Google reports soaring attrition among Black women • Hacker News Board

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#391

Post by rufus_foreman » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #248

dahfizz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a retort I see online a lot, and it is not a good one. When people say how its dangerous to voice opinions nowadays, they aren't using medieval Europe as a reference point (where it was also very dangerous to voice unpopular opinions). The reference point people use is their own experiences online from ~10 years ago. People used to be able to say whatever they wanted online, and now doing so is dangerous. You…

"it is still unequivocally true that voicing unpopular opinions online is more dangerous than it used to be." This is because the online audience is much larger than it used to be. I could say something on usenet in 1994 and the reach was pretty limited. To be clear, stating unpopular opinions has always been dangerous if the wrong people hear them. Now its just that they're much more likely to hear it online.

In the communities I participated in in the 90's, although most of them were left-leaning politically, people with different opinions were welcomed. People wanted to hear counter arguments and they wanted to hear the other side of the story.

As far as I can tell, that is all gone now. People with unpopular opinions just get banned immediately. Sometimes it is the same exact people in the exact same communities who 20 years ago would have wanted to hear that unpopular opinion. I don't know if the cause is that they have been trolled one too many times, they just got older and changed, something in the culture, who knows. The big sort keeps getting bigger though.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#392

Post by bmn__ » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #341

bmn__ wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German That's incorrect, there are rules. (These rules have a few exceptions.) m: -en, -er, -ig, -ismus, -ist, -ling, -m, -or f: -ät, -e, -ei, -enz, -heit, -ie, -ik, -in, -ion, -keit, -schaft, -ung, -ur n: -chen, -lein, -ment, -nis, -tum, -um That makes the proposed contrast weaker than you initially thought.

If anything, the contrast is stronger. Slovenian: -a feminine , -o, -e neutrum , rest masculine . (Again, some exceptions.) Italian and Spain is probably even simpler, since there’s no neutrum.

> the contrast is stronger

That's mathematically impossible.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#393

Post by lunixbochs » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 10:52 PM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #226

enumjorge wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries! And I’m guessing you’re not one of the affected minorities. Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech. People pushing for more equal treatment of certain minorities didn’t happen out of the blue. There’s a long history of certai…

a good example of this is the disabled. any of those same brilliant tech workers could acquire a disability at any time - they come from the same group of people , but we seem quite under-represented. and the developer tools themselves tend not to be accessible (I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.) it's curious, right?

> I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking

My Talon project is capable of voice controlling Visual Studio, both at the interface level and at the code insertion/editing level. It can use Dragon as a speech engine, or my own engine. It has an existing Visual Studio integration, and Talon makes it easy to write your own context specific app commands or integrations.

- https://talonvoice.com

Here's some Visual Studio support for it:

- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vi...

As well as vscode:

- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vs...

Here are a couple of public GitHub issues about dictation support in vscode:

- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/40976

- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/117980#issuecomme...

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#394

Post by mastazi » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 10:54 PM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #151

mastazi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are studies that show that polyglot speakers tend to think in slightly different ways when they switch languages. It is probably true that speaking a language where every noun is gendered might slightly change the way you think, but in my personal opinion not in the way you imagine. What I mean is that when masculine or feminine are used to describe mundane everyday objects, it's very well possible that the ide…

Totally agree with your "other side of the coin" assessment that this gendering of everyday objects could diminish the importance of gender overall. To my original point, one of the most interesting examples that I can think of is how you gender groups of humans in Spanish or Portuguese. If I understand correctly, no matter the distribution of the group, the group becomes masculine once there is one man in it. It cou…

Yes the group becomes masculine no matter the distribution, this is also the case in Italian. If I remember this correctly, this is because the old Latin neutral gender, in those modern languages, has been assimilated into the masculine gender. (If you study Latin you might notice that in many cases the neutral terminations are more similar to the masculine ones so, in a way, it makes sense that at some point the line started to blur I guess).

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#395

Post by seattle_spring » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 11:04 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #273

marcus_holmes wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that all applicants are of equal attainment, ability, and motivation. However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us. Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point. I se…

> while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.

Yep. In elementary school I was called a computer nerd every day. Want to know who usually flung that insult? Girls. Typically ones that would say "ew, math is gross."

Now they're the ones posting the 70 cents on the dollar misinformation to their FB feed.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#396

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 11:26 PM UTC

slumdev wrote: post #173

daniellarusso wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost as thoughtful as Slack enumerating all user skin tones via 5 integer values.

I thought making everyone cartoon yellow was more empowering. Especially on the Internet, with pseudonymity, we're all nothing more than the ideas we present. An egalitarian dream was twisted into a woke nightmare for bad actors to earn free PR by pitting people against each other.

Ha, I set my emojis to the precise colour of my skin, someone (I know IRL) complained that it wasn't my race ... like, that was, at the time, my actual skin colour.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#397

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #373

slumdev wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you say that to a person who insists on taking offense, he would tell you that a white person using red icons might be offensive to Native Americans or people with albinism.

I don't mean "red" as in Native American, and I wouldn't use Native American icons. I mean, when you peel back the skin, we all bleed the same color. Even albinos do. The point is, once you move past the skin, all our blood looks alike. We all share that. (I agree, though, that some are likely to insist on taking offense. Also, I note that albinos might have a case to complain about non-albinos who are called "white"…

"... if you prick us do we not bleed ..."

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#398

Post by mastazi » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

alisonatwork wrote: post #234

mastazi wrote: post #17

I'm Italian and I speak Spanish and Portuguese relatively fluently. Using the term "Latinx" in my opinion is a form of cultural appropriation, because it imposes a way of using grammatical gender that is typical of the English language (think e.g. about the "singular they") upon neo-latin languages where the perception of grammatical gender is very different. In neo-latin languages such as Italian or Spanish, grammat…

"Latinx" is not cultural appropriation. On the contrary, it was coined by people of Latin American heritage who feel uncomfortable with the gender binary or who have an explicit non-binary gender identity. These people felt unrepresented by their own native language, so they tried to find a term they could use to describe themselves that would make them feel comfortable. There have been other attempts too, like "Lati…

> it was coined by people of Latin American heritage

Were they predominantly people of Latin American heritage who lived in Latin America and spoke Spanish or Portuguese, or people of Latin American heritage whose primary language might have been English because they lived in a predominantly English speaking country?

Let's say a person of Latin American heritage, but whose everyday language is English, modifies their Latin American language in ways that conform to the English language. How do we evaluate that?

Yes, I agree that we could not call it appropriation, because that person is indeed of Latin American heritage, but is this not still a form of "cultural imperialism", where a language that is dominant for political or economical reasons imposes itself over other languages?

And does it not become cultural appropriation later on, the moment that word spreads and becomes mainstream mostly among people of non Latin American heritage, while Latin Americans seldom use it to refer to themselves?

> There have been other attempts too, like "Latine", "Latin@" and so on.

Yes, it is true that there have been some attempts at making the language more gender neutral in other languages too, as I said above I'm Italian and I saw some attempts in Italian as well, things like "Cara/o cliente..." ("Dear customer..." where "dear" has both the feminine and masculine termination, separated with a slash). And I don't have issue with those attempts.

But I take issue specifically with this: why attempting to make the language more gender neutral, using a device (grammatically neutral words) that is typical of the English language and doesn't really exist in Spanish? I am of the opinion that you can use an inclusive language while still speaking Spanish, e.g. you could say "Latinos y Latinas", or for brevity you could write both terminations with a slash like in the Italian example above, there is no need to force an English language device onto Spanish.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#399

Post by economusty » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #357

caeril wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women are also currently well-represented in computing in Eastern Europe, Iran, China, and somewhat in Russia. None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech", and most of them are certifiably more patriarchal than any of the Western countries currently suffering from under-representation of women. One can conclude from facts on the ground that neither gender equality nor pro-diversity movements correla…

> We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work. Could it be that women tend to care about stuff like a healthy work-life balance, and things like the 996.ICU working week can discourage them from applying? Whoops no, we've been told that's sexist wrongthink.

Your comment is great and more observant than most everything in this thread. The answer is freedom, when women have lots of choices they don't choose to play with things as often as men.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#400

Post by alisonatwork » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:48 AM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #398

alisonatwork wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Latinx" is not cultural appropriation. On the contrary, it was coined by people of Latin American heritage who feel uncomfortable with the gender binary or who have an explicit non-binary gender identity. These people felt unrepresented by their own native language, so they tried to find a term they could use to describe themselves that would make them feel comfortable. There have been other attempts too, like "Lati…

> it was coined by people of Latin American heritage Were they predominantly people of Latin American heritage who lived in Latin America and spoke Spanish or Portuguese, or people of Latin American heritage whose primary language might have been English because they lived in a predominantly English speaking country? Let's say a person of Latin American heritage, but whose everyday language is English, modifies their…

I really don't see this as something worth making a fuss about. Languages change all the time based on how people use them in the real world. Concepts and ideas that did not exist 100 years ago do exist today, and the language evolves to express those.

Given Spanish is spoken as a first language by hundreds of millions of people in tens of countries around the world, I don't think it should be seen as a problem that some of those Spanish-speaking people are finding new ways to express an experience that perhaps other Spanish-speaking people don't find relevant to them. There are 40 million native Spanish speakers in the United States, and millions more who speak it as a second language. At least some proportion of those consider themselves non-binary, and would like to have a term that explicitly recognizes that identity. (Note that your suggestion of "Latinos y Latinas" does not explicitly include non-binary identities.)

I don't think it really matters if "Latinx" is a word that was developed in the United States by people who live there. It might be a bit crass to refer to people across the entirety of Latin America using that term, but I don't see anybody doing that.

As far as appropriation goes: just like Spanish, the English language is evolving too. Sometimes we adopt foreign terms into English, and often we bastardize them, and that's not considered especially remarkable. We took "diva" from Italian and use it for both female and male "divi". I don't think that's cultural appropriation.

To be clear, I am not an American, so I am sympathetic to your view that American politics and culture tends to push itself into other countries. Here on HN that happens a lot. But I don't think this particular term is something worth worrying about. The way I see it there are many worse things Americans could be doing than creating a new word that people there have a use for.