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My granny is a programmer

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Re: My granny is a programmer

#21

Post by eric_bullington »

mmcnickle wrote: post #13
huhtenberg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Are you married? - Yes - Do you have kids? - No - Thank you for coming

- Ok, see you in court. No proper company will ask those questions, let alone even hint at them. If they do, there will be a dozen employment layers willing to take on your case for free.

They don't have to! What self-respecting Internet-raised hacker doesn't at least use some sort of social media? It would takes a lot of discipline to never mention your new baby on Twitter, or whatever social media they are using, regardless of whether you're a man or a woman. Unless he/she is very careful, some family information will leak out, even if it's just in the form of something like an obituary for a family member (which usually includes family information).

Re: My granny is a programmer

#22

Post by eric_bullington »

elisehein wrote: post #14
klibertp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... It depends, I suppose, what you define as equality. I'm too young to actually remember this, but I know from various sources that women under communist regimes, at least in central Europe, were seen as capable of working as hard as men. There are many posters of women driving agricultural machines (I don't know the word in English - something that's used to harvest cereal) and doing various other works that a…

I've grown up with the same perceptions of gender equality in the Soviet job market. However, I get the feeling that this does not so much have to do with a heightened sense of morality or anything, as it does with the fact that work in the USSR was simply a chore or an obligation that was assigned to you. Often people didn't do a particular job because it suited their personality or they were exceptionally good at i…

That's not what was suggested in this story, at least. She seemed to have an aptitude in math and interest in computers, so she choose a university where she could study CS.

Re: My granny is a programmer

#23

Post by paganel »

mich41 wrote: post #15
klibertp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tractors, exactly. I even googled the actual thing: http://www.bwphotography.pl/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/... The text below says, roughly: "Let's fight for the betterment of socialistic Polish villages".

Cute picture. But even after 50 years of this propaganda, I'm yet to see a woman driving tractors in Poland (yes, I've seen many men driving them). Sometimes I don't know if feminists are really serious or just trollin'...

> Cute picture. But even after 50 years of this propaganda, I'm yet to see a woman driving tractors in Poland (yes, I've seen many men driving them).

Not a tractor, but my aunt was operating an industrial crane in the '80s in communist Romania.

Re: My granny is a programmer

#24

Post by mich41 »

klibertp wrote: post #19
mich41 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cute picture. But even after 50 years of this propaganda, I'm yet to see a woman driving tractors in Poland (yes, I've seen many men driving them). Sometimes I don't know if feminists are really serious or just trollin'...

Cute, right? I have the same impression, but this may be because I didn't live then and I don't associate it with all the other things that happened then instinctively. You're right of course in that it's hard to see a woman on a tractor, but what I'm saying is that 50 years of propaganda can't pass without any consequences, even if it was widely recognized as a propaganda and it was actively opposed by many. I think…

> Cute, right? I have the same impression, but this may be because I didn't live then and I don't associate it with all the other things that happened then instinctively.

Well, this was slightly sarcastic. I wouldn't hang this picture on my wall, but it was clearly intended to look good like all the other pictures showing people happily running around with hammers or sickles and building better socialist future :)

As for whether encouraging women to pick up technical or scientific jobs (when it works) does any good, I'm not sure. I'm under impression that lower number of women in IT and CS is mostly caused by the female part of "I've no idea what I'm doing, I kinda landed here by accident" crowd going somewhere else. Those who are serious get through regardless of sex and the rest, well, isn't serious.

Re: My granny is a programmer

#25

Post by arocks »

L4mppu wrote: post #18
arocks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India, you will find an equal number of women and men in computer science engineering. There is no stigma associated with being a programmer either (It was never extremely uncool). In practice, I have found that there are women who are as good as men when it comes to programming. I strongly believe that women don't have any inherent disadvantage. It is just social conditioning.

Please tell me more.

Will be happy to answer any specific questions :)

Re: My granny is a programmer

#26

Post by mgkimsal »

tomsthumb wrote: post #8
evincarofautumn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> agricultural machines You’re probably thinking of tractors and harvesters.

Possibly a 'combine'(com-bine, with some oomph in that om)... kinda appropriate....

I've got a brand new combine harvester...

Re: My granny is a programmer

#27

Post by smoyer »

klibertp wrote: post #4
foohbarbaz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm... No. Not then and not today.

Well... It depends, I suppose, what you define as equality. I'm too young to actually remember this, but I know from various sources that women under communist regimes, at least in central Europe, were seen as capable of working as hard as men. There are many posters of women driving agricultural machines (I don't know the word in English - something that's used to harvest cereal) and doing various other works that a…

During WWII, the U.S. promoted the capabilities of women through their "Rosie the Riveter" posters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter). Too bad more of that attitude didn't stick when the "boys returned".

From a business perspective, I have to wonder how the U.S. economy withstood the end of the war. The troops returned, flooding the market with labor and at the same time, much of what was produced during the war had no market in peace-time.

Re: My granny is a programmer

#28

Post by gngeal »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #10
readme wrote: post #2

Afaik, gender equality was much better in the USSR than it is today in the US.

To be fair you might expect that, if you have a command economy you can say "how can we get more women in IT?" and answer with "Take women out of nursing and put them in IT".

"To be fair you might expect that, if you have a command economy you can say "how can we get more women in IT?" and answer with "Take women out of nursing and put them in IT"."

During WW2 in Russia, the Soviets had female snipers and female fighter aces. Why shouldn't they have females in a new, blurry position of a computer programmer - a position so new and so alien to most people that no stereotypes could have evolved by then?

Re: My granny is a programmer

#29

Post by Cthulhu_ »

readme wrote: post #2

Afaik, gender equality was much better in the USSR than it is today in the US.

> Afaik, gender equality was much better in the USSR than it is today in the US.

I wouldn't call it gender equality, when it's apparently limited to a certain field (IT) and when comparing then with now. I'm not a historian or a cultural expert, but I do know two things:

* The majority of software developers in the early days were women. Programming was seen as clergy work, administration, and the existing administrators (then mostly women) were simply transferred to work with computers.

* There are percentually much more women working in the IT industry in eastern Europe than in western Europe or the US. I'm not sure if that percentage switched much over time. I don't even know how many men work in IT in eastern Europe; for all I know it's a women-dominated field (thus, no gender equality either, although I prefer a term indicating equal gender distribution, which is rare in pretty much every professional field)

At the other discussion above, about strong, working women, this was very much true, both in reality and in propaganda posters, during WW2 in the western world / the US; since the men were off to fight the war, the women had to do the work, keep the US industry going, build weapons, etcetera. Then the men returned and took over those jobs again, or something.

Re: My granny is a programmer

#30

Post by huhtenberg »

mmcnickle wrote: post #13
huhtenberg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Are you married? - Yes - Do you have kids? - No - Thank you for coming

- Ok, see you in court. No proper company will ask those questions, let alone even hint at them. If they do, there will be a dozen employment layers willing to take on your case for free.

They did, they do and they will. Welcome to the outside of the US.

It is especially true in the context of both the Soviet Union and modern day Russia.

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