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I knew exactly how she felt

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Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#231

Post by s_baby »

_bfhp wrote: post #212
s_baby wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) Those edge cases you speak of are not part of the dominant discourse. When woman on woman sexism is approached in the dominant discourse it's in the form of... >In the few cases where other women are shown as the problem they are framed as victims of patriarchal socialization not responsible for their behavior. B) You're making some big assumptions about my awareness of sociology.

A) Dominant discourse as in the occasional Jezebel article you see shared on FB or actual gender and sexuality studies? What is your experience with the latter? B) You're not giving much to address those assumptions.

A1) I meant both independently though you can't really separate the two. Academic feminism is just as involved in creating a public discourse as they are an academic one.

B) Why would I? The question was obviously a red herring just like the "mouth frothing" ad-hom.

My competence in the matter is sufficient. I switched my major from sociology to CS with a focus on machine learning/data. I've dated several feminists and have been tangentially involved at various points in my life. Not that any of this matters. It's a completely irrelevant question.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#232

Post by csense »

mwfunk wrote: post #40

Lifelong geek here, and I can totally understand the appeal of this story. Reading some of the comments is kinda depressing though. There's no "us" and there's no "them". There are groups of people in the world with similar clusters of interests, and I guess that one of those clusters corresponds to traditionally geeky interests. But sometimes it seems like people internalize the whole us and them thing way too much.…

Thank you for pointing this out.

A bias toward viewing situations as "us vs. them" is part of humans' tribal nature.

Any time someone points out that something isn't an "us vs. them" situation (or that a particular position is predicated on a situation being "us vs. them"), you should really give weight to that criticism because it's a very easy mistake to make. Look hard at whether it really is an "us vs. them" situation, and if it isn't, what are the consequences that flow from that?

In this particular example, the case is pretty clear: The parent's spot-on.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#233

Post by csense »

kobot wrote: post #102

I am a girl studying computer science. I never understood the whole geek girl mentality of "I don't get OTHER girls! They only like shopping! I like nerdy things!" I like shopping and makeup. I also like nerdy things like Lord of the Rings and programming hackathons. I get along with girly girls AND geeks. People are more complex than "I only like shopping" or "I only like Star Wars". It's not hard to make friends wi…

> It's not hard to make friends with people who have different hobbies than $YOU

The above statement may be true when $YOU == "kobot", but it's not true for a nontrivial subset of the nerd population.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#234

Post by s_baby »

vacri wrote: post #225
s_baby wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) Those edge cases you speak of are not part of the dominant discourse. When woman on woman sexism is approached in the dominant discourse it's in the form of... >In the few cases where other women are shown as the problem they are framed as victims of patriarchal socialization not responsible for their behavior. B) You're making some big assumptions about my awareness of sociology.

A) 'Edge cases'? 'Few cases'? Ha. B) I like how you elect to stay mysterious on this point. Since you didn't bother to actually clear anything up and explain where you're coming from, you sound just like yet another pride-wounded MRA mouth-frother.

Why would I waste my time proving myself to someone so rude and bigoted?

If you're as familiar with gender studies as you say you are and these "complex narratives" are as ubiquitous as you claim you should easily be able to show us several counter examples. You can't because you've obviously never seen this literature.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#235

Post by csense »

asperous wrote: post #66

> "They thought she wanted to build the next Terminator or hack into Government systems, when she just wanted to build self-driving cars." Maybe she doesn't see how this is similar in terms of amazing, but I would say those other women weren't far off.

The student was probably complaining about the unwashed masses' Hollywood-fueled fantasy of the computer hacker: Anyone who can write a program longer than 10 lines is capable of hacking into any computer system in five minutes or less, using or fixing any piece of computer-y, electronic-y, or science-y equipment, etc.

Hacking systems gets easier the younger the hacker is, the more important the data being protected by the system is, and the more resources its owners have to secure it.

All of these are of course ridiculous assumptions which suit narrative purposes but have no basis in reality. A lot of people don't understand that, and they can be really annoying to those who do.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#236

Post by A1kmm »

seivan wrote: post #32
memset wrote: 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…

The problem isn't PM's know jack about code. The problem is the set where a PM would even be required. That means there's a structural flaw in your process. The idea of having a project manager is ridiculous. People _should_ manage themselves and take ownership of the project. Making the PM useless.

How the project outputs will be produced (the supplier in PM lingo) is only one aspect of the project. Projects typically have an associated business interest, and users who will use the products produced by the product.

Certain resource roles (e.g. business analysts, UX specialists) can provide advice on the impact of decisions on the business case and the users, while others provide technical input, but project decisions typically cut across more than one of supplier / business / user interests, and it is in the interests of the business to ensure that someone can integrate the requirements of all three.

Having a project manager (or equivalent role such as an agile 'Scrum Master') is not incompatible with employees taking ownership of the project - decisions that only affect the supplier, or fall within ranges that the business / user is happy with can be taken by the suppliers. Often, the PM's role is to facilitate agreement between the different stakeholders.

It is possible for the PM role to be shared amongst the suppliers, but it is not usually a good idea for a big project, because being a PM is a specialist area in its own right hat developers have to learn separately from their specialist technical skills, and spreading the role across too many people can mean that context switch inefficiencies mean the PM role doesn't get carried out.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#237

Post by navs »

Feeling out of place, I can absolutely sympathise. I haven't quite found my place yet. It's made worse with all this talk about star wars, geeky t-shirts and other pop culture paraphernalia. We aren't all fans of star wars. We aren't all jumping at the chance to make pop culture references in conversation and we don't all own t-shirts with witty slogans concerning the dark side (I do confess to owning 2 wolverine t-shirts though). Now shows like the Big Bang Theory only help to reinforce this silly idea of what a 'nerd' is.

I was very into Heavy Metal growing up. Just as I was into comics. I felt like an outsider in the typical social circles at school and university and I felt even worse when I found the 'nerd' or 'geek' or 'metal' circles. Liking Metallica apparently didn't make me a true metalhead and so there you go, denounced. I'm not into D&D so there goes my invitations to D&D sessions. What about the girl in that conference that wasn't wearing a star wars t-shirt, that was just as interested in that talk? I absolutely hate how each sub-culture tries to belittle the other and how its admission is dependent on whether you all like the same things.

I know that wasn't the main focus of the OP's post and I'm somewhat incoherent because I did just wake up, but I had to have my little rant. It's not just the IT industry alienating based on gender but also hobbies and interests.

--- Amateur developer in Auckland that would like to meet other developers and not just to talk about star trek.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#238

Post by lotharbot »

ahoyhere wrote: post #201
petercooper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen Star Wars . Well, I tried to but fell asleep 10 minutes in. Oddly, I'm not feeling like an odd one out here, even so :-)

Star Wars is really, really stupid. Also boring. People have an obsession with it because it hit them at the age when they were too young to realize how it's about as intellectually challenging as My Little Ponies in Space. They saw LASERS! and SPACE SHIPS! and EVIL PEOPLE! as 9-year-olds and it embedded in their minds as "cooler than cool." The same way that some adults have a huge nostalgia-on for He-Man or Gem and…

> "about as intellectually challenging as My Little Ponies in Space"

The modern incarnation of My Little Ponies is substantially more intellectually challenging than you might expect.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#239

Post by claudius »

pessimizer wrote: post #170
claudius wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue it is also a very good heuristic for finding Star Wars fans. Your point being?

My point being that if 80% of programmers are young men, and knowledge of Star Wars jokes (or whatever) can find young men at an 80% accuracy from a general list, but good programmers at only a 64% accuracy from a list of programmers, you should just cut out the rationalization and just hire based on sex and race. You haven't discovered a heuristic for hiring good programmers, you've discovered a heuristic for confir…

Take false positives into account – you will find more young men who are not engineers than Star Wars fans who are not engineers (for suitable values of engineers and personal experience). Since such false positives are extremely annoying[0] when looking for interesting people in a party, you want to minimise them first, not the false negatives.

[0] A false positive takes you n minutes to discover and abandon, whereas a false negative ideally doesn’t concern you at all, assuming there are enough interesting people.

Re: I knew exactly how she felt

#240

Post by klipt »

magwildwood wrote: post #166
nhebb wrote: 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…

I agree with the first part of your comment, but am confused by your conclusion. As a woman in technology (yes, one who codes, not a marketer or lawyer), I have my own views on this. I am a nerd when it comes to technology. I have a passion for it and could talk about it all day. I don't however, have a significant interest in sci-fi or fantasy films. From first glance, I appear to be stereotypically female: I'd rath…

> I appear to be stereotypically female: I'd rather talk about make-up than Tolkien

What's interesting is the majority of fantasy readers are women (in fact, the majority of fiction readers in general). I know a quite a few female lit geeks who care about Tolkien (or Harry Potter) but not particularly about technology.

The definition of geek is pretty vague at times. I've met socially awkward geeks who are obsessed about one thing and incapable of talking about anything else; and then I've met socially awesome geeks who have a burning curiosity about everything and just talking to them makes you feel amazed at the sheer wonder and variety of life.

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