Hacker News Reader

Comment by exstudent2 | Hacker News Reader

I think 4chan and Silicon Valley mercantilism are themselves a symptom of public education's failure in general and towards boys in particular.

Boys are struggling in many areas in western society. They happen to be succeeding in tech. It's no wonder they're edgy about letting outsiders manipulate the field.

Silicon Valley preaches individual achievement and personal responsibility. No doubt boys often needed those skills to survive an education system designed around them. Feminism often pushes for change at the institutional level, not for individual accountability thus the tension IMO.

View on HN

I think your opinion is flawed. You seem to be giving Feminism and Education in general too little credit for their good intentions (which are basically, woman being treated equally as men) and way too much credit for their impact on society. People don't found startups because of Feminism, or something they learned in a classroom, or even from listening to some unicorn founder preaching "personal responsibility". They found it as a way to make money doing something interesting instead of super boring CRUD problems.

More than that, your opinion about education seems to not actual support the fact that fewer women are going into Computer Science and related fields than were in the 80s. If it was all down to education/politics, and there's more money now in this field than there was then, why has that ratio gone down? OTOH, if the people making the hiring decisions at startups are choosing to not hire women (consciously or not) and those decisions are trickling into the rest of the midsize companies, then maybe there's something wrong with the hiring process itself.

I'm sure their intentions are good, most people's are.

In general there are fewer men participating in higher education than women:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_306.10.a...

2012 shows enrollment at: 43% male, 57% female = 14% difference

In my original comment I said that men are succeeding in tech and not much else. I think these numbers show that.

If there are fewer women going into CS then it's not the hiring process that's the problem, it's a supply issue.

People have many reasons to create startups, but the decision to make one is way down the pipeline of where any issue lies.

What makes someone passionate enough about technology that they choose to study it, pursue it as a career and eventually maybe do a startup? That question gets answered early in life and doesn't have to be the same for everyone.

Women don't have to be interested in technology. They should be given the same opportunities as men if they are though and from everything I've ever seen in our industry, they are.

    which are basically, woman being treated equally as men

There isn't one feminism. There are at least two major camps that I can identify. There is the one you mention that promotes a policy of equality and there is another camp that promotes a policy of equity. The goals of equality and equity are not the same, the methods to achieve them are not the same and often those in those camps consider the tactics of the other camp counterproductive or ineffective.

TBH, this dichotomy isn't even a feature isolated to feminism, but is a basic feature with most -isms and movements (for or against). There are those from one side that work towards equality and those that work towards equity, and on the other side there are those that work towards inequality and those that work towards inequity.

An approach for equality or inequality starts with promoting an idea or attitude to achieve a change in treatment.

An approach for equity or inequity jumps straight to seeking for arbitrarily chosen, unequal, and unnatural changes in treatment that breeds resentment because there is no establishment of understanding between both sides. Changes in attitude follow after the changes from a need to resolve cognitive dissonance (which leads to all sorts of zany, invented and often polar justifications for the unnatural changes (because of equity promotes an "us versus them" dichotomy instead of a unifying attitude of "we"))

I can see the change in gender ratios in the 80s being highly correlated if not partially caused by the move from an East Coast Organization Man (or Woman) industry around Route 128 with companies like IBM and DEC to a West Coast Hippie Homebrew industry around Silicon Valley with companies like HP then Apple.

When the industry moved from the east cost Organization Man (or Woman) operations, the computer science and engineering career largely fell off the map at Universities.

Up until ~93 (the year of the IBM layoffs) colleges and universities were grooming you for Organization Man (or Woman) career companies like IBM, DEC, GM, Ford, Chrysler, GE, Philips, AT&T, Shell Oil, Exxon, etc.

When tech stopped being an industries made of career companies, it became a fringe industry that you only knew was viable if you knew people making a living in it. At that point we have an industry that grows far more slowly based on Granovetter's strength of weak ties and far more rapidly based on strong personal hobby interest in subject matter such that you end up learning about the myriad companies in Silicon Valley well before there was a tech media like Wired and TechCrunch standing on roof tops and declaring a gold rush.

Before Wired magazine, no one without an already strong personal interest in computers and software really knew anything about what was happening in Silicon Valley. It was essentially non-existent for an entire generation (X) and most of a second generation (Y). It's only with Millenials that Silicon Valley has been considered a good career path for those with capital in terms of technical aptitude/competence, but aren't hard core computer nerds.

I'm curious how the engineering gender ratios evolved for companies like IBM and DEC versus HP and Apple from from 1970 to 1995. Now with those figures in hand, I'm curious what impact layoffs and workforce reductions at IBM, DEC and other highly visible traditionally Organization Man (and Woman) companies had on the industry ratio and the visibility of women in the industry.

I was born in the early 80s and my formative years when I would have been thinking about "what I want to be when I grow up" were basically the mid 80s to the mid 90s. At the time, I had exactly one engineering role model from elementary school to high school, an engineer at Philips, despite the fact that I grew up in a reasonably affluent town about a 30 minutes from the IBM headquarters in upstate NY. Computer Science wasn't even on the radar career wise. You were encouraged to become a doctor, lawyer or business person. If you were interested in companies like IBM, you were encouraged to want to get an MBA and be on that side of the social divide in those Organization Man (and Woman) companies, because the engineering side wasn't considered a path towards affluence for the systems thinking gifted like medicine and law were.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com