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Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

nerdess.net

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Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#31

Post by bitops »

atomical wrote: post #4

"This is a bit of a delicate topic. Quite often I am the only female person in the team and have to be careful not to take advantage of the perks that come with it. Guys are fascinated and scared by girls who roll up their sleeves and take on a job that society labels as “men’s work”. If you’ve ever drilled a hole, skinned a rabbit, or changed a tyre you know what I mean. As I mentioned earlier, guys will definitely…

> Sounds like an alternate reality.

I have a hunch that part of this is related to the fact that nerdess is German. Or at least, she's based in Germany per the site.

I'm from Denmark (and a guy), and I can say from firsthand experience that attitudes towards women in Europe are still very old-school. Not everywhere, certainly, and Europeans are open-minded liberal socialists etc, but behind the scenes the old attitude of "women and technology don't mix" is very much alive.

For example, many guys in Europe I've spoken to will make jokes about girls not really being fit to work on cars, working with computers, or doing anything "technically hard".

Even some years ago, there was an advertising campaign for a lotto (or something similar) with the tagline "so simple even a woman could understand it". The advertisement featured a pretty blond woman standing in her kitchen, listening to the boys hoot and holler about their winnings next door with a vacant expression on her face. This was plastered all over the main train station in Copenhagen.

So, while I agree it probably seems like an alternate reality in the US (assuming that's where you're from), it's not so far-fetched in other parts of the world. Just my $0.02.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#32

Post by Jun8 »

OK, nobody commented this up to now but I think is important: Among the many posts about this subject I've read on HN recently this was absolutely the best: Not only it approached the matter in a no-nonsense, practical matter without preaching from "the height of an unwritten book" or an axe to grind but it also gives excellent advice to young girls who want to venture into the field.

With posts like this I wish there was a mega-upvote option on HN, e.g. for 500 points of karma you upvote 10 points.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#35

Post by vacri »

I (100% female) work as a web developer and are not sure if the lack of female colleagues bothers me or not. Political correctness dictates that it should

Political correctness isn't really about groupthink or how you should feel. It's about not making other people feel shitty because you're too lazy to use inclusive language. It's simply an extension of 'manners', and gets demonised when it shouldn't be.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#36

Post by vacri »

victorhn wrote: post #11

"If a male and a female developer with a similar skill level apply for a job, I bet that in 99.9% of the cases the girl will get the job." That looks like sexism to me.

In order to test it, we'll need at least two thousand developers (in matched skill pairs) going for one thousand jobs.

It might take a little while to perform that experiment...

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#37

Post by derleth »

unimpressive wrote: post #9
nickporter wrote: post #5

Why is it that people group IT and software development together? To me, they are two completely different fields. For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software. I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different type…

Because people as a general rule abstract anything related to computers or computing into one lump object. This vague, ossified amber of the interwingled nature of computer media causes problems with understanding computers. That and the sort of person who does development ends up doing some IT and Vice versa.

> Because people as a general rule abstract anything related to computers or computing into one lump object. This vague, ossified amber of the interwingled nature of computer media causes problems with understanding computers.

The same thing happens with every field. If you're at all medical, you're lumped into the 'doctor' category regardless of whether you're a neurosurgeon or a scrub tech, and all doctor-type humanoids know everything about everything from the cingulate gyrus to my granny's chilblains.

Which is still closer to the truth than imagining that everyone who is 'good with computers' can instantly diagnose and fix every single problem that has ever come up for everything that can run software.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#38

Post by RandallBrown »

Articles like this are what are going to get girls into computing. They need to know that there are other normal girls, just like them, that do this for a living.

I got my ex-girlfriend into software development. She comes off as a very stereotypical girly girl. She likes clothes, shopping, and top 40 pop music. I convinced her to take an intro programming class her sophomore year of college. Now she's a software engineer at Amazon.

All it took her was a little convincing that she could do it, and that normal people (I suppose I seemed normal to her) do it too.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#39

Post by orangethirty »

nickporter wrote: post #5

Why is it that people group IT and software development together? To me, they are two completely different fields. For example, I see an IT person as a mail server administrator in a large company, and a developer as the person who would write the mail server software. I'm not saying that an IT professional never writes code, or a developer won't ever touch a Nginx config file. I just mean they are two different type…

    class Computer:
        pass

    class IT(Computer):
        pass

    class SoftwareDeveloment(Computer):
        pass

    #that's how people see it.

Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech

#40

Post by reso »

victorhn wrote: post #11

"If a male and a female developer with a similar skill level apply for a job, I bet that in 99.9% of the cases the girl will get the job." That looks like sexism to me.

Realistically, this choice would never happen, because any decent software shop would hire both if they were identically qualified.
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