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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder, have computers inherently been designed as boy toys? I don't support continuing the teaching that girls should like pink things, dresses and flowers, but it does exist quite strongly. So if we assume boys are thought or predisposed to like esthetic X, while girls are thought or predisposed to like esthetic Y. Have computers been designed to esthetic X?

Basically, my point is, are computers gender neutral in their design? Or are they boyified? If they're boyified, then maybe we do need to alter their design, and work to make them more neutral or have girlified versions.

Note: What would be the boy term for pinkifying?

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This calls for a full-blown essay at some point, but for now I'll just throw this comment out there.

[Using the terms girl and boy to continue the language of the parent comment; not meaning to be diminutive to anybody.]

Computers are inherently designed as girl toys, and boys are the foreigners in this world.

With the caveat that any statement you make about half the population is going to be wrong about a lot of people, statistically, girls are more risk-averse than boys.

Most of the advancement I've seen in programming over the past few decades has been for the purpose of reducing risk. Universal code reviews, automated tests, TDD, stronger type systems, distributed version control are prime examples off the top of my head.

Certainly there's a place in programming for more than one cognitive style, but it's the risk-averse style that puts the infrastructure in place such that the risk-taking style can create things that aren't a total disaster. So I'd summarize programming as a diverse world with a girlified core.

Parent comment seems to be asking about aesthetics. Is the black brick 'thinkpad' or silver macbook more aesthetic to boys or girls?

However, since we are in topic of risk. Things like TDD and type systems only start to ring a bell when someone is already reasonably invested in computer science. The initial exploration (click all the menu items to see what is there, etc) is a risk seeking behavior.

True that the parent comment was more about aesthetics. I may have jumped too eagerly on the word "inherently".

Back to the topic of risk, I don't think the average girl is so risk-averse that she won't engage in exploratory activities. Curiosity is universal.

Part of it is that the computer field grew out of the radio and electronics clubs which were overwhelmingly male.

Even if they were trying their best to be inclusive and open it's really hard to walk into a room for the first time and see that you're the only X in there and want to stick around. You will feel like an outsider for a long time even if you do stick around most likely. Worse, these feelings can amplify any perceived rejection from the community you feel.

Ironically to stick around you have to have a bit of an asshole streak because in the monkey part of your brain you know you don't belong and you have to ignore that and plow forward regardless of what you perceive the others in the group are thinking. This is an area where women are at a disadvantage as they tend to be more empathetic overall.

I don't think computers themselves have been designed that way necessarily, but a much more obvious culprit is the advertising in the 80s and 90s. Computers were strongly marketed as toys for boys. NPR's Planet Money had a very interesting episode on this. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

It's telling that there isn't even a term for this. You've hit a major point here.

Until a few minutes ago, I'd never heard of "pinkifying", either. Here, I'll make one up that will be instantly recognizable: Masculinizing.

Yes, pinkifying is not a real term, but the truth is, I was trying to describe the stereotype and couldn't for boys. I thought girls stereotypes are they like pink, flowers, dresses, sparkles, dolls, etc. And then I chocked on boys, I wouldn't be able to go ahead and "masculinize" something, because I wouldn't know what that means. I'm thinking boys like fighting, to argue, the color blue or red, trucks, cars, heavy machinery, computers, video games, etc.

This surprised me. My stereotype of boys is that they like things which leads directly to professions such as politic, business, engineering, policing or war. While my steteotypes for girls would seem to lead to low professional value activities in comparison, like house-wife, florist, artist, hair dresser/makeup artist, care taker. With the exception of fashion and lucrative care taking jobs like doctor, the rest doesn't pay well.

I make nothing of this, I think it might be a telling observation, but I'm not making any argument of it. I do find it intetesting. What would be other people's stereotype for boys vs girls about what we might think they "like"? I think that's a good exercise, and a good place to start better understanding the problems related to them.

It's a real term. -ify is a productive suffix in English that can combine with nouns and some ajectives to create a verb. N-ify means "make like N, or endow with N, somehow"; Adj-ify is "make Adj".

Dictionaries do not exhaustively list every possible combination of a word with every applicable prefix and suffix.

I think it's a useful term, for sake of discussion

Yes, liking cute, pink things is a common girl stereotype.

Liking rough sports, guns, cars, and having a lot of testosterone are male stereotypes, among others.

If you need a visual thing you can do to something to make men like it more, you could paint it with racing stripes or hunter/army camo. It doesn't lend itself to a pithy word easily, but it's the same idea.

I'm not saying it's right to stereotype anyone. I'm saying that it's not eye-opening that it's easy to understand a stereotype about one and then fail to come up with something similar for the other.

I think its definitly not irrelevant though. The fact is, my bias is weaker for boys, at least I have to assume, since I need to think harder to come up with it. If this is true at large, it could be that boys are held to lesser expectations of conformance to a strict set of behaviors and interests.

I also find it interesting how once I do come up with the stereotypes, they do seem to lead right into the current job ratios.

Now, I don't know the cause of the stereotypes, they could be observations of nature, or creations of nurture, but I do find they tell a bit of a story.

Not eye-opening I'll admit, but an interesting detail.

Also, you rarely see people fretting over the low percentage of males going for primary education jobs. In many ways these jobs are just as or more important than computer programming, but nobody cares that it has such a lopsided gender ratio.

Personally, I don't even care about it, but it makes me pause to consider why I have to be so concerned about the lack of women in CS. Am I being an asshole and trying to shove people into a career they have no interest in?

I think the two possible issues are:

1) Job availability and remuneration. CS is a high ROI profession currently. It pays well, has lots of open jobs for it, and takes relatively low investment to get into. If it wasn't so, they'd be much less talking about its gender gap.

2) The treatment of the minority gender in a particular field. There might be low males in primary education, but those that are in the field, do they find themselves at a disadvantage? Do they feel like the majority female create a toxic environment for them, making them feel uneasy about working in that field?

But I'll add one more:

3) People in STEM might actually be very open minded and progressive, much more open to talk about issues and much more interested in fixing them, and not letting bias be truth. This might be why you hear about women in stem and their difficulties, while you rarely hear about the difficulties of women in other male dominated fields.

> 2) There might be low males in primary education, but those that are in the field, do they find themselves at a disadvantage?

No, they don't. They are given extra responsibility and promotions much quicker than the women. I think the staff division in our local primary school is something like 4 guys and 25+ women. Everyone loves them.

> you rarely see people fretting over the low percentage of males going for primary education jobs.

Perhaps not where you are. In the places where I have first hand knowledge (UK and Norway) people have been fretting over that for decades.

Is the problem that they're boy-ified in their design? Or that they're boy-ified in the way we refer to them and their users? Boy-ified in our expectations of who will be interested in them. Boy-ified in the pronouns we use to refer to users. Boy-ified in who features in the ads that suggest who's responsible for buying and using them.

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