When I started as a developer in the UK I earned a bit less than £30k a year
and wondered: How can whole families live of this? How can anyone save money
for a mortgage?
[...]
It might sound arrogant but since I am an IT contractor I don’t have to think
twice about that Halston Heritage dress I fell in love with the other day, I
just buy it.
Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
81–90 of 271 posts
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#82I (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.
There's a fine line between someone feeling "shitty" and groupthink / often naive & distant.
A friend of mine says that anytime a person refers to him as "African-American" he sees them as totally distant and that "they usually don't talk to black people" - so I can see this working both ways.
Political correctness (what the 'polis' sees as correct) isn't always what those who may 'feel shitty' think is correct - so I share her feelings.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#83"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 attitud…
Maybe you think of this campaign?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxsMWnK1X7k
The tag line is "there is a lot of stuff women don't understand", and the format is a womans literal visualization of a sport metaphor. In this case, "giving away a goal". The campaign is still running, and considered one of the most successful advertising campaigns in Denmark.
The company behind it is 80% state owned. and 20% owned by the non-profit sport organizations. It used to have a monopoly on gambling. The profit goes to charity.
I would not generalize the Danish peculiar brand of humor to all of Europe. One of the advices to Danes going abroad is "stay away from humor, foreigners don't understand our brand of humor". Same for visitors, they are told "the Danish jokes are not meant as insulting as they sound".
In our own self image, we are so liberal and open minded that we can safely joke about all kind of stereotypes. E.g. Danish state owned children tv has a running gag about how lazy and incompetent Polish workers (our "Mexicans") are. It is probably also no accident that the Mohammed cartoons were made in Denmark. Although that particular incident taught Danes something about how different humor can be viewed in the rest of the world.
Edit: Two more details. 1) Most high profile ad campaigns in Denmark are based on humor. 2) This is the only one I can think of where women are shown as stupid. The common pattern is that the man is being goofy while the sensible woman is buying the advertisers product.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#84OK, 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 ther…
While and rather excellent article on why the IT field is a suitable career, good grief, the sexism politics has really entrenched itself into people mindset.
It almost boggles my mind. Here some supposedly sexist snippets from "scenarios you may occasionally find yourself in when working as a girl in tech".
Colleague: “So...you are the new designer?" (As if "so...you are the new Foobar" would not be said to any new hire. if I got a new boss, my first word might be "so...you the new boss? hi my name is so and so!". How and in what way would that be sexist remark, and does it matter if the new boss would be female or male? would it matter if the position is boss, developer, designer, sysadmin, or sales?)
Useless male developer has written some crappy code that he doesn’t even understand himself anymore. Now he needs to extend it with new features and asks you to do it. (As if female developers get exclusively dumped with fixing bad code. Especially if its a new hire/consultant/out sourced, how does this surprise anyone? its even a saying that "the new guy gets all the work no one else want". Does it matter if its a female or male?
so for mega-upvote, the article has some issues. Its better than the normal articles we see, but its not 10 times better.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#85"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.
"That looks like sexism to me."
You say that as if letting someone's gender affect your decisions is somehow, magically, inherently always ALWAYS wrong. It isn't. Some situations it is. Some situations it is not.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#86OK, 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 ther…
While and rather excellent article on why the IT field is a suitable career, good grief, the sexism politics has really entrenched itself into people mindset. It almost boggles my mind. Here some supposedly sexist snippets from "scenarios you may occasionally find yourself in when working as a girl in tech". Colleague: “So...you are the new designer?" (As if "so...you are the new Foobar" would not be said to any new…
How and in what way would that be sexist remark
The assumpution behind that question is that women could not be a developer.
To give racist equivalents, it's as if in the USA, imagine you came into the room and there was a latino man there "Are you the new cleaner?"; or in UK, imagine one was introduced to a new eastern european member of staff, "Are you the new cleaner?". These questions are motivated by racist assumptions, and this OP's examples are motivated by sexist assumption.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#87Why 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…
Yes they are different, but they are so close aswell. After all how much job movement is there between IT & development? Lots. Compare that to the job movemement between IT & being lawyer (not that much) etc.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#88"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.
It's only sexism if it uses sex as a criteria to disadvantage someone who isn't male, in the same way that it's only racism if it uses race as a criteria to disadvantage someone who isn't caucasian.
There used to be many caucasian-on-caucasian racism. Many places would still count it as breaking anti-discrimination law.
After all, "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs". That's racist for 2 reasons.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#89"Guys are fascinated and scared by girls who roll up their sleeves and take on a job that society labels as “men’s work”"
Actually, I'm fascinated and scared by all IT people who roll up their sleeves and do manual labour.
Re: Why it is Awesome to be a Girl in Tech
#90"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.
There are several definitions of sexism, one is essentially "taking someone's sex or gender into account when making a decision". This appears to be the definition you're using. It's a very simple, easy to understand, easy to identify definiton. It also means that in many cases (e.g. hiring in an IT company), men can be the victims of sexism.
There's another definition, which is actions that's designed to maintain & reinforce the institutionalised power structure among sexist. Right now, if modern UK life was a video game, "male" would be an easier difficulty level than "female". There are statistically less problems for the "male" group. Sexist actions are actions that re-enforced that imbalance. This definition is harder for some people to accept because it means that you need to look at yourself and think about what power imbalances you might be benefiting from, and it means you can't just do s/female/male/g and make it just as sexist.
(There are some cases where there's an inbalance in favour of women, any men here ever took up knitting & crochet? Try getting involved in that, you'll see things from the other side)