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My positive experience as a woman in tech

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Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#161

Post by ksenzee »

SuperComputing wrote: post #111
indifferentalex wrote: post #19

10/10 Will read again. The sexism debate has indeed painted a bleak picture, people so often try to show a different side of the picture but end up using the wrong words or simply adding ambiguity to the discussion, most of the time only making the matter more complicated, and worst of all, pulling us even further from a potential solution. This one showed us not only a potential solution, but also proved it's effect…

And the "sexism" debate was stirred by people who were only tangentially involved in Tech, like the PR person "Adria Richards". If you listen to actual women with actual Math, CS, or EE degrees, you'll hear a different story.

Right. My title is Senior Software Engineer, with the corresponding experience and salary, but since my degrees are not in one of those three fields, I'm only tangentially involved in tech. Thanks for providing such a succinct demonstration of the kind of dismissal "actual women" in the field get to hear all the time.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#162

Post by [deleted] »

jkot wrote: post #25
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #6

Sexism is not "over-rated" OECD's Social Institutions and Gender Index Is at http://www.genderindex.org , and is a litany of baked in prejudice, violence, lack of access to education, lack of access to property and other normal legal rights. When we compare the lot of a 16 yo girl in Rwanda to a High schooler in SF, yes it is hard to find where the High schooler is having problems, but we just have to look at the rat…

Poor and oppressive countries (India, Ukraine, Saudi...) typically have more women in tech compared to western countries. There are not that many job options, and IT is often only reasonable option to get western salary.

[deleted]

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#163

Post by venomsnake »

jkot wrote: post #25
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #6

Sexism is not "over-rated" OECD's Social Institutions and Gender Index Is at http://www.genderindex.org , and is a litany of baked in prejudice, violence, lack of access to education, lack of access to property and other normal legal rights. When we compare the lot of a 16 yo girl in Rwanda to a High schooler in SF, yes it is hard to find where the High schooler is having problems, but we just have to look at the rat…

Poor and oppressive countries (India, Ukraine, Saudi...) typically have more women in tech compared to western countries. There are not that many job options, and IT is often only reasonable option to get western salary.

I am not quite sure why you lump Ukraine with the others.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#164

Post by blowski »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #152
blowski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Sexism is not identical to misogynism. Where the latter is about being nasty, sexism is believing something about somebody solely based on their gender. So if I assume you don't like pizza and football because you're female, so instead buy you frozen yoghurt, I'm being sexist even if it's with the nicest of intentions. We're all human and we all make mistakes, but sometimes people blow those mistakes out of…

Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct? Consider the following procedure: 1) For a woman I don't know, I buy her frozen yogurt. 2) For a man I don't know, I buy him pizza. Now suppose my stereotypes are actually accurate - i.e., P(likes froyo > pizza|woman) > 0.5 and P(likes pizza > froyo | man) > 0.5. This procedure, based purely on stereotypes, will make everyone happier than flipping a…

> Is it sexism to make assumptions that are probabilistically correct?

Yes it's sexist, because assuming something about somebody based purely on their gender is precisely what sexism is. However, sometimes, in the face of limited data and limited resources to gather more data, being sexist might be the best possible course of action.

The problem with the stereotypes of gender is that you are dealing with huge numbers of people. Even if a well-conducted survey reveals that 99.9% of women prefer frozen yoghurt to pizza, then there's still around 3.5 million women in the world that prefer pizza to frozen yoghurt.

So the best possible way to decide whether to buy pizza or frozen yoghurt for a woman is to ask her. However, if you had to make a snap decision then, yes, you should go with the statistically more likely option and if you get it wrong then she should understand why you did it.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#165

Post by vinceguidry »

> It takes a lot of introspection to see one’s internalized stereotypes. Therefore, a lot of the time, you cannot be sure if you have experienced sexist behavior, and there is no way to find out for sure, since the perpetrator doesn’t know either.

I had the thought today that the sexism debate is actually a war, but it's not a war fought by humans against other humans. It's fought by groups of neurons against other groups of neurons, our conscious minds are just pawns.

Many times, those groups of neurons war inside the same person's brain. Biological warfare is fierce.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#166

Post by eric-hu »

userium wrote: post #133
indifferentalex wrote: post #19

10/10 Will read again. The sexism debate has indeed painted a bleak picture, people so often try to show a different side of the picture but end up using the wrong words or simply adding ambiguity to the discussion, most of the time only making the matter more complicated, and worst of all, pulling us even further from a potential solution. This one showed us not only a potential solution, but also proved it's effect…

Based on discussions we have had with women in tech at https://keepwomen.com , it's not just sexism, but many women leave tech due to working conditions (low salary, no advancement), work-life balance (too much travelling, commuting), or the company environment (poor cultural "fit"). Some solutions for retaining women in tech are e.g. flexible working hours, personal development opportunities and workforce diversity.

Those are the same reasons I've heard for why we have a young age distribution in tech relative to the age distribution of the general population.

Poor industry retention seems to be a problem across the board.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#167

Post by blowski »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #109
blowski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Sexism is not identical to misogynism. Where the latter is about being nasty, sexism is believing something about somebody solely based on their gender. So if I assume you don't like pizza and football because you're female, so instead buy you frozen yoghurt, I'm being sexist even if it's with the nicest of intentions. We're all human and we all make mistakes, but sometimes people blow those mistakes out of…

>So if I assume you don't like pizza and football because you're female, so instead buy you frozen yoghurt, I'm being sexist even if it's with the nicest of intentions. If I'm buying my young niece a toy, and see two otherwise equal toys except one is blue and one is pink, is it sexist to choose the pink one? I have to make a choice, there is no non-colored toy. I only think it crosses into sexism if my niece told me…

> If I'm buying my young niece a toy, and see two otherwise equal toys except one is blue and one is pink, is it sexist to choose the pink one?

It would be sexist if you bought the pink one thinking "She's a girl, she'll prefer pink to blue" because you would be assuming something based solely on her gender.

The best course of action might be to ask her "Do you want the blue one or the pink one?". But maybe you couldn't, and so you used your knowledge of your niece and of little girls in general, and you go with the pink one.

Sometimes we have no choice but to use our stereotypes, but whenever possible we should get more data rather than just making assumptions.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#168

Post by Joeboy »

ksenzee wrote: post #161
SuperComputing wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the "sexism" debate was stirred by people who were only tangentially involved in Tech, like the PR person "Adria Richards". If you listen to actual women with actual Math, CS, or EE degrees, you'll hear a different story.

Right. My title is Senior Software Engineer, with the corresponding experience and salary, but since my degrees are not in one of those three fields, I'm only tangentially involved in tech. Thanks for providing such a succinct demonstration of the kind of dismissal "actual women" in the field get to hear all the time.

> since my degrees are not in one of those three fields, I'm only tangentially involved in tech

That conclusion cannot reasonably be inferred from the post you are responding to.

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#169

Post by zeveb »

cubano wrote: post #27

Here is my personal experience with the fringes of this issue over a lifetime of watching it play out before my eyes... If a female is attracted to the guy, things he says or does are considered "cute", "flirtatious", and/or "interesting". If not, the same actions are often considered "creepy", "jerkish", and yes even "sexist". I think its just human nature to perceive things in this way, and since women grow up in s…

> If a female is attracted to the guy, things he says or does are considered "cute", "flirtatious", and/or "interesting".

> If not, the same actions are often considered "creepy", "jerkish", and yes even "sexist".

In my experience, the exact same thing is true with the sexes switched: behaviour which I find attractive in a woman I find attractive is awful in a woman I don't find attractive.

I think this is probably a universal constant: we all appreciate it when someone we'd like to get closer to gets closer to us, and we all are at the very best neutral when someone we don't wish to get closer to, moves closer in.

It's not even sexual: who hasn't experienced the phenomenon of the bore at a party who just. won't. go. away?

Re: My positive experience as a woman in tech

#170

Post by m0dc »

FussyZeus wrote: post #95

Personally I've only ever witnessed sexism at play in larger companies, startup culture by it's nature I think is anti-sexist, the highly competitive market for employees combined with the sense of "who gives a shit about genders, we gotta get this thing fixed NOW" kind of makes it a defacto meritocracy. Not to say that it can't happen in startups of course, just saying in the Perfect World, a startup culture would e…

Biases come into play even when judging supposedly objective things like technical merit. In a startup environment where every new hire has a huge impact on the outcome of the company, the subconsciously perceived 'safe bet' will always be to favor the person who talks and acts the most like a young Zuckerberg.
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