Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coding Like a Girl

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 169 posts

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#151

Post by stephenboyd »

c22 wrote: post #142
stephenboyd wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's the author speaking at a programming conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6071MRIzCA

As you can see, she is appropriately attired.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#152

Post by dkuntz2 »

lmz wrote: post #104
rfrey wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being short is a natural impediment to playing professional basketball. Being female is not a natural impediment to programming. So, even if you're correct that gender assumptions are valid (and apparently OK) because of the prevailing gender makeup, it is not impossible to fix - you fix it by changing the prevailing gender makeup. (I don't agree with that assumption, but let's grant it for the sake of exploring the…

> Being short is a natural impediment to playing professional basketball. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggsy_Bogues

Impediment doesn't mean you can't work around it, it just means it's more difficult.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#153

Post by stephenboyd »

bhayden wrote: post #115
spiffyman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. You might get disregarded as a "business guy" if you show up to a meetup in a suit. But it's just as likely that people will just assume you're in financials. One of the better Python speakers I know of shows up everywhere in a suit. But women consistently report not being taken seriously when wearing dresses.

I don't think a woman in a dress is analogous to a man in a suit. Here is a woman in a dress, something she might wear to convention about programming if she wanted to wear a dress: http://dressforweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Korean-ver... It's fairly modest and not loudly styled. This is not the same style of dress as a man wearing a suit. The equivalent for a woman would be this: http://www.acrdepos.com/wordp…

This is the author at a programming conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6071MRIzCA

You might say that it's loudly styled, but somehow this guy never has people doubting his programming cred: https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1...

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#154

Post by xorcist »

mgkimsal wrote: post #112
rfrey wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the asshat behaviour you describe affected you as much as any individual woman is affected by similar behaviour. I know (in the abstract sense) the people you're describing and they make me mad. That said, if the kind of behaviour you're describing affects women much more than men, can we still say there's sexism at work? Say I pull some statistics out of thin air: say 1 of 20 men get harassed like you descr…

How do you define "affects women more than men"? More women are affected by it? Women are affected by is disproportionately, as a percentage of their office population? Some other measure? Ahhh - you're talking about proportionality. I'm still not sure, but would need to see concrete examples. The particular article I'd read, the 'examples' were "I wasn't promoted", "I felt bullied" and "my ideas weren't taken seriou…

The difference is between "what an asshat" and "I don't seem to belong".

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#155

Post by Mithaldu »

foldr wrote: post #87
Mithaldu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a certain specific londonish dialect i'm thinking of, but don't know the name for, so i abbreviated it to chavs, but feel free to extrapolate my thoughts. My problem also isn't the people, my problem is that i cannot fucking make out the words they are trying to form, but i guess you can ignore that too despite me literally saying that in my previous post.

I'm not ignoring it, but the whole point is that the reasons that people give for liking/disliking a particular dialect are often not the real reasons. I think it's pretty telling that you chose to identify one of your example dialects using "chav", which is basically a term of abuse directed at a certain social group which isn't dialectically all that homogenous.

So i didn't want to leave you hanging, and i figured out thanks to the help of gaius below that i wasn't talking about chavs, but cockney, as exampled in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o

It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing their words in the first place).

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#156

Post by Consultant32452 »

TACIXAT wrote: post #120
polarix wrote: post #46

Something is twisted in all these discussions of gender in tech, it really seems like we're just going around in circles over and over again. I've never read anything that felt like a particularly insightful explication of the cause here. Is it possible there's something more fundamental in society that this phenomenon is merely a symptom of, and that the fix is not going to be something like "just challenge yourself…

This is actually the first gender in tech article I've really liked. A lot of them off no solutions or advice, this one did. As for detecting and resisting unconscious bias, I've worked hard to lessen the anger I feel day to day and know it is possible to correct subconscious reactions. Humans are awesome at categorizing information and making assumptions. I'm sure the ability to recognize patterns helped us to survi…

Your appearance is a form of communication. If you communicate message X to me I'm going to respond accordingly to X until you somehow communicate you'd prefer response Y. As soon as you do I'm happy to adapt and give you what you want, but it's unfair to chastise me for giving you a response appropriate to X first.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#157

Post by foldr »

Mithaldu wrote: post #155
foldr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not ignoring it, but the whole point is that the reasons that people give for liking/disliking a particular dialect are often not the real reasons. I think it's pretty telling that you chose to identify one of your example dialects using "chav", which is basically a term of abuse directed at a certain social group which isn't dialectically all that homogenous.

So i didn't want to leave you hanging, and i figured out thanks to the help of gaius below that i wasn't talking about chavs, but cockney, as exampled in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing…

I'm not sure why you'd hate an accent just because you find it difficult to understand as (I'm guessing) a non-native speaker. It's probably just a matter of getting more practice at listening to it.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#158

Post by Mithaldu »

foldr wrote: post #157
Mithaldu wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So i didn't want to leave you hanging, and i figured out thanks to the help of gaius below that i wasn't talking about chavs, but cockney, as exampled in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing…

I'm not sure why you'd hate an accent just because you find it difficult to understand as (I'm guessing) a non-native speaker. It's probably just a matter of getting more practice at listening to it.

Because generally these people are perfectly capable of using the standard version of their language just fine. I make exceptions for people who were alive at the times of WW2, but most people who speak in heavy accents do it because they have no courtesy for their fellow humans. As for more practice: I already spent 16 years learning english to a near-native degree (among others). I'm not gonna bother trying to learn the accent of someone who probably only speaks a single language and is simply too lazy to use the standard language of their own country.

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#159

Post by TTPrograms »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #12
spcoll wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feedback makes it clear that acting feminine is considered a weakness, instead of a strength. You shouldn't be ashamed to look beautiful, wear dresses and make-up, and present cute slides with a pink theme and occasional kitty picture. This is what the whole "like a girl" is about: if you express your femininity in the things you do and the way you look, people associate that with incompetence.

Exactly. If you were to make a stereotypically "masculine" presentation, you wouldn't get negative comments on it.

So you believe that a presentation can be identified with a gender?

Re: Coding Like a Girl

#160

Post by skj »

kelukelugames wrote: post #18
skj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with the vocal comment, many people get annoyed with female voices when they're in a supposedly serious context. But the thing is that it's not actually some fundamentally annoying or distracting quality of the voice- it's that it's different from what they expect: a male voice. "This American Life" had a great segment about this, targeting "vocal fry" in particular: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-a…

I think vocal fry is pretty annoying period, but let's assume it is gender specific. That doesn't mean having poor inflection is a female only problem. Read any public speaking guide or speak to a speech coach, fixing rising inflection is one of the first recommended fixes. If anyone is interested, I found this book very useful: http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947...

That's the whole point: it's not gender specific. But when people complain about it, the targets are almost always women.
Post reply on HN