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That is not what this is about. It's about being treated as non-technical because you happen to be a woman in tech.

The reality of being a woman in tech comes with serious problems, and how we're treated is one of the biggest contributors to those problems.

This point is so obvious and self-evident that I'm really amazed that anybody is acting as if that's not the central thesis of the essay. One of the first links is to a PDF with a title by Mar Hicks called "Sexism is a feature, not a bug." Every single time someone argues sincerely or otherwise that sexism is no longer a problem in software development communities, please think back to the time that all these self described hackers couldn't read an essay spelling out in detail that the "technical" designation is socially constructed by everyone else without your permission and often is along gendered lines - they all read that, missing the point, and said "sure you can!" How many of these same commenters have described and will go on to describe a colleague with more mathematical, statistical, and scientific rigor than they and be like "oh, she's not that technical"? Will it be all of them?

I just don’t get why it matters. So, redefine and reclaim whatever you want technical to mean! The term is constructed, SO CONSTRUCT IT THEN.

Every single human is excluded from some club they might otherwise want to be a part of. Exclusion and inclusion, in some proportion, is the human condition.

The author is a psychologist. Okay. I am a high school dropout who studies and uses psychology and sociology in my work. I am never going to be called a sociologist or a psychologist. I accept that. But I am those things, in some real and practical sense. I am a scientist and a philosopher and I am not swayed by anyone claiming those identities who tells me I’m not. They don’t have to include me in their reindeer games and I won’t waste an erg of my energy asking them to.

I am technical. I am a man. I judge whether other people are technical, or for that matter whether they are men. My judgements may or may not influence other people. So what?

I read the essay because I was trying to understand what her motivation is. What is her project? I’m still not sure. I don’t buy that exclusion and othering and lacking “full humanity” should or do matter (they are facts of our existence… now what? complaining about them mostly creates hostility because power is real and powerful people will act to defend themselves.)

Still I found it thought provoking and endearing in a weird way. It was a usefully irritating essay by someone very different from myself.

Maybe people are acting that way because the article explicitly states that gender is not the main point. But of course that wouldn't make for nearly as good of a reactionary commentary.

Their own examples are constantly bringing up gender instead of any other relevant point. It reads to me like someone who has heavy bias in that area but is trying to deflect instead of address it.

No, those look like an obvious honeypot for catching anyone willing to see it as a gender thing.

The author wants to move the boundaries of technical to include her skill set. But her skill set could be compared to the business class (who also consume numerical research), and those people are not considered technical either, regardless of gender or race or anything else.

Business class skills are generally considered a tier above... all of society.

I did not think this was what was going on for most of the piece (which is part of why I spent most of it not following WTF it was about) but by the end I think this is accurate: the author's complaint is that scientific and number-y workers from non-computing disciplines aren't paid like SV programmers. (Which, neither are the vast majority of programmers, so, you know...)

Like, I think (it's still not entirely clear to me) that's the actual point. It's made fairly clear (relatively clear—again, still hard to follow, at least for me) toward the end.

On the other side, the lack of the human skills she champions is a boundary often drawn to sieve technical people out of leadership.

Her clients seem like extra successful people, so yeah, if she wants to be like them then maybe she's not technical yet. But if she's focusing on the money part then stepping into the business domain is a step above technical.

Yeah, I earn well over US median, and just going from evidence in the essay I'm pretty sure the author makes more than I do, but that we both earn less than her sense of "Technical" (US coastal big-tech workers that get programmer-scale salaries) which makes the attempts to connect this to struggles due to sex and gender identity and race and SES background fall pretty damn flat for me.

Incidentally, the photo at the top of the piece would make for really good "rich coastal tech worker" in-group signaling.

The article isn't about gender specifically, the author explicitly calls that out.

The author isn't asserting that they feel this way. They are saying that the world doesn't see them as technical.

And it is demonstrably true. Go to any (technical) conference and see how even the most technical people are denigrated or dismissed if they don't fit into the preconceived notions of the audience.

Or, to simplify, https://xkcd.com/385/

But why does it matter? How is this worth spending life energy on?

It’s reading a long essay by a girl who wasn’t invited to a classmate’s birthday party.

Just make your own community, and call it whatever you want.

I don't know how to explain to you that other people have feelings and are worth treating as humans.

She spent a lot of words making really solid arguments about how segregation has taken hold in some of the most influential and profitable sectors of the modern world. Let’s not pretend that casting people from it does not have consequences.

The technocracy does not tolerate other communities - that’s also another of her points. The powers that drive this machine are malignant and constantly striving for monopolization and domination. Competition has become a thing to be avoided, rather than relished.

> The powers that drive this machine are malignant and constantly striving for monopolization and domination. Competition has become a thing to be avoided, rather than relished.

So, Ayn Rand was right in her diagnosis?

It's been a while since I read Rand - but I thought she felt that those monopolistic forces would use the government to empower that monopolistic behavior. What we're seeing is that if the government does nothing then that monopolization absolutely continues.

I don't see a way the free market alone could deliver us from this. Well crafted and enforced antitrust legislation seems to be the only thing that has ever worked against this kind of force. The key in that is making sure we don't elect an oligarchy who wields that antitrust to defend their interests.

One side has an excuse, the other doesn't.

I wish I had an excuse not to be technical. But I will not complain about not having it. Neither I will fake being what I am not so I can get that sweet free out of jail card.

I am a dumb tech boy who is fragile and broken. And I am not upset about it. I will kindly help you without putting you in a pedestal.

Your move to be human.

> This is clearly falsifiable

No it isn't.

(Elaborate? You first.)

They were saying that they know of counterexamples to this statement.

I'd be very impressed if someone can find a woman in tech who's never had her input dismissed due to "not being a technical person". The frequency of such events goes down but is difficult to bring to zero.

I have no doubt that every woman in tech has been dismissed due to "not being technical". Even as a man I've been disrespected as not technical - I fit all the tech stereotypes. I'm well aware of the social norms that are against woman in tech that don't apply to me.

However there are a lot of well respected women in tech and with not much effort they can find places where they are respected.

You're probably right about that, but I don't think that's the criterion? I think "considered to be non technical" is quite a bit different than "has at least once been dismissed as insufficiently technical".

I work with a number of women who are clearly "Technical" in the sense of this article, even if they have been dismissed a number of times as you say.

I'm totally with you (and presumably the author) that this kind of dismissal is really toxic. But I also feel like there's a no true scotsman thing going on here; if you say "actually I know Technical people who fit the author's description" the retort is "well the article isn't talking about those people!".

As an example that nearly everyone here will now, Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, Vite and etc, has a degree in art and art history. By any metric imaginable, he's also deeply technical with a very strong track record.

You missed the most important criterion in that list which Evan You does not match.

If you're trying to imply that the whole thing is about gender, then I submit that even the author disagrees with you:

> I am structurally incapable of being Technical because in the world we have built, Technical must always be conditional for people like me, buffeted around by some unearned privileges and some undeserved exclusions as mediated by people’s perceptions and the current social location of my gender, class, race, ideological perspective, the role-related identities that the label put on my work gives me, and all of the other categories our brains are using to slice up this planet in between meteor strikes.

So it's not just gender, it's a whole litany of stuff, including class, race and "ideological perspective" (whatever that means) that prevents "being technical".

You could be forgiven for missing this, though: the article isn't trying very hard to have a coherent point. Perhaps another reason the author isn't "technical" is an inability to write clearly.