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Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

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Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#51

Post by waterlesscloud »

roguecoder wrote: post #48
gms wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a problem that the nursing profession is dominated by women? If so, why?

We address this is every gender thread on hacker's news. Yes, it is a problem. Yes, people are trying to fix it. Yes, including creating male-only nursing scholarships and spaces and community groups. None of which has anything to do with programming. I don't know if you think you are being clever or if you are just repeating a talking point, but either way it's a derailment that has been addressed a hundred times be…

This entire conversation has been said 100 times.

It's interesting how the original article throws something at least kinda new into the mix, but this whole thread just heads right back to the same old grounds.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#52

Post by s_baby »

majormajor wrote: post #39
s_baby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about women in coal mines and crab fishing boats? It's true that a man has greater mobility towards the top of the career ladder but this "privilege" also exposes him to the much more likely risk of ending up on the bottom of the ladder. It's not equal to have proportional gender representation in only desirable jobs.

By "the bottom of the ladder" do you mean economically? Is your claim that women have a higher earnings floor then men? Could you provide figures?

It's not something you can completely measure economically. A coal miner makes decent money but how do you put a price tag on black lung or being crushed to death?

>When I did the research for a book called The Myth of Male Power I discovered a Glass Cellar that holds far more men than the Glass Ceiling. The Glass Cellar consists of the hazardous jobs and the worst jobs (minimum security, low pay, bad conditions). The hazardous jobs-or Death Professions-result in 93% of the people who are killed at work being men. Of the 25 professions that the Jobs Rated Almanac rates as the worse professions, 24 have in common the fact that they constitute 85% or more males (welders, roofers, etc.).

http://www.warrenfarrell.com/labor_day_art.htm

Also need to consider the other costs externalized on marginalized men. Men are ~5 times more likely to die from suicide. Men are more likely to be homeless. They are more likely to be pariah of society. They live 7 years less than a women when a century ago the difference was 2 years. These are all costs externalized on men based on the traditional idea that men are strong/privileged and need to "man up".

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#53

Post by scott_s »

csallen wrote: post #45
scott_s wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An indication that it is cultural is from looking at other cultures: If you look globally, there are countries where that isn’t the image, and in fact, their numbers are dramatically better. I was recently speaking with some of our Oracle engineers from China and they pretty much have a fifty-fifty split of men and women. And they think it’s sort of odd that we don’t. http://www.txchnologist.com/2012/breaking-the-bro…

That's interesting, although I'm not inclined to take hearsay of hearsay at face value. It'd be great to see a report with some hard numbers proving that this is the case, and examining the cultural differences that could explain why their numbers are so drastically better than numbers elsewhere in the world. Also, from a scientific perspective, this is a disastrously imperfect experiment. You cannot rule out the eff…

I actually agree with your first statement - I saw that a few days ago, and I'm keeping it in mind provisionally.

As to the second point, humans are not very genetically diverse. Of course there are enough differences that we can sometimes conclude that a particular person's genes come from an ethnic group, but it's not as nearly as varied as even other primates. Basically, we hit a genetic bottleneck sometime in the past 100,000 years. So it's far more likely to be a result of culture than genes.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#54

Post by scott_s »

Xcelerate wrote: post #33
InclinedPlane wrote: post #3

Right, this is just a call for something akin to affirmative action, which has had questionable results at best. The onus here isn't on women. And the right solution is not to preferentially favor women in the tech field. What you'll end up with is a situation where asshole misogynists consider themselves even more justified in treating women in tech as second class citizens. This time because "they only got there th…

I'm a little confused as to what the problem is . Is it that there aren't enough women in tech, or is it that women who are in tech aren't being treated fairly? If it's the latter, then I'm all for fixing that problem. But if it's the former, then it may just be the case that women don't' want to be in tech. I try encouraging my sister to learn about programming and computers all the time, but she'll have nothing to…

Then that stereotype is the problem that people want to fix. And then it becomes a chicke-and-egg problem: how do you fix the stereotype without having more women in tech? So you try improving things on both sides.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#56

Post by colmvp »

Volpe wrote: post #50
kvnn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.?

The low numbers of women in I.T with CS majors, is indicative of this. Are you just trying to enforce a burden of proof here? Or do you seriously not think that woman are ostracised in I.T?

There's a lot of Asian's in IT in the U.S., yet how many are CTO's or CEO's in Silicon Valley? Are Asian's ostracized from upper management?

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#57

Post by gms »

roguecoder wrote: post #48
gms wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a problem that the nursing profession is dominated by women? If so, why?

We address this is every gender thread on hacker's news. Yes, it is a problem. Yes, people are trying to fix it. Yes, including creating male-only nursing scholarships and spaces and community groups. None of which has anything to do with programming. I don't know if you think you are being clever or if you are just repeating a talking point, but either way it's a derailment that has been addressed a hundred times be…

Actually my intention was neither; I simply asked a question I am curious about the answer to.

Why is it a problem that nursing is dominated by women?

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#58

Post by vorg »

kvnn wrote: post #35
Volpe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech is supposed to be meritocracy. You can't have a proper meritocracy if the prospective field don't have access to the same level of opportunities. Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on (i.e before education has finished).

> Women get ostracised from I.T. fairly early on What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.?

> What evidence have you found that suggests that women are systematically ostracized from I.T.?

It's pervasive in everything, even in the names of stuff. E.g. there's a recent programming language that calls its interpolated strings "G-Strings". That's the class name in the code. A method for finding out the length of the "G-String" was added, called "size", in addition to the existing one called "length". So...

    assert "----V----".size() == 9
The language designers who invented those names had a good old laugh at the pun in the mailing lists. But female programmers are often offended, and have a case for having that language (and related web framework) banned from their workplace, in favor of another.

Re: Women in Tech: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

#60

Post by einhverfr »

coderdude wrote: post #2

>If I appear to be moronic, self-centered, or sexist… it’s only because I am (I’m a guy). Still I believe my heart is in the right place, and unlike my head, hopefully it’s not in my pants. What the hell? I feel like I'm watching a US TV commercial. "Whoops honey, if I didn't have my sports cap on I'd probably lose my head." "Oh dear, you lovable oaf." Mother and daughter shake heads at retarded male

More or less. I also think that the issue isn't investing or the like. It's trying to discover what sorts of solutions are available to large organizational problems that make it hard for women to participate comfortably in tech startups. If Marissa Mayer had been pregnant shortly after her job started at Google, what would have been necessary to make it so she could have balanced work and family life better?

Right now we have this myth that companies are machines and parts are largely interchangeable, and that gender doesn't matter in the functionality of the part. I call this a myth because it is a model we use to think about business and make sense of it, even if it isn't literally true. Gender does matter. Parts are not interchangeable. And it might be better to think of companies as ecosystems rather than machines.

The question I have for women in tech is: If you could start a business that would different about the way it would be run? Forget all models of how things are done. What would you change?

I think that's where the solution is.

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