Live data from Hacker News

To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

susieye.com

121–130 of 238 posts

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#121
post #96
post #47

Tongue in cheek, but I think there might be a point here struggling to see the light of day... Why? I mean, why would women want to get into coding? If one is not already working with computers, from the outside world, its a crappy job, and the money isn't better than many other things. Not to mention the insane hours culture. Women have a clean sheet choice. Why work in an office, killing your brain on hugely comple…

[deleted]

" All the money, fame, and the joy of owning your own company..."

Yeah, I think maybe you're the one that is slightly deluded. OP offered a realistic view of what a coding job often implies, and why it might not be that glamorous to many women.

You pretend they're all going to own their own company and make a ton of money.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#122
post #47

Tongue in cheek, but I think there might be a point here struggling to see the light of day... Why? I mean, why would women want to get into coding? If one is not already working with computers, from the outside world, its a crappy job, and the money isn't better than many other things. Not to mention the insane hours culture. Women have a clean sheet choice. Why work in an office, killing your brain on hugely comple…

I'm a high-end coder working as a consultant for a major international bank (etc etc etc), and your assertions / sweeping generalisations about coders are wrong; first, not all of us are weirdos; most are married or dating, and we work regular 9 - 5:30 days (with some flexibility). Definitely not a mine (although I wouldn't mind a bit more natural light, but then, office buildings).

If it was a 'terrible way to be', I wouldn't be working here; I like my job. Also, if they try to lure me in with bouncy toys, I'll tell 'em to fuck right off - that probably means the other working conditions, pay, etc are shit.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#123
post #77
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Plus women have to take breaks in their 20's and 30's for maternity reasons." Women aren't required to have kids?

A better reply would have been "we'd like mean to take paternity leave too". I sometimes wonder if HN commentors ever think that maybe their comments might leave them open to legal liability in some future case.

>> I sometimes wonder if HN commentors ever think that maybe their comments might leave them open to legal liability in some future case

While I agree with advising caution, and disagree with the gp sentiment, I don't think that mild gender insensitivity and poor communication skills are as of yet civil or criminal offenses on comment sections.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#124
post #116
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is mainly because nursing isn't a 'career' kind of a job. You can make $50K an year, but 10 years down the lane, now what? While your engineering friend is aiming to sell his start up for some millions of dollars, your job doesn't even have the scope to even attempt anything like that even if you wanted to.

Nursing has career path through specialist forms of nursing (intensive care, nurse-prescribers, etc) to management of teams, wards, hospitals, health trusts, etc. That's what a normal career. Most people don't have the sell-the-company lottery as an option.

Actually my point was, if you look at it carefully- Professions like teaching and nursing do have a degree of career progression, but that looks super pale in comparison with any anything in the engineering domain.

The argument is similar to the discussion about Wall Street traders and Programmers. Note each of those folks at the Wall Street are taking back millions in bonuses each year. Yet we are to them a nursing-like profession, what the nursing profession is to us.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#125
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

primitivesuave was literally recounting their own experience with young children; are they "sexist", or is describing reality just not to your liking? What does "acting like boys" even mean, may I ask? primitivesuave was taking about the toxic masculinity that involves macho superiority and violence, sorry if it upsets you that that's what masculinity involves. primitivesuave wasn't talking about genitals, they were…

primitivesuave's post is fraught with unconscious sexism. That is the problem. First he generalizes that all adolescent males put on "pseudo-masculine efforts". No they don't. That's just as much a stereotype as "all girls suck at coding" or whatever stereotype-du-jour militant feminists are raging about this week. Maybe a few of the students put on "displays" that he considers to be "pseudo-masculine efforts". That…

I'm not saying all males put on pseudo-masculine efforts, I'm saying it only takes one kid who makes an inappropriate joke like changing "public void" to "pubic void" when we're doing a code review. In such a situation, the boy will suppress a smile while he innocently exclaims he made a typo, while his friends all giggle innocuously. If you don't work with kids, you will not fully understand how the adolescent mind manifests itself in the classroom environment, and how difficult it is to suppress it. In the situation I just described, all we can do is mentally make a note to not call that same student up again. And in this situation and all related ones, we're dealing with a male student. Girls simply don't find stupidity that funny, and as an instructor I get pretty sick and tired of it.

I've spent the last 30 minutes defending myself on HN so I will conclude with this. We are not segregating our classes. We are not trying to shield female students from the realities of the world. We are simply making a business decision to offer an alternative environment for our female students who would otherwise have to deal with awkward situations like the one I just described. The all-girls classes are ridiculously chill and my instructors leap at the opportunity to teach them, because girls in middle and high school are on average more attentive and respectful than their male counterparts. You can tear apart my real-world observation all you want, but that is the simple reality of it and once you open your mind beyond some idealistic vision of what education should be, you'll understand that my reasoning is not just "unconscious sexism".

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#126
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a way how to teach those adolescent males to behave like humans? If their behavior is that bad that it makes uncomfortable learning environment for other students, then it needs to be addressed. I'm woman and my experience is that most adolescent males are not apes and are able to act like human. Separating them by gender is accepting bad behavior as norm when it actually is not a norm. Young polite males…

I don't think you're thinking young enough. When's the last time you tried to control an impulsive 6th grader?

Nothing wrong with traditional classrooms and teachers for those, tbh.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#127
post #103

Kudos to Susie for putting herself out there to make a point! For everyone else debating this issue: to look at the problem objectively, we have to break down the different clusters of people that need encouragement and support to get into tech/startups in order to see how we measure and fix each cluster: 1. American children of any affiliation (race, sex, gender, location) need to learn how to code, because it is th…

I dunno about 1; in a similar line, you'd have to teach them electronics, farming, carpentry, household, and how to get unemployment benefits. But I'm in favor of teaching kids all of the above though.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#128

Here is my abridged comment: 1. It is important to like who you are and what you do. I am glad you are proud of being who you are, 2. But at the same time I don't like when people are calling out initiatives like "more women in tech". Look, getting a job is tough. It can be luck or qualification. I know someone is going to cite some research studies but at this point, let's just say yes we get it, a lot of assholes o…

No one is "telling" girls to do anything. You seem to recognize that the issue is bigger than "women (and men) in tech," that it's actually more about "women and men" in general, but you don't want to put any effort into thinking or learning about gender.

Organizations for girls in tech offer resources to the few girls who are actually there. I encourage you to try to find me a program that isn't completely voluntary, but I doubt you will.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#129
post #4

I hope this article goes viral. I can't believe we're still not over these stupid preconceptions that intellect has anything to do with our reproductive organs. It shouldn't have anything to do with luck, but still: Best of luck to all you girls out there!

Judging by some of my colleagues / the people I've worked with, intellect isn't a prerequisite for getting into the tech industry either :p.

Re: To the Girls of HackerNews: I am a Female Founder who Codes

#130
post #76

It would be really nice to see more females in the industry, but I rally have to ask myself if those artificial promotions will help much. I never learned to program because of some courses or because the industry needed me, I started programming because I wanted to create things. There was just a natural interest in computers and how they work, that's what drove and often still drives me today. If females have the s…

How do you make the determination that the interest is necessarily "natural" when children's minds are so pliable growing up? It's a proven fact that boys and girls are treated differently by their parents and the media, and surely their older peers...

As I said in the other replay above, the "natural" interest isn't just from growing up, but it's also the unforced way of being interested in the topic or simply getting hooked on the idea of programming.

Sure you can learn to program as you can learn to play a game or learn how to knit, but why do we have to artificially get women into the industry just to get number imbalance up? I guess the situation is simply different than here in Switzerland, because here we do all kinds of stuff to get more women into the industry but the numbers haven't really changed, so is it still "our" fault? Can't we just accept that women might not be so interested in computer science as much as most men are not interested in female-dominated professions.

I won't stop anyone promoting computer science, regardless whether it's for women or men, I'm just fed up with all the generalizations and prejudice regarding "the industry" and the fact that people simply don't want to accept that there are generally differences in interest between genders.

Post reply on HN