Ambient Un-Belonging: Women and Tech Startups
audreywatters.com
Audrey's got a great summary of all the clarification / untangling of Arrington's mess...
audreywatters.com
If one really believes there is a vast untapped well of ladies who want to code XML files for poor wages for 14 hours a day, identifying and hiring them yourself sounds like a sure fire path to millions.
You won't believe the number of times I've heard Ben Affleck's "don't pitch the bitch" line from The Boiler Room presented as a serious maxim of doing business.
The "don't pitch the bitch" rule was because women supposedly thought more aboit potential investments and couldn't be coerced into taking risks over the phone. So, in a way, it was more insulting to mens' level of judgment ;-)
"M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
...
M: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
A: No it isn't" --from Monty Python's argument sketch
"DH3. Contradiction.
In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom. The lowest form of response to an argument is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting evidence.
This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in:
I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory.
Contradiction can sometimes have some weight. Sometimes merely seeing the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to see that it's right. But usually evidence will help." (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html)
More than once, I've noticed developers who are women derided as less competent, less capable than their male peers. Their professional success is ascribed to their appearance, their male bed partners, or some other such male-invented loophole. One of these conversations happened just the other day where I work. The really disturbing bonus is how suddenly "bitch" becomes a synonym for "woman."
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I can't claim to understand a cause or a solution. My mom was a single mother who started her own business to keep me fed and clothed, so I maybe I'm immune to this business of discounting the capacities of half the population with no more information about them than their anatomy.
I only know it makes me sad.
edit: Initially terrified that this got voted into the negatives. Thanks for restoring my faith in you, HN.
No company name because some commenters here are jackasses and anything I say is representative of my employer :rolleyes: Nonetheless, we're a startup in SOMA you've probably heard of.
edit -- Perhaps you should sack up and tell people you're uncomfortable with them talking about your coworkers / women in such a manner? Much like racism, sexism is aided by ambient acceptance of such stuff. Like, for example, when people hear sexist comments and are quiet about it. It's not necessarily easy to do, but the right thing isn't always easy.
And you're completely right, of course. I, honestly, was too shocked to react. I mean, flabbergasted. It's so... antiquated, like finding out someone resents the Union for that whole abolition thing.
In the days since, I feel bad not to have spoken up.
Mike Arrington says flat out that the reason why there aren't enough women in tech is because "not enough women want to become entrepreneurs." It's a question of motivation. This statement is easily falsifiable and I don't think any of the responses make even a meager attempt to do that.
Is there a disproportionately higher number of women-lead start-ups applying for venture funding and then not getting it? Since this is a question of motivation, even showing that a significantly higher percentage of women-lead start-ups fail would suggest that Mike Arrington is wrong.
Punting on the cultural issue for a minute, is tech really the best option available to an academically prepared American lady? Compared to, say, management consulting, or law, or medicine, or... ? We have good lives as programmers, don't get me wrong, but for startup hours you could work for McKinsey and make six figures from day one with no uncertainty about exits required.
Which is the point of this article: The tech world is a very unwelcoming place if you're an outsider (and sometimes even when you're an insider, which Michelle Greer apparently is).
Some disparity will alway boil down to choices. If women take maternity needs, than she will expect to be behind her peers when she come back.
As much as I like awesome hacker females to live in my world, some women...for whatever reason choose other professions instead. I'll respect that choice, not try to convince them that they work on tech for the sake of getting 50% gender balance.
Men. Are. Victims. Too. But a conversation about women's oppression is not an appropriate context to explore it. It makes us feel like you don't believe women's oppression is a problem.
Unlike reasonable discussions, where you make a point and the other person points out the flaws in your reasoning, or presents evidence for a counterpoint, or something like that, arguing with feminists always ends up with the feminists expressing their emotions and trying to rule certain arguments "out of bounds", not because the arguments are flawed or invalid, but because they make feminists feel "heartbroken".
And how can you talk about why there aren't more women or other minorities in tech when you're just going to paint it as vague or emotional and ignore what they say?
We call that "assuming what you're supposed to be proving", or for people who still remember the traditional meanings of idioms, "begging the question".
edit - some meat to my point:
One case that I'm thinking of involved a woman making a fairly reasonable technical point (something involving Apache, I think - it was a while ago) in the hallway at a conference, but then got lectured for ten minutes by a guy who took exception to some minor pedantic point. Totally condescending, rude and thoughtless - he didn't do the same to the other male developers in the discussion.
There was another incident at a Developer conference here in Australia a while ago, where a developer put up pictures of hot chicks in his Perl presentation. Again, unnecessary and stupid.
Do you still think that I'm assuming things?
But erikpukinskis didn't say, "here is some evidence, therefore women in software are oppressed". He seemingly implied that the "why are there few women in software" discussion was inherently a "conversation about women's oppression". He took the "conclusion" and implicitly put it in the "premises" column, which is exactly what I was criticizing.
It's not a conversation about women being oppressed--it's a conversation about why there are few women in software. "Women are oppressed" is an answer, erik was characterizing it as the question.
> OK, that's an argument. You're doing it right...
Yeah, that's exactly the sort of stupid, patronising attitude that causes the problem in the first place. I'll just point out that neither you or Kiba have introduced any evidence in your arguments, that you don't even know what begging the question is, and that someone arguing rationally would have instead pointed out all of the areas in IT where women are treated fairly or overrepresented, and leave it at that.
I haven't made any arguments. I've criticized some statements for using outbursts of emotion and assertion in place of arguments, and I've criticized other statements for implicitly treating "women are underrepresented in IT" as synonymous to "women are oppressed" rather than actually going through the trouble of arguing the point. But I haven't advanced an argument of my own yet. I have my own tentative answer to "why are women underrepresented in IT"--can you guess what it is? (Probably not.)
"...that you don't even know what begging the question is..."
Care to enlighten me?
Wikipedia: "Begging the question (or petitio principii, "assuming the initial point") is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise."
Implicitly treating "women are underrepresented in IT" as synonymous with "women are oppressed" begs the question, because "women are oppressed" (or the more complete, "women are underrepresented in IT because women are oppressed") is the proposition to be proven.
"... and that someone arguing rationally would have instead pointed out all of the areas in IT where women are treated fairly or overrepresented, and leave it at that."
Criticizing the form of someone's argument is perfectly rational--more so than criticizing their "stupid, patronizing attitude" or making personal attacks.
Right - so you haven't read the article then? It presents a lot of arguments, not-very-implicitly-at-all. Maybe that's the first place to start.
Bravo.
Men's role as expendable defender is not a role hoisted by women, but rather through evolution. The oppressor, if any, is nature for making us that way. In that sense, men cannot blame women.
It also work in the opposite direction, there are things that women probably should not do when she is having a baby.
Once upon a time that was true - but since everybody is supposed to be equal now, you can bet that I am not going to do that. And I don't think that many men are doing that either.
When it come to ensuring the survival of human race, you know what the commander/leader/whoever in charge, male or female, is going to choose.
Does it sucks to be a male too? Yep, but it also rock to be a male sometime too.
Maybe one of the reasons for the gender disparity in software engineering in particular is that it revolves around logical analysis and direct steps from problem to resolution, while women are (stereotypically) more adept at emotional reasoning than logical reasoning. If so, what, if anything should be done to correct this?
I hope all of us would agree that it is wrong to judge people on their gender. I think the reason a lot of women have a very negative response to the original post is that the women responding feel like they don't get equal treatment at work.
I think that articles that seem critical of women for not achieving more in the tech field are counterproductive to promoting a good working environment.
I would like to see more men come out and say that publishing blogs that make women feel unwelcome in the tech field is wrong.