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Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

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Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#71

Post by toasterlovin »

joshguthrie wrote: post #58
jscheel wrote: post #39

After a blow-up in my town a few months ago, I tried to encourage a few notable female tech proponents that negativity was not the way to win the fight. I was publicly lambasted, called denigrating names, had false information spread as far as cities 3000 miles away, and even had a meme made about me (containing incorrect info, imagine that). Negativity breeds nothing but negativity. I often fall into the trap myself…

> negativity was not the way to win the fight Negativity is never the way to win [anything]. We didn't go to the moon with negativity and as people, we can't get over things with negativity. I recently got in a position similar to yours (oh well, no meme though) and I heartily agree: Negativity only begets more negativity. I would love to write paragraph upon paragraph about how negativity can change you and how "doe…

We can build or we can destroy.

I believe in building, because, despite all those who would destroy and tear things asunder, we builders continue to make progress. Bit by it, piece by piece, the world is becoming a better place.

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#72

Post by sliverstorm »

danso wrote: post #33

A little off-topic...but I was just reading "Coders at Work" and of the 15 coders interviewed, only one was female (Fran Allen): http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html Despite this, the author (Peter Seibel) begins his introduction by mentioning Ada Lovelace in the very first sentence. In the next sentence, he talks about the six women - Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence…

To my understanding, women's involvement in early computers was largely as operators and for data entry. In other words, menial labor. It would be easy to retrospectively recolor this reality, if one wanted, as our understanding of what it means to "program" a computer has changed. Today a programmer writes code, back then a programmer manually entered code written by someone else. Recall the term, "PROM programmer" (burner). A PROM programmer certainly did not architect code.

I could be wrong, of course.

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#73

Post by [deleted] »

joshguthrie wrote: post #58
jscheel wrote: post #39

After a blow-up in my town a few months ago, I tried to encourage a few notable female tech proponents that negativity was not the way to win the fight. I was publicly lambasted, called denigrating names, had false information spread as far as cities 3000 miles away, and even had a meme made about me (containing incorrect info, imagine that). Negativity breeds nothing but negativity. I often fall into the trap myself…

> negativity was not the way to win the fight Negativity is never the way to win [anything]. We didn't go to the moon with negativity and as people, we can't get over things with negativity. I recently got in a position similar to yours (oh well, no meme though) and I heartily agree: Negativity only begets more negativity. I would love to write paragraph upon paragraph about how negativity can change you and how "doe…

[deleted]

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#74

Post by shardling »

jscheel wrote: post #39

After a blow-up in my town a few months ago, I tried to encourage a few notable female tech proponents that negativity was not the way to win the fight. I was publicly lambasted, called denigrating names, had false information spread as far as cities 3000 miles away, and even had a meme made about me (containing incorrect info, imagine that). Negativity breeds nothing but negativity. I often fall into the trap myself…

Sorry, but I can't help but remember encountering people who told stories much like yours, only to find on closer examination that they were incredibly, deeply in the wrong.

Since you don't go into any actual details about what set the situation off, it makes it really hard for me to take your anecdote too seriously.

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#76

Post by artsrc »

adventured wrote: post #55
jackowayed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this ratio is currently around 25%? Do you think it's because women are inherently much less interested in tech? Or do you think it's because our society imposes stereotypes and values on women, and gives very "macho" impressions (often based in reality) about what work in tech is like, which leads women who would otherwise want to study and work in tech not want to? Fixing the culture of tech and th…

It's like asking why do women dominate nursing and teaching jobs? Is it sexism? Is it because men are incapable of doing the jobs? How come there's no big outcry to equalize nursing so that men are 50% of the field? How about teaching, women also dominate that field. Women outnumber men 2 to 1 in high school teaching. They account for 85% of all primary school teachers. No outcries to equalize those numbers? Must be…

As an industry it is a really important issue that men are not going into teaching.

Disqualifying half the population will reduce the quality of the selection you can make.

The quality of teachers is of critical importance to the effectiveness of education. The effectiveness of education is critical to equality, social cohesion and economic growth.

Actual evidence of sexism in hiring is more persuasive of the presence of sexism, than the ratio of people employed. A standard way to study this is to send out a bunch or resumes in which only the gender changes.

I think there are sexist social pressures on men which reduce their desire to become nurses.

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#77

Post by graycat »

danso wrote: post #33

A little off-topic...but I was just reading "Coders at Work" and of the 15 coders interviewed, only one was female (Fran Allen): http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html Despite this, the author (Peter Seibel) begins his introduction by mentioning Ada Lovelace in the very first sentence. In the next sentence, he talks about the six women - Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence…

At Watson, my office was on the same floor as Fran's, and we talked a few times. She had a heck of a nice smile. She played a role in a math subroutine library that could take special advantage of several processors, and I asked her about some of that. I mentioned that it was easy enough just to start some tasks. She explained, as I recall, how her work also did careful things about data alignment in interleaved memory or some such, etc.! That was really getting into the details!

She was one of the very few women I ever saw in a STEM subject and good at it.

Her husband was Jack Schwartz of the fundamental 'Linear Operators' with Nelson Dunford, as I recall, at Yale. Schwartz was long at Courant and did a programming language SETL, 'set language', for allowing programming via essentially set theory notation.

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#78

Post by lsc »

patrickgzill wrote: post #38

What sane woman would get into tech, when being a lawyer or MBA is so much more lucrative?

>What sane woman would get into tech, when being a lawyer or MBA is so much more lucrative?

I would assume that a rational woman would go into tech for the same reason a man would; because those jobs depend on social skills in a way the tech jobs do not.

I mean, this is changing, some; there are a lot of unemployed lawyers right now, but yeah; the set of people who could be both a good programmer and a good MBA? yeah... uh, that's a small (and very well-paid) set of people. (I mean, sure, most good businesspeople can and probably should learn a little bit of programming... just like most programmers should learn a little business. But for most of us? we can only be really good at one or the other.)

Most of us? we're lopsided. We were born with traits that make it easier to succeed in one are than the other and/or we've been putting effort into one area rather than the other for most of our lives.

This is true of most of the nerds I know, male and female. If you are good at everything? yeah, you get to write your own very expensive ticket. But most of us? well, we chose to focus on one or the other, or we don't and we end up being well-rounded but mediocre.

The thing about this? we make this decision before we are old enough to understand the implications. If you are in college before you decide you want to work with computers, well, I've already spent half my life up to that time practicing. I mean, if you are that much better than me (and really hard working) you can catch up, but I've got a hell of a lead.

This is my personal pet theory to explain the difference in interest; from an early age, boys are taught that they will be valued, mostly, based on what they can do; what they can make happen. I knew that if I could make myself useful, there would be a place for me, society would value me, even if nobody really liked me very much on a personal level, even if I was ugly or unpleasant to be around. Now, I wasn't a girl, so I don't know, but my impression is that this isn't what little girls are taught.

(Now, obviously, I have limited perspective here. This is just what I observe in myself, and what I observe in my peers of both genders. Most nerds seem socially... a little bit broken. It seems to get better with age, but man, the socially optimized have a hell of a head start. I'm sure there are many other factors, but this is how I personally rationalized the decision to become a nerd.)

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#79

Post by vacri »

adventured wrote: post #55
jackowayed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this ratio is currently around 25%? Do you think it's because women are inherently much less interested in tech? Or do you think it's because our society imposes stereotypes and values on women, and gives very "macho" impressions (often based in reality) about what work in tech is like, which leads women who would otherwise want to study and work in tech not want to? Fixing the culture of tech and th…

It's like asking why do women dominate nursing and teaching jobs? Is it sexism? Is it because men are incapable of doing the jobs? How come there's no big outcry to equalize nursing so that men are 50% of the field? How about teaching, women also dominate that field. Women outnumber men 2 to 1 in high school teaching. They account for 85% of all primary school teachers. No outcries to equalize those numbers? Must be…

Teaching and nursing are both fields where you need a degree to start participating. And if you look at the discussions in those fields, there's certainly strong concern about lack of males in teaching and mild concern about lack of males in nursing.

Tech doesn't require a degree - it's a field anyone with a free evening can pick up. It also bears a significantly broader scope than nursing or teaching.

Re: Stop complaining about the lack of women in tech

#80

Post by snogglethorpe »

mjn wrote: post #40
danso wrote: post #33

A little off-topic...but I was just reading "Coders at Work" and of the 15 coders interviewed, only one was female (Fran Allen): http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html Despite this, the author (Peter Seibel) begins his introduction by mentioning Ada Lovelace in the very first sentence. In the next sentence, he talks about the six women - Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence…

Some of the depictions in the 1960s, interestingly, played up programming as a stereotypically "women's" occupation, complete with pop-psychology explanations of why women were particularly suited for it: http://blog.fogcreek.com/girls-go-geek-again/

The mother of a friend of my sister's was a programmer in the '60s (for some large company, IBM or the like), and to hear her tell it, the stereotypical programmer back then was more like traditional stereotypes of newspaper reporters than anything else: hard-drinking, chain-smoking, wise-cracking, cynical, etc.

It was pretty funny imagining her—a petite artsy (actually she was a full-time artist at that point) grandmother type when I talked to her—knocking back shots of whisky with the boys but apparently that's what they all did...

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