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Comment by yuvadam | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I can't hear about gender in engineering jobs anymore.

The likelihood that you will see a blog post about the "benefits of being a male software engineer" is exactly the same as the likelihood to see a blog post about the "benefits of being a male social worker".

We do not need to artificially try to bring in more engineers of a certain gender just because the numbers don't make sense.

And we do not need more blog posts calling out our oddities as engineers. We all dress like dorks. We all have our quirks. Get over it.

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And this is precisely why we need still more posts.

You know why we don't need a "benefits of being a male software engineer" post? Because every day is a "benefits of being a male software engineer" day for male software engineers.

You should probably have a read of http://amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/ . As a rule when it comes to this sort of material, if it makes you feel uncomfortable and defensive, please think about why this is before commenting.

I'd love to see a post about "benefits of being a male social worker", or any other female-dominated field! As a feminist (3rd wave), I don't think equality is possible without addressing the problems faced by men, as well as women. Men in such jobs are routinely mocked by other men and subjected to ridicule by our masculine culture society. And that sucks.

Oh, no, please not Derailing For Dummies. It'll certainly reduce the number of replies you get, but not in a good way...

As a sign of good faith in the community here, I've removed the link for now :)

I admit, I haven't read the entire checklist. When the first item on it is blatantly wrong, I kind of got turned off.

Go read about the advantages women have in hiring in the sciences: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1

Anecdotally, women are also given advantages in big corporate IT, but I'm not aware of any studies. Corporations are generally loath to give away data on stuff like this, who knows what lawsuits it might bring.

I only skimmed the rest, but I found 14) particularly amusing. The politicians who stole my lunch [1], my freedom and my money all have a penis (just like me). This is a privilege how?

[1] In Jersey City, where I live and work, Steven Fulops chased away the food trucks to protect subway.

The list is a generalisation across all fields, so discounting it based on how something might not be true in your field is a bit short-sighted. #1 is true still for many fields.

Of course, the link you provided wasn't for the general tech sector - it was specific to universities, which have other aspects in play. Even within the general tech sector, there are plenty of reports of questionable hiring practices. I've found to be not uncommon for my gender (female) to be an issue during interviews, and we've seen posts here in the past about this subject. Further, women are often moved rapidly into management roles, and their technical abilities treated as suspect.

And yes, I'm speaking as something big corporate IT, and it's no better. Just looking across at our large (40+) server support teams, you can count the number of women on one hand. The application support teams here are slightly better, but only just. We're a typical shared services company in the UK, and our competitors are all very similar.

As for 14, you've found a truth about privilege lists - they might not always be things you like.

Which fields is #1 true for? Regardless, I'll assume you are right. Points 1-3 are irrelevant for the conversation we are having here (about women in tech), so I'll keep reading.

4) is a matter of whether you personally adopt a collectivist viewpoint or not. If women disproportionately adopt collectivist viewpoints, why is that anyone's fault besides their own?

5) is probably on point. 6) may be true in general, but (much like 1-3) it seems false in tech. Consider Leah Culver - "ooh, a girl that can program, and hot", as opposed to "meh, barely competent".

7-14) may be true, but are similarly irrelevant to a conversation about women in tech. Also, you still haven't explained how 14 is a "privilege". How does Obama's penis benefit me, relative to a woman?

On 14, the failure mode is called "not carving reality at the joints." Because .00001% of men wield large amounts of political power, whereas even fewer women (at least, visibly) do so, political power is a male privilege.

There are certainly reference classes for "likely to wield political power" that change the likelihood ratio by far more than "male."

You're missing the point.

The issue is not the raw numbers, but the pychological problem - that people like you are not in power, or not as equally holding power. That you are not of the type of people who have power.

And yes, there are other privileges, like White privilege, middle/upper-class privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, not-abused privilege, and so on. These intersect to cause more issues again.

The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof; but when you start creating negative categories like "not-abused" to privilege, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anybody except the people actually in power are all that privileged.

Unless, of course, you're privileging gender privilege far above other types of privilege.

...and I just hit semantic satiation.

"The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own privilege is refutation-proof" Actually, I never said this, and I wouldn't. Most people who are privileged don't directly realise this, but it is common for concerned parties to learn about privilege to begin to "check their privilege" - to question how their privileges affects their interpretation of something.

I am privileged in some ways, and not in others. Generally privileges are treated as being different and hard to compare, because "oppression olympics" (arguing some are more harmful than others) never actually helps the discussion, and generally leads to people forgetting to check their privileges - who am I to speak for the experiences of other minorities?

The fact that you act amused at "not-abused" as a privilege is part of the whole problem, especially when you consider how this intersects with with privilege (or lack thereof) issues.

The concept of intersections between privileges (or the lack thereof) is important - that some combinations of the effects of a privileged society are worse than others.

My amusement is at the application of the word "privilege" to a negative description.

I currently enjoy not-superstitious privilege, not-being-kidnapped privilege, not-being-forcefed-arsenic privilege, and many others that help me maintain my status and position in ways I may never have thought of. But calling them "privileges" is silly; it leads, as I said, to semantic satiation; and that's part of the whole problem.

Many people here do not enjoy neurotypical privilege, but they don't use that language, they try to describe the actual problems they face and the ways to surmount them as efficiently as possible.

You are missing the point. You are choosing to slice reality at the joint of gender, assuming that people with breasts are "like you" but people without are "different". Of course, in a discussion of political power, this is not a very useful way to slice. Male predicts very little. Insider status (e.g., child of politician) predicts a lot more.

You are also implicitly assuming that the category of "like you" matters at all. But that's a choice you are making. I can choose to view Peter Thiel as "not like me" because he is gay. I can also choose to view him as being "like me" because I aspire to be awesome in the same ways that he is.

If women are less likely to make this choice, that's not privilege. That's simply the choices of individuals holding them back.

Seems dated? Personally I call into question the masculinity of any guy that won't support his children, to the point of shunning one particular jerk for 10 years now.

Women get hired, promoted and paid better than men in certain jobs (enlisted military service, govt jobs) that they strangely don't want! So some of it is self-inflicted.

I'll also add to this: Men who fail to have children are called into question. If you're married, older, and have no children then one of you is assumed to be impotent. If the woman is prettier, then its likely the man will be considered impotent. Even if the man is charismatic, a lack of children combined with a lack of sexual show (e.g. philandering) will be seen a sign of low testosterone and emasculation.

"7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are relatively low. (More).

8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are."

First, those are two pretty big caveats, especially considering how the vast majority of people in prisons are men. Second, I'm pretty sure males are far more likely to be the victims of violence than females. So while these individual claims may be true, it seems to ignore the bigger picture.

Maybe there are some legitimate points in this list, but for the most part I think this is an example of the "make so many accusations that none of your readers will have the time or energy to go through and refute all of them" school of writing.

  The likelihood that you will see a blog post about the
  "benefits of being a male software engineer" is exactly the
  same as the likelihood to see a blog post about the
  "benefits of being a male social worker".

You draw the wrong conclusion from this observation. You are not taking into account that male social workers are nowhere near as inclined to keep a blog as software engineers are. In fact, in more traditional media, regular stories about the working experiences of, for instance, male nurses have been quite common for decades.

It depends what you mean by "artificially", imo. If our profession is being so badly misrepresented to the extent that women who would otherwise enjoy a career in engineering are driven elsewhere, then I think our society has a problem that we should give significant attention.

Do you feel the same way about the fact that only ~20% of social workers are men?

Or worse, 90%+ of elementary school teachers are woman.

my wife works in public health, a field that seems to be 90% female. My wife's office is much more gender skewed than mine.

If doctors didn't make so much $, I am convinced that women would make up the majority of doctors.

My wife is in medical school, and getting a masters in public health, at the same time. Meanwhile, many of her friends have dropped out of MBA programs, or stopped working full-time to be pregnant / get married / be a home-maker.

However, there are more females in medical school now than males, it's just a matter of time as the older generation retires.

Personally, I think there would be more doctors if it didn't cost $200k+ and 4 years to get a medical degree (compare the opportunity cost vs working as a software engineer for 4 years with only a bachelors).

I absolutely think it's a problem that the vast majority of elementary school teachers are women.

I don't think it's inherently terrible to have fields that are dominated by one gender or another but I do think that in the case of school teachers men are being pushed away by social forces and it's detrimental to all children to be taught only by women.

I'm interested to know why you think this is a problem?

I, for one, didn't become a teacher because the pay is terrible, I make more annually my first year out of school (programmer) than most highschool teachers make anually.

It had nothing to do with gender, more to do with money.

Also, my mom is a highly advanced math teacher (teaches AP courses, grades AP tests etc), so I think she provides a good rolemodel for women and men who want to be good at math.

As far as I'm concerned this is a problem worse than the "no female engineers" problem. Little boys need role models and examples to grow into men. Even those with a good dad need them.

And I bet that other teachers appreciate there being a man around, just as I have found that a workplace that includes women engineers is a much nicer place to work than one that doesn't.

It's not worse. It's not better. It's a different aspect of the same issue.

We only really develop a proper understanding of gender around the age of 7, but influences before then set up the mindstates to come, and help to drill everyone (including parents and teachers) in appropriate gender roles.

Kids see male doctors and female nurses. They have female teachers at school. When shopping for toys, the girls get pink kitchen sets and dolls, and the boys are offered machines and cars.

From a young age, our society teaches us that women are not engineers, and men are not teachers. We need to solve them both.

Barbie is a computer engineer now.

My wife is in medical school, and there are more females in medical school now than males.

In order to change these kinds of things we need to move on from the past and look forward, and stop worrying about what color toys our children have.

Personally I think we need to overhaul what kind of education is valued. As in, encourage all kids to get STEM degrees, or alternatively become lawyers or doctors. Stop encouraging kids to go to university and major in english or philosophy or... any number of majors that lack hard math / science classes.

If we get kids to major in the right kinds of things in college, I think we can stem the current unemployment recent grads are feeling (nobody is looking to hire a liberal arts psychology major, except restaurants (waiters)).

But it's more than that. There are lots of boys out there that never interact with men. There are lots of boys who become convinced that school is for girls and who tune out and subsequently become shut out of the entire modern economy, not just segments of it.

When I was an education major, to the extent that people commented on my gender, the comments were all positive—as a teacher I would be providing kids with a “male role model”, etc.

(Of course, one of the reasons that I didn’t go on to a career in teaching is that the pay sucked. I believe that one of the reasons teachers’ pay sucks is that it’s a traditionally female occupation, and schools can recruit women who do not depend on their teaching salary for the majority of the family income.)

" I believe that one of the reasons teachers’ pay sucks is that it’s a traditionally female occupation, and schools can recruit women who do not depend on their teaching salary for the majority of the family income."

I never really considered that. I always assumed the pay sucked because tons of people who don't have actual career passions decide to just be a teacher instead. It's like never having to leave school and get a real job! Boy, that's going to get me some flak, but I've seen it first hand plenty of times.

For evidence, my state (Connecticut) has one of the strictest set of teacher certification requirements in the country (being a teacher here basically makes you an automatic hire in most of the rest of the country). Yet, whenever there's a teacher job opening, it gets hundreds of applicants.

The teaching profession is definitely a buyers market, and I'd bet without unions teacher salaries could be halved and still never have vacancies. No, I'm not actually saying that would be a good thing. Education provided by the lowest bidder is an awful idea.

I think it’s a vicious cycle.

Most of the people who apply for the jobs are mediocre because the pay sucks, and the pay sucks because the school districts don’t consider their mediocre teachers to be worth more.

(There is also, of course, a minority who teach despite the sucky pay because they actually love doing it. My understanding is that those people would rather have more autonomy in the classroom than more money.)

"benefits of being a male software engineer"

"benefits of being a male social worker"

I don't get your point. Aren't these exactly opposites in terms of prevailing stereotypes? So why would the odds of seeing those articles be exactly the same?

The internet is the largest record of human history in existence. If you don't see the problem with it being created and curated by white and asian males the issue lies with you.

I'll offer this. At what time was any recorded account of history not skewed by some prevailing perspective?

I don't think you are saying that makes it justified, are you?

Oh no. Absolutely not. Just observing a pattern.

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