Comment by pdabbadabba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdabbadabba | Hacker News Reader

This whole saga has been uncomfortable from the beginning--and now I'm cringing harder ever than ever. Not because I disagree with much of what Amilia has written, but just because it's painful to be, in some way, a witness to the rift that this piece makes evident.

In any case, Amilia is right to highlight this quote:

> Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.

This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim. Unless we interpret Alex as inquiring about the social circumstances that prevent women and 'blacks' from seizing these 'opportunities' (and I don't see how that's a plausible interpretation here), then what Alex is suggesting is that there is something wrong with women and black people, a physiological symptom of their gender or race, that prevents them from seeing or taking these opportunities when presented with them. I find that, if you pay attention, you also see this way of thinking at work behind the scenes in more reasonable-sounding claims about racial and gender politics. Sometimes its overt, but more often its buried in points about, e.g., the corroded norms of "black communities."

>Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.

I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics. The Current crop of tech leaders came from the era where middle class boys were bought computers by their parents as it was seen as a thing for boys to be into and not girls (I think this stereotype is still prevalent but far less powerful now). Computers just were not affordable to working class folks back then. Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers.

I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders become naturally more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.

> I expect (and hope) that in the next 10 years we'll see the distribution of tech leaders to become more diverse. Not because of any activist drive but simply because these kids are much more likely to have access to the tools they were denied in the past.

I don't see much hope of that as the fundamental problem hasn't changed. Lack of STEM training / degrees in pre-K / elementary school teachers and a gender problem worse than tech. We've had a lot of debates about the availability of programmable computers to lower incomes in a lot of threads.

>I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics.

The answer is simple. Women are naturally inclined toward social fields. There are few women who want to do something highly technical and not people-oriented. Men do not have the same strong social inclination. The physiological differences between male and female affect their psychology as well as their superficial appearances; let's not kid ourselves.

These are tools called "generalizations", which means they're not universally applicable, but they are helpful for understanding the world.

Hasn't that been demonstrated false? Women (girls) start out just as interested in everything including technology. They are socialized away from math and science. Any physiological bias is in the noise.

a) it's hard enough to demonstrably prove anything in real sciences, data from social sciences rarely reflects anything other than the author's bias. One's ability to contrive a desired result with opaque language should not be used as evidence contrary to the easily observed, near universal reality. Don't let someone else's agenda send you into denial.

b) a loss of interest as a person matures does not necessarily imply that loss is artificial. That unique psychology may emerge naturally over the developmental / maturation process, just as some physical features emerge.

We must all understand that we have our own biases. I'm having a hard time believing anybody can use personal observation to separate physiological differences from socializing influences. In fact I don't believe it at all.

It sounds the same as making up comfortable stories, denying the science that is done so as to absolve oneself of doing anything about the current state of affairs.

Do you have a source that indicates that something in female brain structure during maturation/puberty or hormones associated with puberty causes more socially inclined behavior and career choices?

Once upon a time the vast majority of nurses and veterinarians were men. Now they're dominated by women.

Is that a problem to be solved or just the nature of reality?

Actually, serious research tends to point to the opposite of what you say... it's pretty much biological. Even studies with monkeys show that female baby monkeys prefer dolls while males prefer cars as toys...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/gender-toys-childre...

Unfortunately, there are so much political agendas and sensitive issues at play here that this kind of science is not disseminated too much.

Then why do women make up a large proportion of life sciences and medical degrees?

Because medicine is a social thing that involves meeting and interviewing patients on a daily basis in order to restore and nourish them back to health. It involves a lot of daily interaction with the outside world (it's not an isolated, non-human field; there's a lot of society in it, even as you get increasingly technical). That matches female predispositions exactly.

Imaginary female dispositions. Because guys do it too. So not strictly female at all.

And yet surgeons are still primarily male. This article[1] I found interesting, since it trots out just about all of the same rationalizing explanations that the programming discussion uses.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3706651/

Because you can not walk away in the middle of a surgery to pick up your kids from school. Simple as that...

The example of surgeons helps your parent comment's point... among doctors, surgeons (together with radiologists and a few others) are among those with the smallest social contact with patients and their families. During most surgeries, the patient can't even speak!

Women make up roughly half of biology graduate students and 40% of postdocs; those degrees aren't inherently more "social" than other technical fields.

http://news.mit.edu/2014/research-reveals-gender-gap-nations...

The danger here is that you are assuming that the main dominatedness of a field does not alter conditions around it in a way that is potentially self-fulfilling.

What I am suggesting is that while I agree that these disparities were likely due to class differences that manifested themselves in racial and gender inequalities, we now have a world where the industry is dominated by one gender and a few racial groups. Does the present situation makes it less likely for more women and minorities join tech? Without an activist drive, the answer seems likely.

A lot of what the author brings up here are forces today that makes the reversal you are hoping for less likely, unless an equal but opposite activist force is applied.

>I've always wondered if the answer to this was due to the culture and class demographics.

You could probably make a well supported case for why this is true for minorities, but what makes the entire hypothesis shaky is if it was a cultural and class issue, what does that say about middle/upper class white women?

Now let's assume that these women were discriminated/discouraged out of tech. How are we sure that in 10 years those same forces won't do the same to minorities?

I don't have a solution, but I don't think the computer penetration problem sufficiently answers the question.

Perhaps gaming has something to do with this? Leaving aside whether there is something 'male' about gaming and the specific games that are most common, I recall that in my youth gaming was a 'guy thing'. I can imagine that frequently interacting with a computer in the form of gaming easily leads to becoming a programmer or tech worker.

Insightful, but you are so far removed from reality that you don't even realize most of these teens and early 20 somethings can't type at all because the cheap mobile computers are too convenient.

> Considering the poverty most minorities families faced then and still do now, it's sadly the case that they couldn't afford computers.

My father bought me (and my brother) a 2nd hand computer in 1988 (ZX Spectrum+), in communist Czechoslovakia, for a price of more than two monthly salaries.

Was the social situation in the U.S. really that much worse? I seriously doubt it.

Now of course my father was an academic, and was very smart, so he obviously saw a value in it. But it seems to me that being poor is really a poor excuse here.

There's a lot more to poverty than just "not having money." If my bank account suddenly dropped to zero, I lost all my material possessions, and I didn't have a job, I'm pretty confident that, within a few years, I could build things back up again and have a comfortable lifestyle (albeit, one with a very sad retirement account). This isn't the case for most people in poverty [edit: in poverty in the US Obviously, very different depending where they live]

So if you're saying: "You were raised without any sort of education, never had a bank account, are trapped in a cycle of high-interest loans, have never had a good-paying job and don't have the skills to get one, and this is all you've ever seen and all your children have ever seen around them... but it's a really poor excuse for not buying a computer!" then fine. You can certainly have an opinion!

Just keep in mind that it may not be wise to compare those in poverty to a smart, well-educated academic who sees an "obvious" value in computers for his children.

> Just keep in mind that it may not be wise to compare those in poverty to a smart, well-educated academic who sees an "obvious" value in computers for his children.

That was my point - the problem here is cultural, not economic. I was specifically addressing the "cannot afford" wording in the parent's post.

I think, for better or worse, people choose role models who are like them. If you're a white male, your role models end up being white males. If you're a black female, you probably look up to other black females. Not exclusively or consciously, but it's probably the first place you look. "Who should I be like?" "Well, maybe that person who's already a little like me except older and more successful."

When you combine that with the historical situations that people in positions of power have been white males, you have a much broader variety of role models for white males than for anyone else.

That's not to say people can't or shouldn't choose role models who are a different race or gender than they are, just that it might not naturally be their first instinct.

Your first role models are pretty much always going to be the people you have contact with from a young age. So we start with your parents, Extended family and Kindergarten teachers.

Yes, we pick up other role models in our teens, but I think a lot of the "damage" is done by then. The expected roles have started to be processed and internalised.

You've missed peers.

They are likely more influential than teachers.

(That they aren't "further along" doesn't mean that their behaviors and attitudes will not be adopted)

She makes the exact argument supporting the parent though. That having people who look like her was incredibly important to her decision going into tech.

Which is a real problem IMO. I didn't go to school. Most of the programmers I know didn't. So maybe it's part of that culture. But I didn't have much in the way of peers when I started. It was just the most promising career option I had.

But the people I looked up to in tech weren't much like me other than their (mostly) maleness. And that wasn't a factor (for me). Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, Matz, Roy Osherove, Jon Lam, Jamie Cansdale. They were just names on a page to me. Never met any of them. But I respected their abilities and what they wrote.

I certainly never had a mentor (though my father in law did get me my first real tech job, subcontracting for minimum wage, busting out the less fun HTML side of things for his work for a few months). I'm incredibly grateful to him, but that wasn't going to build a real career. So I picked up a dozen or so books, read them front-to-back, and a year later was a c# developer.

I feel like you have to want it for yourself. I could be totally wrong, and I have no idea how you'd measure such a thing, but for the non-college crowd at least, I've got to think stories more similar to my own are much more common than stories where someone found a group of people who looked like them they could consider mentors.

I've always been extremely conscious of who my role models are, so this is my preferred explanation for any kind of achievement gaps.

Many people reach out for "race and sex realism", or, historical-material explanations, but I think the power of media and role models rules in this space.

The error here is actually assuming that learning to code is an obvious opportunity. Many people, especially women, consider other things more worthwhile in life, and they have other options. And we only tend to notice the success stories, too, not the accounts of coders toiling away in windowless basements.

> This whole saga has been uncomfortable from the beginning--and now I'm cringing harder ever than ever. Not because I disagree with much of what Amilia has written, but just because it's painful to be, in some way, a witness to the rift that this piece makes evident.

Yeah. I honestly don't care so much about the idiot father's claims but rather just the fact we are witnessing a rather painfully public collapse of a family.

She mentions she hasn't been near her father for years, so presumably the collapse already happened long ago. Still, she is probably not unbiased.

I felt that way too. I think she has a lot of issues to work through regarding her father, and it may be a lot of that which are fueling her rage. Not saying her arguments are wrong, but I am concerned about her impartiality.

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