Comment by SovietDissident | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SovietDissident | Hacker News Reader

SovietDissident

Similar to the putative attitude of the organizers of these conferences, colleges have bent over backwards to get more female enrollment (indeed, there are now more females going to college than males). However,

"A new report from the National Student Clearinghouse looks at degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) and finds that the share of STEM bachelor’s degrees going to women ticked down over the past decade. The biggest decline was in computer science, where women received 23 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2004 and just 18 percent in 2014. On the bright side — at least for career prospects — both men and women are slightly more likely to be majoring in STEM fields today than they were in 2004; it’s just that men have shown more growth than women."[0]

The opportunities are there for those females who want it. Maybe most of them simply don't want to go into the computer field---individual men and women have different things they want out of life and out of their careers, which is ok! Why should everyone be a computer science major? The world would be a pretty dull place.

The author's points are quite valid; I would add that you don't want to push people into a field they have no interest (or aptitude) in. It makes the person miserable and cheapens the degrees of others (a smaller consideration in tech, I'll grant you, since it's more meritocratic than some other fields).

The smallest minority is the individual. If 95% of individuals who happened to be men gave the best auditions, they should probably be given the spots. I say "probably" because if it's a private conference, the organizers can do whatever they want, and people need not attend if they don't like the speaker choices. Ultimately, if women are dissatisfied with the "boys club", they can organize their own conference across the street.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...

The opportunities are there for those females who want it. Maybe most of them simply don't want to go into the computer field

You seem to take that as a law of nature... as though it's natural for there to be a truly massive gender bias in computing, a gender bias that was far less 20 years ago and has gotten egregiously worse since roughly 2000.

The real question should be: why the hell aren't women enrolling into and graduating from CS programs?

The answer is probably enormous and systemic, but the current situation should not be seen as acceptable, IMO.

Incidentally, the same questions could (and should) be asked of, say, men in nursing. And, again, the answers are certainly enormous and systemic, starting from childhood socialization, running through peer group issues, and on and on.

> The opportunities are there for those females who want it.

This is a fallacy. The problem isn't that sexism in STEM isn't conscious choice; it's not like those nasty menfolk go out of their way to make women feel unwelcome. It's systemic, a culture where women are perceived as less technically competent, more unstable, less deserving of recognition or promotion. If our names are clearly female-gendered, our papers and conference submissions are accepted less frequently, even if the paper itself is the same. The old joke among women in STEM is that "you have to work twice as hard to get half the credit."

I've been coding for the web since 1996, professionally since 1998. I currently work as a senior software developer for a major retailer, and as you might have guessed, I'm female. Science, tech, engineer, math - all of these fields have gotten significantly more hostile towards women in the years I've been involved with them. Under the guise of "professionality" I've been stalked, harassed, invalidated and belittled - and I've experienced less problems than most of my female colleagues.

I look around at my coworkers, and of the several hundred developers and engineers there, less than 5 are women. 98% of my coworkers are male. I get talked down to by junior developers all the time; they either mistakenly assume I'm new to the field or not a developer at all. These aren't guys trying to make it difficult. They're operating under flawed, sexist assumptions, and that's what makes working in STEM an uphill battle. How many times can you get the message "you're inferior" before you believe it? 100? 1000?

I have a 12 year old cousin who loved programming the first time she tried it. She's smart and driven and would be a great developer. She's already given up on it; would you like to know why? Because she's isolated as a female geek and was teased about being a girl. Arguing that if we don't like it, we can just organize our own whatever is dismissive and reductive. You know what happens when we organize our own whatever? We get harassed and threatened and tons of shit heaped on us because we're women. So don't tell us that it's "there if we want it," because it's not.

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