101–110 of 437 posts
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> Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. The key is to make it a priority to move to an area where all the families promote a culture that views academic excellence as a good thing. I know this isn't available to everyone due to financial limitations. But it's probably available to more than realize it.
No need for a [sic]. That is how the rest of the English-speaking world spells it.
> Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines. Sans the "general inter…
Computer parts and tech magazines might be inevitable detritus of any office/area focused on working with technology. Do I have to lockup my programming books and hide away the spare components I'm working with?
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A horrifying reminder of the capability for critical thought of the general population! This is to be expected though. Removing gender associations is going to be seen as an attack on existing peoples' upbringings. Anything that falls into that category is going to be a painful fight.
There's an effect I forget the name of. Basically, if you give someone something and then some time later take it away they experience anger. When you give rights to one group, you have to remove them from another (important: even if the second group had rights that were not rightfully theirs). Men previously and incorrectly had exclusive access to jobs (and votes, and so forth). By giving women fair chance to those…
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I'll confirm this anecdotally. My sister was extremely good at math and science... until the end of middle school, when she started hanging out in earnest with her friends. Her friends thought that any intellectual interest was nerdy and stupid, and my sister acted accordingly. Now, the girl who was easily learning algebra in elementary school "just can't do math." I think that the big difference in STEM is that nerd…
It's very sad how many people (both male and female) I knew growing up were "extremely good at math and science" until they ran headlong into anti-intellectual American high school culture. I saw people who loved science fiction spiral into useless party culture and end up with unfulfilling low-value service jobs. That's a tremendous waste of talent, and I don't think it's very much a gender issue. I favor an approac…
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How did you draw that conclusion? First of all I do not work in an environment where I do not connect with my peers, secondly I said that I do not like this culture, not that I have a problem if people do. I just understand if poeple do not like it.
That is the premise of the article.
I should be careful not to state I'm not taking the position covered by the well-worn pre-rebuttal in the article. I'm not scoffing at this phenomenon. It's real and I'm wondering: why aren't we trying to make kids immune to it?
Instead all I see is people that want to exploit it and steer people into selecting careers such that the superficial representation found on a spreadsheet makes the commentariat happy.
e: It just comes across as working to makes your metrics look good, without reaching the underlying goals the metrics are less-than-perfect at measuring. If there really are societal issues keeping people that would have otherwise entered a "tech field" out, shouldn't fixing it be about helping everyone overcome the obstacles in achieving that step of self-actualization? Instead I just see social engineering designed to balance the gender ratio.
This was a very well written and balanced article. I want to contribute a reason why I think that many men in tech hold back from fully endorsing this viewpoint. The reason is that there is a very fine line between saying that you don't have to be nerdy to be in tech, and failing to acknowledge that in general being nerdy is a disadvantage in society, and many people found a refuge in tech where they were mocked and…
Speaking as a nerd who grew up in the early 1990s: persecuted nerds do not have the right to (in any way) cordon off computer science as a refuge for their culture. But a lot of male nerds think they do!
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There's an effect I forget the name of. Basically, if you give someone something and then some time later take it away they experience anger. When you give rights to one group, you have to remove them from another (important: even if the second group had rights that were not rightfully theirs). Men previously and incorrectly had exclusive access to jobs (and votes, and so forth). By giving women fair chance to those…
This article isn't talking about taking away "exclusive access to jobs" from men. It's hinting at separating geek culture from software development. Let's be honest: the two interests correlate well. You're talking about stripping many practitioners of software development from their culture. Why is that just?
Where did you get that from? I was merely attempting a theory (not excusing) on why these people act they do toward equality.
We've known this for a while, it boils down to: barbies. Fixing this problem is really, really hard. Assuming I gave my daughters equal access to both barbies and chemistry kits, which would they choose? Kids want to fit in with their friends. Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. What does that lead to? The child choosing their gender stereotype (applies both ways) so that they can fit in. It's what th…
Sewing kits, to me, sound kinda boring. Why not Lego for everyone? Lego is great! It stimulates creativity and you can do whatever you want with it. If you want to play with cars you can make em out of Lego. If you want to roleplay, you can make buildings and use the Lego minifigures! Doesn't that give you the best of both worlds? Heck, even if you're not interested in building your own stuff from scratch, a lot of s…
Although at some point, i discovered that superglue was much easier than sewing.
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It doesn't hurt my feelings. It does, however, make it harder for most women to participate here. The correct way to handle it is to either find out my gender or speak as if you do not know what it is instead of assuming I am male. If you do not know my gender, it takes very little effort to speak in a way that admits you do not know it: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-fool-be...
> It does, however, make it harder for most women to participate here I've seen many people make this claim, but I haven't seen anyone back it up with evidence. What do you mean by "harder"? Do you mean "more difficult"? In what way? Right now, I believe claims that tiny linguistic differences create meaningful barriers to female participation in technology are all specious. I could be convinced otherwise, but have s…
Years ago, I joined an urban planning forum. It had been around for 10 years. It was the most prominent forum of its kind in the world. The majority of members were in Canada or the Continental US. The owner was frustrated that he did not have more of a global membership. He was not very socially savvy. He had explicitly stated his desire to have more international participation. I felt okay with kind of fucking with the group culture to hand him his wish. I was there about 6 months and was not a moderator when membership generally began to rise, but in particular international membership went up.
Part of how that happened:
I was a nightowl living in California, so I was often on late at night, like midnight my time, when it was the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast. Most members were not only living in the East Coast to West Coast time zones of the continental US, they were on the East Coast. It was a professional forum of nerds. So they were there mostly during working hours, 8am to 8pm east coast time (8-5 for east coast and west coast inclusive, since it is 8pm on the east coast when it is 5pm here).
So one of the cultural things going on was that if anyone was there during the evening or weekend, they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours. It was clear to my mind that this was a barrier to participation for anyone living outside of those time zones -- that potential international members would already be self conscious about being "different" and they would be online during their normal work hours, which were outside that 8-8 east coast timeframe. So the ugly comments about how terrible it was to post outside of those times was something I actively hunted down and fucked with. I threw it in everyone's face that I was there after midnight, that I was a woman and a student and so on (ie I emphasized that I was demographically different from the predominantly male employed professionals to help make foreigners more comfortable with being different). I was the only person having real time conversation with our one active Australian member when it all began.
That changed. I successfully killed the "I am here outside those hours, so I must be a lozer" meme and International membership went up.
I cannot "prove" that me going after that small linguistic detail directly caused it. I can tell you the forum existed for 10 years before I arrived. The forum owner had bitched for years about his desire to have more international members. Six months after I joined, international membership went up. I set it as a goal to make it happen as a gift to the forum owner since I felt he was doing good work and had explicitly expressed a desire for it.
So I believe strongly that I am right. I am also, as far as I can tell, the highest ranked woman here in terms of karma score, apparently by quite a stretch. So perhaps I know something about how to make that work here, if you want to believe my performance is in some way indicative that I know what I am talking about. Or you can do what a great many people do to me and wave it off as "luck" or "coincidence" or whatever and not indicative that my mental models have any kind of sound basis. That gets done to me quite a lot.