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I knew exactly how she felt

trishkhoo.com

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Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#191

Post by vacri »

raylu wrote: post #169
dragonwriter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that department that kept the corporate computers working and worked for the CFO, not part of the department that shipped products and worked for the VP Engineering. When I worked for an enterprise software company close to 15 years ago, there was clear recognition of both IT-as-internal-organizati…

> (This shouldn't be surprising, since IT-as-industry is effectively just the outsourced version of IT-as-internal-organization.) You're right. I've never thought of writing the software for a self-driving car as the outsourced version of configuring Active Directory for IE7, but when you put it that way it seems so obvious!

Yes, pushing bits around here to suit an external set of requirements is totally different to pushing bits around there to suit an external set of requirement. As different a skill as laying tile in the shower recess of a new house or inspecting a sheep for signs of a disease.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#192

Post by fudged71 »

vacri wrote: post #181
fudged71 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well I'll be damned!! Wikipedia just keeps getting better :)

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#193

Post by irremediable »

vacri wrote: post #183
s_baby wrote: 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…

A very good comment that succinctly describes why so many of us unfairly dismiss feminism.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#194

Post by vacri »

noamsml wrote: post #38

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that consuming cultural artifacts that happen to correlate with liking engineering has anything to do with liking engineering. If you think liking Star Wars is necessary for being an engineer, you're probably missing some pretty good people who just aren't that into Star Wars.

Perhaps you should find this high-school age person and inform them that the coping mechanisms they have found on their own are not suitable for the world at large. This isn't the CEO of a tech company outlining the hiring process we're talking about, it's a lonely teenager trying to find like-minded people.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#195

Post by vacri »

copper-horse wrote: post #162

I'm sorry, but if people don't get your Star Wars humour, that does not make them stupid. May be they just didn't like Star Wars. And may be somehow they thought that being "in marketing or law or something" is just as worthy an occupation as writing spam filters for google. I guess the reason they form a community in the short time of an IT event, and "the nerds" are always on the fringe is this same dismissive atti…

Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working in IT. It's working for IT, but it's working in marketing and law. Would anyone seriously think that the sysadmin for a law firm could seriously present at a 'women in law' presentation?

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#196

Post by mirkules »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #67
noonespecial wrote: post #2

I'm not sure the author quite understood the seeing Star Wars thing was a super low bar fitness test. Once long ago my new wife asked me why geeks always wear tshirts with obscure references that no one gets. I was slightly put out by the question until I figured it out. They're a uniform. It's how we id the friendlies on the battlefield.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

Thanks for the light bulb. I honestly thought Randall Munroe made that term up in http://xkcd.com/806/

Edit: just realized it was cleverly modified to include "leet". And edit 2: which I then realized is a shibboleth inside a shibboleth.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#197

Post by dragonwriter »

vacri wrote: post #195
copper-horse wrote: post #162

I'm sorry, but if people don't get your Star Wars humour, that does not make them stupid. May be they just didn't like Star Wars. And may be somehow they thought that being "in marketing or law or something" is just as worthy an occupation as writing spam filters for google. I guess the reason they form a community in the short time of an IT event, and "the nerds" are always on the fringe is this same dismissive atti…

Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working in IT. It's working for IT, but it's working in marketing and law. Would anyone seriously think that the sysadmin for a law firm could seriously present at a 'women in law' presentation?

> Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working in IT.

It is working in the IT industry. It is not working in an IT profession. "Working in IT" can mean either.

I suspect that there is a group of people who would be interested in a presentation on issues facing "Women in the IT industry" as well as one with interest in issues facing "Women in the IT profession", and I suspect that those groups overlap considerably. Though, I would also suspect that there is a substantial subset of each group that is not in the other.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#198

Post by coldtea »

rjknight wrote: post #151
coldtea wrote: post #124

> She then talked to me about robotics and physics and programming and how none of the other girls in her class understood anything she was talking about. They thought she wanted to build the next Terminator or hack into Government systems, when she just wanted to build self-driving cars. All the other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would be bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else w…

And it goes to show that "sexism is the barrier" is not the whole story This is true but possibly not in the way that you think. I'm not sure that girls are choosing that different way of life quite so much as they're conditioned to do so, and this is discriminatory. I think it's possible to explain the phenomenon described in the OP via "intersectionality" - in other words, there are multiple forms of discrimination…

>In this case, both geeks and women suffer from discrimination in different contexts. Being a geek and a woman is doubly difficult because mainstream society (both men and women) say "you're a woman, you shouldn't be a geek".

Sure, but why should society like everything? In this case, geeks.

Now, I'm a geek myself. But I still find it OK that society can like some things (and professions) more than it does others.

Especially since part of the geek essence is being "antisocial" it makes ever more sense of the general population to not like geeks. So much sense, that it's actually more like a tautology ("anti-social people are not liked by society").

Not to mention that geeks themselves do the same distinctions all the time. Who would waste a second's thought to think a McJob guy or a city cleaner as somehow "inferior"? Or even people like "office drones" with their Excels and such?

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#199

Post by ahoyhere »

> 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.

Anyone else read this paragraph and think: "Yup, I bet she really was making them feel stupid"?

I was that judgmental dick of a teen and thank god I grew out of it. If I were the adult she was talking to at a party, I would have warned her against thinking that "different" meant "better." And told her that probably the best friends she'd ever make were not the ones who were carbon copies of her interests. If she would have the guts to leave aside the preferred pop culture and meet other people where, and how, they truly are.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#200

Post by philwelch »

eightpersimmons wrote: post #182
philwelch wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And what do you call it when boys bully each other to enforce arbitrary social norms? Because I don't see a substantial difference between the two cases.
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