Girls and Software

"That amounts to asking employers why they are breaking the law, which makes it a little tricky"

Maybe you haven't noticed, but you are already assuming that employers are guilty. That kind of thing is exactly what makes me speak out against feminist articles all the time, because there are so many unspoken assumptions.

What if they aren't and there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for them paying less to women? Are there even employers who pay their female employees less than the males? Perhaps it is rather a difference between companies? (Just examples). What if the women just work less hours than the men (which seems to be the case)?

I think the answer to the wage gap has more than just two parts.

Also I suspect most wage gap studies neglect to mention that women automatically get half of their husbands income.

Edit: to answer one of your arguments, women more likely to stay home because they have lower wages. What if they chose a profession with lower wages because they knew they'd be staying home anyway? Or maybe they chose a less paid, but more fun job, because they don't need to provide for the whole family?

You probably automatically assume it is a problem. But what if it is a privilege instead? What if instead of measuring "wage", we would measure "time spent with children and family"? See how you are being manipulated? Of course everybody may decide for themselves what they prefer (work or time with family), but it seems wrong to just assume those preferences for all of mankind.

I suspect a lot of feminists don't have children yet, so they don't even know what it means. To me, having witnessed my wife toiling in labor for hours, it seems ridiculous to send a woman right back to work after having given birth to her child. Of course she should have the privilege to spend time with her children - she sacrificed the most to have them in the first place. What makes me angry is if this privilege is then turned on it's head and the people who toil to make it possible (ie men earning the money to support the family) are then being blamed for it.

Again - everybody may choose their own preferences. I am just saying that the preferences we see today may not be completely arbitrary. Most people end up having children after all - nothing against the ones who don't want to have children, but they simply don't make a significant impact in the long run. They die, and then that's it.

There's a big difference between a professional developer and a "rockstar programmer"; the latter may safely be assumed to have no sense of elegance, and to utter all sorts of atrocities in the process of building something that barely works as fast as possible and then moving on to the next thing, which is why I've found it quite feasible to make a living cleaning up after them. I see no reason why you can't do likewise; it's a more sedate professional life, but also a more satisfying one -- your "rockstar programmers" move on quickly because they don't dare to stand still for fear of their mistakes catching up with them, while the guy who solves those problems is always well favored.

Don't be fooled by propagandists of ESR's stripe or by bizarre little hothouses like the Silicon Valley startup scene! What counts in the software industry at large is not whether you call yourself a "rockstar" or a "hacker" or whatever else you like, but instead whether you are a professional with solid engineering chops. Concentrate on developing your professionalism and your professional skills, and you won't go wrong. All else is fashion.

(Don't equate "rockstar programmer" with "hacker", either. The former tend to view the latter as outdated Emacs-using neckbeards with no relevance to the real world; the latter tend to view the former as tiresome, barely competent children who wouldn't know good code or good tooling if they broke their nose on it. Which opinion is accurate, if any, is left as an exercise for the reader..)

Really? Aside from rather extreme or contrived situations, the average person in the real world simply does not witness multiple graphic deaths or see thousands of women naked.

Can we at least consider that there might be a psychological impact of the fact that in one afternoon you can see more horrors and more nudity than 99.999999% of the world would have seen in a lifetime two decades ago? That there is so incredibly much disturbing content and porn on the internet that the expected reaction is "meh", followed by moving on to yet more violence and porn? That there is so much porn that the craziest fetish you can imagine probably doesn't just exist online, but has an entire website dedicated to it?

It is not just a difference of quantity either. The internet trains you to just move on from things which would have been life-changing events had you witnessed them in the real world pre-1990. Do you really think seeing a picture of a mass grave on the internet is the same as seeing one in real life? Do you think even seeing one in real life now is the same as seeing one in real life before it was possible to just ask the internet for thousands of pictures of one?

In any fair comparison, the internet is absolutely nothing like real life.

Very interesting article.

The problem I have with the particular form the tech-feminist crusades have taken is that it seems to me to be diversionary at a fundamental level. Women are not just under-represented in tech, but in the majority of the most lucrative professions as a whole. So, unless we accept the bogus argument that women are just naturally worse at stuff other than babies, we must assume that this is a problem with society as a whole (the dolls-versus-lego thing is a part of that, but not the only one).

Women-only classes and so on may or may not help the particular women involved into the industry - I don't know. Presumably that can be empirically studied by people with the time and resources to do so. But the underlying problem is a matter for 'concerned citizens', not the tech industry as the tech industry.

Crusading, say, for 'codes of conduct' at conferences has the seductive appeal of a modest and realisable goal; unfortunately, there is no nice, pat answer to gender inequality in society, as the last three centuries of 'concerned citizens' have learned. To put it bluntly, it's not dick jokes at PyCon keeping women out, any more than it's dick jokes at law school that produces the gender gap in law firms.