51–60 of 117 posts
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The argument is that sexism is what creates the scarcity in the first place. So by creating an environment where sexism is less of a factor you attract more women.
There is nothing in that experiment supporting that theory, though. So why push it anyway? How does people flocking to free education prove anything?
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Probably incorrect. And I could just as easily posit the reverse. Say we have one woman and nine men. If we add a woman, does it really double the likelihood of a harassment suit? Why would it? Either one of the nine men harasses women, or he doesn't, why would adding a second women change his behaviour? On the other hand, if we halve the proportion of women by hiring ten more men, I'd say you may have doubled the ch…
I don't completely understand your argument here, on a purely intellectual level... In a very simple model, going from 0 women to 1 woman should increase the number of harassment suits, right? Then going from 1 woman to 2 women should have a similar effect, because all naturally occurring functions are differentiable :-) Intuitively it seems to me that the amount of reported harassment should be proportional to how m…
I wasn't born yesterday. If someone makes a claim without a shred of evidence, it's perfectly legitimate to say, "Well, here's another alternate explanation that's just as unproven, so clearly yours has nothing special going for it." I gave you a Flying Spaghetti Monster, and you're telling me that intuitively, God has a long white beard, not a saucer.
I'm perfectly ok with your saying that you choose to believe something without a shred of evidence, to take it as faith.
But that won't change the fact that simply making shit up, asking if it's "wrong," and then saying that you'll stick to it unless someone else proves your unsubstantiated prejudices are mistaken is bunkum.
That thinking isn't thinking.
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There is nothing in that experiment supporting that theory, though. So why push it anyway? How does people flocking to free education prove anything?
If you can't see my point and want me to elaborate, ask like a normal civilized person and I might.
Want cognitively diverse teams? It’s not as simple as hiring more female technologists. I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles. Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to be known in startup circle…
I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I don't think it's controversial to believe that one's best chance at achieving "cognitive diversity" comes from having a variety of genders/backgrounds/ages/etc/whatever on your team. That's not incompatible with rejecting the belief that one gender/race/whateve…
It's not really a question of believing one gender/etc... is better at something here it seems to be a question of not believing it as the author seems to think "cognitive diversity" can be achieved simply by adding women to your dev team.
This is a really great plan for hiring top talent in a way that's not immediately obvious. There is a lot of talk of 'sexism' in the tech world, but from my experience, many top male engineers are going to prefer working in a team with a few more females. If the article is correct then this proves this further - they were able to hire some big names simply by having those extra female engineers. Training up female en…
Want cognitively diverse teams? It’s not as simple as hiring more female technologists. I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles. Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to be known in startup circle…
> I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles. You are absolutely right that essentialism is not generally accepted any more, but you're mistaking essentialism a bit. Essentialism is not 'women do things differently than men,' essentialism is 'Women are x.' As an example, certain feminists don't believe that trans women are women, because they are not born with sexual organs that are the e…
The article doesn't really say why they wanted more female engineers, other than "it was vital to the product." I'd like to see more women engineers, and I applaud Etsy's initiative, but it seems unlikely that adding a few more super-junior (freshly-trained) women developers to their staff is going to meaningfully change the product in the near term. I suppose (hope) that these women could help prevent anti-female pr…
I didn't know which company was accused of this, but the version I heard was that "female" was translated as "hembra". It does mean that, but you usually hear it applied to animals.[1] Probably an easy mistake for someone to make if they're told to translate a string without being made aware of the context. [1] The DRAE, considered the "dictionary of record" in Spain, says that female animal is definition 1, and fema…
The same goes with the male equivalent: "macho", which now is only used for animals and not people. (Macho can be also used in a similar way as in english, but that's a different acception and context usage)
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I don't completely understand your argument here, on a purely intellectual level... In a very simple model, going from 0 women to 1 woman should increase the number of harassment suits, right? Then going from 1 woman to 2 women should have a similar effect, because all naturally occurring functions are differentiable :-) Intuitively it seems to me that the amount of reported harassment should be proportional to how m…
I think the onus is on you and those who agree with you to discard all this "intuitively" and other hand-wavy stuff and come up with some hard evidence and/or citations, or back down and say, "we're making this shit up because it suits our biases." I wasn't born yesterday. If someone makes a claim without a shred of evidence, it's perfectly legitimate to say, "Well, here's another alternate explanation that's just as…
I wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this. At his confirmation hearing, when Alan Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get more work for the same amount money by hiring women. Now, of course, the difference has mostly been…
Of course, you can find plenty of sexism in both finance and engineering. And I'm sure it discourages some women from entering. But it is important to note there are plenty of industries today with high female representation, such as law and medicine, that in the recent past were bastions of male dominance. A female relative of mine went through law school in the 1950s and can tell tales of male chauvinism more extre…
Edit: probably more telling is that both law and medicine are heavily involved in a sense of social responsibility, something that women are traditionally socialised for. Engineering not so much.
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Unfortunately, when approaching an issue like this you cannot do so without adopting a sexist viewpoint yourself. To begin to analyze workers in terms of sex or gender to begin with, itself is sexist, the same way that affirmative action is racist. It's fine and good that companies want to hire more female engineers. But this article is lame, which you should have picked up on when the author used the word "rockstar"
> To begin to analyze workers in terms of sex or gender to begin with, itself is sexist, the same way that affirmative action is racist. Which is, again, not sexist or racist at all. *-ism implies institutional bias of a society, not an individual instance of discrimination. It is _discriminatory_ against men, for sure. But not 'sexist.'
Sexism/racism et al. can exist outside of institutions no? "Hate crimes" for instance clearly do not involve any recognizable institutions yet clearly involve an -ism of some kind. Nor do -isms only exist at the society level. For instance it would be possible for a female owned company to not hire men (female hiring bias/sexism) which would run counter to larger societal biases.