371–380 of 630 posts
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It's about internalizing the idea that it's a feasible choice you give actual thought to.
How to distinguish between "I didn't know that was a feasible choice for me" and "I know what programming is like and I don't want to do that as a career"? How many girls and women fall into each category?
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I didn’t say law was “fixed.” (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.) What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That,…
> (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.) Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices? My guess is this means having 9 women on the Supreme Court is to make up for all the years there were 9 men on the Supreme Court. I find this dangerous logic. Seeking to alternate oppression of one group versus another do…
> Wait, what? Is this an argument that men are inherently unsuited to be Supreme Court Justices?
It just means that if gender is not considered, we should see an all women's court once every 2^9 = 512 time.
If the number never goes above the mean, gender must still be a factor.
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> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “bu…
>Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions
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Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane. Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they shoul…
> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “bu…
Building things is not just construction though. I mean, your average clock maker is not qualified to plumb a bathroom, but that doesn't mean he's not making things.
I don't have an opinion on this, but the idea that programmers aren't building something is a bit silly.
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If I understand you correctly, people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient and we need to drive them out of the workplace to make others more comfortable? Isn't there a place for people good at thinking deeply about difficult problems on their own and coming up with effective solutions? Yes, everyone needs to be able to communicate well to be part of an effective team. But there is als…
> If I understand you correctly, people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient and we need to drive them out of the workplace to make others more comfortable? You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. But anyway, the point is that the conception of programming as a task suited to people who like to work in isolation is incorrect and harmful. One…
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>Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered. This is an argument that's rarely if ever been used against allowing women to serve in the military. I think it's the argument that you'd like people to make rather than an argument that people have actually historically made. More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service shou…
Well it is is pretty obvious to me that in day to day practice women were kept out of the army because (as sibling poster) they are physically worse fighters than men by raw strength. But it is also pretty obvious to me that over the centuries brilliant military planners would have regularly thought about using women on the front lines and then rejected the idea for much better reasons than 'I'm a sexist'. The stereo…
I think you are just advancing your own arguments against allowing women to serve in the military here, not actually giving any evidence that these arguments were widely used in opposition to women's military service. That's a tangent.
Incidentally, in the broader context of this thread, this is exactly the kind of fringe content that just might give women the impression that the tech community has a sexism problem.
>Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
I think you misread. I said "if you see women primarily as baby machines", not "if you see women as the primary baby machines".
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> You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. I do think that. I think programming selects for people high in introversion and maybe even on the autistic spectrum. I think some extroverted people find those people deficient and don't like working with them, and would like to change the working environment to be less comfortable for the introverts and more comfortable for the e…
Programming culture selects for those people, to an extent. If you're employed as a programmer, you're most likely being paid to solve other people's problems by writing code. If you can't communicate with those people, you'll never be able to do that successfully. It's no conspiracy. A socially clueless introvert who's being paid a lot of money to do nothing useful doesn't have much to offer.
There are also a lot of tasks where thinking deeply without distractions or interruptions for an extended period of time is the best way to come up with good solutions.
And even a lot of the best communication comes from taking time in quiet and deeply thinking about what you want to say and writing a good, convincing argument.
Thinking introverts have nothing productive to offer is just bigotry, and really makes you come across as a complete ass.
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> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. Haven't there been studies that showed that women moving into a profession was actually associated with pay dropping?
It's not some conspiracy to pay women less. It works like this: 1. More people (women in this case) enter the profession. 2. Due to increased labor supply, pay starts to drop. 3. Men, placing a relatively higher priority on high pay, begin to avoid the profession. That last point is sort of interesting. Men are strongly associated with their careers and level of pay. This is most of their status. It has a tremendous…
While this is plausible, the data on this isn't consistent. In fact, some professions that saw a large influx of women also saw wage increases. There are many variables at play.
People ask me how The Atlantic differs from Harper's. Here is a good example. Harper's would _not_ run an article that would even suggest a crack in the framework of leftist orthodoxy. But noting the date of the article, would this article be published now that Mrs Jobs is at the helm? Perhaps not...
> People ask me how The Atlantic differs from Harper's. They do? Really?