241–250 of 294 posts
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." If you want more geek women, you need more geek girls. (Girls, if you wait long enough, turn into women, funnily enough.)
She shouldn't feel bad. I've never seen more than a few minutes of Star Wars or Star Trek. Never seen Dr. Who or any of the Monty Python stuff. I've never seen a single Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movie (or read the books). But I keep telling myself that one day I'll binge through them all online.
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.
I think this article can also help http://io9.com/5928739/the-secrets-of-geek-mating-rituals geeks really value smarts in both sexes. So we always try to outsmart all and are delighted when we don't succeed. I have had a few relationships break down just because my gf would never understand that I will argue for everything just for the sake of flexing my brain.
...or perhaps because you just wouldn't stop arguing. Making a relationship work requires adaption from both partners.
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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?
By the way, "sexual policing" comes from sexual competition and evolutionary psychology, which comes from thinking with your ovaries instead of your brain. In much the same way idiot men's one-upmanship comes from thinking with the testicles.
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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…
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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.
They had the same sort of social structures in the middle ages, but if you were one of Queen Brunhilde's knights, how exactly were you on top? You were utterly expendable, Brunhilde was on top.
This can be a tremendous advantage to companies in Russia I feel and it is something that we in the west, be it Europe or the US, should strive for as well.
well, maybe the big part of what kills women's interest in programming/CS is the unnecessary nerdiness that comes attached with it. As if watching starwars or Dr. who or reading marvel comics is essentially related to competency in CS. Note that this is largely a US phenomena. I am not making a judgement about the value of said material, just that they need not be bundled and presented as part and parcel of computing…
"Because the other guy interested in the same field watches Star Wars, I'm going to change career!"
Whether you like a field is supposed to be based on whether you like the field, not how cool you find the other people in the field.
So you're not describing girls who are interested in CS, you're describing girls who want to get into a field full of cool people.
Maybe if they are intolerant to having nerds as colleagues, said girls should aim for Hollywood instead of CS
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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. E…
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That's a good insight, and Star Wars is a good parallel. Not knowing a Hermes bag is probably akin to not knowing who George Lucas is. You're aware there are big name designer handbags out there, but never cared about the details. They're entry level bits of geekery, just in different fields.
it's not quite a good analogy. Hermes bag is related to fashion. Starwars in unrelated to computer science.