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To my daughter's high school programming teacher

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Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#501
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really have a hard time believing that anyone can think someone who says "make me a sandwich" isn't making a sexist remark. Don't get me wrong, I agree that in some contexts it can be given and received as a joke, but it is absolutely sexist. Just because males may receive gender-based outcasting in a home-ec class does not make that also sexist (are they harassing him to go bring her home a paycheck???), nor does…

Nobody said the original case is OK. In fact, knowing in advance someone would advance that strawman, I preemptively addressed it in the post you replied to. I stated that it is bullying, not sexism. If you try to solve bullying by addressing sexism, you will fail.

>I stated that it is bullying, not sexism

It's not mutually exclusive. The sexism comes from the culture that even makes "make me a sandwich" a remark to use in a bullying context. Bullying comes in all forms, but gender-based bullying has another insidious component in that it re-enforces sexist ideas and cultural norms. This is why addressing it independently is important. Just addressing bullying does not eliminate the culture where these terms derive their power.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#502
post #167
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why 16-year-old girls leave programming. Remember, guys ganging up on you and telling them to make them a sandwich is just funny! You're so thin-skinned, ladies! thought police! http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110218.9512/sexist-joke-bingo/ ...almost got bingo... good work, cookiecaper.

that's the most PC thing I've seen all week. and I mean that in the worst possible way.

> Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358263

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#503
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said the original case is OK. In fact, knowing in advance someone would advance that strawman, I preemptively addressed it in the post you replied to. I stated that it is bullying, not sexism. If you try to solve bullying by addressing sexism, you will fail.

>I stated that it is bullying, not sexism It's not mutually exclusive. The sexism comes from the culture that even makes "make me a sandwich" a remark to use in a bullying context. Bullying comes in all forms, but gender-based bullying has another insidious component in that it re-enforces sexist ideas and cultural norms. This is why addressing it independently is important. Just addressing bullying does not eliminat…

Saying "make me a sandwich" doesn't have power. The environment of "the majority are singling me out" is what has power, the words are quite literally irrelevant. Sexism would be if the boys in the class thought they were better than girls and thus a girl shouldn't be in the class. That is without a doubt not the motivation, but rather the standard "we can pick on this person so we will". There was only one girl in one of my programming classes too. She was part of the group picking on me, because the group felt I was an easier target. That really is the root of it, and attempting to address nonexistent sexism will not help solve it at all.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only really think of two ways of understanding the extreme gender imbalance in these jobs. Either there are systemic discriminatory forces at work, or women are somehow inherently ill-suited for programming jobs (ie. because of cognitive deficiency). I worry, but of course couldn't prove, that the sort of responses you get to proposing the former betray that many people subconsciously believe the latter. To tho…

"cognitive deficiency"??? Please consider the possibility that just because someone else's mind doesn't excel in the same way yours does, it doesn't necessarily mean their mind is deficient! I believe your choice of words demonstrates well the bias that is at the root of the problem we are discussing. IMO nerd superiority is the most unbecoming pervasive trait found in the tech industry.

I think you may have missed my point; I think the idea that women have any sort of cognitive deficiency is absurd. I believe that the reason there are so few women in tech has to do with systemic disincentives, rather than that they "aren't good at it" or "don't like it."

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're saying that women need special treatment as the more delicately nurtured sex? I completely disagree. The tech environment is what it is, and I don't want to be treated differently than my male co-workers. Also, I've never seen anything resembling a "grotesque pastiche of misogyny and bullying" in my 17 years of working as a programmer or systems analyst.

Close the thread everybody, a token woman just invalidated the whole thing. No misogyny in tech. Also one time a black dude said "what racism? lol" so there's no racism.

Racism? What's that? Isn't that what Morgan Freeman said we need to ignore?

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#506
post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a theory, you're just deferring the question. Why wouldn't women be interested in this kind of profession? Do women not like comfortable, creative, high-paying jobs with lots of perks?

> That's not really a theory, you're just deferring the question. No, it's still a theory. It might naturally lead to the next question, "why don't they wanna?", but so does a lot of theories/explanations (just ask Socrates). > Why wouldn't women be interested in this kind of profession? Do women not like comfortable, creative, high-paying jobs with lots of perks? I don't know, but there could be a lots of reasons, s…

I don't really understand what you're trying to say. Unless you have a compelling idea about why having been born a woman makes you not want the best available job in the current economy, what are we even talking about?

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much wrong with this comment. First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse , and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error . Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches D…

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of wh…

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it.

Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping.

Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time.

???

Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse.

Oh noes, you have outed me! I shrivel up in the face of your freethinking ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#508
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dad/daughter humor inserted. Not to be a dick, but you may be guilty of a little benign sexism yourself there... the author is a woman.

She first mentions such halfway through the article, and her writing style is masculine. Even I guessed (not assumed) male until that point.

what does "her writing style is masculine" even MEAN?

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of wh…

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code , which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropria…

Well most TV shows air at a particular time of day, so if you watched it you presumably wouldn't be coding at that particular time of day, either. Women code while their husbands watch football.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#510
post #496
post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, I am not taking responsibility for an imaginary problem. Are you claiming that the original authors daughter was imagining her classmates bullying her? Are you saying that I'm imagining the fact that there are far more men than women in the programming profession? These aren't "imaginary problems". These are very real problems. Now, there may be some debate about exactly which behavior is problematic; some peop…

>Are you claiming that the original authors daughter was imagining her classmates bullying her? No, I am claiming that the problems the post I replied to was putting forth are imaginary. I am quite aware that bullying is a real problem. >Are you saying that I'm imagining the fact that there are far more men than women in the programming profession? No, I am saying that is not an indication of a problem, much less sys…

OK. Let's start from the beginning. The post you are replying to was a reply to the general tenor of a lot of posts, like yours, in this kind of thread. Posts which try to deny that there's a real problem, that the only reason that there aren't as many women in tech is that they have chosen not to.

Anecdotes like the original article, as well as many others that have come before, demonstrate that there is a real problem. There is some seriously problematic behavior out there. Now, how much of the gender disparity in tech is due to these kinds of problems, and how much is due to simple self-selection? That's hard to say; there may be arguments either way. But that doesn't really matter; even if the entire gender disparity can't be explained by odious behavior, at least some of it can, because there are very clearly women who are being off-put by very obnoxious, sexist behavior.

And furthermore, people are offput by defensive behavior, where tons of people come out of the woodwork and deny that there is any problem whatsoever. If you mention that some behavior makes you uncomfortable, and then a lot of people come out saying "there's no problem. It shouldn't make you uncomfortable. You just aren't all that into tech, you don't have thick enough skin" is that going to make you feel welcome and safe?

He's saying that we need to stop being defensive about it, stop trying to deny that problem, and start taking responsibility for hostile and off-putting behavior. Taking responsibility can include not doing it ourselves, and can also include not treating it as if it's acceptable behavior, not turning a blind eye to it, and not denying that that it actually exists.

So by telling him that he was discussing imaginary problems, you were doing exactly that. You were ignoring the actual, real, live example of the problem in the original post, and saying that what he was talking about is imaginary. That's why I brought up the original post; in order to claim that RyanMcGreal's problems were imaginary, you must be claiming that the original post is imaginary.

Now, in other posts, you seem to be trying to make the distinction between bullying and sexism, brushing this off as mere bullying. What you've missed is that it can be both. There is racist bullying. There is homophobic bullying. There is sexist bullying. There is bullying just for the sake of bullying. Just because it's also bullying, doesn't mean that it's not sexist, and part of the pattern of behavior that drives some women from the field.

Taking responsibility does not mean saying "oh, I'm an oppressor, thus I should be ashamed of myself." It means speaking up when you hear someone being harassed, it means stopping bullying that's going on right in your classroom (and being aware enough of your classroom to notice it going on), it means trying to understand why someone's upset or offended and try to think of reasonable, fair ways to fix that, rather than immediately jumping to the conclusion that the problem they are describing is not actually a problem.

> There is a strong correlation between increased freedom to choose "non-traditional" professions and fewer people choosing them. More women worked "men's jobs" when they were told they were men's jobs than they do now that they are encouraged to seek those jobs.

So, where is your evidence to back up this claim? It's a pretty strong claim, so you had better have some pretty good evidence to back it up.

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