Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On being a girl in computer science - a confession

zanytomato.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 305 posts

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#201

Post by droidist2 »

LockeWatts wrote: post #144
hackinthebochs wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Holding "women for CS" events only makes the women in CS feel even more isolated from their male peers I don't think this is true at all (and usually you never see women say this, just males rationalizing their position). Women centric CS events are to encourage those who have an interest but may have been hesitant for some reason to seek it out. Or to encourage those who are students to seek help and find comraderi…

>The difference is that girls have an immediate re-enforcing explanation for that sense of being out of place: you don't belong because you're a woman How is this different from guys who go, "They're so ahead of me. I'm out of place, because they are all smarter than me"?

Exactly my thoughts. Most of the people I've spoken with honestly in my CS classes have expressed these feelings of inadequacy. Often it's accompanied by things like "oh, I didn't take CS in high school and it seems like everyone else did." If they're a certain gender or race they may feel this has hindered them, even though many others in the class secretly have the same feelings of inadequacy.

I'm not sure whether it'd be comforting to feel (correctly or not) that your background is partially to blame for your lack of confidence or success. On the one hand you may discourage yourself and set yourself up for failure because you believe you have a good reason to fail. On the other hand it may prevent you from beating yourself up as much since there are some external factors at play that are out of your control.

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#202

Post by jimzvz »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #185
jimzvz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am saying that people don't like being segregated (not that they should not like, do not try to put a different spin on it) and as a person who has interacted with other people my whole life I do have a right to say that. Yes, women are people so I believe this includes women. Maybe there are people that like being singled out based on their gender in this context but I have definitely not met any. > they can t…

> Maybe there are people that like being singled out based on their gender in this context but I have definitely not met any. The fact that women participate in these events is an obvious counter-example. And yes, the author is essentially making your point. But she is also speaking from a position of privilege, as someone who was never intimidated by "boy stuff" and who admittedly got along better with boys rather t…

haha, okay.

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#203

Post by zallen »

I keep returning to the time Etsy decided that they wanted female engineers (http://www.themarysue.com/etsy-female-engineers) and tried to figure out how to find them (http://firstround.com/article/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-... - good summary of their presentation points).

Interesting results; it worked. They did find that women had less industry experience, which made them riskier hires; a self-perpetuating problem, as we all know with the cliched need-experience-to-get-jobs-to-get-experience cycle.

The company was rewarded by taking the risk. The key take-aways are that they not only created an event that targetted women, but they also overcame several other barriers like women not wanting to leave already-safe workplaces (because it's more of a risk if you don't fit in as a woman than as a man) and women not asking for help as much (because if you ask for help, you're more likely to be seen as a failure/fraud) by creating a mentoring, learning environment that catered to women.

This sort of effort appears to be what's needed, even at the post-graduate level, to achieve gender parity in programming work.

I suspect that OP is one of a lucky set of gifted natural engineers who would have found her place in tech (and did) anyway. But, most people aren't natural engineers, and the deck is simply societally stacked against exploring the field as a woman if you don't have a burning innate interest already.

NB: I'm female, and I ended up in programming for mostly mercenary reasons (jerbs! My arts degree wasn't panning out); I never had any "Women in CS" events to point the way, but I did have work experience as an adult with female scientists and engineers, so it felt totally plausible that I could go into engineering myself. That exposure was key. The subfield I'm in now - web - is one of the few with a lot of female devs, and a community that actively supports us. I've heard a few coworkers express similar misgivings to OP and yet the evidence seems to be that the more we are encouraged to participate, the more we do.

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#204

Post by prudhvis »

mrxd wrote: post #192
cletus wrote: post #102

I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?" Instead the question should be (IMHO) "are there any barriers to entry for women in CS?" I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action. Some believe in a meritocracy that is blind to race, age and gender. They believe…

> Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender. History disagrees with you. In the 1960s, programming was considered to be "women's work", like typing, filing and other clerical duties, while men did the engineering bit of actually building the machines. But people began to realize that software was difficult and important, so they decided women had t…

> They also distributed the answers to the aptitude tests within all-male fraternities and clubs.

Do you have any source for this?

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#205

Post by laureny »

cletus wrote: post #102

I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?" Instead the question should be (IMHO) "are there any barriers to entry for women in CS?" I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action. Some believe in a meritocracy that is blind to race, age and gender. They believe…

> Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender.

At the risk of being downvoted into oblivion, I'll ask the question that nobody seems to want to ask: is it possible that females are genetically programmed to be less interested or less skilled than males for computer science?

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#206

Post by TheZenPsycho »

laureny wrote: post #205
cletus wrote: post #102

I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?" Instead the question should be (IMHO) "are there any barriers to entry for women in CS?" I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action. Some believe in a meritocracy that is blind to race, age and gender. They believe…

> Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender. At the risk of being downvoted into oblivion, I'll ask the question that nobody seems to want to ask: is it possible that females are genetically programmed to be less interested or less skilled than males for computer science?

it is "possible" in the sense that anything is possible. It is just as possible that the opposite is true: that women are genetically programmed to be more interested in computer science than men. Either proposal is a red herring though. This is not a worthy line of argument or thought to pursue, and is not backed up by any evidence. More likely is that these are cultural issues.

Why is it not worthy? Because the number and proportion of women in computer science is declining. If you really believe this is due to genetic factors, then what we should really be thinking about is what factors are at work here to cause such rapid evolution! But clearly this is absurd, isn't it?

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#207

Post by zallen »

ufmace wrote: post #78

The attitudes in this thread seem a little disturbing to me. Let me illustrate with a different example: There are a number of other fields that are consistently dominated by women in the way that programming and CS are by men. Teaching, especially at the elementary-school level and younger, nursing, HR, administrative assistants, and others. Why is there no effort to bring more men into these fields? Is there some "…

1. The topic isn't about men's participation in other fields; it's about women's participation in this field. The 'what about men?' argument is something that you see a lot in many spaces where women's rights and inclusion is discussed, and it's a derailment from the point. We're not discussing men's non-traditional career choices, and if we were, the barriers and issues to be discussed would be very different. That's not to say that isn't an interesting topic, but the discussion turning to be about men happens in so many discussions about women and equality that it's become a cliche (queue larger point about society in general). What you can do is ask what men, who share an interest in an egalitarian society, can do to help women in this instance.

2. You probably don't mean to, but you're displaying a lot of privilege here (in the technical sense, not pejorative): by that I mean you're making an unstated assumption that the barriers that women face getting into the field are the same as what you faced, and therefore that, given those small and inconsequential barriers, they just must not be interested -- if they were it would be as easy for them as it was for you! Sorry to say that it's not that simple, and men's and women's experiences of tech and education and society just aren't the same, for the most part, and for the most part it's women who have the lower-quality experience.

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#208

Post by eaurouge »

I'll be more interested in hearing the opinions of women who didn't have access to a TI99/4A at age five on the need for "women in CS" programs. The questions are: Are there women who, under different circumstances when growing up, would have pursued a career in CS and would like to do so now that they're adults? How do you make it possible for these women to achieve their goals and in the process improve gender balance in the software industry?

Tech blog posts/comments and Hacker News being what they are, the opinions I've read have been from the tech-privileged - men and women. I would really like to hear from the tech-unprivileged, particularly those women that discovered computer programming too late in life to make a career of it without access to some sort of special program.

We should not pretend that all individuals are born with equal access to technology - or really equal access to anything. I also have a problem with this idea that writing computer programs is some highly technical process that only a small fraction of the world's population is capable of. Yes, it comes more naturally to some of us. But many computer programmers are programmers today because they had access to a computer programming course in high school, or they had parents or mentors or peers who encouraged them to start programming. It all starts with access - interest, focus, ambition, motivation, intellect etc are determining factors on career trajectories but these all come later, after access has been granted.

If Formula 1 teams started signing female drivers en masse, the likelihood of one of them being a Saudi would be effectively zero. I apologize, that's hardly a fair analogy, but it underscores my point that it all boils down to access. If one of those hypothetical female drivers happened to be a Saudi princess, raised in Belgium with access to Spa in the off-season and Michael Schumacher's 1994 championship-winning Benetton, and she couldn't see why other women needed special training programs, why I wouldn't know what to make of that. Again, I agree, not a fair analogy.

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#209

Post by biafra »

jimzvz wrote: post #153
Anechoic wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do not want want to be segregated, even if it is, supposedly, for a good cause. Really? Because self-segregation is pretty obvious in any number of contexts.

Yes but there is a difference between forced segregation and self-segregation.

And who is forcing women to go to events like the Berlin Geekettes Hackathon?

http://berlingeekettes.github.com/hackathon/

Re: On being a girl in computer science - a confession

#210

Post by eaurouge »

minamea wrote: post #18
mitchty wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess i disagree to a bit. I understand where you're coming from there, but I think "girl only" cs meetups help eliminate a possible burden to get into the computer world. I think for that reason alone they're a good thing. Could it be taken too far? Sure but I don't see that happening right now, and at the moment given how few women are in our field I think more such things are needed to at least reduce the sharp…

> Could it be taken too far? But I'm under the impression that today we offer women-only CS courses and the norm has become women get hired over equally or more qualified men in the name of eradicating sexism. I humbly suggest this is taking it too far. I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gend…

There are already other responses to your assertion that prioritizing for female employees is morally wrong. But how often do you hear startups talking about "culture fit" playing a role in hiring decisions? Is it morally wrong to prioritize culture fit over competency? If your answer is "no", it may surprise you to find that this is considered acceptable practice in many companies.
Post reply on HN