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Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

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Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#111

Post by petesergeant »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #94
toolz wrote: post #57

I do believe there are unique challenges to being a woman in tech, but the odds seem in favor of women doing well both back in the 70's and today with todays stats having roughly 20% of CS grads being female while some 23% of SWEs are female. That suggests there are more women in software jobs than women who have been pursing that career academically. What stats do you see that suggest the odds are against women in t…

You need to look at dropout rate...what if women are 50% of freshmen CS majors and only 20% of graduates?

I'd like to see that rate adjusted for people who were hobby programmers before they started. I suspect more boys than girls do programming before college, and that having done programming before college helps people not to drop out. I believe that the key to increasing diversity in tech is to increase the diversity in kids who are programming for fun. I have previously supported Black Girls Code for this reason.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#112

Post by barrysteve »

Atreiden wrote: post #34

[flagged]

Women are also resentful of their partner's success and their egos can not take it.

The paragraph you quoted, Ely's husband sounds jealous of the attention she got and her control over the company. That can happen in any kind of partnership.

You're dragging up sexism, where it is not the primary problem. Why?

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#113

Post by trimethylpurine »

leononame wrote: post #76
toolz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well I'm not making a value judgement, but we're talking about odds, not "good" or "bad"...if 20% of women go after a software job and the field is made up of an even higher %, that suggests the odds are amazing for women. Odds don't tell the whole story, but the odds seem in women's favor at the moment.

If you define odds being good as "the odds are good for the ones that choose to study CS", sure. But if you define the odds as "women overall", 20% is a relatively poor number in my opinion. Yes, we're getting better and yes, it takes time. But I don't think we can pat ourselves on the back here. That the women who decide to work on tech do well is (in my very unscientific and unproven) opinion just an indicator that…

These assumptions and stats are virtually meaningless.

Every human being, man or woman, has unique challenges. Classifying these challenges by sex ignores the vast and more important majority of an individual's fitness for one career or another, or lack there of.

More than just encouraging your daughter to study tech or any other career (tech might be saturated), encourage them to learn how to interview aggressively, and how to ask for raises. Encourage them to be fearless.

And do the same for your sons.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#114

Post by AlecSchueler »

toolz wrote: post #57

I do believe there are unique challenges to being a woman in tech, but the odds seem in favor of women doing well both back in the 70's and today with todays stats having roughly 20% of CS grads being female while some 23% of SWEs are female. That suggests there are more women in software jobs than women who have been pursing that career academically. What stats do you see that suggest the odds are against women in t…

Can you see that you've completely dismissed the lived experiences of many many women, brushing them aside with whatever statistics you could find?

And what do those statistics show, only that women are vastly under-represented in work and education. There's very heavy cultural reasons for that and your comment actually feels reflective of them.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#115

Post by AlecSchueler »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #113
leononame wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you define odds being good as "the odds are good for the ones that choose to study CS", sure. But if you define the odds as "women overall", 20% is a relatively poor number in my opinion. Yes, we're getting better and yes, it takes time. But I don't think we can pat ourselves on the back here. That the women who decide to work on tech do well is (in my very unscientific and unproven) opinion just an indicator that…

These assumptions and stats are virtually meaningless. Every human being, man or woman, has unique challenges. Classifying these challenges by sex ignores the vast and more important majority of an individual's fitness for one career or another, or lack there of. More than just encouraging your daughter to study tech or any other career (tech might be saturated), encourage them to learn how to interview aggressively,…

> Every human being, man or woman, has unique challenges.

Have you faced sex based discrimination, intimidation or othering in your workplace?

> ignores the vast and more important majority of an individual's fitness

The issue is that the capacity of women is backgrounded to the point that they have to do more to be seen as talented as their male counterparts. I'm sure every woman in tech would love to focus on skills instead of sex but that's just not the world they're presented with.

> More than just encouraging your daughter to study tech

More than this teach your sons about bias against women, how to have empathy for historically marginalised groups, how to give space for quieter voices, the broader cultural norms that lead to inequality etc

You can teach generations of daughters whatever you like but the weight of solving these issues is far from resting only on women, and the idea that it is is ironically hostile in itself.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#116

Post by AlecSchueler »

rootusrootus wrote: post #64
leononame wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How ist 20%/23% good? Am I reading the numbers wrong? 40%, that I could agree on. But 23% is very low. Another thing is culture. The in the company's where I've worked at, how the men talked about women was pretty off-putting to be honest. They didn't do it in front of women (obviously), but even your nerdy developers would drop comments that had me wondering whether I was really in the ckrrect field. I'm sure the wo…

Would be nice if it were higher, for sure. And it will become that way, because more women go to college now than men. Will we care about young men being under represented in college before they get down to 20%? I'd like to think so, but I won't take that bet.

> go to college now than men. Will we care about young men

This is called whataboutery. The fact that we are still de-railing conversations about women's representation to centre men's issues shows exactly why there's still so much work to be done.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#117

Post by AlecSchueler »

ThomPete wrote: post #56
laurex wrote: post #49

It’s not just that she overcame odds as a woman in the tech business that amazes, but that she was so clearly someone who cared about people, and chose to risk her business and reputation more than once to stay true to her values. That’s perhaps even more rare in this industry than being a successful female CEO.

there are no odds as a woman in the tech business. The tech industry is on of the most inclusive industries because it measures talent and value creation not features no one can do anything about

> The tech industry is on of the most inclusive industries

The irony being that by saying this you're literally dismissing the voices and lived experiences of many many women in tech who would say otherwise.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#118

Post by 0xEF »

ThomPete wrote: post #56
laurex wrote: post #49

It’s not just that she overcame odds as a woman in the tech business that amazes, but that she was so clearly someone who cared about people, and chose to risk her business and reputation more than once to stay true to her values. That’s perhaps even more rare in this industry than being a successful female CEO.

there are no odds as a woman in the tech business. The tech industry is on of the most inclusive industries because it measures talent and value creation not features no one can do anything about

ITT: likely male HN users weighing in on how difficult or not difficult it is to be a woman in the tech industry.

I'd love to hear thoughts on this take about just how inclusive the tech industry from women, or LGBTA or BiPoC individuals.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#119

Post by mkesper »

nimfan wrote: post #63

"Vector was late in moving from machines with 8K processing to 16K, which had become the new industry standard." I was interested in S100 bus machines, but couldn't afford one! If I'd only known, I'd have borrowed to buy a Vector Graphic S100 back then, just for the novelty of having an 8192-bit CPU! ;-)

The CPU was a Z80, that must have been RAM. http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Grap...

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#120

Post by lr1970 »

shrubble wrote: post #110
Atreiden wrote: post #34

[flagged]

She married a multi-billionaire, who she was in a relationship of some kind with, before she was ever divorced. Did you notice that in the article? BTW Bob Harp went on to found Corona Data Systems also.

For a more balanced contemporary (from 1985) depiction of the Vector story, see [0]. Basically, Bob Harp was the main technical force behind all Vector products, akin to Steve Wozniak at early Apple. In 1982 Bob and Lore could not agree who should be running the company and Bob left. Soon thereafter Vector deflated.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...

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