Hacker News Reader

Comment by hiram112 | Hacker News Reader

> ...since she has enough accomplishments in her own right to be named...

I've never been interested in this woman, nor did I know anything about her previously. But just from her very brief Wikipedia, here are the highlights:

* Born into super wealthy family

* Sent to Pre-Ivy league boarding school in Connecticut

* Studies at elitist Ivy League university (Princeton) and graduates with pseudo-degree of 'English'.

* Meets Jeff Bezos while working the typical elitist hedge fund starter job in Manhattan. They get married!

... lots of years pass

* divorces Jeff Bezos, becomes one of world's richest persons

* donates a fraction of the money she won in divorce.

Wow, a true American by-the-bootstraps dream. Certainly, it is sexist to refer to her as "Jeff Bezos' wife" based on her many many individual accomplishments.

View on HN

For an excellent example of "a true American by-the-bootstraps dream," let's look at George W. Bush's Wikipedia:

George W. Bush attended two years at The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Piney Point Village, Texas in the Houston area.

Attended high school at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he played baseball and was the head cheerleader during his senior year.

He attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

His application to the University of Texas School of Law was rejected.

If that's all he did, he really wouldn't have been notable enough for Wikipedia. But then he did that thing at the end, so now all the details of his life are just supporting characters to the main story.

What is a pseudo-degree?

This person considers any degree outside their personal preference of "important" degrees a pseudo-degree. I am guessing this personal preference probably closely aligns with whatever is currently considered "job-ready" degrees, and ignores the historical context in which some degrees used to be much less valued than presently.

For instance, a degree in math (the M in STEM) used to be considered a dead-end for a job, except to teach primary school, and was very female-dominated. This was true to such an extent that it was women who did most of the ballistics computing during WWII [1]. Many others invented new processes, like Grace Hopper, who designed the first compiler for a programming language. Sometime after the widespread media attention around the first personal computers - and who they were marketed for - this trend reversed, so that by the 1990s computing became seen as a "male" interest, and thus came to be dominated by men. Notably, this media interest was a Western phenomenon, which is why you'll encounter a lot of female Russian or Indian programmers working for American companies that are trying to boost their quotas of "diversity."

Another example of a reversal of trends of "real" degrees is aerospace engineering, a degree which used to be very lucrative (with the end goal working for any of the companies affiliated with the cold-war era space race). But when the United States decided to shut down their space program, a lot of these engineers lost jobs fast, and newly minted graduates could find no work.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#1940s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com