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

What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 437 posts

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#311

Post by hugh4 »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #81
dclowd9901 wrote: post #77

> Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with “Star Wars” posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor — art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines. Sans the "general inter…

Let's suppose I worked at a desk next to yours, and one day, I brought in an elaborate lego Millennium Falcon to put next to my monitor. Would you support a policy that required me to remove this icon of geekdom in the name of making the workspace more welcoming for women?

In a more traditional workplace, such as a law firm, your boss would tell you to take your Milennium Falcon home because it's unprofessional. Professionalism is a virtue which is deeply underrated by the computational professions.

Part of "professionalism" is the recognition that you can be whoever you want to be on your own time, but while you're at work your personal identity is partially subsumed into your identity as a member of a profession. That means you dress, decorate, talk and behave in a way that's a bit more neutral and respectable than you might in your college dorm room.

This is a bit dull, sure, but it also enables all sorts of people to work together effectively by papering over their individual differences with a shared professional identity. The fact that your coworkers are of a different sex or generation to you and like different things is pretty immaterial when you're all wearing suits, sitting at undecorated desks and talking about work. Nobody will be alienated by your dick jokes, because nobody makes dick jokes.

Greater professionalism is the solution to many of the tech industry's problems.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#312

Post by Kalium »

pcl wrote: post #206
omonra wrote: post #178

I don't get something. There seems to always has been a problem of diversity in tech. Yet US has done just ok with males (white and asian) doing this stuff. Ie better than anybody else in the world. Why is this a problem (something the writer - who is a literature professor, by the way) considers a given? Is there any proof that increased diversity has any effect (except employment opportunities for the otherwise und…

Here's an economic rationale for diversity in hiring: Your project's total addressable market probably includes a diverse population of people. Meanwhile, the decisions in your project are made by the folks involved in it -- maybe some PMs, hopefully some UX and design engineers, and probably some programmers. I believe that our opinions are informed in part by our environment -- as someone living in California, I co…

> So, I conclude that a diverse team will come up with ideas that are broader, and as a result, solutions that help more people, than would a less-diverse team.

Will seems like a very strong claim to make. Can, certainly, but will? Maybe it all depends on what kind of sample size you have in mind.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#313

Post by [deleted] »

duaneb wrote: post #288
muddyrivers wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a software engineer, male, Asian. Somehow I can relate to the article. Although I was always one of the top students in math and science and enrolled the top university, I was both intimidated and kind of disgusted by the culture stereotypes at the beginning of my career. I had self doubts if I would ever become a good software engineer, since I was far from the stereotypes. Sometimes, I was deeply disgusted by…

So—first, empathy, I don't get video games at all. Second—this strikes me as fairly standard cultural shock. It's one thing to find yourself immersed in a culture, it's quite another to find that you have to immerse yourself in that culture to reach your teammates. This is an experience I have not encountered before; people have surprised me with the lengths they go to ensure a healthy diversity in company culture so…

[deleted]

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#314

Post by meowface »

brc wrote: post #172
pavornyoh wrote: post #19

> What really keeps women out of Tech? It is because they don't want to be there. The opportunity is there for everyone to take thus men and women. I actually think women have an advantage in this space and it is up to them to see it and advantage of it. As a woman, I am tired this. If you want it, go and get it. There shouldn't be any special treatment. Prove you deserve to be at the table, prove you deserve to be t…

I tend to agree with this. For whatever reason, girls just don't like the work. When I stated studying, the ratio was 50:50 split. By graduation time, it was down to 80:20 as he girls transferred into different courses or dropped out. I was friends with many - as they changed or dropped out they all said they don't like the subject matter or the type of work. By the time we all started working, it was further down to…

While 1) my own experience somewhat matches yours, and 2) it does seem, subjectively to me, like a lot of this can be attributed to women freely choosing not to go into the profession early on, you did absolutely nothing to refute any of the points in the article.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#315

Post by meowface »

mcguire wrote: post #271
gaius wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't like it much because she seems to be saying "hiding positive expressions about things you like could be helpful" Quite. The person who happens to like sci-fi isn't motivated by excluding anyone; they like it because they like it and will share their enthusiasm with anyone. Has that person intentionally done something wrong? And if not why should they be censured for it? That is the elephant in the corner of t…

" The person who happens to like sci-fi isn't motivated by excluding anyone; they like it because they like it and will share their enthusiasm with anyone. " You sure about that? I know quite a few people who are seemingly only interested in science fiction and gaming it its various forms and aggressively disinterested in anything else. Maybe you know some, too: people who use terms like "sports ball" and whatever th…

I think you'll only find that in personality types that most of society probably isn't too fond of. That's not a gender thing, that's just a pretentious, insular, obnoxious personality.

And frankly, I don't think that's very common in professional settings. A basic rule of polite conduct is respecting other people's interests and beliefs.

That said, I myself do sometimes say "sports ball" because I think it's a humorous way to address a topic I know absolutely nothing about.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#316

Post by dclowd9901 »

hugh4 wrote: post #258
dclowd9901 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you square that circle for me where you are interested in science, but not science fiction? I'm not talking about science fantasy, but fiction rooted in science and the ramifications of scientific development.

This is part of the cultural problem. Why should anyone be called upon to justify their non-interest in something?

No one's being called out. I'm curious about how it works, so I asked. Thankfully not everyone here is as reactionary as you, and I actually learned something.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#317

Post by kisstheblade »

One question. Why is it important to make, quote: "computer science more attractive to women..."?

I mean I get that the sex discrimination stuff and treatment of women we read here on hacker news is bad and of course it would help if there were more women in tech.

But other than that, if you think of the women in general and not some "diversity would be good" (which it probably would be), why the worry?

Why aren't we as worried that not enough men show interest in being nurses or kindergarten teachers or social workers? I know from experience that it would be very important to get a more "balanced" look at things in those fields.

Are we still treating women as little girls who we need to be worried about because they "only like superficial things and nail polish" and can't really take care of themselves unless we make changes so that "important stuff" is more attractive to them? I think this is a very patronizing attitude, and dismissing the stuff some women may find more interesting than "hard sciences"

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#318

Post by afarrell »

jkyle wrote: post #24
mpweiher wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. Exactly: both boys and girls get strong negative feedback for being nerdy. Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback.

> Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback. In these scenarios, boys find groups that are supportive. In their case the video game playing, computer oriented, math/physics/etc. "nerds" are one such social group. The entire point of the article is that those same groups are not supportive for women and girls. It has nothing to do with th…

So then it seems like we should focus on introducing feminine-nerdy interests into programming culture. I don't know what these are and why Star Trek wouldn't be among them though.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#319

Post by meowface »

jkyle wrote: post #24
mpweiher wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Boy nerds get beaten up, girl nerds get ostracised. Exactly: both boys and girls get strong negative feedback for being nerdy. Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback.

> Yet, somehow more boys are sufficiently interested that they find their interest more important than the negative feedback. In these scenarios, boys find groups that are supportive. In their case the video game playing, computer oriented, math/physics/etc. "nerds" are one such social group. The entire point of the article is that those same groups are not supportive for women and girls. It has nothing to do with th…

I think a lot of it is a network effect problem. As (hopefully) more nerdy girls start finding each other and providing alternatives to ostracization at a young age, they'll be able to increase their numbers.

That said, as controversial as there is, I think there is a bit of a genetic component here. Not that girls are genetically less capable of being good engineers or even of being nerds, but rather, that men may be genetically more likely to have obsessive and solitary interests, including things that seem to be borderline on the autistic spectrum.

Men are 8x more likely to be diagnosed with high-functioning autism than women are.

If there is a genetic component to this [1], then the numbers of female nerds are probably always going to be lower than female nerds. But awareness and support of female nerds is certainly important.

[1] http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/introduction/gender-an... (See section about chromosomal differences)

Post reply on HN