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I knew exactly how she felt

trishkhoo.com

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Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#181
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTFM ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key

Right, but it's unintuitive and takes a while to decrypt. Browser extension idea: hover over IPA to see only the relevant glyph pronunciations.

Hovering over it does reveal English approximations in the wikipedia article. Did you try? I'm running FF19 and the only addon is NoScript.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - women sometimes internalize and participate in misogynistic and cruel behavior, and it can be hard to talk about. I've seen this happen with the "fake geek girl" phenomenon - some women who feel that they are legitimate parts of the community participate in this kind of destructive policing because they've bought into the cultural misogyny and are often rewarded and have their status reinforced in their…

Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? When women bully other women, it's because they're agents of the patriarchy?

I'm honestly not sure what seems ridiculous to you. In these instances, the female bullies are acting out misogynistic discourses. Can you clarify what your sticking point is?

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#183
post #61

I see plenty of insightful comments here but no one acknowledging the conclusion. >It’s funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT. How many of these articles/talks put the impetus on changing women alienating women from tech? How likely are you to see some twitte…

Feminist discourse is usually 1 dimensional.

No, it's not. It really, really isn't. You only notice the stuff that mentions female-victim/male-perp because you don't really care enough about the issue to notice anything further. There is heaps of feminist discourse on women judging women and limiting their options by doing so, the topic of this article. And there are plenty of complex narratives rather than black and white reasoning.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#184
post #25

I will offer an experience which is the inverse of this! I am a male software engineer who works in fashion (and before this I worked in wine.) I knew nothing about wine when I started, and my fashion sense is prototypically, well, male-software-centric. People in the wine industry are palpably aware that people view it as "hoity-toity". Professionals I've worked with are usually very gracious in explaining what it m…

This. I used to attribute it to douchiness, and sometimes it can be. Some people seem to feel the need to flaunt some kind of (mostly imaginary) superiority over others. That said, the curse of knowledge is also a good explanation. Some people just assume it is common knowledge because for them and others they talk with it is, so when they encounter someone that doesn't know it, it is easy to think "they must be an i…

I used to have that problem about half the time, and the other half of the time, the opposite-- where I'd assume they knew nothing about my field, and elide details they were actually interested in. So now I tend to ask lots of probing questions when explaining things, which seems to annoy people who just want me to get to the point! Surely there is another middle ground; the one I'm trying seems to not work.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#185
> All the other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would be bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else watched Doctor Who. None of them understood the joke on her Darth Vader t-shirt. One of them listened to her podcast and asked her what “Marvel” was. One of them told her to stop making them feel stupid all the time.

Believe it or not, you can be a good coder without knowing who Doctor Who and Darth Vader are, or what Marvel is. Not even having seen Star Wars will make you a good programmer!

(A friend of mine who saw the linked post was astounded at the idea that girls are keeping other girls out of IT by not being enthusiastic about juvenile comic books and juvenile sci-fi. That is just about the single stupidest thing one could possibly think---unless, perhaps, the single stupidest thing one could possibly think is that it's somehow daring or transgressive to be a fan of Dr. Who. Come the fuck on.)

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#186
post #65
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because that pretentious image is something we want to overcome If this is true, you're very subtle about it.

Hah. Realize that wine is made, literally, by farm boys who spend the year picking and crushing grapes from the field. When you visit a winery you realize how far-removed the winemaking process, which is as down-and-dirty as any other farm work, is from its cultural air. This is my experience with many wine professionals - people who procure, ship, or teach about wine for a living. There is a valid criticism of sommo…

I think there may be some overexposure issues in some parts of wine as well: if you work in a popular place like the Napa Valley, it's easy to slip into the equivalent of the jaded tech-support worker who assumes everyone they talk to is going to be a total idiot, and isn't going to be very subtle about that assumption.

One way to avoid that is to go to places that aren't over-exposed. I did a short driving tour of Texas wineries a few years ago, and it was quite low-key and pleasant. People were pretty friendly and wanted to explain things. Some people were actual wine makers in the literal agricultural sense, but even those who weren't—mostly semi-retired people who decided to run a winery in their late-middle-age as kind of upper-middle-class dilettantes—were pretty friendly.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - women sometimes internalize and participate in misogynistic and cruel behavior, and it can be hard to talk about. I've seen this happen with the "fake geek girl" phenomenon - some women who feel that they are legitimate parts of the community participate in this kind of destructive policing because they've bought into the cultural misogyny and are often rewarded and have their status reinforced in their…

Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? When women bully other women, it's because they're agents of the patriarchy?

'patriarchy' doesn't mean 'an active conspiracy of men; they meet on Tuesdays, bagels will be provided', it means something more along the lines of 'social structures designed/evolved to keep men on top'. Anyone can contribute to the structures, usually unwittingly.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#188

I'm going to annoyingly meta on this one because I'm feeling really philosophical today. There is a constant dissonance in the western world between assumptions about "ideal" or "moral" statistical probability distributions and actual statistical probability distributions over a large sample size when it comes to any politically sensitive topics like the one implied in the article (i.e women having an interest in sci…

This article wasn't "there isn't a 50% gender split in IT, therefore something is wrong!", which is what you're alluding to, it was "this person was shamed away from their interests by their peers". The article doesn't talk about distributions at all.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#189
post #96

This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the tech industry. There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly obvious to me is that many…

Many women not being interested in the field is not a _cause_ of the male-oriented tech culture; it's a symptom (although it is self-perpetuating) The idea that 'most women just aren't interested in the field' because they're women, and not because the male-dominated culture _makes_ most women uninterested in the field, is harmful. Making that statement on a male-dominated community site perpetuates and constructs th…

I do not think what the field do about the internal culture matters since women are discouraged long before they have any encounters with the IT industry. The internal culture rarely matters for the outward appearance.

What we instead should do is focus on schools and activities for young women interesting din technology.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#190
post #96

This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the tech industry. There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly obvious to me is that many…

Many women not being interested in the field is not a _cause_ of the male-oriented tech culture; it's a symptom (although it is self-perpetuating) The idea that 'most women just aren't interested in the field' because they're women, and not because the male-dominated culture _makes_ most women uninterested in the field, is harmful. Making that statement on a male-dominated community site perpetuates and constructs th…

I do not think what the field do about the internal culture matters since women are discouraged long before they have any encounters with the IT industry. The internal culture rarely matters for the outward appearance.

What we instead should do is focus on schools and activities for young women interesting din technology.

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