Comment by jqwizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jqwizard | Hacker News Reader

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The narrative that women don't succeed in computer science and cybersecurity because of discrimination never aligned with my experience whatsoever.

Sure, when I was in high school and college, there were significantly less women. And sure, women experience discrimination in many forms, many in ways that men don't understand or have to deal with. I get it, I'm speaking from a "position of privilege" as a man.

But I had numerous female teachers and college professors in my programming and math classes. The female students in my classes were smart, capable, and dedicated. Never once did I see them denied anything or treated differently. Female friends told me about negative experiences facing sexism, and they always came from people outside the school, or at the very least outside the CS program.

And yet literally everyone I talked to at this overwhelmingly left-leaning school assured me that being a female CS student was a form of torture. They could never explain why. Forget about the female-only scholarships, the conferences, the special clubs and interest groups. These middle-class college students living in one of the world's richest cities are suffering in this field, and we should be doing anything and everything to help them, we will not be satisfied until we have an exact 50%-50% split.

I'm not saying it's all rainbows and sunshine. Obviously sexism is still a systemic problem in many parts of American life. I have sisters, they have told some awful shit. I'm simply posing the questions - at what point does a minority group stop being disadvantaged? When do they stop being considered a minority? Who gets to decide when and how that happens? Why are there so many scholarships, interest groups, and initiatives designed to help women in STEM who are struggling, but the very real problem of men and boys struggling in other fields is largely ignored? How large does the gap between male and female education have to get before it reaches public consciousness?

It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone. The vague impression from my social group is that Europeans have it figured out and we just don't, but I really don't know if that's true.

great comment. I think people tend to in general look at “now” and not “how we got here.” I have been in the industry for 3 decades now, many, many, many projects, many many teams and colleges. In the 90’s when I started there was simply no women working in our industry - like none. In the early 2000’s we started getting some resumes, 1 in say 20-ish were women. In the 2010’s that number went up a bit… and when I had the pleasure of having women on my team they were without exception invaluable members of the teams…

now you are policy maker and you say “what do we do to bridge this gap? what do we do to get more women to join the industry?” the answers are largely in your comment, scholarships, interest groups, outreach, summer camps…

now are we at the point now to say “ok we good, lets ‘tone this down’” - possibly. in my personal experience I would say women are still disproportionally underrepresented but maybe we’ve “done enough”…

A few years ago when this came up, we pulled up the stats for gender parity in all the different STEM fields. Physics, engineering, and CS were the only ones where there was clearly apparent pressure against female participation. Everyone who's ever been to both an academic cryptography conference and an academic CS conference has probably noticed this: there are way more women in cryptography than computer science in general, because cryptography pulls in mathematicians.

People have all sorts of just-so explanations for why this should be; boys are more interested in manipulating physical objects, or more interested in building things. But none of it holds up when you compare across all the fields; moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.

“Veterinary medicine has been predominantly female in the US since 2009. That trend is continuing, with 87.3% of current veterinary school applicants identifying as female, as well as 88% of veterinary technicians.”

(Source: aaha.org)

Given that the gender imbalance in physics/engineering/CS is always blamed on men pressuring women against participating, one wonders, what kind of monstrous women are gatekeeping the veterinary field, and what kind of harassment are they inflicting on men who try to participate?

If you want to make the argument that there are structure impediments to men becoming vets, I'm receptive.

This is really strange reasoning: "people claim that in field X, group Y doesn't enter for reason Z. Therefore if in field A group B isn't entering it MUST be for reason Z, and couldn't possibly be for another reason".

The actual logical problem I was pointing out was in tptacek’s implied argument that “if a field is 80+% one gender, the only possible explanation is that the dominant gender is gatekeeping the minority gender”.

That kind of gets to what I was trying to say, though. The 'just-so' story I hear often is that men in STEM fields are incredibly sexist and this is just how it is and certain policies are the only way to fix it. I'm willing to accept that might be true but I would like to know why.

I don't really buy the "computers were marketed towards men" argument that was mentioned a few child comments down. I also don't really buy into the idea that men are just inherently sexist and women aren't, especially since I've heard both mysogynist and mysandrist comments from women in my workplace...

Why are fields like law, medicine, and mathematics more receptive to women?

40 years ago, the personal computer was marketed at boys. That's just a type of marketing we are still trying to correct over 2 generations later.

And that's how we should treat it. It's too later to get people interested in engineering in college. you need to start 5 years earlier minimum. Ideally 10 years earlier.

nobody marketed personal computer to me 25 years ago. but my interest in hacking it was so much bigger than my sisters I became a programmer. Changing that isn’t a matter of correction. You need to actively remove boys that are more interested which not yield the best results

>but my interest in hacking it was so much bigger than my sisters I became a programm

That's a whole generation off the ads of the 80's that was selling this as a toy for boys. The bulk of that marketing was already culturally set by the new millennium.

And you may have missed the 90's marketing too. If you watched Hackers (1995) or any other media featuring "nerds" with computers in that decade and weren't at least turned off, the marketing worked. Because you chose to go through and it likely portrayed hacking as an undesirable male hobby for women.

> Changing that isn’t a matter of correction. You need to actively remove boys that are more interested which not yield the best results

You underestimate the power of marketing. Going from barely any women in the 2000s to 20% in the next decade (half a generation) is herculean effort. That doesn't happen naturally.

One of the main characters in Hackers was a woman and she was portrayed as the best, or among the best. Not sure how this supports your argument.

> moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.

No you couldn't as women were barred from those fields pretty recently then. No women working today has been barred from physics or engineering, the situation is not the same.

I’ll give you a pretty easy example. I was looking at a design doc I was consulting on. The lead engineer said “oh sorry, this document was for real engineers”.

My partner has a PhD in maths and physics and she absolutely suffers from discrimination in both fields for being a woman. It’s a field full of men who aren’t very in tune in what it means to be appropriate and professional around women, she is constantly dismissed and ignored despite being a leading expert in the world for what she does, and has had men make non consensual advances on her including her having to duck away from men trying to kiss her unprompted.

She knows women who haven’t had this experience as strongly but it definitely happens to a lot of them in fields dominated by men who have very poor social conditioning when it comes to women.

Her experience was actually worse in Europe than the US, too. To the point that she refuses to ever work in a certain country again, which is a shame given it’s a great opportunity

> It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone.

It's a nice sentiment, though a quick look at our history reveals that it's all about identity politics and culture wars. There is no way to move past it because the US is, and will remain, a divided, multicultural, individual-focused nation. It's one of my favorite aspects of the country, though it's caused no small amount of grief.

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