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What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

nytimes.com

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Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#431

Post by magicalist »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #430
magicalist wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't follow in the slightest. There's more to "dominating" an industry than being effective at a job (I'd put that fairly low on the list as long as you hit some threshold, actually).

What are more important reasons for dominating in the industry [other than being effective at a job]?

Are promotions handed out to only the worthy? Are technical decisions always made by the expert that should have been there? Is every interview candidate perfectly evaluated and ranked relative to their competitors? Are only expertly programmed and well tested code bases valued at billions of dollars?

Of course not. Political skills, connections, self promotion, being in the right place at the right time etc etc are all hugely important. Ask anyone giving advice on everything from getting a job to advancing your career to funding your startup. Within a huge (huge) swath of ability, your technical chops just aren't correlated with your eventual success.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#432

Post by mpweiher »

robwilliams wrote: post #393
mpweiher wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's inverted about "bumbling idiot male hacker"?

>a trope that typically applies to males is applied to a female character, or the other way around (Gender-Inverted Trope) If the trope is "basement dwelling male nerd = good hacker" then they're inverting it and making the female a good hacker.

They're both excellent hackers. In addition, she is cool, whereas he is a bumbling idiot responsible for comic relief.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#433

Post by AdeptusAquinas »

omonra wrote: post #422
AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where my political orientation comes into it. Also note I am not from the US, so it is unlikely I fit into whatever weird party conceptions you have over there anyway :) The point I was making that increasing numbers and diversity in something means more stuff is produced and there is greater innovation. It means the pool of candidates for a given role is larger, allowing better selection. This is all self-e…

Ok - you think so, I don't. So we can agree to have a difference of opinion. However - on my side is every single real-life example of success in tech. EVERY SINGLE successful technology company was NOT diverse (and only once they get big enough to be targeted by diversity scammers that they start to pay lip service to this). Therefore if diversity was indeed at all important, wouldn't you be able to point to example…

My argument is that correlation doesn't imply causation. Just because all current examples are biased does not mean that the only way to do things is to be biased, right?

To put it another way, the concept of disruptive change is when some company does something different than all the other companies have done up to that point. I imagine uber, airbnb et al being told by someone that the 'empirical evidence is 100% against them' as well.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#434

Post by robwilliams »

mpweiher wrote: post #432
robwilliams wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a trope that typically applies to males is applied to a female character, or the other way around (Gender-Inverted Trope) If the trope is "basement dwelling male nerd = good hacker" then they're inverting it and making the female a good hacker.

They're both excellent hackers. In addition, she is cool, whereas he is a bumbling idiot responsible for comic relief.

You're missing the point, "cool female hacker" isn't a trope.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#435

Post by 13thLetter »

robwilliams wrote: post #434
mpweiher wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're both excellent hackers. In addition, she is cool, whereas he is a bumbling idiot responsible for comic relief.

You're missing the point, "cool female hacker" isn't a trope.

The original comment suggests that it quite definitely is a trope.

(Which is fine, of course. But let's not kid ourselves that we're breaking media stereotypes that were gone years ago.)

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#436

Post by belovedeagle »

Mz wrote: post #402
belovedeagle wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would make ugly comments about clearly not having a life that they were posting there outside of work hours. How is this a "small linguistic detail"? It has nothing whatsoever to do with using 'he' as a gender-neutral pronoun; it's on a completely different level.

They did not think it was a big deal. It was self deprecating humor, aimed at themselves. It certainly wasn't intended to imply anything about anyone else. If I had tried to convince people that it was something that was going to make foreigners hesitant to post, I would have been dismissed. I didn't bother to try to convince anyone I was right. I felt that the forum owner's clearly stated desire to have more interna…

> misgendering women

You're being dishonest by assuming the answer to the question. I don't believe that using 'he' "misgenders" women at all, because it doesn't.

Re: What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

#437

Post by sridca »

magicalist wrote: post #429
sridca wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very fact that your previous comment was misinterpreted by tptacek to the point of castigating the imaginary nerds to give up their imaginary rights to "cordon off computer science as a refuge free from nerdiness" indicates to me that those people who are wont to blame the men in tech have little empathy to begin with. The nerd culture has been one of the most inclusive cultures I've been with. As esr wrote, "No…

And Jefferson wrote "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." . just because someone famous described a culture certainly doesn't mean it's true universally.

Of course not. The provided quote from Eric S. Raymond -- who, in my mind, is more of someone who intelligently analyzes these matters better than most people than is someone popular/ famous/ worshipped -- is to illustrate the 14 years of personal experience dealing with nerds (7 years in India; 7 years in the West; plus various interactions over the internet with people from other cultures) wherein it became clear, again and again, that the nerd culture has been one of the most inclusive cultures I've been with. Indeed, just in the last month I have seen two incidents where the non-nerds (the so called "women in tech") have clearly demonstrated their lack of empathy (and there have been more such incidents, outside of tech).
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