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Comment by gordonguthrie | Hacker News Reader

> This community is pretty small relative to the overall community of technologists, and it has some biases with respect to places, people, and concepts. I believe you are simply seeing one of those biases emerge as a side effect of the conversation.

I don't think so. I think the tech community is pretty much up its own arse and thinks it is god-like and precious.

Techies really buy into the 'we are pure', 'we only deal with evidence', 'we are the best', blah-blah. All the great myth of meritocracy and guff like that.

Anything that points out this is not true and that Joe Coder might not be perfect and it just kicks off. Oh, yeah and plain sexism as well.

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"It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists." -- Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash

  > Techies really buy into the 'we are pure', 'we only deal with evidence',
  > 'we are the best', blah-blah. All the great myth of meritocracy and guff
  > like that.

This whole thing seems like a strawman. You're stating that all (or most) 'techies' believe that we're in some sort of utopia where it's impossible for another 'techie' to do any wrong? Really?

So no one that qualifies as a 'techie':

* Hates Bill Gates and rails against proprietary software?

* Hates Steve Jobs and rails against propietary/close platforms?

* Trolls online forums just for the 'lulz?'

* Has every commited a 'morally wrong' crime (dodging the "hacking shouldn't be a crime if I don't really mean it"-type arguments)?

  > Anything that points out this is not true and that Joe Coder might not be
  > perfect and it just kicks off. Oh, yeah and plain sexism as well.

Again, really? Who here thinks that 'Joe the Coder' is perfect? Aren't we as a tech community filled with 'colorful' personalities? Don't we constantly have people bickering to the point of ridiculousness over the most trivial thing possible in forums/mailing lists?

Personally, I think that the reactions here boil down to:

1) Nothing in that post comes off as out-right sexism. None of the dialog even refers directly to the fact that she's a woman.

2) Posts like this rail against 'males in the tech community' as a group.

If you're a male in the tech community, you read a post like this. Maybe you see some dialog in the post. Dialog that is claimed to be sexist. Dialog that you could see yourself saying to a woman, while in no way trying to be sexist (e.g. "you're being a little hard on person A"). You feel the need to push back against this becuase it seems like it could just be a mis-understanding.

This seems likely to be the simplest (and more probably right) explanation of the behaviour.

You are entirely missing the point. I haven't commented on her post. I have only summarised the responses to it - which is a stream of ad hominem (or indeed ad feminam) invective.

A respected blogger makes an observation about the industry and is howled down.

The idea that her post 'rails against males in tech community' is supported by what evidence? She left that team for another team. She has a long set of blog posts. Find the railing thing please, with evidence.

I said 'posts like this' for a reason. I think people here are (probably 'were' by this point) responding to a general idea rather than the specific post (unfortunately).

First you must stop making offensive blanket generalizations about techies. Even if you're a techie yourself, that doesn't give you license.

But honestly, to me it doesn't sound like you're a techie. Or maybe you're just not very self-aware? Because you're exhibiting a very familiar thought pattern: "bluuuuh, those guys over there think they're so smart, let's whoop them". Every nerd who's ever been bullied for being a nerd can recognize this sort of person from a mile away. One of the dreams of the original nerd community was to get away from people like you, yet here you are, fresh as ever.

What on earth are you talking about?

Parent was making some general observations about the nature of sexism in the tech industry and its causes. How did you get from that to this 'you're not a real techie' nonsense and jocks beating up nerds in school?

I'll tell you that I am a 'real techie' (but not a true Scotsman) and I am pretty much in agreement with what gordonguthrie said.

So great, you're exemplifying the shoot-the-messenger style under discussion. Well done.

Truth hurts.

If you took offence to the characterisation of the IT community as generally self-absorbed and sexist, you really need to look around. How many women do you work with?

It's not the type of work that drives women out of IT, it's the people they have to work with.

Truth isn't the only thing that can hurt, though. Ignorance and malice can hurt too, especially when combined... Let me try to explain how I understand this issue.

When some subgroup is underrepresented in some area even though there's no statistical difference in innate ability, many people tend to automatically blame discrimination. I don't see how that can be right. For example, you could notice that Asians are overrepresented in US universities. The theory concludes that either all US universities are racist in favor of Asians (obvious bullshit), or Asians are innately smarter than whites (more obvious bullshit). Hmm. Isn't it more likely that the theory is mistaken and there can be other factors at work?

Same goes for the small number of women programmers. Sorry, you don't get to attack me for sexism until you have data proving sexism is the real culprit. Otherwise it's like blaming witchcraft.

There is an interesting issue in the philosophy of science regarding the "hard center" of theories. Basically any prediction about a reasonably complicated situation will rely on a large number of premises.

If you happen to be committed to one premise more than the others, you will always blame one of the other premises when an observation doesn't fit your hypothesis.

In the case of sexism there are so many confounding factors that you'll never be able to say with certainty that sexism is the root cause, only that there is a good chance that it is.

If there is a good chance that something bad is happening then it seems like you could reasonably be expected to produce a non-zero amount of effort in avoiding it.

We have data. A brief sampling: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15853.pdf, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1508924, http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/fall2002/FERREIRA/FERREIRA..., http://www.scribd.com/doc/18370009/Sources-of-Financing-for-...

There is plenty more out there, all suggesting that women are promoted differently, treated differently, more likely to experience active gender-based harassment and are more likely to be excluded from the camaraderie and informal networking that leads to job satisfaction. Don't assume that just because you are ignorant everyone else is too. Some of us have been engaging with, measuring, quantifying and attempting to change these destructive culturally-sanctioned behaviors for a very long time.

Only the first of those four articles deals with women in IT jobs. It is behind a paywall but I found a freely available copy here: http://www.mcgill.ca/files/economics/leavescience_all.pdf . It's a nice article. I don't think it supports laying the blame on sexism, though.

The paper focuses on something called the "exit rate", that is, how many people with a certain education are working at a job unrelated to their education. The average exit rate over all professions and both genders is 21%. Female engineers have a pretty low exit rate of 12.9% - that is, 12.9% of women who studied engineering now work in other areas. Male engineers, on the other hand, have an extremely low exit rate of 9.8%.

The author then tries to explain the difference between "pretty low" for women and "extremely low" for men. She observes that the differentials in exit rate, across all fields including engineering, can be mostly predicted by the gender makeup of the field. Quote from the paper's conclusion:

> The results would appear to point to problems for women specic to the engineering profession. However, I show that the excess exits of women trained as engineers, as well as their excess exits for pay and promotion reasons, are no larger than would be expected given the share of men in the field: the higher the male share, the greater the excess female exits from the field, both in total and for pay and promotion reasons.

Then the author hypothesizes that improving mentoring and reducing "possible discrimination" might help reduce the gap, without giving any specific arguments.

It seems to me that the really important figure in the paper is 9.8%, not 12.9%-9.8%. That is, more males are behaving abnormally by staying programmers despite possible problems with pay and promotion, while the behavior of female engineers is closer to the average rational human being. What do you think?

Also, I'd be really interested in seeing what you think are the best papers proving that the lack of women of IT is due to sexism. Taking apart random vaguely related papers is fun, but I don't have infinite time.

If you don't have time to bother to learn about a topic, why do you assume you are more knowledgable on it than people who do spend their time studying the topic at hand? Your theory boils down to "Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that." You can "take apart" as many papers as you want to maintain your ignorance, but all you do is make yourself irrelevant to the discussion.

If you want to "prove" that the disparity is due to men and women experiencing different cultural dynamics in male-dominated spaces (which is why research regarding male-dominated scientific fields and financial firms are relevant to the question at hand) all you need is the Census Bureau's labor statistics. The interesting research questions are what specific dynamics are at play and how we can disrupt them.

Lest you assume my contemptuous response to your willful ignorance can be ignored due to a [citation needed] tag, one paper that perhaps offers more of the background you are looking for would be the FLOSSPOLS overview of their gender-related findings in Open Source communities: http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_I... For background on the mechanisms involved on a micro level I'd suggest the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and on a more macro level specifically regarding gender, I recommend Pink Brain, Blue Brain.

If you want to claim that the highly statistically-unlikely and culturally-variable gender disparities in pay, promotion and participation are not due to sexist dynamics, you need to provide both an alternative theory and evidence to support it. Given that the only evidence required to prove that sexist behavior is present in technical spaces are the comments to this article, the burden of proof is on those who disregard the published research on the topic and claim those behaviors are either isolated aberrations or have no effect on women's willingness to be employed in the field.

About the labor statistics: if you say they're all I need, it seems that you dismiss the argument I made above, that disparity of outcome does not imply discrimination all by itself. Why?

About the paper: it looks much more sloppy to me than the previous one you linked. This quote from p.12 is at the root of my dislike:

> Unlike the survey data, where claims to generality can be made via mathematical operations, generalising from ethnographic work is done via interpretation as in the humanities.

The humanities haven't been scientifically tested, so we don't know if their method leads to truth. For example, on pp. 16-17 the authors note that many women are computer users but few become IT professionals - and immediately conclude, from that fact alone, that hostile work environment must be the reason. It's fishy that there are no intermediate steps of reasoning and no alternative hypotheses. There are many such examples in the paper.

About the books: I'm already a big fan of Kahneman. Why specifically do you mention his book as support? Pink Brain, Blue Brain seems to deal with the development of children rather than with sexism in mostly-adult fields like IT, and if its conclusions are right, then sexism of male IT workers is not required to explain the small number of women in IT because differences in development are already enough. Why are you mentioning it as support?

Also, do you disagree with what I said about the previous paper? It's a little frustrating when people abandon lines of argument to start new ones.

If you took offence to the characterisation of the IT community as generally self-absorbed and sexist, you really need to look around. How many women do you work with?

The fact that there are few women in tech does not necessarily mean that IT is self-absorbed and sexist.

Do you look at the nursing community and assume that it is self-absorbed and misandrist simply because there are not many men in it?

Then again, personally I work at an office that is a 50/50 male/female split, so perhaps I'm not the best one to comment on these matters, I don't know what it's like at a "real" tech shop...

My girlfriend is a health visitor and a nurse with 30 years experience. Let me give you a quote from her, solicited over breakfast:

"Men, like shit, rise to the top".

The NHS is largely a female institution - the managers are overwhelmingly men.

I worked in Direct/Call Centre banking. The overwhelming majority of the staff were women, the senior staff were overwhelmingly men.

http://www.nhsconfed.org/Publications/Documents/Management%2...

> 59 per cent of managers and senior manages are female and three quarters of entrants onto the NHS Management Training Scheme over the past five years have been women.

Good, I hope things are getting better. My other half works for Lothian NHS Trust - their board is 17-8 men to women (for a majority female workforce): http://www.nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk/OurOrganisation/BoardCommi...

Do you have an updated answer to bermanoid's question about the nursing community?

Men are over-represented in the management of nursing in relation to their proportion of the workforce.

I am not sure what you want me to say.

That seems to answer a different question, not the one bermanoid asked.

To recap, bermanoid's question was a reply to manicdee's comment which claimed that underrepresentation of women in the tech industry, in and of itself, is evidence of sexism. Since men are underrepresented at all levels of the NHS, manicdee's theory would allow us to conclude that the NHS is sexist against men, without the need to look at any other evidence. Possible valid replies could be a) disagreeing with manicdee's argument about sexism in the tech industry, b) agreeing that the NHS is sexist against men, or c) pointing out some flaw in the above reasoning. I guess that you would answer c), but your comments so far don't seem to point out any specific flaw.

Manicdee said IT is self-absorbed and sexist therefore there are not a lot of women in it.

Bermanoid said there are not a lot of men in nursing therefore nursing is sexist.

'X therefore Y' does not equal 'Y therefore X' your premise is invalid.

I believe, based on many years experience of this industry that it is self-absorbed and sexist. I agree with manicdee.

No, manicdee said "How many women do you work with?" as an argument to prove that IT is sexist and no one should get offended at allegations of sexism. So both cases were "Y therefore X".

I think you are really stupid. Are you sure you are a techie? What kind of techie? Do you know Haskell?

ETA: Gordon and I took this conversation offline and he seems a nice enough guy, but I will still leave my rudeness here for posterity.

> First you must stop making offensive blanket generalizations about techies. Even if you're a techie yourself, that doesn't give you license. But honestly, to me it doesn't sound like you're a techie.

I started programming in 1979. Prior to that people used to beat me up big style. I can techie-you up anyway you like.

What we had here was a group of people beating up Rachel By The Bay, and I don't like it because I was a bullied nerd.

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