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Girls and Software

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Re: Girls and Software

#211

Post by SamReidHughes »

jebblue wrote: post #68
stchangg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a female developer w/ a EE degree, but mostly self-taught wrt coding. My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring thi…

Ironically there was a time when a coding error could lead to physical damage to the screen, even the CPU or other electronics. Also ironically, breaking things is not only half the fun it's maybe 75% of the learning.

Read the VLC story. That time hasn't passed.

Re: Girls and Software

#212

Post by nitrogen »

arrrg wrote: post #210
nitrogen wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it. You know what's disgusting? People getting disgusted over issues that don't warrant disgust.

I’m not sure how exclusionary rhetoric follows from that. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Also, I think that statement is just outright wrong and misleading.

I wrote my first comment before reading the article, and later found that paragraph in which the article's author seemed to share my sentiments.

In my first comment I may have been speculating on the motivations of others, but I did so by drawing in part on my own experiences. Programming, computers, BBSes/online services/Internet, etc. gave me something I could do as a grade school child that didn't depend on other people's approval of my social identity. My point was and is that it would be just as tragic to drive off the social misfits as it would be tragic to exclude the socially adept.

Sadly, sometimes it seems the mainstream have seen how much money can be made by former and present misfits as hackers and want to take ownership of it for themselves.

Edited to add: After rereading the thread, it seems you may have been commenting specifically on the sentence that I quoted. I don't intend to justify the heuristic that leads some to assume non-social-outcasts are non-hackers, only to explain it, and perhaps find a way of bridging the gap between those who use that heuristic, and those who are harmed by it.

Re: Girls and Software

#213

Post by codygman »

fudged71 wrote: post #130
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #42

> Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the girls will be too scared to try. And that's why we can't use sexism to fight sexism (or mistakenly enforce the same composition of the general population on self-selected subsets).

I've wanted to mention this for a while but the topic hadn't come up. My engineering faculty tried many things to get more girls in the program, including having girls-only events with the female dean. Of course, all students got these emails, and many of us guys were left wondering why we never had the chance to meet the dean in events like these. Excluding sometimes seems worse than the biases these programs aim to…

Excluding the more privileged sometimes seems worse than the bias which excludes the less privileged?

That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

Re: Girls and Software

#214

Post by danellis »

pjc50 wrote: post #135
superuser2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point on guitar, I guess I was thinking of piano, strings, and voice, which are quite popular where I live. Sports can be cheap but in extreme cases of (sub)urban sprawl, getting to a field - or the field where an organized game is happening - is pretty difficult without a car. Also you can't really play organized, coached, team sports without your parents signing liability waivers.

You can play without litigation waivers in most non-US countries. You can also kick a ball around in the street.

Well, you say you can kick a ball around in the street, but signs prohibiting ball games are a common sight in the UK at least.

Re: Girls and Software

#215

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

bitwize wrote: post #35
timr wrote: post #14

I'm torn. I think she makes some really good points -- particularly about discouraging young girls and the futility of shoving adult humans into foreign social situations -- but I also think she might be rather narrowly defining the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in" ). Maybe it's possible that there ar…

For the longest time I harbored the biggest crush on a girl from my high school. The thing that made me fall in love with her (and it was love -- as much love as a 14-year-old could feel) wasn't that she was pretty or cute or popular -- though she was all these things. (Head cheerleader. Literally. Dated a football player and everything.) It was that I had the good fortune to peek over her shoulder at some BASIC code…

This is the kind of story that reveals a lot more about the teller than the subject.

Re: Girls and Software

#216

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

arrrg wrote: post #168
nitrogen wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me seems highly destructive. I suspect this heuristic started out as a way for the outcast, socially unwelcome hackers to finally find a group to which they could belong, an activity that didn't judge them for their intellect or their appearance. I further suspect that some of the pushback against lifting this heuristic comes from those same…

Oh man, even more zero sum thinking. Outcasts making others outcasts, bullied becoming bullies. Nice. The general point is this: rejection because of the way you dress (no matter how) or look (no matter how) is not cool. The direction doesn’t really matter. But this groupthink is pretty disgustingly exclusionary.

I think a lot of programmers and such have bought into a dress code that involves ratty old tshirts and jeans and that kind of thing, c.f. scorn at people who show up to technical interviews in a suit

Re: Girls and Software

#217

Post by sliverstorm »

jseliger wrote: post #110
krstck wrote: post #51

Oooh, this was an icy stab right at the core. She's completely right: >Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a females T…

When I became a teenager, I got wind that it wasn't something "cool" and got spooked. For someone as insecure as I was, having a hobby that I couldn't really "explain" to normal people was embarrassing. When I was a teenager, coding or being technical in general wasn't cool either, and most of the people who were involved were or at least seemed insecure and embarrassed. Perhaps the climate in middle / high schools h…

what makes many boys persist in their uncool, embarrassing, low-ish status activity?

Perhaps the fact that, social outcast or not, such boys are nowhere near alone? They can be social pariahs together with many other boys that enjoy the same things.

Re: Girls and Software

#218

Post by vinceguidry »

mattmanser wrote: post #113
superuser2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself , by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised. There aren't many other creative activities like that - h…

I almost posted exactly the same post as simias earlier, your post worries me a bit as you don't seem to understand there's been generations of hackers who had no internet access. I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home. It almost feels like you didn't read the article, the author talks about more generic probl…

> I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home.

I did the same. My interest in programming actually started to decrease as my access to the internet increased. This was, however, in the mid-90s, when there weren't the big online communities that there are now.

Re: Girls and Software

#219

Post by archagon »

archagon wrote: post #167
Crito wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was young, probably 12 or 13 I think, I saw a series of images of a spider bite on a mans thumb causing the thumb to swell, split open, go necrotic, and eventually require amputation. Did this damage me? No, I'm fine. I gagged when I saw the images, then I scrolled down and looked at some more. Lasting effects? Well today as an adult, I smash spiders when I see them. Not a big deal.

I disagree. I saw a ton of stuff I never should have seen at that age. It didn't scar me for life, but it's desensitized me to a lot of terrible things. Unless you're a doctor, I just don't think it's healthy to look at NSFL gore, go "meh", and move on to something else. I also occasionally have those images flash in my head. I don't want them there, but there's nothing I can do about that now. (Granted, the same thi…

PS, I don't care what you believe, but please don't downvote just because you disagree with something. It's passive-aggressive and it ruins communities.

Use your words.

(This was in response to my comment getting downvotes.)

Re: Girls and Software

#220

Post by archagon »

Crito wrote: post #193
archagon wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I saw a ton of stuff I never should have seen at that age. It didn't scar me for life, but it's desensitized me to a lot of terrible things. Unless you're a doctor, I just don't think it's healthy to look at NSFL gore, go "meh", and move on to something else. I also occasionally have those images flash in my head. I don't want them there, but there's nothing I can do about that now. (Granted, the same thi…

I don't think that desensitization is an inherently bad thing. There are any number of things that people become desensitized to as they grow up. In this modern society, there are many adults who have never so much as seen a dead body (having never even gone to wakes). In previous generations, and in different societies, seeing dead bodies is common place and does not have the same power to disturb. Does it harm a ch…

Surely you would agree that there are limits, socially determined or otherwise? Would you be OK with your child seeing a motorcyclist's head blown off? A man's distended anus? There are no limits on the internet. I saw all these things because I didn't know any better, or because I was morbidly curious. It didn't ruin me or give me PTSD or anything, but it definitely shaped my personality. I regret it now, in my mid-twenties.
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