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Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

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Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#301

Post by mundo »

onetwotree wrote: post #289
mundo wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fewer women are interested because they don't want to work, go to school, and socialize in sexist environments This is preposterous. The field of law was exclusively male not long ago, and is around parity now. Same with medicine. You think the first women in law school and med school were welcomed and supported? Do you think female doctors and lawyers a generation ago encountered less sexism than women in tech tod…

The field of technology is undergoing exactly the same growing pains that law and medicine did some time ago. I think in the next decade or two I think we will see women achieving the same kind of representation in tech that they have in law and medicine. And as this process takes place, haters will hate, pretend there isn't a problem, and spew various kinds of sexist nonsense, just like they did when women were ente…

> Keep whining though. Maybe you'll be able to prevent the spread of the dreaded females into yet another bastion of male dominance.

I didn't say there was no problem; I said you were wrong about its cause. From that you conclude that I'm a sexist who is actively trying to keep women out of tech?

Jesus man, I know this is a contentious issue, but get a hold on yourself. I've hired and promoted female software engineers. When I left my last job, I spent nine months grooming a woman on my team to take over my job (not because she was a woman, or even because she was clearly the most qualified, but because she was the one who expressed interest in it and busted ass to learn it and took classes to improve in areas she was weak in.) I may be a sexist or I may not be, but you're not in a position to judge based on a comment in a forum you didn't like. Maybe take a breath and remember that there are real people behind these handles, eh?

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#302

Post by PeterisP »

smt88 wrote: post #157
fdsaaf wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genome-wide clustering algorithms that are run with no a priori assumptions about population structure end up discovering human population groups that match almost perfectly with self-identified "race". The claim that race doesn't exist is simply false. We can talk about whether or not it's useful to make policy decisions based on race, but if we're respecting the data, we can't say that there are no coherent human p…

Again, there is no scientific consensus on how to define race, and many scientists see it as an impossible or meaningless taxonomy[1]. That's the core problem. You've chosen to use a purely genetic definition. My assertion is that everyone is a mixture, which is true. People exist on a continuum of race without discrete borders[2]. 1. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-c... 2. http://www.natur…

The position on that continuum of race is just as correlated with the same metrics as the self-identified classification.

The issue 'race is correlated with X' is not materially affected by how exactly race (especially its borders) is defined and taxonomical problems - it's important in it's own regard, but in this regard, it's not the core problem, it's a red herring distracting from the core question of "does race affect X'; and that question is the same, with the same answers, no matter if in your analysis you choose to model race as discrete borders or as a continuum.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#303

Post by rhizome »

runeks wrote: post #218
AngrySkillzz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a member of a disadvantaged group, you often do not have the ability to identify as a professional first and a group member second. That is the effect of being disadvantaged. Other people will make your life seem primarily about being a group member. Think about dealing with sexist/sexually-charged comments, racial tension at the office. Even if you want to just be a professional, other people will get in…

> If you are a member of a disadvantaged group, you often do > not have the ability to identify as a professional first and > a group member second. That is the effect of being disadvantaged. > Other people will make your life seem primarily about being a group > member. The only power other people have over you is the ability to alter your thoughts. Thoughts, however, can be ignored. Some thoughts are just harder to…

This doesn't account for the fundamental attribution error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#304

Post by liberale »

dang wrote: post #21
sakaloda wrote: post #13

Diversity in tech will never work. You are going against reality if you think everyone has the same aptitude to be good at math/engineering. Look at the data below. SAT Math by race [1] : - Asian/Pacific Islander = 598 - White = 534 - Mexican American = 461 - Black = 429 SAT Math by gender [2] : - Men = 537 - Women = 503 [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171 [2] http://www.fairtest.org/sat-race-gender-…

This is sleight of hand. Even supposing all that "data" to be accurate, you assume your conclusion by acting as if you know what the reason for it is. But, as we all know, nothing is more highly disputed. This is not the way to an open-minded and open-hearted discussion about the truth; it's a tangent to yet another generic ideological flamewar. That violates the HN guidelines. Since you've done this repeatedly befor…

What why?

The SAT scores provided by the parent comment is official data. It is not "data" as you connote it to be. Just follow the Government stats linked he published.

The conclusion of the parent comment is not unwarranted. Tech companies pride themselves in hiring only the best and there is strong statistical correlation between SAT scores or any other standardization test vs academic/professional performance.

Tech companies want the best now, it doesn't matter if some group of people are best due to inherent awesomeness or lot of privilege or both or neither. Similarly it doesn't matter if some group of people are not among the best due to financial hardship in their families, racial biases against them.

In the current paradigm, tech companies should either hire the best or hire for diversity. They cannot do both until the underlying society has already changed.

Is pointing out racial/gender differences in SAT scores or IQ tests or in hiring at Facebook/Google/Amazon/Microsoft equivalent to being a racist?

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#305

Post by smt88 »

james-watson wrote: post #278
jondubois wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds terrible, but these things are quite rare. They should have gone straight to the police and pressed criminal charges. As a woman in the office, your main issue is that some male bosses won't take you seriously. On the other hand, if you're a woman, many bosses (female bosses and also some sympathetic male bosses) might give you extra help/special treatment (which is fair enough).

Precisely. I am completely flabbergasted by the parent comment. How can someone allow a rapist to walk free? What job is worth keeping that interferes with justice being done? Which VC can survive a lawsuit resulting from firing an employee who was raped by her direct supervisor???? These questions must be answered if the parent's story is to be believed. If the story is true, it would be international headline news…

People did not believe her. That's why she was fired. It was a he-said, she-said situation. Plenty of people didn't even believe Cosby's accusers until it was revealed that he himself had admitted to drugging and raping women.

Even if people do believe you, you're heaped with shame. Who wants to make an "international headline" out of something so painful and personal?

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#306

Post by tzs »

gadlfy wrote: post #257
tzs wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yokels A yokel is, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "an uneducated and unsophisticated person from the countryside". Do you have any reason to actually believe they were from the countryside, or do you just assume that if someone is a dipshit they obviously must be country people?

Semantics aside, how do you feel about these individual's behavior?

They were dipshits.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#307

Post by smt88 »

jondubois wrote: post #253
smt88 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the "harder" aspects are being sexually harassed and intimidated in ways that aren't possible to do to men. I have a friend who was raped by her boss, and then he raped another coworker. They were afraid of getting fired, so they didn't tell anyone. Finally her friend spoke up and was fired. (This was at a VC-backed, Silicon Valley firm, by the way.)

That sounds terrible, but these things are quite rare. They should have gone straight to the police and pressed criminal charges. As a woman in the office, your main issue is that some male bosses won't take you seriously. On the other hand, if you're a woman, many bosses (female bosses and also some sympathetic male bosses) might give you extra help/special treatment (which is fair enough).

I didn't mean to imply that it's common, but sexual harassment is much more common. I was trying to make a point about women facing a whole class of issues that men don't face.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#308

Post by Wintamute »

kbenson wrote: post #203
Wintamute wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the statement that on average women are less likely to be interested in tech careers is likely reasonable. For example, take veterinary science ... this is a rigorous and demanding area of study previously dominated by men, but now dominated by women. You can Google about this yourself, but here's an article I just found [1]. So why has this happened in the veterinary sciences, but not tech? One answer could…

> perfectly capable of moving into and dominating a technical field when that chimes with some aspect of female nature. It doesn't have to be female nature. It could just as easily be culturally encouraged nature, or a combination of the two (a culturally encouraged aspect that was originally developed from human nature, in a self reinforcing loop). > The male predilection towards abstract and systematic thinking cou…

Care to expand on what you think that horrendous reasoning could be?

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#309

Post by devhead »

RGamma wrote: post #283
goshx wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to look for the best talk you've mentioned. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRiV_b3WsoY Very good talk indeed.

What's that? "Hey, this is how we quickly engineer simple, yet inaccessible, websites whose drop-down menus break without Javascript? Look!: Your browser only needs 500MB of RAM and 2 seconds of CPU time of your laptop executing the jumbled piece of Javascript that outputs this otherwise trivial HTML and CSS without regard to what these standards actually are intended for!" "Loading..."

tangential argument identified, watch out for this angular hater who appears slightly off topic.

Re: Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech

#310

Post by digler999 »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #207
redthrowaway wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If there is no gender parity, there is a problem. This seems to be an extraordinary claim made in the complete absence of evidence. Is it a problem that there are more women going into early childhood education or biology, but more men going into petroleum engineering? Why? Why aren't men and women allowed to express their preferences without it being pathologized?

It wouldn't be a problem if inequality wasn't influenced strongly by negative factors for women. The tech industry is rife with evidence of hostility toward women; IT Barbie and gendered toy marketing are other examples of how women are not on equal footing with regards to entering this industry. And there is also the problem of women being paid less to do the same job. To paint a picture that says the current landsc…

> and gendered toy marketing

Why don't you go into the toy business with androgynous products and let's see how you do ?

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