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Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

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41–50 of 66 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#41
This is bullshit.

There is no such hostility.

Way to generate a conversation around a topic where you provide no hard evidence of any of the claims you're making.

Here's a popular black coder: https://twitter.com/seanlilmateus

Here's a popular woman coder: https://twitter.com/ericasadun

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#42
post #23
post #19

I'm commenting here as a response to a few posts that highlight my use of the word "hostile" - a somewhat inflammatory word but my time in the journalism world taught me to bait clicks.... c: I wouldn't say -hostile- in the sense that there's an active conscious attempt to bar women and people of color from computer science, what I mean is that in the computer science world there's an underlying structure which is ra…

I think the underlying question should be, "Why are fewer and fewer women are attracted to the field?"

yep, in college, our CS programs usually had hardly 18 to 25 girls in a class of 150. And some of them even dropped out. When we graduated, there were hardly 10 girls amongst us. So it's not that we "eject" them. We just don't get many girls attracted to this field.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#43
post #41

This is bullshit. There is no such hostility. Way to generate a conversation around a topic where you provide no hard evidence of any of the claims you're making. Here's a popular black coder: https://twitter.com/seanlilmateus Here's a popular woman coder: https://twitter.com/ericasadun

Thanks for the anecdotes - I'm looking at statistics. The hostility may not be apparent (to you) but it's structural and it's real.

see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#44
post #39
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your attitude is childish and short-sighted. When certain groups are -by default- disadvantaged compared to a dominant group, just saying "go do work like I did" - is meaningless.

Really ? On systems where people are essentially identified by their email adress and/or username ? Why don't you tell me. One of these is female (and pretty accomplished in the open source community), one of these is non-white ... which is which ? * thegrendel.abs * tille * pgquilles If you can't, obviously the reason is not just racism. On mailinglists, github and irc, skin color and sex don't exist. If there is a…

If you have a harder time accessing these supposedly raceless-genderless systems, then you can't participate. Research has shown that the utopian vision of the internet being the ultimate equalizer was never realized.. groups still divide by socio-economic classes online as they do in the physical world.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/13/social.networking... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_segregation

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#45
It'a not. Where I work we are usually open for programming positions. Girls simply don't show up, it's not like there are hundreds of them that we send back home because they're women. When I'm on github and I fork something from supernerdy81, i don't even know if it's a he or a she, nor I care and surely that wouldn't make any difference in using a library. Just to say. It happens that men are eventually more interested in technology than women, generally. You can see it among your friends or family. There are things that attract women's interest most. It's not that knitting community is hostile towards men, it's just that few men (me, for example) are interested in knitting.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#46
Wut?

I didn't realized there were any hostility to women and/or black people.

For women, I don't see it. I have tons of female friends that are programmers.

As for black people... two of my friends are black, one of them is female. And they've never complain about racism in their work force. I've worked with one black person and that person played the victim card a lot, that's another story in itself entirely, but other than that.

I haven't see any hostility against women or black people.

edit:

What I do see is the gender imbalance in CS major in education. Also there are far less black people in education but I'm not sure what's the driving factor is. It could be population wise, economic reason, etc...

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#47

Wut? I didn't realized there were any hostility to women and/or black people. For women, I don't see it. I have tons of female friends that are programmers. As for black people... two of my friends are black, one of them is female. And they've never complain about racism in their work force. I've worked with one black person and that person played the victim card a lot, that's another story in itself entirely, but ot…

All of your proofs are personal anecdotes. If you need some empirical evidence check this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

Or do some research on computer science demographics.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#48
post #26

http://learncodethehardway.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html There. That should do it--for our part, we'll try to be friendly. What more do you want? EDIT: http://railsgirls.com/ is actually pretty great to be fair.

I decided that I wanted a new career in programming. I learned Rails through Michael Hartl's (wonderful) tutorial. Several months later, I had a job as a programmer. My being female has never, ever come up. In fact, of the five programmers in my shop, two are female. Any interested party can learn the skills, and then all you have to do is find someone you can help. There's a huge demand for programming skills, but a…

Not to discredit your success, but your example is an anecdote, and it is not the usual one. Only about 10% of people in the computing industry are women. See my recent comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#49
post #37
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, check my recent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

you're citing statistics without proof of their relevance to this discussion. by hostility, it seems that you actually mean "Why do blacks and women represent a minority in computer science?" Computer science has always been an inbetween between engineering and hard sciences--because of that many laymen were employed to do menial computer tasks early in history. This was, perhaps , one of the first chances for laymen…

Maybe you're right, (maybe) all the women statistically disappearing from the computing field are moving to other engineering and science jobs. We could throw any number of untested theories at that simple statistic.

Honestly though, that's irrelevant because WHERE they're going is not what I'm addressing. It's WHY, and HOW can we reverse the trend of anti-diversification in the computer industry? If they're leaving for other industries, even scientific ones, there's nothing wrong with the individuals choice but there's something less-desirable about the computer industry, and I doubt it has anything to do with the raw content of a computer related job.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#50
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to reply to the original post but thank-you for editing and clarifying a bit. I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages? Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking…

Stop worrying about computer science specifically -- it's no different in engineering fields, and worse in the sciences. The reasons are not specific to CS.

I'm addressing CS because it's relevant to me. It's a community that I participate in so I'm addressing this issue in my community. Honestly though, the gap between women and men in CS is far greater than other fields.
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