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

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

#21

Post by primitivesuave »

notastartup wrote: post #10
primitivesuave wrote: post #9

I run a private education organization that teaches kids how to code at a physical facility, and we get a gender breakup of male and female students that is similar to that of the industry (around 80 - 20). Because of the overwhelming male presence, it is difficult to make a comfortable learning environment for the female students, who may often feel uncomfortable, at odds with, or ostracized by pseudo-masculine effo…

This is extremely sexist and needlessly hostile. It's like being male and interested in coding is somehow associated with all the stereotypical male attributes which turns off women from coding. Ah, so we need to have boys acting less like boys because it's clearly why we don't have more women in tech. So we all need to teach teen boys to become meterosexual so it can be more inviting and suitable for females? I thin…

I respect your idealism and definitely did not want to sound sexist or hostile with my comment. I completely agree that segregating by gender doesn't do much good when it comes to lifelong skills of working with the opposite gender, but at the age group levels that we deal with, it becomes incredibly difficult to handle the disparity in average maturity levels between genders.

I merely wanted to point out a practical experience and was not trying to advocate gender segregation.

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

#22

Post by kamaal »

olefoo wrote: post #3

There is nothing about programming computers that is gender specific; in fact it seems kind of weird and awkward that we have to discuss this at all. Given that so many of the foundational figures of the field ( Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, etc. ) were female, the fact that programming and IT became an almost entirely male-dominated profession is suspicious, and should make us question the attitudes and social constru…

Its not about programming. Or anything to do with the profession. Its has much to do with the culture.

In my first project near impossible work conditions and deadlines were placed on us. Most of us had to make extreme sacrifices(health wise, socially and in many aspects)- The other option was being out of the job. The problem is you need a supporting family. Here in India, its difficult for women at least socially and even in your own family to justify working whole nights, weekends and late hours consistently. You can try to fight that when you are single, it gets near impossible to do that after marriage and kids. Plus women have to take breaks in their 20's and 30's for maternity reasons.

At the other end, super success in software depends on all this start up culture which is very hard on most women.

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

#23

Post by ps4fanboy »

notastartup wrote: post #7

To the Boys of HackerNews: I am a Male Founder who Codes but no one cares because there's too many of us and that makes us not at all interesting. Have women have ever been robbed of being able to code like voting? Why does it receive so much attention? What adversity did they need to overcome to be where they are? Is it physical like someone who suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome or glaucoma overcoming their disabi…

While I agree with what your saying, the common man has only very recently and in most places 50 years more than the common woman been able to vote. It is a relatively new invention.

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

#24

Post by flebron »

wetmore wrote: post #15
notastartup wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely sexist and needlessly hostile. It's like being male and interested in coding is somehow associated with all the stereotypical male attributes which turns off women from coding. Ah, so we need to have boys acting less like boys because it's clearly why we don't have more women in tech. So we all need to teach teen boys to become meterosexual so it can be more inviting and suitable for females? I thin…

Yes explain to me how keeping things the way they are will fix the situation.

I will do that as soon as you explain how treating female coders as if they were freaks, segregating them in their own class, decreases the problem of integration of more female coders in tech.

Perhaps the issue of "feeling alien to the community" would be improved by, you know, not alienating females from the community, with sexist behavior such as this.

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

#25

Post by Zombieball »

notastartup wrote: post #7

To the Boys of HackerNews: I am a Male Founder who Codes but no one cares because there's too many of us and that makes us not at all interesting. Have women have ever been robbed of being able to code like voting? Why does it receive so much attention? What adversity did they need to overcome to be where they are? Is it physical like someone who suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome or glaucoma overcoming their disabi…

Unfortunately I believe there are gender stereo types in our culture which make many men view women as inferior coders (both in the workplace situation and an interview environment) simply because they are female.

A situation where I have experienced this first hand is where a fellow SDE (female) colleague by chance happened to sit at a desk next to one of the VPs at our organization. Many people instinctively thought she was the VP's assistant and spoke to her as such. She was a fantastic coder, had a PhD, but because she sat next to a man in a position of power was assumed to be an assistant.

Not trying to sound like a feminist (I am far from one) but I believe what women are being robbed of is 'equality'. It is a real problem in our industry.

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

#26

Post by kaybe »

jmnicolas wrote: post #17
notastartup wrote: post #7

To the Boys of HackerNews: I am a Male Founder who Codes but no one cares because there's too many of us and that makes us not at all interesting. Have women have ever been robbed of being able to code like voting? Why does it receive so much attention? What adversity did they need to overcome to be where they are? Is it physical like someone who suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome or glaucoma overcoming their disabi…

Yes exactly. I'm a bit fed up with people advocating more women in . As far as I can tell these same people don't complain that teachers and nurses jobs are mainly occupied by women. Everybody seem to agree that a nursing job is not attractive for most men. Maybe the reason that women are few in tech is because these professions are not attractive to them.

I heard tons of people complain about that, though for other reasons - it would be really good for boys (and their social and academic performance) to have male rolemodels, the argument goes.

Consider the reasons for non-attractiveness. In the case of nursing, it's bad pay as well, presumably. In the case of IT, the general unfriendliness is one reason, though there might be others. Shouldn't we just remove the removable ones?

(I don't first-up reject the theory that there might be 'biological' reasons that apply to the majority of people, but we won't really find out until we try. And there will always be outliers.)

(Why, you ask? So that when I walk into a room, I could be the boss too, and not automatically be tagged with 'secretary'. It's about status and power in the end, maybe?)

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

#27

Post by pjmlp »

kamaal wrote: post #22
olefoo wrote: post #3

There is nothing about programming computers that is gender specific; in fact it seems kind of weird and awkward that we have to discuss this at all. Given that so many of the foundational figures of the field ( Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, etc. ) were female, the fact that programming and IT became an almost entirely male-dominated profession is suspicious, and should make us question the attitudes and social constru…

Its not about programming. Or anything to do with the profession. Its has much to do with the culture. In my first project near impossible work conditions and deadlines were placed on us. Most of us had to make extreme sacrifices(health wise, socially and in many aspects)- The other option was being out of the job. The problem is you need a supporting family. Here in India, its difficult for women at least socially a…

I would say it depends a lot on the country as well.

In many European countries those conditions would suffice for a class action against the employer.

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

#29

Post by greenyoda »

smtddr wrote: post #12
notastartup wrote: post #7

To the Boys of HackerNews: I am a Male Founder who Codes but no one cares because there's too many of us and that makes us not at all interesting. Have women have ever been robbed of being able to code like voting? Why does it receive so much attention? What adversity did they need to overcome to be where they are? Is it physical like someone who suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome or glaucoma overcoming their disabi…

You sound like you don't believe there is any significant gender bias or sexism in the tech field. Is that what you think?

I'm skeptical that drawing special attention to female founders who are coders will reduce gender-biased behaviors. The most effective way of combating gender bias is for the people who run companies to stop tolerating that kind of behavior in their employees. Do you have an employee who makes disparaging remarks to another employee based on their sex? Then tell them to cut it out, and if they don't, fire them. Do your hire "brogrammers" who behave like frat boys at work? Then start hiring people who can behave in a civilized manner in professional environments. That's the only way that real progress will be made.

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

#30

Post by shangxiao »

smtddr wrote: post #19

To the author of this blog and all ladies reading this: I'm sorry, but just like stories around racial diversity in tech you're about to see a bunch of HN comments making _EVERY EXCUSE CONCEIVABLE_ , and then some, to dismiss your concerns and/or say this blog is doing damage instead of helping. I think they're all wrong, but I can't argue against all of them. All I can do is upvote your supporters and downvote the d…

Your condescending attitude just makes you sound like a tool, not a hero
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