female There are languages where pronouns are not gender-red, they are neutral and you see the same results. > I've come to realise how gender biased the world is A lot of it is due to biology itself being "biased" and a lot of society evolved to accommodate those sex differences. I think tech is over glorified and is presented as this boy's club where everything is amaz…

My native tongue (Turkish) is one language without grammatical gender. Learning languages with it, it was immediately clear to me that that was a problematic thing. Luckily no revolutions are needed, as languages tend to become more analytical and lose grammatical gender progressively. I think that what enabled women to gain many rights and at times actual equality in most societies was/is technology. Before widespre…

I tend to agree with everything you say. I'd like to call out this part:

I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people instead of many faux-techie types

I was surprised to read this, but not totally surprised. I've been wondering when this phenomenon will start to be publicly discussed. I think women faking technical skills to benefit from "women in tech" hype is a really serious problem that isn't discussed anywhere near enough, probably because people are scared of the crazed feminist witch-burning crowd. But women and especially actually technically skilled women need to start addressing it head on.

The problem of fake "women in tech" seems to have grown astronomically in the last few years. I've been writing software for decades but I don't remember noticing this even as recently as 2010. It will, eventually, if not strongly discouraged, cause men to quietly and silently start assuming that a western female who claims to be a programmer or claims to be technical is probably lying (10x so if she's attractive!). This risks setting back equality of opportunity in technology, which I think everyone agrees on, by many years.

In the past year alone I've encountered perhaps four or five cases of women who exaggerate their technical abilities to the media or others online, to the extent that they're just deliberately deceiving people. One case was a journalist who claimed in her bio she was also a contributor to a somewhat well known open source library, which surprised me because why would you be a low paid journalist on a low traffic tech news site if you had programming skills good enough to take part in that project? Turns out her "contribution" was a single character typo fix in a comment, submitted through the github web UI. Another case involves a woman who was put in charge of a corporate funded open source project and liked to loudly and repeatedly claim to the media that she was a 'hacker' with an interest in machine learning and cloud infrastructure, who hung out and gave talks at hacker conferences. She actually did give a talk at a security conference once: on suicide prevention. She has no program traceable to her anywhere, no history of doing any programming work in the past and no github account despite the project she led being hosted on github. In short, no evidence of these supposed hacker skills are anywhere to be found. She is allowed to make these claims about her skills unchallenged because nobody will criticise a "woman in tech".

Of course most cases aren't so blatant. But they add up. It makes total sense for women to do this. Claiming to be technical has become a free pass to jobs, status and wealth and they know nobody will call them on it.

Unfortunately in an environment where Damore can't even suggest that men and women are different in ways that cause them to have different interests without getting fired, the far more touchy subject of deliberately deceptive behaviour by women is unlikely to ever come up outside of anonymous forums. The problem will fester until many years have passed and attitudes have become entrenched. Neo-Victorian attitudes may rise again. It could be a terrible pity.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#26
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My native tongue (Turkish) is one language without grammatical gender. Learning languages with it, it was immediately clear to me that that was a problematic thing. Luckily no revolutions are needed, as languages tend to become more analytical and lose grammatical gender progressively. I think that what enabled women to gain many rights and at times actual equality in most societies was/is technology. Before widespre…

I tend to agree with everything you say. I'd like to call out this part: I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people instead of many faux-techie types I was surprised to read this, but not totally surprised. I've been wondering when this phenomenon will start to be publicly discussed. I think women faking technical skills to benefit from "women in tech" hype is a really serious pr…

Thanks, I mostly agree you too. This topic is a hard one to discuss, nearly a taboo. A proof might be that this post was flagkilled, luckily when I mailed the mods about it they did unkill it.

When I said faux-techies I mostly thought about HTML/CSS programmer types. While I did not know about the types you talk about, it's not very hard to believe, given how the way we execute this whole diversity thing is so open and defenceless to exploitation by bad actors. Unfortunately taboos mixed with a prejudiced view of woman as a naive, pure being (which is deeply patriarchal, if anything) are a big obstacle.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#27
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I visited Toys ‘r’ Us shortly after they started shutting down, and saw a pile of drum sets. Half were black, half were pink. I was pleased to see the black sets showed both a boy and a girl using the drums. However, the pink ones showed only the girl. Progress? I suppose. We have a long road ahead.

It's also interesting to note that not too long ago, pink was considered a masculine colour.

Would you mind expanding upon that or providing a link? That would be a very interesting read for me!

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to see the foundations of our society, ask and investigate what create social status. Even at preschool, kids usually arranging themselves into group with a hierarchy. Usually those groups are separated on gender, through at the youngest age group they tend to be a bit mixed and by the time kids hit puberty its almost fully sorted into groups of single-gender. Age 5 to 10 should provide a bit of insight i…

I think there's discussion about how segregation of the sexes during a period can lead to improved outcomes, and that children cross-culturally self-segregate.

I could not reply to this earlier since the topic was dead and flagged.

There has been some data to show that gender segregated schools can create improved academical outcomes, through I have not seen conclusive meta studies if the improvement is statistical true or how large the effect is. A common criticism to gender segregated education is that it harms gender segregation in society and reduce pro-social behavior, which in context of this article would be counter-productive.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#29
post #26
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with everything you say. I'd like to call out this part: I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people instead of many faux-techie types I was surprised to read this, but not totally surprised. I've been wondering when this phenomenon will start to be publicly discussed. I think women faking technical skills to benefit from "women in tech" hype is a really serious pr…

Thanks, I mostly agree you too. This topic is a hard one to discuss, nearly a taboo. A proof might be that this post was flagkilled, luckily when I mailed the mods about it they did unkill it. When I said faux-techies I mostly thought about HTML/CSS programmer types. While I did not know about the types you talk about, it's not very hard to believe, given how the way we execute this whole diversity thing is so open a…

Thank you for contacting the mods. I am entirely unsurprised that the response to my post was to try and suppress it rather than post any replies or arguments against it.

The sort of people who support these diversity movements always seem to be the same sort of people who immediately jump for censorship and other communist-style tactics. If the way to figure out who runs society is just to look at who you aren't allowed to criticise, then we surely live in a matriarchy.

Re: Why Women Don't Code?

#30
post #20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My mother taught me to flip all pro-nouns to female There are languages where pronouns are not gender-red, they are neutral and you see the same results. > I've come to realise how gender biased the world is A lot of it is due to biology itself being "biased" and a lot of society evolved to accommodate those sex differences. I think tech is over glorified and is presented as this boy's club where everything is amaz…

My native tongue (Turkish) is one language without grammatical gender. Learning languages with it, it was immediately clear to me that that was a problematic thing. Luckily no revolutions are needed, as languages tend to become more analytical and lose grammatical gender progressively. I think that what enabled women to gain many rights and at times actual equality in most societies was/is technology. Before widespre…

> women could become part of the workforce too

> women's rights and their participation in many other areas.

> Since the decades following industrial revolution, they became more and more present steadily in politics, academia, culture, etc., becoming quickly co-protagonists of modern life.

Some studies say that as a result they are unhappier and have less children.

See: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp09-11bk.pdf

> I dream of a world where one's sex is just a biological detail that matters in their amorous affairs and private life.

Do you want men and women to act, think and feel exactly the same?

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