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Coding Like a Girl

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Re: Coding Like a Girl

#141

A couple years ago she attended a technical conference and on the first day, she wore a dress...wore a nerdy t-shirt and jeans instead, and she had a better experience that day. People assumed she was technical and didn’t dilute their explanations to her I'm not sure this really makes the case that its sexism at play. For example, if a guy wore a suit and tie to a conference, people might assume he's not a programmer…

Agree. That's just stereotypes and I don't think it's exclusive to one gender. It's just that girls are much less common in programming communities

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#142
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are dresses that would not garner this response. Wearing lingerie would be another way to present oneself as feminine, but I think even the author would reject this as inappropriate attire for a tech conference.

Please tell us more about the dresses that would not garner this response and how they are different from what she wore.

Somewhere down in this thread bhayden posted this link:

http://dressforweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Korean-ver...

I can't speak for everyone, but something like this seems totally appropriate for the occasion and would not cause me to make any knee jerk assumption.

Obviously neither of us know exactly what the author was wearing since it isn't mentioned in the article, but this quote leads me to believe she may not have been exercising the most restrained judgement in this area:

"Once an ex-partner told me “You look better in jeans and a tshirt. Why do you wear dresses? Why do you wear make up? You don’t have to dress up to impress me.” That moment led me to so many realizations. It made me realize that most people think femininity is an act to impress men. It was then that I was 100% sure my dressing up wasn’t for him at all, I didn’t at all care if a partner disliked my dresses, or makeup. I was wearing them for me. And it was then, that I realized that continuing to wearing dresses just for myself was a totally valid way to say a big FUCK YOU to the patriarchy."

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to deny that sexism exists in this industry or the world. I think people should be able to wear whatever they want wherever they like, but the pragmatist in me thinks some of the responsibility for these issues would be easier solved by the individual than by expecting everyone else to modify their behavior.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#143
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends on the dress. Dresses can range anywhere from the peak of formality (equivalent to white tie attire for men) to somewhere in the neighborhood to nearly the level of informality as athletic or sleepwear, and anywhere in between.

Either way, out of sync with whatever everyone else was wearing, and when she changed her clothes but not her gender she was accepted by the others.

Eh. "Accepted" is probably a relative term here. As in, she was probably not "accepted" the way a man would be in casual attire. She just had slightly fewer hurdles to jump.

In any case, the point here is that men's reactions to women in dresses often cause distress and make women feel uncomfortable in technical settings. That's frankly ridiculous, since (as far as I understand) many women like to wear dresses and don't feel that they're formal. Maybe it's due to a misunderstanding? Men labor under the misapprehension that dresses are formal attire when they're not, and that causes the disconnect, etc. etc. Doesn't mean we should just accept it -- let's correct the misunderstanding. :)

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#144

Assume people are as or more qualified than you. I think this is a great rule to apply to your dealings with anyone of whatever appearance or gender - often our assumptions about people are wildly inaccurate (and we make hundreds before they've opened their mouth, and lots more after the first sentence). If they're not more qualified, they'll make it clear, and if they are more qualified/intelligent, maybe you'll lea…

In my experience recently in medicine (as a man), I've never noticed other doctors assuming lack of competence in female doctors, but did have female colleagues describe constantly being described as 'the nurse' by patients, usually by the oldest patients (who of course spent most of their life in a world where doctor=man, nurse=woman). Women's experiences of sexism and bigotry from male doctors when trying to 'break into' medicine over the last 50 years were pretty miserable on all accounts, but it feels to me like once the numbers of women in senior positions was high enough, the sexism pretty much went away: it's pretty hard to assume 'women don't know anything' when you've gone from utter ignorance as a medical student and junior resident to actually being good at what you do based on training and supervision from awesome female and male doctors in roughly equal numbers.

With regards to 'Assume people are as or more qualified than you', I think this is just basic courtesy. If there is no way of 'knowing' someone's knowledge or status eg by rank insignia, it always safer and much better received if you make a conscious effort to be wrong..in the right direction ie in the direction of more knowledge / status /experience. People are happy to correct you, but are often flattered: 'Are you the founder?'..'No, I'm actually the intern' , or 'are you the attending physician?'..,'No, I'm a med student' ends up being a much nicer interaction for all concerned than if you ask it the other way around, while still fulfilling the need to exchange useful information.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#145
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High Rising Terminal is a thing and it has nothing to do with gender: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal Edit: Heck, in the segment you link they even comment on the fact that the guy does it too, and it was one of the first things i noticed. Those are just valley people, that's it.

It's worth reading this piece for context. Reactions to uptalk can belie underlying prejudices. http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_...

I read it and got this far:

    > But even if women did uptalk more than men, we've all
    > heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation
    > doesn't indicate a question. No one's actually confused.
And as well-meaning as Marybeth Seitz-Brown might be, i do not appreciate the insinuation that i am lying when i, as a foreigner, state that i hate HRT* in men, women, americans, australians, anyone because it fucks with my parsing of spoken english, which is already one of hardest-to-parse languages on this planet.

Should i read further? Does she at any point acknowledge that i might be saying the truth?

* It's the only thing too, i don't mind excessive "like" usage, high-pitched voices, gravely voices, rednecks.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#146

Assume people are as or more qualified than you. I think this is a great rule to apply to your dealings with anyone of whatever appearance or gender - often our assumptions about people are wildly inaccurate (and we make hundreds before they've opened their mouth, and lots more after the first sentence). If they're not more qualified, they'll make it clear, and if they are more qualified/intelligent, maybe you'll lea…

In my experience recently in medicine (as a man), I've never noticed other doctors assuming lack of competence in female doctors, but did have female colleagues describe constantly being described as 'the nurse' by patients, usually by the oldest patients (who of course spent most of their life in a world where doctor=man, nurse=woman). Women's experiences of sexism and bigotry from male doctors when trying to 'break…

Yes mostly assumptions would be made by patients or other professionals they interact with, not other doctors.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#147
Three points that seem to say that the girls/women should do well in information technology:

(1) Advantages.

As I recall from K-12, college, and more, in several respects of talent, interest, diligence, psychology, socialization, etc., the girls/women (girls here and below) are, on average, significantly better than the boys/men (boys here and below). So, the girls have some significant advantages.

Of course, coding, information technology, computing, etc. consist of "clean indoor work, no heavy lifting".

With those advantages and the nature of the work, it would appear that any girls who want to do well in coding, etc. have a good shot, often better than that of the boys.

(2) Evaluation.

How to evaluate the girls?

As in the OP, is it important for the girls to wear pretty, feminine clothes versus nerd wear of worn jeans and T-shirts?

No. The main issue is getting the work done.

When I was a student, it seemed that the girls got graded on their work, not their clothes; when I was a professor giving grades, again the only issue for a grade was the work. Thus, it seems to me that, in the world of work in information technology, the easy, natural, obvious approach is just to evaluate the work, ignoring clothing, gender, etc.

(3) Writing.

In computing, we need to build on the work of others, but to do so we need a good description of that work. That is, we need good documentation.

Thus, to me, currently the main bottleneck to progress in information technology is bad documentation from poor writing. Since in school on average the girls were better at writing than the boys, I have to believe that girls can be quite welcome and do well improving the quality of the writing and, thus, help alleviate the bottleneck.

If my startup works, then I will have to hire, and I will expect a person who does some work will also write the relevant documentation. Here the girls should have an advantage.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"90% of RAM is not fault tolerant, of course men are going to assume it's not RAM if it's fault tolerant" would be a ridiculous thing to say, because you just can't reason that way. If you had to make an assumption, and all you knew about an item was that it was fault tolerant, ruling out RAM is not a terrible strategy if 90% of all RAM is not fault tolerant. Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a dev…

>Likewise, if all you know about someone is they are a developer, assuming they are male is not a terrible strategy since you are correct 90% of the time! Yes, and I'm not questioning that. The problem is that that same statistic says nothing about the likelihood that a given female is a developer.

But if about half the people in the world are female and there are more male than female developers, then isn't it safe to assume that the likelihood of a random male being a developer is going to be higher than that of a random female?

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#149
post #72

Richard Hamming discusses clothing, presentation, and the cost of not conforming to expectations in You and Your Research .[1]. It's not exactly analogous to what's described in the article, but related: John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen.For a long t…

"You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going to give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo and an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not to let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about. An enormous number of scientists feel they must assert their ego and do their thing their way. They have got to be abl…

Gee, apparently it helps that I never saw Tukey, at least not in person! I heard about Tukey from (1) Tukey's lemma, equivalent to the axiom of choice, (2) convergence and uniformity in topology, (3) stepwise regression, (4) the statistics of power spectral estimation, (5) exploratory data analysis, and (6) the fast Fourier transform. So, with (1)-(6), I didn't pay attention to how he looked! But when I wanted to go for a Ph.D., I wrote him at Princeton, explained where my career had run into his work and asked if there was education for a career in such things. I got back a nice letter from G. S. Watson saying, "Yes" and claiming that Princeton was one of the best places for such work. I did apply to Princeton, and did get accepted, but I went to Johns Hopkins instead (my wife was already in her Ph.D. program there so that we wouldn't have to move!).

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#150
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making the mistake of thinking that dresses are formal attire. I'm not a woman, but I don't think that's a valid assumption.

Less formal than a ballgown sure, but definitely more formal than jeans.

FWIW (and I know I'm beating a dead horse), I did an informal survey on Facebook about this. The question was, simply, "Are dresses formal attire?" The universal consensus is "no." Dresses can be easier than pants, comfortable like pajamas, etc. So I think there's a good chance that many men simply have the wrong idea about dresses and they're the equivalent of jeans & hoodies.

Anyway. Maybe it's worth asking the women you know.

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