Quoted from the article:
> We need to address the undervaluing of HTML and CSS for what it is: gender bias.
I find it baffling how some people can make such ridiculous statements to fit their narrative and insecurities.
> We need to address the undervaluing of HTML and CSS for what it is: gender bias.
I find it baffling how some people can make such ridiculous statements to fit their narrative and insecurities.
I am a very strong supporter of feminism, but this kind of reasoning needs to stop.
The idea of "as a man you're biased from your position of power, therefore your opinion is invalid/worthless" means that the opinion of any men can be shut off automatically just by finding a gender twist on any debate. It's incredibly condescending, and frustrating, since any rebuttal you might try will be dismissed as your inability to see the other side, no matter how tenuous the connection to gender is. I would even go as far as to say that it's a mirror of the old "these are men things, as a woman you wouldn't understand" that was sadly common in the past.
While I'm very happy to see women empowered and their perspective being taken into account more and more, I'm also worried about the rise of any system that leads to the opinion of a group not being listened to. That is never good, period.
And to be clear, I'm not equating the current trend of dismissing male ideas to the suffering of women under patriarchic societies. Just pointing out a worrying development.
But HTML and CSS aren't art, nor is layout a "creative" activity. HTML and CSS are configuration. They're no more feminine than JSON or a Lua table. I don't think there's ever been a time where, even if the gender bias described existed, it was ever applied in the way described.
Graphic designers tend to be pretty well respected, even though they are also very underrepresented and needed in the FOSS community. People that mainly work with HTML and CSS are less valued because they're seen as mere "transcribers" of the design made elsewhere, or at least that's my perception.
Yes, and insofar as feminists continue to use this reasoning, we should reduce our support. It may seem like a sad case of a few bad actors poisoning the well, but the lack of outcry by other feminists implies, to me, that the movement has gone rotten, no matter how I wish it weren't so. If you keep poking your allies in the eye, you can't expect them to remain allies for long!
I yet have to find an article from him about engineering that makes any sense. He's able to write a few lines of jQuery this seems to make him feel like he knows so much about things he has no experience on.
But hey, at least you got to knock his programming chops amirite?
Frost can publish his ideas about JavaScript being intimidating because the naming convention is camelCase and not kebab-case, and it's fair game for any other programmer to point out that Frost doesn't know what he's talking about.
> We need to address the undervaluing of HTML and CSS for what it is: gender bias. Even though we wouldn’t have computer science without pioneering women, interloping men have claimed it for themselves. Anything less than ‘real programming’ is now considered trivial, silly, artsy, female. That attitude needs to eat a poisoned ass.
And it's from this link: http://www.heydonworks.com/article/reluctant-gatekeeping-the...
I admit I don't understand the point. I haven't experienced this perception of HTML/CSS as something "trivial, silly, artsy, female". It's possible though that this does exist? In some places? I mean people do have a tendency to think of what they're good at as superior to the things they're bad at...and loads of programmers are really bad at HTML/CSS.
Attributing "gender bias" here is stupid and harmful. I'm repeatedly astounded that these people are taken seriously.
It's charlatanry.
I don't necessarily agree with argument in its entirety, but it isn't about the mere participation of men. It is about the exclusion of women. Very different things.
I see what you mean by "interlope", that is a good point. That is a rather poor word choice from the quoted article (by Hayden). I find it hard to believe that Brad, being a man himself, would argue that men can't participate in the field.
I've long since given up hope of trying to parse the madness. I sincerely don't understand what motivates people to say these ridiculous things, and as a consequence I sincerely can't tell when somebody means what they say to be figurative and when they are expressing a genuinely-held (but mad) belief completely literally. Given the alarming frequency with which these sorts of claims in fact become accepted truths among feminists that get repeated over and over, I err on the side of assuming the latter.
Hayden used the word, and did so in a context where there was no obvious way to interpret it as hyperbole or metaphor. In the absence of any other possible interpretation, I'm going to assume that he means exactly what he said.
Pioneering women were crucial in the development of CS as claimed, but HTML and CSS were both created by men so the author's accusation of denigrating the contribution of women is simply not a factor in this issue. Characterizing HTML and CSS as feminine in this way is promoting exactly the sort of gender stereotyping these rants are claiming to oppose.
I'm afraid this is what gender wars activism has come to - fabricating and promoting fake gender stereotypes and associations so they can keep fighting the good fight for it's own sake.
> ...women (and men) who feel their roles as front end devs are considered less...
> I didn't see it as a gendered issue until it was brought to my attention by female co-workers...
Female co-workers bringing an issue to your attention doesn't make it a gendered issue and you literally refer to it as a non-gendered issue, though parenthesising men.
As a full-stack JS dev, having come from a .NET background, through a pure frontend job, to a full-stack position, I regularly have to shoulder banter from Scala colleagues' (both male and female) snark at Javascript - primarily because it's existed for a long time and been a barely justifiable mess for most of that time.
People tend to assume that I do frontend and try tu push me toward ui design side of things, despite me being completely crappy at that. It was real problem only once, normally I can easily negotiate different position. But, it requires me to often explain that I really cant design - I dont have to explain I dont do any other technology to avoid position, ever. People dont assume me to know sql, databases, server, java, but they do tend to assume me to be good at design.
Every frontend dev I've ever worked with has received this same treatment, so I would find it difficult to believe it's even predominantly females; but maybe I've met a lot of exceptions.
But, I am not even frontend developer and get the assumption that I am one. When I was nearby frontend, people made further assumptions about which part of it I do - they expected me to do aesthetic work altrough I am really bad at it and were sometimes oddly awkward when I wanted to talk about architecture or algorithms. I don't think male frontend developers are not undervalued, but the assumption about which part of it they do is on average a bit different.
Or it's a False Cause.
I am not proud of how male dominated frontend is, and no one should be: https://2018.stateofjs.com/demographics/gender-breakdown
As you get closer and closer to coding, you can see how this ratio gets smaller and smaller: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/designer-compensat...
What's at issue here is that coding is a combination of EQ and IQ, and when we create environments that favor "rightness" over common empathy and effective communication, we turn our backs on the people who favor thinking that way (no matter their gender) and we make worse products as a result.
We're not writing code for machines, we're writing code for people.
2. Claim that the new prevalence of women in front-end coding is sexist
3. ??
4. Profit!
- Everything bad in the world is because of straight white men, and capitalism.
- Coding is not part of a coding job. Culture is more important.
- Making people feel happy is more important than building something that works.
- Truth is subjective, i.e. post-modernism.
Parrot the above talking points with an air of self-importance and you'll be well on your way to a highly-paid do-nothing job.
I understand the temptation, I have my own critiques as well. But divisive rhetoric is not the correct response.
The 4th one about truth is perhaps an exception, unfortunately some people might agree to that. Although, it's a bit abstract for most useful discussions.
Edit: I had to add quotes, as I really dislike that word.
2. A more subtle point, but I've seen enough articles written by members of the tech scene to be convinced this may be a genuine issue. Articles claiming that demanding merit-based software development is bigoted/racist/sexist, others saying that if there isn't equality of outcome for all software devs, then the issue is the stated goals of software development.
3. Similar to 2
4. Again, very US-centric. There is a definite movement towards a person's "lived experience" and feelings (of being "safe" or whatever) is more important than objective facts.
The points above are true to the extent that I decided the West-Coast US tech scene was not for me, and returned to my home country.
I know what you refer to, as I worked in SF recently for several years. I don't think it is true that white men are unilaterally demonized by any significant group in American culture today. There is obviously some of that occurring, and occasionally the behavior is a bit troubling, but I don't there is any major problem to worry about. The behavior you are concerned will go away naturally as the recent social movements mature and are able to see some of the progress they are making. In general, most people don't support the extreme behavior, so there is only limited space for it to survive.
I do think patient and healthy pushback can be appropriate in the right circumstances. It is a tricky issue though. There are some very legitimate (and some less so) reasons motivating such behavior, even if, occasionally, some of the specific actions themselves are troubling. Anyone claiming rigid, simplistic absolute statements here seems wrong to me.
Perhaps I'm biased towards (and privileged enough to do so) being patient with what I see as some temporary flare ups that are side effects of attempting to process and rectify some of the results of absolutely terrible historical occurrences over the past several hundred years. I don't know. We will see how the next 10 or 20 years go.
I have to go so I won't address the other issues. These topics are tricky and hard to discuss with a short comment.
I will say that the way you are discussing them is preferable to the person I accused of straw-manning. You seem more capable of considering nuance, which I appreciate.
> I have about 3 blog post drafts covering similar ground and apparently we see very much eye-to-eye on this
> Whether it’s explicit gender bias or not, it’s important to recognize that people are afraid to speak up about how they feel for fear of getting dog-piled on by a bunch of “real” developers. That needs to change.
Based on the tone of everything else written by Frost and Pickering here, I’m not taking each sentence most charitably.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/09/14/google-...
"Logic programming is considered superior to HTML/CSS even though it isn't. Just like one gender thinks that they are superior to others even though they aren't."