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Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

bbc.com

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Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#41

Post by wtmt »

kaitai wrote: post #35
DoreenMichele wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA, parents don't typically arrange an adult daughter's marriage without asking her what she thinks either. (She also was living with extended family, a thing Americans tend to not do either. In America, we default to the nuclear family. When it began with saying she was cooking for 8 people, I assumed she had many children. Not so.) Also, she liked to cook and if you are a woman and have a career, doing thin…

I usually find a lot to agree with in your posts, but this time I want to push back on arranged marriage = forced marriage. That's just false. Also want to push back a bit on having kids and then "just hiring other people to do everything for them". Many cultures have extended family, grandparents, other wives, other adults/older children do child care. The nuclear model is not the norm in the world or in history and…

> I want to push back on arranged marriage = forced marriage. That's just false.

As someone in India, I responded to a similar comment above explaining why such indignation and generalization would be inappropriate and incorrect. Please see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913844

Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#42

Post by scottlamb »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #22
zem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just the opposite - it's highlighting the sexism she has to face, where she is expected to put in a full day's work and also do housework, including cooking for eight people.

Presumably she had some control over her fecundity? She could also, partner with someone willing to cook meals? The whole "demanding to spend your life in work, like men have traditionally had to do" and then complaining that now you've got work and family to manage is bizarre. There's only a certain amount of time -- spend it working or raising a family, you really have to choose.

> Presumably she had some control over her fecundity? She could also, partner with someone willing to cook meals?

I wish those things could be taken for granted, but...

Fecundity: Not saying this is true for her in particular, but I suspect the woman sometimes has remarkably little say in birth control (think husbands refusing to wear a condom, doctors and pharmacists refusing to supply birth control pills, etc) or even frequency of sex (from the belief that a wife is not doing her marital duties if she refuses sex, to refusing to prosecute even violent outright rape when she does).

Partner: the article says her marriage was arranged (which I understand to be common), so I wouldn't assume she had much say in it at all:

> A year after she began working at Isro, her parents arranged her marriage to orthopaedic surgeon Dr Manjunath Basavalingappa - which meant that she suddenly had a household to run.

By the way, the article also gives a reason her husband doesn't help out with household duties (besides societal expectations that she'd do it all)...

> Dr Basavalingappa explains that as a doctor, his working day often stretches up to 18 hours, while his wife mostly worked office hours. Dakshayani seems satisfied with this explanation.

...which I find insane by itself, but it's not limited to India. I just googled "medical mistakes long shift" and found a NIH study...which defined an extended-duration shift as at least 24 hours. [1] Unsurprisingly, it found that doctors screw up less when they don't do that, and talk about setting the bar low...I'd expect >12 hours to be considered extended-duration, perhaps even 8.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705824/

Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#43

Post by toomanybeersies »

as1mov wrote: post #26
nonamechicken wrote: post #20

Related: Why women in Stem may be better off working in India and Latin America: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2... What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ India and Italy have the highest percentage of female developers: https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk...

I work in the Indian tech industry (a large service based company in the past and some small-ish startups), so perhaps I can share some insights on this topic. The reason for the somewhat balanced gender ratio here is much more mundane than what these articles would make you believe. In India, engineering is one of the "default" career paths for most poor/middle class families children for leading a stable life. It's…

> it's just a day job which helps them provide for themselves

Is there something wrong with that?

The idea that you need to super passionate for your job and practically live and breath it seems to be a fairly common attitude around HN and the tech community in general.

For me software engineering is just a job. I enjoy my work, sure, but I wouldn't do it if I wasn't getting paid. Most people in the world have a similar attitude to their work. I don't think the secretary in my office goes home and makes spreadsheets and types word documents. My friend who's a plumber doesn't go home and stick pipes together for fun.

I think that the difference is that in the West, we have more options for careers that offer a comfortable life. Trades pay well in the West, my tradie mates here in Australia make as much as I do, or even more. This isn't the case in the developing world, where there is a stark difference between white collar and blue collar wages.

Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#46

Post by sseth »

as1mov wrote: post #26
nonamechicken wrote: post #20

Related: Why women in Stem may be better off working in India and Latin America: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2... What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ India and Italy have the highest percentage of female developers: https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk...

I work in the Indian tech industry (a large service based company in the past and some small-ish startups), so perhaps I can share some insights on this topic. The reason for the somewhat balanced gender ratio here is much more mundane than what these articles would make you believe. In India, engineering is one of the "default" career paths for most poor/middle class families children for leading a stable life. It's…

I too work in the software industry in India (and have been working since the last 30 years). And i have worked for several years outside india as well.

My Indian colleagues through the years (male and female) have been no different in their commitment compared to colleagues i have worked with in Europe, US, Australia for several years.

And I should add that at least the companies i have worked in "give a shit" about women in the workforce. I don't know whether we have more women that the US - but we definitely have much fewer than there should be - so there is no need for being self-congratulatory. My company (with about 1000+ people) has several policies in place to hire more women and make it easier for them to resume after a break. And i think we are far from unique.

Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#47

Post by throwaway_12323 »

> It was a tough job made tougher by the responsibilities of an Indian wife.

First of all, Kudos to these people! I wish India regains its old culture of respecting the knowledgeable rather than dim-witted Bollywood bimbos whose only "talent" is being born with a fair complexion.

Second, what stuck out in the article was the patronizing tone of the BBC. The 'West' and its never-ending quest to look down on us 'Heathens', never fails to amuse me. I was under the assumption that this was a creation Christian 'othering', which secularized under colonial rape of India, but apparently even the Greeks thought of the Orient as being filled with exotic monsters! With Christianity, it becomes the work of devil,and thus everything in India becomes 'evil' and ruled by the goat-monster. Now everything in India is worth destroying by the enlightened 'church' of intellectuals.

See,

https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/the-most-dangerous-place-for-w...

Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#48

Post by sseth »

bluGill wrote: post #33
nonamechicken wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the USA, parents don't typically arrange an adult daughter's marriage without asking her what she thinks either. Same in India also. Arranged marriage doesn't mean forced marriage. It's unfortunate people have this perception. Even in arranged marriage, men and women agree for marriage only if they are ok.

At least the ones I have talked to understand that you don't refuse. It might be possible, but it isn't done. Of course India is a big country with a lot of people. Their culture is not completely shared. To state anything in absolute terms is probably wrong.

Everything you say about India is true, and its opposite.

For the record, i can safely say that arranged marriages without the couple even meeting were common in my parents generation upto the 60s, became unusual in my generation (I don't know of any case in my family) around the 80s/90s and now would be unimaginable in my children's generation. This is a mostly (but not completely) urban middle class experience, spanning a very large family in north and west of India.

Things are different in the North vs the South, rural vs urban, poor and rich, different religions probably and so on. We are probably the most heterogenous society on earth, so this is not surprising.

Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#49

Post by throwaway_12323 »

as1mov wrote: post #26
nonamechicken wrote: post #20

Related: Why women in Stem may be better off working in India and Latin America: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2... What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ India and Italy have the highest percentage of female developers: https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk...

I work in the Indian tech industry (a large service based company in the past and some small-ish startups), so perhaps I can share some insights on this topic. The reason for the somewhat balanced gender ratio here is much more mundane than what these articles would make you believe. In India, engineering is one of the "default" career paths for most poor/middle class families children for leading a stable life. It's…

Quite honestly, considering that most other jobs require bullshitting expertly (Humanities, Journalism)... I'm glad, Indian parents want their chidlren to do something useful with their lives.

Re: Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

#50

Post by backpropaganda »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #43
as1mov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the Indian tech industry (a large service based company in the past and some small-ish startups), so perhaps I can share some insights on this topic. The reason for the somewhat balanced gender ratio here is much more mundane than what these articles would make you believe. In India, engineering is one of the "default" career paths for most poor/middle class families children for leading a stable life. It's…

> it's just a day job which helps them provide for themselves Is there something wrong with that? The idea that you need to super passionate for your job and practically live and breath it seems to be a fairly common attitude around HN and the tech community in general. For me software engineering is just a job. I enjoy my work, sure, but I wouldn't do it if I wasn't getting paid. Most people in the world have a simi…

I think parent worded it in a way that's causing confusion. The point is that in India, tech is one of the only few ways to earn a decent salary. The average American has many more ways to earn a decent salary and thus the choice to go into tech has more to do with whether they had some interest (not passion) in tech or not for whatever reasons. Money alone is not an overwhelming factor because you can get equally well-paid elsewhere. In India, that is not the case. You can ONLY get paid well (assuming you're an average person) if you go into tech.
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